Welcome

Occasionally, I feel the need to transfer thoughts from some corner of my mind to some forgotten corner of the blogosphere. So this is the space where I do that.


The postings here are a good cross-section of my interests. There are quite a few posts on some philosophical thoughts. There are also more professional posts on areas of strategy, IT Management, and data science.


I hope they are enjoyable and thought-provoking to read. Please leave comments and let me know what you think. I would enjoy the opportunity to engage in a conversation on these topics.


Sunday, November 6, 2011

Scientifically Speaking

One of the big challenges faced by scientists is communicating their findings to the public.  Very often, it is the case that they report one thing, but the public hears something completely different.  Scientific language often gets interpreted differently by people who only speak Common English and not Scientific English.

For example, let's take one of the tactics used by Creationists, those people who refuse to believe the fact of Evolution because it contradicts their religious beliefs.  Creationists like to make a point that evolution is "only a theory".  In common usage, a theory is just a guess that someone makes.  We say things like, "I have a theory that the dog ate my sandwich".  It's a guess we make, and we're going to go out and look for evidence of it.  In Scientific Language, a theory is the current best explanation that we have for something that we observe in the universe.   A theory of gravity explains how we think that gravity works.  We all know that gravity exists.  We don't say, "I have a theory that gravity exists".   No, it's an observed fact.  However, scientists have a theory of how gravity works that explains gravity and takes into account relativity and quantum physics.   In Scientific Language, the word we use for a guess is a hypothesis.  A scientist would say, "My hypothesis for the disappearance of my mid-day sustenance is that the canine inhabitant of this domicile has consumed it".

When we talk about the Theory of Evolution, we're talking about our explanation for how evolution has occurred and what mechanisms drive it.  We're not making a guess that evolution could be true.  Evolution is an observed fact of nature.  There is no doubt about it.  However, there is still scientific debate over some details of the explanation.  Such debate is healthy because it is how we learn more.  It doesn't indicate that there is doubt about whether evolution is true or not.

Another example where I see this language disconnect is when talking about the results of some study or experiment.  For example, suppose a study was performed that was aimed at determining if acupuncture was effective for reducing pain.  The scientists would report, "the study showed no evidence that acupuncture was effective at treating pain".   The problem here is that to say "the study showed no evidence" leaves room for the reader to think that there could be evidence, but it just wasn't found by this study.  It's like saying, "there is no evidence that there was a second shooter who really killed President John F. Kennedy".  People who want to believe in a second shooter can easily believe that the investigators simply didn't look in the right place to find the evidence of the second shooter.

Here's where the real problem is.  In fact, scientists know that no study is final proof of something.  There is always more to know.  In addition, experimental studies are carefully designed to test specific hypotheses.  There are very strict conditions specified that are used to determine if the hypothesis is correct or not.  So a given study is only looking at one part of a problem.  There could be other evidence that this study wasn't looking for, and thus wouldn't find.  Every theory is tentative - it could change if more evidence is discovered.  That's the strength of science.

On the other hand, the fact that an experiment was conducted and had negative results is itself evidence.  If we test acupuncture and find that there is no difference in pain whether acupuncture was used or not, then we have evidence that acupuncture did not improve the pain.  We shouldn't say "there is no evidence that acupuncture improved the pain".   We should say, "the evidence of this study shows that acupuncture does not improve pain".

In some cases, many experiments have been done with no positive results. At that point, scientists should be clear and simply say, "given all the evidence that has been gathered, we conclude that acupuncture does not work".   Simply adding the statement about having gathered data gives more weight to the conclusion.   As scientists, we have to be true to our value of being accurate in what we say.  However, if we are going to communicate our findings in a way that people can understand and use to make better decisions in their lives, then we have to speak in a way that is understood by people who don't speak Scientific English.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

There's a new study that indicates....

I recently watched a documentary called "Forks over Knives".  The premise of this film is that you can avoid a lot of illnesses, especially cancers and heart disease, if you avoid all animal-based foods and eat only non-processed, plant-based foods.  Let me state right from the start that I immediately saw this for what it is - vegan propaganda.   I found some good blog posts that dissect the film bit-by-bit and point out what is wrong with the arguments and with the science.  That's not the point of this post.

What I want to write about today is one particular bit of evidence that the film uses to make its case.  They refer to a study done in India that studied the effects of a diet high in casein (milk protein) on the incidence of cancer in rats.  They report that rats who received a high-casein diet had higher incidence of cancer than rats on a low-casein diet.  From this, the film draws the conclusion that diets high in animal proteins promote cancer growth, and thus all animal products should be avoided.

If you take this as reported, it's pretty scary.  In fact, even if you don't accept the leap from casein to all animal proteins, it makes you think you might want to cut down or eliminate dairy foods from your diet.  But, I'm skeptical.  If this link between milk and cancer had been proven, first, we would see rampant cancer in places like the U.S. where dairy consumption is high.  We don't see this.  Second, many more studies would have been performed to verify this claim, and it would be all over the news.  It's not.  So what's the truth?

First, we have to look at what the study really said and what it was trying to find out.  Any scientific experiment is designed to answer a question.   Scientific experiments are expensive.  They are carefully controlled to limit the number of different factors that could influence the outcome.   They want to get quality answers to a specific question with the least cost in time and resources.  So what was the casein experiment trying to accomplish?  They were specifically looking at a carcinogen called aflatoxin and the effect of the level of protein in the diet on aflatoxin's ability to cause liver cancer.  Why aflatoxin?  Well, aflatoxin is produced by a fungus that can grow on grains in humid climates.  I assume that in India, there is a higher risk of being exposed to aflatoxin due to their diet that is high in grains and the tropical weather.  Thus, it makes sense that Indians would be studying this toxin.  Why study using casein?   I don't really know.  I'll guess that it's because it's a readily available protein that's available in a pure form that can be used to carefully regulate the protein level in an animal's diet.   It's probably just the typical diet protein that biologists use.

So, now that we know what the Indians were studying, let's look at the results.  What the movie didn't say was that over half of the low-protein rats actually died before they reached one-year old and were examined for cancer.   Low-protein actually means malnourished.  The underfed rats didn't have enough protein in their diet for their livers to grow and properly metabolize the aflatoxin.   So the alfatoxin destroyed their livers and killed them.  The high-protein rats were actually receiving a balanced diet.  Their livers grew properly and were able to metabolize the aflatoxin.  However, the aflatoxin doses were very high, so they still got cancer, but at least they lived long enough to get a cancer.

This result also gives us insight into what else the Indians may have been trying to study.  In a country with rampant malnutrition, they may have been wanting to see if Indian children without sufficient nutrition were more susceptible to aflatoxin damage.

So, let me summarize all this.  In India in 1968, researchers performed a series of experiments on rats to see if malnutrition would make it more likely for children to die from exposure to a toxin that is often found in their food supply.   The researchers happened to use casein, a readily available protein to carefully control the nutrition level the rats received.   Thirty or so years later, a doctor with a strong ideological bias that animal foods are bad for you, took this study and misrepresented the results to say that the experiment showed that high levels of animal-based proteins cause cancer growth.

There are two obvious, but unfortunately common, problems with this.  First, the doctor took a study intended to measure one thing and reported only specific aspects of it to make his case, which had little to do with the original study.  Second, an experimental study on rats was generalized and reported as if the results were automatically and obviously applicable to humans.  Rats aren't people (even if some people are rats).  However, mice and rats have enough in common with people biologically and genetically that doing initial studies on rodents can provide information that is useful for later studies with humans.

Vegan propaganda aside, we see this kind of situation all the time.  We see headlines like "Eating walnuts cuts breast cancer risk in half".   If you look closer at the study, you find that it was a mouse study where half the fat in the mice's diet was replaced by walnuts.   Breast cancer incidence was reduced.  I don't know the rest of the details of the study, but I can guarantee you that it doesn't show conclusively that you can cut your breast cancer risk in half by eating some walnuts every day.

The media sensationalizes scientific results to make a story.  The result is that people don't believe anything that scientists say.  "Walnuts prevent cancer?  Heck, last week they said that they were bad for you."   Never assume that a headline accurately represents the results of a scientific study.  It's more likely that the science has made some advancement on one piece of the puzzle that is cancer (or some other disease).   The true story is likely much more interesting than the glossy, sensationalized version that the media will give you.   The link between malnutrition and the risk of aflatoxin poisoning is much more interesting, useful, and true than "animal-based foods cause cancer".

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Evidently True

I grew up in a Catholic household in a predominantly Christian part of the rural Midwest.  It seems like there's a church on every street corner of my hometown.  The Christian world view was part of our culture and our identity.  As a young boy interested in science, it's therefore no surprise that one of the sources of information that I was given was a cassette tape that talked about all the evidence of God's work in nature.  I listened to this cassette repeatedly. 

