Sam Maggee's Open Salon Blog

Bill Nye The Hero Guy, with Dr. Pepper

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 15:09:38 -0400

I was online the other day when I noticed a flap developing. There are lots of flaps online, so I usually don't pay much attention. But this one caught my eye.

It seems that the company that makes Dr. Pepper, the popular soft-drink, had decided to use the familiar "March of Progress" pictographic representation in one of their online ads. You all know the image, which depicts the evolution of humanity from early upright mammals, through hominids, to modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens...

The flap was caused by a bunch of people on Facebook who didn't like the company using an evolutionary teaching tool to sell pop. Actually the "March of Progress" is a rough teaching tool at best. The depiction of the hominid period could be expanded to include at least several more divergent branches of our distant relatives from the past. The thing is more art than science...but even a hint of evolutionary theory is enough to set off some people.

Those complaining about it on Facebook were, of course, creationists, and what they, of course, were angry about was the idea that Dr. Pepper might be associated in some people's minds with evolution. Putting aside the rather gross assumption that the advertising of a cola company should be considered such a great source of influence in our society (Pepsi for God anyone?), the Dr. Pepper flap reminds us once again that there are those amongst us for whom evolution is still in doubt.

A Word About Theory, In Fact

There has been more garbage written about the word "theory," especially when it comes after the word "evolution," than perhaps any other topic in our time. For the record, a theory is not just a set of ideas, or assumptions, or even a set of hypotheses. A theory is a large set of statements about how the universe works. In other words, it's a framework for explaining certain aspects, or processes, in biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, etc.

Evolutionary theory is a very important framework for explaining certain processes in biology, especially the development of species through variation and natural selection. It's supported by mountains of evidence, including mountains of genetic information about our own development over millions of years, along with the development of every living species around us, and all those that have gone extinct, too. It's not "in doubt," or "unproven," or even "theoretical" in an everyday sense of the term. It is in fact a fact. It occurs. It is occurring, right now, to every living being on the planet--and to those on other planets as well.

Part of the problem with the public debate about what a theory is comes from the reluctance of many scientists to speak in terms of facts. When people hear that, they think that science is made up of a bunch of guesses, with a little proof attached. But scientists don't like to talk in terms of facts because they always want to leave the door open, even if just a little bit, for future discoveries that might expand and alter what we know about a particular thing. A good example is Newton's theory about how the universe works. If what you want to explain is three-dimensional perceptible space, then Newton's theories are just fine. But if you add time into the mix, things get more complicated, and you need something else, you need a new framework and a new theory, and that's General Relativity.

That doesn't mean that Newton was wrong exactly, but his theories, and the laws derived from them, are only useful if you stick with three-dimensional perceptible space, the kind of basic environment, by the way, which we're evolved to be able to manipulate.

Of course past theories can be proven wrong wholesale, too. Nobody would seriously try to say today that the theory of spontaneous generation is accurate. Mice do not spring from dirty rags. This theory was wrong, Darwin was right, when it comes to the origins of life and speciation, even though the theory of spontaneous generation had a long history in pre-modern scientific and pseudo-scientific thought and was still being discussed seriously well into the Renaissance. Even somebody as smart as Aristotle believed in it, but he was wrong, dead wrong.

But that doesn't mean that a theory as well developed and well supported as evolution is going to vanish in an instant just because somebody disovers a new mechanism by which life moves forward. It wasn't until the last thirty years or so, for instance, that Richard Dawkins' local influences theory, a whole new way of looking at evolution, gained acceptance. But, once again, it was on the basis of a mountain of proof, and not on discussion alone.

And that's the dividing line between science and guessing. You can discuss and debate and argue and shout about something all you want to, but if you want something to be accepted scientifically, then at some point, you have to come up with the proof. And if you can't, game over. That's all she wrote. Goodbye. This applies to every area of scientific thought, from evolution, to geology, to new chemical compounds, even to the wildest sounding theories of quantum mechanics.

Bill Saves the Day

All of this doesn't seem to have much impact on people who insist that evolution is false, or invented, or some kind of weird conspiracy that was evidently cooked up by thousands and thousands of scientists over many decades--for some reason, probably involving the Illuminati or something pretty stupid like that. It reminds me of Bertrand Russell's famous statement that the best proof against the existence of God are the things that come out of the mouths of believers in his defense. No supposed Master of the Universe would be crazy enough to make such dumb people his spokesmen.

That's where Bill Nye the Science Guy comes in to save the day. Because it was just recently that Nye caused another online flap with a post on the Big Think channel on Youtube.

Nye has been a favorite of mine for a long time. He not only hosts a popular short-segment show where he demonstrates scientific concepts with simple experiments, he's also been a defender of science from the very beginning.

Born William Sanford Nye, Bill studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, and early on in his career he developed an ingenious hydraulic suppression system used in large airliners. He was an aeronautics consultant for a number of years while he was getting his start in media through local TV in Seattle, Washington. That's how he got his big break and became Bill Nye the Science Guy.

A few weeks back Bill showed up at the top of the queue on Youtube with a video titled "Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children." From the title alone, one could sense the flapping about to start. And it did. Big-time.

The video got millions of views, and thousands of comments poured in, and poured down on Bill, criticizing him for suggesting that it's wrong, yes actually wrong, to subject children to reality-denying, anti-scientific, creationist beliefs. But then...wait a second...isn't that exactly what a lot of creationists have been saying for a long time about evolution? That it's wrong, immoral, to teach it in public schools? That subjecting kids to it will have dire consequences, maybe even a flood or hurricane to wipe out a major American city? Bill's video was a brilliant reversal. Honestly, it felt good to be on the other side of the debate for once.

So, from the bottom of my heart, Dr. Pepper complainers, shut the hell up. You're only hurting yourselves...and your kids.

_________________

Here's Bill's video. I've also included a link to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a not-for-profit organization that Bill Nye and a lot of other prominent public scientists belong to. They investigate controversial and spurious claims.

http://www.csicop.org/

Verkakte Hollywood

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 13:08:49 -0400

Something has been on my mind for some time now, and it's time to get it out. One has to expel these things from time to time, just to keep sane, especially when it involves something that is talked about a GREAT deal in the media, but never in the way that you see it, a way that seems perfectly reasonable and true.

Hollywood is verkakte. Now let me qualify that. Hollywood is REALLY verkakte. I don't mean that Hollywood movies are violent, and nobody seems to care. (They are, and they don't, and that's troubling.) And I don't mean that Hollywood involves itself as an industry too much in political debates. (It does, and they do, and they usually end up looking silly because THEY DON'T KNOW ABOUT ANYTHING EXCEPT MOVIES.) What I'm talking about is Hollywood's war against downloading.

Well, alright, illegal downloading, since, technically at least, it is illegal to download a movie you haven't payed for. Although millions upon millions of people do it every day, just like millions upon millions more watch music videos on youtube every day, and trade files, to be able to listen to their favorite music for free.

The fact is, if people can get something for free, they're going to go ahead and do it. And if industries cry foul on the basis of arguments that "the artist is getting ripped off," or "that's our property, just like your home is your property," then people, especially people living through recent history, have every right to turn around and say: Bull cookies.

YOU, as an industry (and I'm looking straight at you, big movie studios, and big recording studios--if there are any left standing at this point)...YOU spent the last fifty years ripping off artists, and filmmakers, and everyone else, by mining the indy market for ideas and then making halfass, lame mainstream versions, by writing up one-sided deals, and telling kids they would "make it big" to get the price of a demo session out of them, and then leaving them by the side of the road, and by making it more and more difficult to find or enjoy anything other than your inferior, branded product...

YOU (and I'm looking primarily at the recording guys now) ripped off African-American artists, and stole their music and musical styles, and "whitened" it, and repackaged a weak-tea version of it to dumb middle class numbskulls who didn't know the difference...with not a penny, NOT A PENNY, going back to the original creators...

And finally, YOU (ahem, movie execs, then and now) ripped off everyone you could for years and years and years and built up mountains of money, which you used to lobby to pass restrictive laws about how movies could be made and distributed in the biggest markets all over the world just to assure your monopoly.

Is it any wonder, then, that people don't feel one iota of guilt about downloading a product made by one of your monopolistic industries, for free, and thereby screwing YOU. Because YOU are not the artist. YOU are not sympathetic. YOU are a bunch of greedy, grasping, politicking jerks whose only goal in life is to eke out a few more dollars by putting out loads and loads of mediocre garbage, and every once in a while, and far more once than a while, actually spitting out something worth watching or listening to...