It's been many years, so I only really remember one particular part.  The preacher (I assume he was a Christian preacher or minister that made the tape) was talking about the fact that when you look at the branch of a tree, you'll notice that the side branches do not grow out of that branch in a random pattern.  In fact, they follow a repeating pattern where, for example, every fifth branch is pointing in the same direction.  This order was evidence of God's hand in the creation of a tree.   God made the tree with a certain logic, and this was evidence of the creator's work. 

For a Christian, or any believer, the existence of a god is assumed.  It's part of the fabric of the Universe.  As such, any observation of order in the Universe is considered evidence of that god's existence.    The problem with this argument is that it is circular.  There is an assumption that a god exists with certain properties and any observations that are made are taken as evidence that the god exists.   The argument is "God exists.  God creates order in the world.  I see order in the world.  Therefore, God exists."   The argument implies that the only way there can be order in the world is because God causes it.  Thus, any order is evidence of God.  It's not a valid argument to assume something is true and then use that assumption to argue that it is true. 

Another problem with this is that the selection of evidence is arbitrary.  Observations that demonstrate their claim is taken as evidence; any observation that contradicts it is ignored.    If something is true, then there shouldn't be contradictory evidence.  If there is, then the thing can't be true.  In reality, if there is contradictory evidence, perhaps you don't have to throw out the idea altogether, but you need to revise it to account for the contradictions.

Let me give an example of something that is also a part of the fabric of the Universe - gravity.  Gravity is a basic property of matter.  Anything with mass will attract anything else with mass.  On the earth, we see this in the fact that things fall to the ground.  The gravity of the earth is so large that we don't normally notice that all the smaller things are attracting one-another, but this fact has been verified in laboratories and in outer space.  There are other known forces that cause objects to be attracted to one-another, including the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and the electromagnetic force.  When we remove the effects of those other forces, we still find that gravitational force is there.  Similarly, if we see two objects being attracted to one-another, we don't assume it is because of gravity.  We look at all the possible explanations and then decide if it is because of gravity.

We didn't start out with some theory of gravity from the start and afterwards looked to find evidence of it.  On the contrary, we observed that things fell to earth, and we wondered why.  As we studied this more and more, scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and others did experiments to measure the effects of gravity and to come up with a description of how it works.  Over the centuries, our understanding of gravity has grown, and it helps us to understand how the Universe works.  Everywhere we look, we find that the effects of gravity are there.  There are no contradictory observations.  The interesting thing is that we still don't know exactly what causes gravity.   I think scientists are still working on trying to explain how gravity is related to Relativity, as Einstein described it, or with quantum mechanics.  

The argument about gravity is like this: "We observed that objects attract one another.  The force that we call 'gravity' explains that attraction.  Therefore, gravity exists."  This is not a circular argument.  We don't assume that gravity exists at the start.  The existence of gravity is the conclusion.

If we wanted to follow the same process for proving the existence of a god, we would start with our observations.  What are these observations?  We see order in nature.   Is the existence of a god the best explanation for this order?  Scientists have observed true randomness on the quantum scale.  How does an orderly creation explain this?  We see "good" things happen.  Is the existence of a god the best explanation of this?  We see "bad" things happen.  How does the existence of a god explain this apparent contradiction?  

The more we know about nature, the more we find that there are better, simpler explanations for the apparent order in the universe than "god did it'.  For the example of the regularity of the branches in a tree, we know that natural selection would have favored trees that can position their leaves in locations that capture the most sunlight.  A tree that grows branches in regular intervals, thus filling every available gap, would collect more sunlight than one that grew branches at random.  Random branches would likely leave gaps (missing the opportunity to capture sunlight), and there would be branches that block other branches (wasting energy spent on growing the branches that are blocked).   Over the millions of years that trees have been evolving, the individual trees of a given species that did the best at collecting sunlight would be more successful.  They would have more energy from the sun that they could use to produce more seeds.  Over the generations, their offspring would be more successful than the offspring of trees with worse branch placement.  These "orderly branch" genes would come to be dominant in the population of trees.  Eventually, all the trees in the population would have these orderly branches.  Thus, it's no surprise that all trees of a species show the same order to their branches.  They are all descendents of trees that developed a particular genetic mutation that allowed them to have more orderly branches than the trees before them. 

The existence of orderly branches in a tree is evidence of evolution.   Like gravity, evolution is a universal property that we have observe everywhere we look.  It is completely consistent with all the observations we make, and it accurately predicts what observations we will make in the future.  We continue to learn more and more about evolution as we gather evidence.  When we find evidence that appears to contradict evolution, we generally find that the evidence actually clarifies our theory of evolution.   If we ever found evidence that truly contradicted evolution, we would be willing to throw away that theory in favor of one that explains all the evidence.  This is how we learn about the world.  This is how we increase our knowledge of the Universe and better understand our place in it.  This is how we use evidence.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

A blast from the past

When I started this blog, it was probably the first time that I "publicly" stated my opinions on religion and philosophy.  I generally kept these thoughts to myself.  However, I thought this blog would be a good forum to express some of the thoughts I have, and perhaps to start some conversations about these subjects with people with whom I've never spoken of them before.

Obviously, my disbelief in religion didn't start when I started this blog.  I wrote the following eleven years ago.  I've kept it to document my thinking at the time.  I've matured and become more educated about philosophy, rationalism, and skepticism since then.  My thoughts and arguments are more informed and refined.  However, the fundamental belief has not changed. 
---


"What I Believe"

I am an atheist.
 
Let me give a couple of definitions just to make things clear. A theist is someone with religious beliefs, that is, someone who believes in a god or gods. An atheist is someone who has no religious beliefs, that is, they have no belief in any god or gods. So atheism is a statement about a lack of belief, it says nothing about what an atheist actually believes. Actually, I’m what is sometimes called a strong atheist or a nontheist. Not only do I have no belief in a god or gods, but I believe gods do not exist. This is a stronger statement than simply saying I’m an atheist.

I do not believe that any gods, especially the Christian God, exist. Nor is there any Heaven or Hell. We are born, we live our lives, we die, and that’s the end of that. There is no existence after life. This makes it especially important that we live a happy, constructive, and fruitful life while we are on this planet. We are not here to prepare for something after life; we are just here. There is no "meaning of life". The only meaning to life is that meaning which we give to it. We are not here "for a purpose". We provide our own purpose to life.

Because this life is all we have, life is incredibly precious. To take someone’s life is to take the most important thing that person has. To waste one’s own life is to waste the most important thing you have. Life should be valued highly, and we should live our lives to the fullest. The biggest "sin" is to fritter one’s life away waiting for some reward in the afterlife instead of making our own "heaven" here on Earth. We do not forgive others because it is what Jesus would do. We do it because when we forgive, we retain the opportunity to continue to have the love and companionship of those we forgive. This is what enriches our lives and makes life worth living. When religion works, it is by distilling the knowledge of those who came before us and giving us examples of how to live our lives in a way that makes us happy and makes others happy.

How did I get to be an atheist?

There was no single event or incident which "caused" me to become an atheist. I’m not an atheist as a simple rejection of the Catholic Church (under whose teachings I was raised) nor as a rejection of any individual’s beliefs. Becoming an atheist was the result of a decades-long search for the truth.

As I mentioned above, I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church. As early as my First Communion, I felt that something just wasn’t quite right about what the church was teaching. I remember wondering why I had to confess my sins to a priest if God was everywhere and knew what I was doing at all times. Now, as an adult, I know that the main reason for this is to make the confessor think about their sins and be remorseful for them. The point is not that this was a major inconsistency in the Catholic dogma, but that at that early age (6-7 years old) I was already questioning the practices and teachings of the church.

I remember a later incident in Catechism where we were asked to tell of some time that we had experienced God in our lives. I couldn’t think of any. One kid in the class talked about how he was pushing something heavy up a hill and asked God for help. He found the strength to make it to the top after that. I thought, "how does that prove that God helped? He could have just found the strength within himself."

By the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I was no longer going to Catechism. However, I still considered myself a Catholic.

In my seventh grade English class, we had to do a debate. The topic I drew was abortion. I took the anti-abortion side. For my sources, I found a bunch of religious pamphlets that preached about the sanctity of God-given life and how abortion was tantamount to murder. I argued this case in the debate. After the debate, my teacher, Mr. Lawson, commented to me that I had made an argument from a position of religious faith. Since faith is a system that is unassailable, what I had done was not debate, but put forth a position against which there was no rational argument. Since I respected Mr. Lawson, I took his words to heart. This was when I first started to acquire the tools for rational thought and evaluation that I would need on my search for the truth.

By the time that I was in high school, I believed that there must be some religion out there that possessed the truth about God. I knew it wasn’t the Catholic Church, so I started looking around for "the One". I had become what amounted to a Fundamentalist. I believed there was a God, and that the Bible was the true word of God. But I disagreed with the fact that, in the Catholic Church, the Priest read and interpreted the Bible to you. You were not encouraged to read it and interpret it for yourself. Since I disagreed with how they interpreted the Bible, I decided they didn’t know the true message in the Bible. At some point around the eleventh grade, I encountered a cult called The Way. They claimed to have a cadre of biblical scholars who had reevaluated the Bible using the original documents. They gave examples of how verses in the King James version of the Bible had been incorrectly translated and they had the real translation. I thought I had finally found the truth. These people had the true "Word of God". I went to one of their church meetings and was listening with an open mind until they did their "speaking in tongues" trick. I thought, "more hogwash". This meeting was supposed to be a friendly, informal meeting for a few of us who were interested. When they passed the hat at the end, I knew this was just another rip-off.

This episode didn’t stop my search. And I was still of a Fundamentalist bent when I entered college. It was sophomore year at Denison when a critical turning point in my life occurred. I was sitting up one night talking with my roommate discussing religion. He was either a religion or philosophy major (I forget which). He ended the conversation with the following statement: "You have to question your beliefs". What he meant by this is not that we should automatically reject the beliefs we were raised with. Instead, we should question all our beliefs. We should ask ourselves why we believe what we believe. There are two possible outcomes of such an enquiry. One outcome is that we realize that we don’t have a good reason to believe what we believe, and in fact, we should believe something else. The other outcome is that we continue to believe what we believe, but now, since we’ve thought about why, we have a good reason to believe it. Our belief therefore becomes stronger, and it is based on our own, personal reasons. We shouldn’t believe things simply because that’s what we were raised to believe or because that’s what everyone else believes.

This was really a life-changing event for me. It got me to step back and change the question from "which church has the truth about God?" to "what is the truth about God?" Never before had I even considered the question of whether God even existed at all.

The next big event on my evolution was senior year at Denison in my Philosophy of Feminism class. We were reading a book called, "The Redemption of God." It was the Ph.D. thesis of a woman who explored the fundamental patriarchal nature of the Christian God. Her hypothesis was that God could be "redeemed" if we redefine what God is. Instead of the all-powerful gray-bearded man, God is simply the power of Love in the world. Jesus wasn’t necessarily the Son of God, but was someone particularly gifted in channeling the power of Love to help and heal others. This was the first time that I came across the concept of redefining God. I mean, God just was, right? But here this woman redefined God into something that made a whole lot more sense to me than what any Christian church had ever told me. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe she was right. Maybe God wasn’t this thing that churches had taught me "He" was, maybe God was something else.

It was at about this same time that I started reading some Existential philosophy. I came across Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement with respect to God:
"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing." Or, to restate this "It does not matter if God exists or not, I am still responsible for my own actions." I basically agree with Existential philosophy. We are all ultimately responsible for our own actions. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, we make a choice to act in a certain manner. It is our choice, and we are responsible for the results of our actions. So I think Sartre was right. If we were to do things because we thought that is what God wants, it still does not absolve us from the responsibility for those actions. We can’t abdicate responsibility for our actions because it’s "God’s will." Once we realize this, we realize that the existence or nonexistence of God really doesn’t matter. If we act in a moral way, we do it because we want the societal and personal benefits of that. If we act in an immoral manner, we accept the societal and personal punishment that we will receive. God doesn’t enter into the equation.
I continued my quest. I discussed it with friends; I read books. But at this time, I knew that I didn’t believe that the Christian God existed.

It wasn’t until probably around the summer of 1989 that I realized that I was an atheist. I had searched and searched, and kept coming back to one fundamental thing, God doesn’t make sense.

So, for about eleven years now, I’ve been an atheist. I’ve read a number of books on atheism, rationalism, and science. These books resonate with what I see as being the truth about the universe. By applying Occam’s Razor, if we take any model of the world that contains a god, we can take the same model minus the god and get just as good an explanation of how the universe works. I have yet to see, hear about, or read about anything that exists or has ever occurred where the best explanation requires the existence of a god.

I consider myself a good scientist. As such, if someone came to me with some concrete evidence of the existence of a god, I would be forced to consider the validity of this data. Because it is physically impossible to search the entire universe to show that a god does not exist, I have to concede the possibility of a god. However, given the overwhelming absence of evidence of such an entity, I believe that no such being exists.

Therefore, my lack of belief in any god or gods makes me an atheist.  My belief that, in fact, no such beings actually exist makes me a strong atheist or nontheist.

Written in the Summer of 2000.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Watered Down

I was recently traveling in France, and, as often happens when I travel, I found myself one day with a bit of nausea and general stomach trouble.  So, we went to the pharmacy and asked for an anti-nausea medicine.  The pharmacist gave us one that she said would work with no side effects.  I looked at the ingredients and found that it was a homeopathic medicine.  Since I know what homeopathic medicine is, I told her that I wanted something else, because homeopathic medicine doesn't work.  She disagreed, but gave me a different medicine.  For this medicine, she warned me that there could be some side effects, such as drowsiness.   I thought that was fine, paid for the medicine, and left. 

Why did I refuse the homeopathic medicine?  Contrary to what a lot of people think, homeopathic doesn't just mean "natural" (as if "natural" equals "safe and effective").   Homeopathic "medicine" was developed in the early 1800's at least 30 years before Louis Pasteur's work on germs and the development of our current understanding of how bacteria, viruses, genetics, and other factors are responsible for  disease.  Homeopathic was developed by only looking at symptoms of diseases, since the causes weren't understood at that time.  It is based on two principles.  The first is the "law of similars".  This "law" states that "like cures like".  That is, if I have nausea, I should take a homeopathic preparation made from something that would induce nausea in an otherwise healthy person.  Of course, now that we know about germs, the law of similars is pretty ridiculous.  Some people confuse this with how vaccines work.  Vaccines inject pieces of the virus's actual proteins and other molecules into the body to get the immune system to work as it normally does to produce an immunity.  This is completely different from using a homeopathic preparation based on a chemical that is nothing like what is causing the ailment, but happens to induce the same symptoms.

The second principle upon which homeopathic is based is the idea that water has memory.  Homeopathic medicines are made by taking the substance chosen based on the law of similars and then diluting it repeatedly.  The idea is that the water will remember the substance, thus increasing its potency, while diluting the toxicity.  Somehow the water only remembers the good parts, I guess.  Then, the water is either dropped onto a sugar pill or taken as a liquid to treat the ailment.  The dilutions used are listed on the box with numbers like 10X or 4C.   They represent how many times that a drop of preparation is diluted into 10 (for X) or 100 (for C) times the amount of water.   So a 5C preparation (like the anti-nausea pills I was offered) means that one drop of the preparation is diluted in 100 drops of water.  Then one drop of that solution is diluted in 100 drops of water.  Then one drop of that solution is diluted in 100 drops of water.  This is repeated two more times to get 5C.  This represents one drop of the original substance in 10,000,000,000 drops of water.  To put this in perspective, this is like dissolving an aspirin in a swimming pool of water.   The creator of homeopathy advocated a 30C dilution.  At this level of dilution, it would be equivalent to having one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a drop of water the size of our solar system.

Of course, at these levels of dilution, the explanation for how the "medicine" works is that the water remembers the substance.  With what we know about how H20 molecules float around randomly in a liquid water, there is absolutely no possible way that information could be stored by them.  It is a physical impossibility for them to have memory.  However, let's think about it for a minute.  What if water did have memory, and thus homeopathic could work.  This would be incredible for the pharmaceutical industry.  They could make one batch of a drug and then just keep diluting it to produce more to sell.  All drugs would cost the same, since the cost of creating the original substance would be insignificant given the large quantities that could be produced from it. 

Let's go further with this.  If water had memory, then we would have "water archeologists" who would study the memories in water to discover information about those things the water has touched in the past (see my previous blog about how many things this could be).   Water could be used in forensics at crime scenes.  We would have TV shows like CSI:Water.  Water treatment plants would have to find ways of erasing the bad memories in water to make it safe to drink.  Who wants to drink water that has the memory of just being in someone else's toilet?  When we go to the bar, instead of complaining that the bar is watering down our drinks, we would want them to.  It would make the drinks stronger without adding the cost of extra alcohol.   We wouldn't have the concept of drowning.  If our lungs were deprived of oxygen, the water in the blood would remember the oxygen it carried before, and that would be sufficient to keep us alive.  In fact, perhaps we would only need to take a few breaths when we are first born, and that would keep us alive for the rest of our lives.   If water had memory, computer companies would be doing research on creating the equivalent of disk drives that use water for storage.  I would be bragging about how my new PC has 2 gallons of storage space or complaining because I lost my music collection when my storage sprang a leak.