The fact is that the recording industry is already pretty much dead. It's been absorbed into much bigger entertainment conglomerates, and most of their sales are for online downloads at 99 cents a pop, or less. It's lost billions that will never be remade, and we can probably thank two rejected East European heavy metal dudes who came up with Kazaa for that (a file sharing service that is itself now dead thanks to endless industry harassment and the plain fact that nobody needs them anymore, there are just so many sources of free tunes).

The focus now is on Hollywood and its product. File sharing movies is easy and widespread and there's nothing they can really do to stop it. But instead of devising a streaming-only model of service--which they're only now getting into in any big way, and which should have been the case more than a decade ago--they're headed down the same ridiculous path that the recording industry took...prosecuting a few big timers, like Megaupload, harassing consumers, and trying to pass omnibus laws like SOPA and CISPA, all of which will have the exact same effect that similar efforts not so long ago by the recording guys did--people will download EVEN MORE. After all, now it's a "cause," and causes are sexy, whereas before it was just about getting movies, and that's, well, blah.

Of course Hollywood did do something about the rise of new online technology, about fifteen years ago. They hired some marketing hacks--they love to do that whenever there's trouble, marketing hacks being such geniuses at getting industries in even deeper--who told them to develop a new, more attractive hard-disk product. They did: the DVD. The DVD, unlike its predecessor, the boring old VHS, had a lot of extra features and featurettes, the making of which became an industry unto itself. If you wanted to own the Indiana Jones movies, or the X-Men movies, or any number of other increasingly obvious serials (can you say movies-as-TV?), then you had to buy the DVD with all its bells and whistles. Fanboys rejoice. Fanboys, you are golden. And that's how fanboys became the center of everything...and the silly model of behavior that everyone was supposed to follow and care about...and everyone was happy. For a while.

But there just aren't that many fanboys. And fanboys can't drive an industry alone, even when you get a big enough number of them together in one place, all chattering away online about the latest glitch in installment #4 of who-the-hell-cares. And besides, fanboys are LAME. Nobody wants to be a fanboy, or sound like one, or even admit to knowing one socially. They are mostly useful for getting the latest clips and teasers and multiple trailers. Otherwise their weird little kingdom should remain shut.

So reality started to catch up with the DVD. Of course instead of wasting more than ten years on an already outdated hard-disk format, Hollywood could have gone straight to streaming--direct streaming on TV was only one early option. But old revenue-making methods are hard to give up, especially when a lot of older career people in the industry built their power and position around a doomed model...

If you want to know what I think went on, it was the "small office" phenomenon. Fifteen years ago, movie execs everywhere were saying to their younger, web-savvier peers: "Here, kid, here's a little office so you can pursue your little streaming internet angle, or whatever it is, us guys over here are busy with the real movie biz." Maybe an overstatement, but not by much, I bet. Dinosaurs make loud noises, right before they go extinct.

That's all academic now. The point is, Hollywood has no right to be pissy about something they could have solved. Yes, that's right, there's nothing inevitable about what's happening to old media. It's their own damn fault. Not consumers. Not technology. And certainly not fate. Is there a dumber concept out there, or a more overused one?

Truth is it was plain old stupidity, and greed, and shortsightedness, and a whole lot of bad management, that did them in.

So they shouldn't be running to government, and to the courts, to fix their ludicrous, entirely predictable failures. After all, Hollywood even had the example of recording companies to see what was going to happen, didn't they? And yet they're following the exact same end pattern the recording industry followed: do nothing, or virtually nothing, for a really long time; and then finally do too little, too late; and then, when that doesn't work, complain and whine and bitch and moan and throw a very public fit; and then try to pass laws; and then prosecute their own consumers; and then go nuts...and then choke to death.

If Hollywood winds up in the same junk heap as the recording industry (and it's heading in that direction very, very fast, despite the big numbers they're still putting up on ticket sales for crap), then so be it. Verkakte morons.