The people who make and sell homeopathic medicine are banking on the fact that you don't know how it is supposed to work.  It's magical thinking.  They advertise "no side effects".  Of course there are no side effects - there are no effects!   But they want you to confuse it with all the other "alternative" medicines that are out there that promise cures to your ills without having to trust your doctor or drug companies or hospitals.   To add to the confusion, a lot of pills being sold put the word "homeopathic" on the label when they really aren't.  They may actually contain significant quantities of potentially active ingredients.   With true homeopathic pills, you can take as many as you like.  Since there isn't any real active substance in them any more, they won't hurt you.  In fact, there is a common stunt that skeptics do where they commit "homeopathic suicide" by eating an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills.   Of course, nothing happens when they do this.  I wouldn't recommend this stunt with just anything marked "homeopathic" though. 

When you see a box of pills marked "Homeopathic", realize that what it really says is "we think you are a sucker and will pay good money for sugar pills".   So if you have a real sickness, take real medicine.  Don't waste your money and delay proper treatment trying fake "medicines" like homeopathy.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Defending Marriage

I'm white.  My niece is white.  She is married to a black man.  They have a lovely mixed-race daughter who just celebrated her first birthday. In their marriage, the fact that the spouses are different races in no way diminishes the quality of the love they share, the partnership that they feel, their commitment to one another, or their ability to be good parents to their daughter. 

As recently as 1967, during my lifetime, it would have been illegal for them to be married in some states.  In Virginia, they would have been guilty of a felony and could spend a year in jail.  Their daughter would have been a social outcast.  Anti-miscegenation laws, as they are called, have a long history in the US.  The primary arguments against interracial marriage were religious.  In the Loving v. Virginia case that ended anti-miscegenation laws in the US, the trial judge in the case argued that God had put the different races on different continents for a reason, and it was a violation of his will to let them mix.  Mixed-race marriages were considered an assault on traditional, same-race marriage.  It was thought that mixed-race marriages could not produce children, or that the children produced would be inferior or "mongrels".  Thus, such unions should not be allowed. 

Fortunately, those laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967.  My niece and nephew-in-law can legally be married, have children, live happy and productive lives, and enjoy the legal benefits of being married.  Even if they weren't able to have children, they could adopt without being legally barred from it.  This is the way it should be.  This is a fair, just, and decent view of marriage.

Sadly, not all of the US's laws on marriage are fair, just, and decent.  There's still an ongoing struggle to allow same-sex partners to marry.   The arguments against gay marriage are primarily on religious grounds.  People argue that God made the sexes in a certain way, and to allow marriage between people of the same sex is a violation of his will.  They argue that allowing gays to marry is an assault on traditional, heterosexual marriage.  Because homosexual marriages cannot produce children, such unions should not be allowed. 

These arguments are just as absurd as they were when they were made against mixed-race marriages.  Just as the race of a couple has no bearing on their ability to form a stable, happy, enriching, long-lasting union, neither does the sex of the couple.  I'm sure there are thousands of same-sex couples living together in loving, stable relationships here in the US.  I know one couple here in Michigan who have been together for over 20 years. Unfortunately, they don't enjoy the same legal benefits of marriage that I do.

The fact that the marriage cannot produce children is equally irrelevant.  I've never had children of my own.  Perhaps I can't.  I don't know, I never tried.  Should I have been prevented from getting married because my marriages wouldn't result in children? 

Same sex couples can become parents through artificial insemination for lesbian couples or adoption for gay couples.  People argue that they shouldn't be allowed to raise children because they might raise them to be gay.  First, this objection is offensive because it assumes that being gay is a bad thing.  It's simply one of the many varieties of sexual preference that humans have.  It's no more good or bad than being heterosexual.  Second, there's a lot of evidence that being homosexual is just part of who someone is.  It's like being black or white.  You don't choose it, it's just who you are.  Third, whites could object to my niece's marriage because they might raise their daughter to be "black", or blacks could make the same objection because she may be raised "white".  Since when do people's objections on how we raise our children determine the legality of our marriages?  I could object that they might raise their daughter Republican.  But I don't think they should be prevented from having children for that reason. 

Last month, New York state passed a law allowing same-sex marriages.  This is another very positive step in allowing fairness and justice in our laws concerning marriage.  I hope that one day soon, we'll have a Supreme Court decision like Loving v. Virginia or a Federal law that removes the barriers to marriage for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.   Preventing same-sex marriage is just as bigoted and wrong as preventing mixed-race marriages.  It is complete violation of the unalienable rights of  "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". 

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

The Eye of a Needle

Sushila Subramanian was a natural musician, a talented engineer, and one of the kindest and most generous people I've ever known.  She was also my wife for 12 years.  For two long years she fought a battle with cancer.  I am still in awe of the courage, grace, and dignity with which she faced that horrible disease.   

Six years ago today, I sat by her side as she took her final breath.  At that moment, my life passed through the eye of a needle.  In an instant, the universe compressed to include just me and her and silence.  I honestly don't even remember who else was in the room with me at that moment.  All of our plans, every possible future that I could have had that included Sushi disappeared. 

Sushi ceased to exist, but my life has continued after that moment.  There are still threads passing through the eye of that needle to connect me to my past.  However, in some ways, just like trying to look through the eye of a real needle, as I move further away from that moment, it becomes more difficult for me to see what is on the other side.  I can only see the needle and the small circle formed by its eye.  Tragically, I can no longer remember the sound of Sushi's laugh, but I can clearly remember, in every detail, the sound of her last breath.   I can catch glimpses in my memory of her playing music or dancing or cooking or walking on a beach, but my memories are overwhelmed with chemo and losing hair and weakness and surgery and hope and lost hope.

Having gone through that experience does not define who I am.   For a brief time after Sushi's death I joined a support group for people who had recently lost their spouses.  But I quickly broke off from that group because I didn't want to define myself as a widower.  I am more than that, and my life is defined by more than that moment.   However, going through that experience did change me.  I'm the same person I was before, but I'm not the same.  In some ways I'm better, in some, worse.  

I've gone on to live my life after that moment.  I've found love and happiness and the joy of being a parent.  I aspire to enjoy every single day.  I look for happiness in things big and small.  I try to learn and grow as a person and contribute positively to the world.  To do any differently would be a betrayal to my own beliefs about the importance of living life, and it would be a betrayal to Sushi's memory.  Cancer took from her the opportunity to live a life.  I feel that I honor her by living a life, in part, for her.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

Religion and Deception

I'm in the process of reading Nicholas Wade's "Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors".   This is a very interesting and enjoyable book that examines the evolution of humans and human society using the results of recent research in genetics to inform the large body of research in traditional anthropology. 
Today I happened to read his section on "The Evolution of Religion", and I don't completely agree with its central premise.  He poses the question of when religion first evolved.  He hypothesizes that it co-evolved with language, "because language can be used to deceive, and religion is a safeguard against deception."   
First, I don't think this argument is logically sound.  Religion requires language in order to be transmitted from one person to another.  As such, it is as vulnerable to deception as any other language-based aspect of culture.   In fact, because religion is based on unfalsifiable ideas (I refuse to call them "facts"), then it is itself a deception.   Second, history is full of examples of "pious frauds", people who lie in order to support their religious beliefs.  Any number of religious artifacts have been proven to be frauds, but religious leaders continue to claim they are authentic just to support the religious belief they represent.   Thus, to claim that religion protects society from deception is provably false.   Therefore, religious belief would not be selected for for this reason. 
This is not to say that religion could not have an evolutionary basis.  A secondary claim that Wade makes is that religious belief helps to form an exclusive community of believers.  If religious observance requires sufficient expenditure of time and resources, then having a religious community can help to exclude outsiders who do not know the rituals and thus may not be trustworthy.  Also, those who do not participate in the religious obligations and are thus "freeloaders" on society may also be excluded and will not receive other benefits of participation, such as business opportunities, access to mates ("don't marry outside the religion"), or support in times of crisis. 
In "The Greatest Show on Earth", Richard Dawkins discusses the concept of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS).   He uses the concept of game theory to give examples of how a population can be divided into individuals demonstrating different types of behaviors where the relative proportions of each type of individual is stable across generations.  In the case of religion, as described by Wade, there could be an ESS where a certain percentage of the population is religious and a complementary percentage is not.   The fact that this is a stable strategy might be sufficient for religion to be selected for.  In a small, otherwise homogeneous community, the likely ESS is to have a majority be religious.  There are already evolutionary advantages to having group cohesion.  Religion can provide that cohesion and could thus prosper. 
This idea would also explain why religions like Islam can prosper in fairly homogenous cultures like you find in the Middle East, but they have more difficulty gaining traction in more heterogeneous cultures.   Dividing the population into different sub-populations of belief systems or philosophies is not as stable (in terms of an ESS) as having a single majority religion.
The fact that religion can be found in every culture is proof that it must have been selected for at some point in our evolution and continued to confer sufficient advantage that it wasn't selected against.  However, as our culture becomes more diverse, and we have other philosophical and political means of encouraging social cohesion, we have less need for religion (or any particular religion) to serve that role.  Also, as our scientific knowledge of the world grows, the mere fact that religions are based on ideas that are not true gives greater reason for them to be rejected in favor of positive philosophical belief systems that are based on our existing and evolving knowledge of reality.  I disagree with Wade's claim that religion originally evolved to safeguard against deception.  However, perhaps we are now witnessing the evolution of skepticism and humanism as a safeguard from the deception of religion.

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Where are you sitting?

In a recent conversation with a gentleman I met, we were discussing the expectations we have for our children when they go to college.  He related the advice that his older brothers gave him when he went to college.  They told him, "When you are sitting in a large lecture hall, sit directly in the middle.  Then, look to your left.  Those people are smarter than you.  Then look to your right.  Those people are dumber than you.  Get used to that, and you'll be happy."
My first reaction was, wow, what an amazing acceptance of a life of mediocrity.   Here's a person who will never aspire to be better than they think they are, and will muddle through life accepting whatever comes along as "good enough".  What a loser.
However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there is actually some wisdom in what he told me.  I think that one of the most important character traits that we can have is self-awareness.  It's extremely important to know who you are, where you are in your life, what you like, what you dislike, and where you want to be in the future.  Don't get me wrong, I don't think we have to live our lives according to some pre-defined plan.  And we certainly don't want to spend so much time "finding ourselves" that we don't actually live life.  Also, I think the big flaw in this guy's philosophy was that he chose his seat before he ever looked around to see where he was and who was around him.
 Just asking the question, "who am I?" is what leads us to freedom.  I owe a great intellectual and philosophical debt to my college sophomore roommate who challenged me with the question, "you should question what you believe."  It was a simple statement, but it changed my perspective on how I understood who I was and what my place is in the world.  The question was posed to me in the context of a discussion of religion (I grew up in an area where there was a church on every corner, and that shaped my world view), but it could apply to any type of belief.
To go back to the "going to college" example, I graduated high school at the top of my class.  I had always been "the smartest kid in the class", so my graduation ranking didn't surprise me.  In college, I realized that I was swimming in a bigger pond.  I was competing with students from all around the world.  I no longer had an expectation to be at the top of my class, but I certainly wanted to do as well as I could.  I graduated 7th out of 512 in my class.  While not the very top, I was pretty happy with my place.  Grad school was a completely different picture.  I knew that I was in an even more elite group, and I couldn't expect to be at the same level.  I was aware of my capabilities, and I set my expectations accordingly.  In many ways, getting a Ph.D. is a pass/fail proposition, and that was a good thing for me.   I worked hard, I did my best, and I passed, but I realized that there were a lot of other people there who were much brighter than I was.  Nevertheless, I was proud of my accomplishment, and I could say that I was successful at what I tried to achieve.
Throughout my life, I've traveled some paths that could be considered quite conventional and some that were quite unconventional.  Along the way, I always tried to understand who I was, what I was doing, and where I was going.
As another example, there are some things in my life that others would label as failures.  For a while, I worked as a research scientist.  This is a faculty position at a university which has an expectation for promotion to higher levels.  However, if you don't get promoted, you lose your job.  When promotion time came along, I realized that I hadn't done what was needed to get promoted, and my chances of promotion were slim or none.  One of my responsibilities was to manage research projects in addition to the normal tasks of doing research, publishing, getting funding, etc.  I felt the management part was more important to the bigger project and more interesting to me, so this is what I spent my time on, to the detriment of the other areas.  Promotion is based on those other areas, not on project management.  So I changed jobs and removed myself from consideration.  Looking back on this, I don't consider this a failure in any way.  At each point during that time, I made decisions carefully and deliberately with the understanding of what I wanted and what was important to me.  The fact that this lead to a different path than was planned doesn't bother me.
In the bigger scheme of things, being aware of who and what we are has an impact on the decisions we make with respect to politics, the environment, technology, population growth, and the future we want this world to have.  The name of this blog and Carl Sagan's quote that I took it from are perfect examples of being self-aware with respect to our place in the universe.   It doesn't represent resignation to a fate, but it says, this is the lecture room I find myself in, this is who I am, and this is where I choose to sit.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Evidence

If you have been watching the news lately, you know that at least one Christian lunatic thinks that today is going to be the Rapture, marking the beginning of the end of the world.  Somehow, he's managed to get a lot of media attention.  I've heard people mention it on the street, and local skeptic groups are having an End of the World Party to poke some fun at the idea.

When tomorrow comes around and we're all still here, what will the Christians say?  Will the ones who believe in the Rapture actually change their beliefs based on the fact that the Rapture didn't happen as predicted?  Unfortunately, no.   In general, their belief that the Rapture will some day occur is based on their faith that the Bible is the absolute, unerring word of God.  It's truth is permanent and unchanging. 

On the other hand, if the Rapture did actually occur, if billions of people suddenly ascended into Heaven in a clap of thunder, skeptics would change their beliefs.  If I saw this happen, of course I would believe that some sort of superior being existed and these events happened as predicted in the Bible.  I would have to be delusional not to.

That's the difference between "people of faith" and skeptics.  Skeptics understand that we don't have complete knowledge of the universe.  Science is a process of gaining facts and modifying our understanding based on the observed facts.  History is full of cases where the scientific consensus was one thing at one time and then changed when a new hypothesis was introduced or new facts came to light that changed our understanding of the universe.   One only has to look at the history of medicine for ample examples of this.  It was once thought that bloodletting was a useful treatment for disease.  We now know that good health isn't a matter of balancing the body's "humors".  We have a much better understanding of the mechanisms of disease and such practices have been rightfully abandoned.  Religious people see this as a fault in science.  They somehow think that admitting that you were wrong and accepting a new idea as a better representation of the truth is somehow a failing in science.  For them, it seems to be important to have beliefs that are absolute.  They do not change no matter what.  This, somehow, is a virtue.

I think that stubbornly sticking to your ideas and being unwilling to change is sad.   How can we grow as individuals if we are unwilling to accept that sometimes we are wrong?   How can we continue to grow and improve our family relationships if we aren't willing to accept new ideas and change as our life situation changes?  How can we ever expect to improve our society if we aren't willing to question the assumptions about the values of our culture, our interactions with others, and our relationship with our planet?

Being a skeptic is a positive world view.  It shouldn't be confused with being a cynic, which is a pretty negative view.  Skeptics want to use all the tools of science, philosophy, and art to increase their understanding of the world.   They want to know the Truth, but they always keep in mind that our current understanding of what is the Truth can change, based on sufficient evidence.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Lack of Evidence

In my previous post, I compared the evidence for the existence of God with the evidence for the existence of mosquitoes.  I'd like to take that idea a little further and generalize it a bit.

Given the claims that are made about the properties of the Christian God, the overwhelming lack of evidence of its existence provides a strong argument that it doesn't exist at all.  Of course, lack of evidence is not proof of nonexistence.  Until recently, we had no evidence of exoplanets - planets orbiting other stars.  We now have lots of evidence of exoplanets.  They clearly exist.  The difference between exoplanets and a god is that we simply didn't have the proper technology to detect the exoplanets.  According to many Christians, their god is everywhere on Earth, and he is constantly involved with peoples' lives.  We should have ample evidence of his existence.  It's not the case that we're just waiting for someone to build a sufficiently sensitive god-detector, and then, voila, there he will be.

But this blog isn't intended to rehash the arguments of my last blog.  I want to apply the same concept to other supernatural claims.  Let's take psychic powers as an example.  If humans had actually evolved psychic abilities of some sort, then we would expect that there would be lots of people walking around with some level of psychic ability.  In fact, I imagine that psychic ability, say the ability to read minds, would have incredible evolutionary advantage.  Imagine being able to walk into a room and being able to immediately know which person in the room is interested in mating with you.  I'm not talking about the perceptive abilities of a drunken frat boy who thinks that every woman in the room wants to mate with him.  I'm talking about the ability to actually read minds and know what other people want and think.  It would be an incredible advantage in dating, business, and politics.  It would be well known that people with these skills exist and who they are.  In fact, they would likely be so successful in mating and surviving that those genes would quickly be prevalent in the population.  Everyone would have a psychic ability just like everyone has a sense of smell.

Instead, we have people who claim to have psychic abilities and advertise them to con a few bucks off of gullible suckers.  Last year I was walking along the street in the Greektown section of Detroit.  I was directly across the street from the Greektown Casino.  I noticed a sign over a door advertising a Psychic.  Amazing.  Of course, if that person really had psychic abilities, they would just walk across the street into the casino and walk out with a fortune.  Instead, they have set up shop across the street and are preying on the statistically challenged (and obviously reality challenged) customers of the casino.  If this isn't adequate evidence that this person's claimed psychic powers are a fraud, I don't know what is.