***

A blog about the laws Hollywood lobbying groups and providers have recently tried to pass:

http://www.politicolnews.com/five-bills-congress-wrote-to-control-the-internet-for-special-interest-groups/

A very good piece on Cracked, on Hollywood, why it sucks, and why so many saps still buy their rotten product, at least for now:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-reasons-hollywood-sucks-and-its-all-our-fault/

A Physicist Gets a Lift

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:11:14 -0500

Brian Cox is smart. He's really, really smart. He's so smart...

Alright. Who's Brian Cox? He's a scientist who works at CERN, the giant supercollider known for attempts to discover the conditions at the origin of the universe, the Higgs boson, gravity waves, and whole lots of other phenomena. It's also known as the most expensive broken piece of equipment ever. It didn't work too well when it was first turned on. But it's fixed now, and Brian, who got a ride from Carpool on youtube, has a few things to say about it, and God, and refrigerators...

Google Science Fair Update: Robots and Nurses

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 16:02:47 -0500

The Google Science Fair is taking entries from 13 to 18 year olds on all kinds of proposals to fix, improve, and expand on technology, general science, methods and other projects.

One of the first entries was the sample below. It involves using new algorithms to improve the delivery of linen and other materials to hospital rooms. As everyone knows, hospitals are mazes. Have you ever been told to follow the yellow line, and then it just ended in a blank wall?

Robots are used in some hospitals to transport supplies around the labyrinth to deliver to patients' rooms. But they have trouble sometimes, like most robots, because they're not good at adjusting to unpredictable environments. Like hospitals. Objects get moved a lot and so alternate routes have to be programmed into the robots to make sure they can get to where they're going. Algorithm are used to create a series of possibilities.

The contestant in the video submitted a proposal to use competitive tests of algorithms in a hospital-like environment to determine which equations would produce the best results, kind of like having a race to see whether Robot A or Robot B, each with different instructions, would do better given a number of altered scenarios. This involves both mathematical and creative applications.

Cool.

You can get all the info on the fair here:

http://www.google.com/events/sciencefair/

**********

A little demonstration

of what is being discussed in the first video...

robots exploring an environment on their own:

Carl Would Know

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 15:01:26 -0500

When I was a little kid I had two good friends: Greg, who lived down the block and could do tricks on his BMX by the time he was eight; and Carl Sagan.

Sagan wasn't a celebrity anymore by the time I was old enough to appreciate his work. But my dad had almost every episode of Sagan's PBS series "Cosmos" on videotape, and the library had hours of specials he'd made along the way.

Sagan was the perfect friend for a budding young geek interested in things like computers and astronomy and how to calculate declination to within a fraction of a degree. Whenever I found myself faced with a really difficult problem, which required a lot of work and time to finish, I would think, "Carl would do it. Carl would know."

I spent hours listening to Sagan's wise-sounding voice, with his famous over-pronunciation ("for emphasis," he once said simply in an interview when asked about it) and I thought that if I could be half as smart as Carl on at least one subject, then I'd be twice as smart as anyone I knew.

You see, I didn't exactly grow up in a family that appreciated science much. (I don't think they'd disagree, in case any of them see this!) But at least they weren't anti-science snobs. Anti-science snobs are people who turn their noses up at anything scientific without knowing too much about any field. They're not the amateurs, who enjoy reading about something even if they don't understand all of it. At least these people are trying. I'm a devout amateur at astrophysics. I don't understand half of it, but I keep reading. But anti-science snobs are just cowards. Some of them hide it behind religion, but really they're just afraid to find out they might not be smart enough to understand something difficult. They're afraid of being outdone by science, as if it were a popular person they couldn't compete with.

That's what happened when my two best friends finally met. One afternoon I was watching Carl on TV in my room, when my mom called me downstairs and there was Greg at the door. He asked me if I wanted to go with him and some friends to watch them do some new tricks off a big dirt berm in a parking lot. I thought about it and said no, I was doing something else. He asked me what it was, and I decided to tell him.

"I'm watching Carl Sagan," I said.

"Oh," he said, and then, "Well, he doesn't believe in God, does he?"

"No," I said slowly. (I'm not sure if this is true. Some biographers say that Sagan was an agnostic.)

"Well, bye then," Greg said. He looked angry.

That was the last time I saw him. I don't know if Greg was disappointed about me choosing Carl over him, or if he couldn't be around someone who admired a guy who (maybe) didn't believe in imaginary beings.

Anyway, Carl and I have been friends for life.