You can take this same argument and apply it to lots of claims - Bigfoot, UFOs, alien abductions, cases of autism caused by vaccines, funny Adam Sandler movies, etc.  In all cases, the complete lack of evidence that such a thing exists is very strong evidence that it doesn't exist.  It doesn't prove it, but it's a good first approximation. 

Saturday, April 30, 2011

The existence of mosquitoes

Summer is approaching.  I'm looking forward to being able to go outside without a coat or jacket on.  I'm especially looking forward to the clear nights when I can get out my telescope and peer into the universe that surrounds us.  The one thing I don't look forward to is the mosquitoes.  It's extremely annoying to go outside and realize I'm just a big walking meal for thousands of little insects.  While mosquito repellents are effective, I hate having to take the time to apply them and then having to shower afterwards to remove them just to have an hour of comfort outside. 

When I used to travel to India, we would take anti-malarial medicines because of the mosquitoes.  We would sleep with mosquito repellent coils burning in the room to protect us.  I have no idea what chemicals I was breathing.   These devices were generally effective.  We would only have a few bites in the morning.  I've heard that scientists are working on laser targeting systems that can detect mosquitoes and fire a tiny laser to kill them.  This would be amazing technology, and I wonder what it would look like when in use.  I can imagine a tiny laser light show shooting around the room. 

We've all experienced the nuisance of mosquitoes.   They are a part of our lives.  They are everywhere, and nobody doubts that they exist.    Why isn't it the same way with God (meaning, the Christian god, but the same applies to all deities)?  If God really existed, why wouldn't it just be an obvious part of the world, just like mosquitoes are?  Why would we need to "believe"?  You don't have to believe in mosquitoes, they just exist, and that's it. 

Imagine what the world would be like if God really existed.  God would be visible and evident in some manner.  If natural disasters actually happened, the people who prayed would always survive.  I read today that an entire town in Alabama was destroyed by tornadoes, including all three churches.  If God existed, the report would be that the town was destroyed, but, of course, the churches were protected. 

If God really existed, people wouldn't have to make up convoluted arguments for why Evil exists in the world.   Either it simply wouldn't exist, or God would make it perfectly clear to every human why it does.   We would never have religious wars, because it would be obvious to everyone what God was and how he acts.  Nobody fights wars over their belief in the nature of mosquitoes. 

If it appears that I'm oversimplifying theology and I don't understand the subtleties of the nature of the existence of God and the need for Faith or whatever, well, that's not the case.   If an all-powerful, omniscient, omnipresent entity actually existed, it would be obvious.  We wouldn't need holy books full of opaque metaphors to explain it.  There wouldn't be dramatically differing opinions on the matter.  It would be as obvious as gravity, or the air we breathe, or mosquitoes.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Pray for Texas

Texas is on fire.  Wildfires have spread across the state and currently cover a million acres.  And what is the solution that has been proposed by the Texas state legislature and signed into law by their governor?  Prayer.

Yes, the government of the State of Texas signed a law asking the people of the state to pray for rain. You can find some of the text referenced here

I wrote about prayer previously in reference to the disaster in Japan.  This current action in Texas serves to confirm the point I was making in that post.  People really think that praying for something will have an effect.  The legislature didn't ask them to pray for inspiration on how to find a solution to the problem or for strength in dealing with it.  Such a request would indicate a realization that prayer is simply a technique for self-reflection and thought.  Instead, they are clearly asking for their god to intervene.  Which again raises the questions - why hasn't their god intervened already, and why do they think they can influence the actions of a god?  When will people realize the inherent problems with this theology?

Another problem I have with this action is the clear violation of the separation of church and state.  The government should never, ever, ever, get involved in telling people how to practice a religious activity.  More importantly (to me), the government should not be encouraging people to practice ANY religious activity.  The state of Texas was very careful in the wording of their call to prayer to be inclusive of all religions.  They clearly saw that they would be inviting (justifiable) lawsuits if they mentioned God (or Thor or Vishnu or any other specific god).  However, they still show a direct endorsement of religion in general.  By endorsing religion, they push out those who have no religious beliefs.  There are many people who feel that supernatural beliefs in gods and devils are all a bunch of irrational, magical thinking that have no place in a grown-up view of the natural world.  When the government endorses religion, it makes non-religious people into second class citizens.  It's no different than if the government passed a law asking for three days in support of "white American culture".  That would clearly be racist, a violation of civil rights, and immoral.  Why can the government get away with acting the same way towards atheists and other non-believers?

The third problem I have with this action in Texas is that it promotes magical thinking that is completely removed from reality.  It treats the wildfires as if they somehow magically appeared and only an appeal to a magical old man in the sky can solve the problem.  The reality is that the fires are caused by a severe drought in Texas.  One (very likely) cause of that drought is global climate change that is occurring because we are burning too much oil and other fossil fuels and are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  While a lot of people oversimplify the concept of human-caused global climate change as "global warming", the reality is that we are causing changes to the climate that are displayed in many ways.  One is that areas that once had plentiful rain will now suffer droughts.  This is likely what is happening in Texas.  Of course, the (Republican) government of Texas isn't going to admit this is a possible cause - not when a significant part of the state economy is based on oil production and refinement.  It's very likely that the oil industry paid significant amounts of money to help get the governor and legislators elected.  Do you think those elected officials are going to turn around and point out that the oil industry is partly to blame for these wildfires?  Of course not.  It's much easier to ask people to shut up for three days and pray to their magical grandfather to smile upon them and solve their problems.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

The Forks in the Road

We're in the process of planning a trip this Summer to go to a relative's wedding.  Like all weddings, it will be a very important day in their lives.  We all have these important days - births, graduations, wedding, deaths, etc.  On those days, we know that our lives are changing.

But what really amazes and intrigues me are the moments where our lives change drastically, and we don't even notice it at the time.  However, later, we look back, and we recognize exactly the moment when we made a decision or learned some fact that changed the course of the rest of our life.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I spent the first semester of my senior year of undergrad at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  I was there as part of the "Oak Ridge Science Semester" sponsored by the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA).  At the end of the program, there was a dinner for all the participants (about 20-30 of us).  At the dinner, I happened to speak with one of the professors who was running the program there.  He was from a small GLCA college in Michigan (I forget which one).  He asked me if I was going to grad school.  I said I was, and listed the ones I was applying to.  They were all universities with top-ranked Computer Science programs (Stanford, MIT, Berkeley).  I had good grades, and my adviser at Oak Ridge had encouraged me to apply to those universities.  The professor at the dinner asked if I had considered the University of Michigan.  Being a native born Ohioan, I hadn't, of course.  I grew up supporting Ohio State.  U of M was the enemy!  But, he said they had a good robotics program, since they were so close to the automotive manufacturing plants.  I was at Oak Ridge studying robotics, so it was a logical choice.

So, when I was applying to grad schools, I applied to UM, just as a backup.  Well, it was a good thing.  All the other universities turned me down, but UM accepted me.   So, that's where I went.   

As I looked back later, I realized that one, otherwise insignificant, moment at a dinner in Tennessee where a professor decided to give some advice to a student caused the entire path of my life to change.  My life could have taken another path, but the one it took to Michigan has been wondrous.  I'm very happy with the choice.

I've had other such moments in my life - when a pretty girl smiled at me in the hallway and I smiled back, when I decided to answer an email that I could have ignored.  It's easy for me to think of these as just random events that happened to me, but the truth is, they have something in common.  Yes, the fact that they happened was random, but what is common is that I chose to act on the event.  I was open to a new possibility, and I chose to act.  While I might not have always chosen "the one less traveled by", I made the choices in my life, and I am happy where it's led me.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Know nukes

The first semester of my Senior year at Denison University, I participated in an off-campus research program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  Oak Ridge is a government research facility that was built outside of Knoxville, TN, to develop nuclear weapons capabilities as part of the Manhattan Project.  The central research facilities are in the middle of a 34,000 acre reserve.  Originally, this was a secure, top secret area.
(By the way, I was there doing robotics research, not building weapons.  My building was "outside the gate".  I didn't even have to pass through any security checkpoints to get to my workplace.)
The Fall that I was there was the first time in 40 years that they opened up the reservation for deer hunting.  Vehicle-deer accidents were averaging one every 1-2 days.  Given the length of time that the deer population had been living unperturbed there, the local hunters were extremely excited at the possibilities of bagging some big bucks for trophies.
As the day approached, all the workers around the lab were getting more and more excited.  The local newspaper was full of articles about the hunt.  The official rules from the lab were published.  Normal limits on the number of deer that could be taken would be in effect.  The only special rule was that each deer killed had to be taken to a special checkpoint before it was removed from the reservation to check the body for radiation.
I used to tell that story, and I thought that the final punchline was pretty funny.  After what is happening right this moment in Japan, I'm not laughing about it anymore.
When I was at Oak Ridge, I listened to presentations by scientists who were developing new ways to store nuclear waste in deep mines encased in concrete.  They were calculating the probability of any of the radiation seeping into the groundwater.  These were really smart people working to solve a difficult problem.  I think they have some good solutions for this problem.  For years I've been generally pro-nuclear.   While I understand there are some environmental, security, and political issues surrounding the tasks of acquiring the uranium, transporting it, refining it, and storing the waste, I felt that those costs were justified given the value of the energy produced.
What the current Japanese nuclear disaster has reminded me of is the risk.  The risk of an accident is too high.  Let me take a moment to review the definition of risk, just to be clear about what I mean.  Risk is the probability of something happening multiplied by the cost if it does happen.  Normally, we think of risk only with respect to the probability.  If something only has a 0.00001% chance of happening, we say it has a low risk.  But if something has a 50% chance of happening, but the cost that we have if it does is low, then that also has a low risk.
For nuclear energy, the cost of an accident is extremely high.  There is, obviously, the immediate danger to the people who are directly exposed during the crisis, but there is also long-term consequences of having radiation released into the environment.  One figure I read said that the radioactive plutonium that is created by nuclear power plants will be around for the next 12,000 generations.    It will be a danger to people for a longer time than there have actually been a species on this planet that we can call "people" (or at least modern humans).  The cesium-137 that was released will be around in dangerous quantities for hundreds of years.   So even if the probability of an accident is low, the cost is so high that almost any probability other than zero makes the risk high.  And in the case of nuclear energy, the probability isn't so low.  There have been at least four major nuclear accidents in the 70 years that we've had nuclear energy.   They happen, and people die.  For decades.
So I'm not laughing at jokes about nuclear deer anymore.   On the other hand, I'm not panicking and taking prophylactic iodine tablets.  The radioactive iodine isn't an immediate threat to us, and after a few months it will have decayed to a point that it isn't a problem.  What I am doing is thinking more about how we really need to be serious about "clean" energy.  We need to understand the risks of our sources of energy and choose wisely.  And mostly, we need to reduce our overall energy consumption so we aren't so desperate for energy that we'll take it from any source, no matter what the risk.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

A cup of history

As I'm writing my blog entry today, I'm drinking a glass of water.  I'm thinking, where did this water come from.  Well, from the tap, of course.  But a glass of water is made up of molecules of water.  In fact, a 8 oz. glass of water contains about 7 million billion billion molecules of water.  Although all those molecules are sitting in my glass right now, they weren't always together.  Also, it's not like my tap magically created the water out of thin air.  Those molecules came from somewhere.
My water at my house comes from a well.  The water down in the well got there somehow.  Some of it has been sitting around down there for years and years and only now is being pumped up to the surface.  Some of it has filtered down from the surface to collect and mix with the water there.  Some of that water came from a cow urinating in the field down the way.  Some came from the leftover ice in a Wendy's cup that someone dumped out of their car as they were driving down the road.  Most of it got there from the rain and snow. 
The water molecules that got there as rain or snow were up in the clouds for some time.  They got there through evaporation from any number of places: the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, any number of lakes and streams across the country, some sweaty guy in Iowa trying to fix his lawn mower, a teapot boiling Texas, lots of places.  Most of the water in the Gulf got there from rain and from rivers and streams that feed into the Gulf.  Some got there from a seasick passenger vomiting over the side of a cruise ship.  Some came from the blood of pirates killed in ancient sea battles.  Some of the water there has been circulating around the Gulf and the ocean for years.  It may have spent time in the cells of a giant squid or passed from organism to organism in the small food chain of a coral reef. 
Before some of that water rained into the Gulf, it was in clouds that came from evaporation of water from some other part of the world.  As we go back and back in time, we see that these molecules have traveled around the world over and over again.  Each molecule in my glass of water may have been part of countless different plants, animals, and other organisms from cats and dogs to dinosaurs to ancient bacteria.  It may have helped erode away mountains and flooded cities.  It may have been locked in a glacier for hundreds of years.  
In addition to the molecules that survived intact for their existence, some of the molecules were formed during the burning of some forest when the hydrogen atoms in the cells of the trees bound with oxygen in the air to give off heat and creating a water molecule that was released into the atmosphere.   Other water molecules formed inside living beings as part of their normal life processes.  Each of those hydrogen and oxygen atoms has their own history.
As we go back further in time to the early formation of the earth, some of the water molecules were part of the cloud of interstellar dust that coalesced to form the Earth.  Other molecules rained down on the Earth as parts of comets that pummeled the planet during its early history.  And for all of those molecules, the oxygen atoms in them were formed in the tremendous nuclear furnaces in the insides of stars.  They were flung into space when the stars exploded and later bound to hydrogen atoms they encountered.
So, as I drink my glass of water, I drink molecules that have participated in the vast history of our universe.   Soon, they will become part of me, and they will join with all the other atoms of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, calcium, and other elements that make up me.   Each of those atoms and molecules has its own unique history.  This combination of atoms and molecules that I call "me" is a piece of a universe that is vast and grand and amazing.  It builds worlds and brings forth life and produces each of us.  When I die, my atoms and molecules will be set free from this particular configuration to spread throughout the world to become part of countless future plants and animals (including us people) that will inhabit this planet.    And, sometime, centuries from now, someone will sit down to have a glass of water that contains a molecule of me.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Glory

I was browsing through the web site of my friend, Tim Householder, when I came across one of his photographs that I find particularly brilliant.
 

Please click this link to see the full-size version.  I'll wait.
(Note: Looks like Tim took down the photo...  I think you can figure it out from the description below.)

This photo has a great David Lynch quality about it.  It portrays something mundane and normal but with a heightened feeling of reality that pushes it into slightly surreal.  There are so many things that I like about this photo.  First, there is the subject matter.  We have an award for the "Best Exhibit of Canned or Dried Beef" and it was won by a piece of beef that was both dried AND canned.  How could it lose?  I also love the composition of the photo.  By providing a wide view of the can on an otherwise empty shelf, I can imagine either of two things.  One, that this is a very big honor, and they want to make sure it is shown, or two, that this is a small, pathetic county fair with not enough exhibits to fill a shelf where a ridiculous piece of beef jerky in a used jelly jar can win a prize.  

As much as it is easy for me to act like some "big-city snob" and make fun of a jar of dried beef, for some woman in Yuma County, it's a big deal.  She worked hard, perhaps for years, to perfect her beef drying recipe.  Or perhaps it's a young girl who did this as a 4-H project, and it's her first award at the fair.  Either way, it's something significant in their life.  It's something they are proud of.  It's one moment of glory for them.  

Every day we pass by the glories in other people's lives and usually don't even notice.  And most of the time, they don't notice ours either.  Sometimes, if we're lucky, we do notice.  Every time I pass by a wedding party I think about how, even if this is just an average day for me, it's a day those people will never forget.   Likewise, on the special days of my life, it's just an average day for most of the people in the world.  I think it's important to be happy in our glories, in our victories, and in our accomplishments, even if other people don't notice or don't value them.  We should also try to keep our eyes open to notice the glories in other people's lives.  Because it's nice for them to have those things recognized, and it's good for us to be reminded that there are so many glorious things in the world.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

I was fat

When I turned 39 years old, I started looking down the road to the big 4-0, and I realized one thing, I was fat.  I weighed 225 lbs. and had a BMI of over 28, a mere 2 points below being "obese".  While I could take some small consolation from the fact that I was "merely overweight" and not obese, it was a cold comfort.  At the time, I was watching my father slowly die from congestive heart failure.   I decided that I wanted to try to avoid that fate, and one good step would be to do something about my weight.

So, I did all the things that I was supposed to do.  I went to the gym 3 times a week.  I walked, or even ran, a mile or so each time in addition to lifting weights.  I cut back on all those fatty, sugary snacks that I was eating.  I really made a big effort.  On my 40th birthday, I stepped on the scales, and I was surprised to find that I had lost a total of zero (0) pounds.

What had I done wrong?  Why wasn't I the lean, fit guy that I was supposed to be?  Well, I thought long and hard about it, and I realized that I had failed to lose weight because I listened to all the hype in the media and the ads from the weight loss programs and did what "everyone knows" is the way to lose weight.  Instead, I should have just used some logic and common sense.

So here's what I did.   First, I applied a little physics and biology knowledge.  To maintain my current weight of 225 lbs with my current level of activity, I have to eat a certain number of calories each day.  I have to move that 225 lbs of mass around to do all the things I do.  This requires a certain amount of energy.   If I weighed less, I would have less mass to move around with me all day and would thus require less energy to do it.  That means I wouldn't have to eat as many calories.

Next, I looked at how I got fat in the first place.  I didn't go from being, say, 175 lbs to being 225 lbs by all of a sudden gorging myself every day on the amount of food that I would eat to maintain my weight at 225 lbs.  If I had tried to do that, I would feel stuffed all the time, I would be uncomfortable, and I would give up on the goal.  Instead, I got fat little by little by eating more than I needed each day.  My body slowly stored that extra energy as fat, and I ended up at 225 lbs. 

Similarly, I couldn't expect to go from 225 lbs down to 175 lbs by starving myself and only eating what would be required to maintain my weight at 175 lbs.  I would feel hungry all the time, I would be uncomfortable, and I would give up on my goal.  Instead, I needed to lose weight little by little.  

So I put these two facts together and came up with a plan.  First, I would set small, incremental goals.  Instead of saying, "I want to lose 50 lbs", I said, "I want to lose 5 lbs".  This is a much more attainable goal.  It also helped me figure out how to reach it.  Instead of eating like a 225 lb person, I would eat like a 220 lb person.  What's the difference?  Just a little bit less food on the plate at each meal.   I never counted calories or weighed my food.  I also never made any food strictly off-limits.  I didn't deprive myself of the foods I wanted to eat, I just ate less of them.  Occasionally during the process I did change one little thing in my diet.  For example, at one point I switched from drinking a can of pop at each dinner to drinking water.  It was a small change, but I'm sure it made a difference.

Once I started eating like a 220 lb person is when the physics part would kick in.  If I'm moving my 225 lb mass around but only providing enough energy to move 220 lbs, my body needs to find the energy for those extra 5 lbs somewhere.  It does that by burning off some fat.  Each time it does that, I get a little lighter, and I have less energy demand to make up for.  Eventually, I get to 220 lbs.

The second, and most important, part of the plan was psychological.  I had to start thinking of myself as a 220 lb person instead of a 225 lb person.  This is a very powerful thing.  If I think of myself as a 225 lb person who happens to weigh 220 lbs at some time, it's not really a big deal if I gain back 5 lbs.  On the other hand, if I consider myself a 220 lb person who happens to be 225 lbs, then it's a problem, but it's not so difficult to get back down to my "normal" weight of 220 lbs.

Once I reached my goal of 220 lbs, I would live that way for a while to get used to it.  Eating like a 220 lb person became my normal way of eating.  Then, I would start the cycle over again.  I would start thinking of myself as a 215 lb person who happens to be 5 lbs overweight and needs to get back to my normal weight.  I would eat like a 215 lb person, and the pounds would start to go away.

During all this process, I did add some extra activity to my day.  When the weather was nice, I would go out and take a little walk at lunchtime.  It was a nice break from my work day.  I got some sunshine and fresh air.  I got to stretch my legs a bit after sitting at a desk for hours.  It was a nice addition to my day.  I'm sure it also contributed to my weight loss, but it never seemed like a chore. 

My eventual, long-term goal was to get my BMI down to the "normal" range.  I calculated that I would need to be about 185 lbs to give me a few pounds leeway to keep from pushing up into the "overweight" territory.   I was very pleased that by the time of my 41st birthday, I had reached that goal.  And I never felt like I was "on a diet".  I just ate like the weight I wanted to be.  I think this is what weight-loss experts mean when they say you have to make lifestyle changes.  The problem is that they never tell you what those changes are or how to make them.   And I think this is why most diets fail.  Instead of making small, slow changes to how they eat, people try to make drastic changes to their diet that don't represent how they will eat day-to-day for the rest of their lives to maintain a healthy weight.

Since the time that I achieved that goal, I've actually lost an additional 10 lbs.  It wasn't as deliberate of a process.  It was mostly a by-product of eating a better, healthier diet and not actually wanting to eat the way I had before.  I don't feel deprived of any foods, but I maintain my weight.  I'm not a 225 lb person anymore.  I'm a 178 lb person, and I will never think of myself as a 225 lb person again.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Green Energy

For the past 9 years, we've been in a bloody and expensive war in Iraq.  We have yet to see the full impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and the nuclear crisis in Japan has still not been resolved.  How long are we going to destroy our planet and our civilization for dirty, dangerous forms of energy?  It's time to start using a plentiful source of green energy that is right in our backyard.  Squirrels.  Seriously, we have enough squirrels in our back yard to power 2 or 3 houses.  If we catch them and put them on little wheels, we could have an inexhaustable power supply.  The way those things are reproducing, they are clearly renewable.  We don't have to feed them, because they just steal what we put in the birdfeeder anyway.  So the cost is low.  It's a simple, elegant solution, and dang are they cute!

(OK, Mike.  That's all I've got on the squirrel thing.  I hope you're happy.)

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Pray for Japan

About a week after the devastating earthquake in Japan, I saw an article on AnnArbor.com which featured a photo of Japanese students painting "Pray for Japan" on The Rock at the southeast corner of campus. 

I'm curious about the belief that underlies this message.  What is the purpose of praying for Japan?  Did their god not notice that the earthquake and tsunami were happening?  Was he somewhere reading "The Pet Goat" and couldn't be bothered to act?  Was he so busy cursing people who were having homosexual sex that he didn't notice this catastrophe?  Perhaps he didn't hear the screams of pain and suffering of the thousands of people who were killed or injured.  He wouldn't have acted until a few people in a small college town in Michigan point out to him, "Hey, look over at Japan.  There seems to be some trouble over there that needs your attention." 

Imagine if our government worked this way.  What if there was an earthquake off the coast of California which caused a tsunami which wiped out part of San Francisco.   What if the government didn't do anything until people around the country started calling Washington DC a few days later to tell them about the disaster?  Would these people put up with that?  OK, perhaps that is pretty much what happened with Hurricane Katrina, but that doesn't make it acceptable, especially from a god. 

OK.  So perhaps their god did notice, but then, why pray?  Will their god not provide enough relief and comfort for the survivors until he gets enough prayers to support it?  Is he playing Japanese Tsunami Survivor and is waiting for all the prayers to come in to see who will get booted off the island and who gets to stay?  If their god is truly compassionate, then he should do what is in his power (which should be everything!) and fix the problem.  He shouldn't need prayer to encourage him in the task.

I guess another option is that, yes, their god will do what he wants to help the people of Japan, but they pray to make themselves feel better.  They don't really expect to influence their god, but the act of prayer is an act of self-reflection.  It focuses them and shows their solidarity with the suffering of the survivors.  Wouldn't it be better to take all that energy that is being spent on prayer and focus on actively doing something that will help?  Donate to the charities who are effective in helping with these types of disasters.  Do work in your own home and community to prepare if a disaster occurs where you live.   Contact your government representatives and let them know what you think they should be doing to help.  There are lots of ways that you can actively do good in the world.   Kneeling and praying and then feeling better about yourself because you did it isn't one of them.

The final possibility for why these people pray instead of act is because that is what they have been trained to do by their leaders.  If you have a problem, pray for help.  Suffer silently and pray.  Because people who pray when there is trouble don't cause problems.  They are willing to put up with injustice, incompetence, and abuse.   They don't strike or revolt.   And when their leaders pray with them, they don't notice that the leaders are the ones causing a lot of the problems.   They are taught to pray and wait for good things to come along. 

If you pray, think about it.  Why do you pray?  What do you hope to accomplish with prayer?  Wouldn't you be more likely to get the results you want if you actively did something to accomplish those ends instead of praying for them?

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

What's in a name?

I admired the late Carl Sagan very much.  His book, The Cosmic Connection, was one of the first science books that I ever read for fun.  His eloquence captured my imagination, and his obvious sense of wonder and awe at the universe inspired me.  When I started looking for a name for this blog, my instant reaction was to start mining his quotes for an apt phrase.

OK, that's not completely true.  My first inspiration was to have a name that referenced the Hubble Deep Field photograph.  This is a photo that I have as the background on my phone.  I chose it because it speaks to me like no other astronomical photo ever has.  If you aren't familiar with this photo, it is a photo of deep space.  The photo represents a miniscule portion of the sky, one the size of a dime held 75 feet away.  In that photo, we see over a thousand galaxies.  Galaxies! Not stars.  Each of those galaxies itself contains millions of stars.  Around those stars are very likely planets, and some of those planets will almost certainly have life on them of some form.  And that photo represents just the smallest fraction of what is out there in the universe.

Hubble Deep Field Image Unveils Myriad Galaxies Back to the Beginning of Time
Source: Hubblesite.org

The universe is huge, and we're floating through it on this pale blue dot, a tiny speck of dust relative to the immensity of all that.  And yet, here is where we make our lives.  Here is where we live and die.  Here is where we love and fight.

I couldn't find a good name with "deep field" in it, so my second inspiration was Dr. Sagan.  He understood how simply, utterly amazing it is that we live and breathe in this vast universe.  So, I've decided to throw my voice into the blogosphere, to take part in the on-line conversation that is toppling regimes, changing lives, and simply keeping us a little closer as a species.   Will anyone listen, who knows?  If even one person stumbles upon this blog and gets inspired or is amused, then I'll be happy with that.