Paige’s Page: December 2004

US Increases Tsunami Aid

Doing the right thing, the United States increased its monetary aid to tsunami victims to $350 million, ten times the amount previously pledged.

Science You Can Use

As we await the upcoming release of the movie White Noise, it seems helpful to learn something about the field of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP). Dr. James E. Alcock has written a history and critique of EVP, and points to examples on the web where you can listen to actual recording where you can hear spoken words embedded in white noise.

Alcock discusses the underlying science behind EVP. Given that the human mind is a fantastic pattern detector, it can on occasion decide that random noise is not noise but a meaningful construct, i.e. a human voice. This becomes even more likely when the listener is told to listen for a voice in the recording. It is kind of like an auditory Rorschach test. He discusses laboratory experiments in which “people can clearly ‘hear’ voices and words not just in the context of muddled voices, but in a pattern of white noise, a pattern in which there are no voices or words at all”. Given this laboratory experience, one must conclude that otherwise intelligent people can come to believe in a phenomenon that in reality does not exist.

Evolution Update

Lots has been written lately about the theory of evolution. Here’s a summary of stuff you should read on the subject:

Steve Reuland at Panda’s Thumb takes apart an article by Phyllis Schlafly, almost line by line, pointing out an enormous number of egregious errors by Schlafly.

Does the media unfairly portray Intelligent Design (ID)? No, says Timothy Sandefur, also at Panda’s Thumb.

Ed Brayton at Dispatches From The Culture Wars discusses what harm would be done by teaching ID in high school classrooms.

Henry Neufeld at Panda’s Thumb describes how he grew up a young earth Creationist, and by studying The Bible, he found evidence against young earth Creationism. Further study led him to read about geology, physics, etc., and his acceptance of the theory of evolution.

You should probably go read all of Panda’s Thumb, by the way. There’s lots to learn from many learned folks.

And if you are interested in reading about a real scientific controversy, take a look at DinoBuzz’s “What Killed The Dinosaurs?” There are two camps, one saying a catastrophic event such as an asteroid crashing into planet Earth caused the extinction, while another camp argues that terrestrial climatic changes over a long time scale cause the extinction. DinoBuzz details both arguments and discusses the evidence in favor and against each camp’s hypothesis.

Tsunami Scam

From J-Walk, a tsunami disaster relief e-mail scam:

Dear Sir/Madam,

With sympathy and heavy laden hearts, we hereby appeal to your sense of generosity to assist by donating any amount you can afford towards The “TSUNAMIS DISASTER HELP FUNDS”, which is aimed at assisting the victims of the Asians Tsunamis which took place on Sunday the 26TH December, 2004.

We are a non- governmental charity organisation with offices and members across 5 continents namely Europe, North America, South America, Africa and Asia. Our goal is to assist poor, innocent survivals of both man-made and natural disasters.

Tsunami Aid

Spain — $68 million
United States — ~~$15~~ $35 million
Australia — $30 million
Japan — $30 million
United Kingdom — $29 million
Denmark — $15.5 million
France — $170,000

Paige — $25.00
You — ?

Tsunami

As I have never lived through such a horrible event, I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to be a survivor of the Asian tsunami. In addition to the huge loss of life (expected to top 100,000), you must also cope with the destruction of the local civilization that supported your life — total destruction of buildings, services and personal property.

My heart goes out to all of those affected. I have donated some money to a charitable organization to provide humanitarian relief for these people. Here is a partial list of charities who are accepting donations for survivors of this tragedy. Please pick one and donate.

Shrinking Glaciers

Pictures taken up to 100 years ago, compared with pictures taken this year, show dramatic shrinking glaciers in Alaska’s Glacier Bay. (Link via Quark Soup)

Did this man survive three days in the icy ocean?

Did George Prangnell, a greaser on the ill-fated liner RMS Titanic, really survive three days in the icy ocean? It is a fascinating story, even if it remains uncorroborated to this day.

After Titanic foundered, Prangnell found himself in the 28 degree Atlantic Ocean water. A drifting life-raft came by, and he tied himself to the raft. Three days later, after the other survivors had been picked up by Carpathia, Prangnell was discovered and saved by a cargo vessel. He was treated for frostbite and exposure, and he survived. He lived until 1953, complaining to his daughter that he never felt warm again, not even in the summer.

At Least There’s No Draft (Yet)

In his final debate with Senator John Kerry, President Bush told the country that he would “continue to expand Pell Grants to make sure that people have an opportunity to start their career with a college diploma.”

Now, we find out that the newly passed budget bill, that the White House helped to pass, does the opposite of what Bush promised. The bill cuts back on Pell Grants, and some 80,000 to 90,000 college students will find that their grants have disappeared, while other college students will have to make do with a modest decrease in the amount of money they receive from the government. This comes at a time when college costs are rising at a rate of about 10% per year. This move saves the government $300 million (that’s million with an ‘m’) at a time when the cost of the war in Iraq has cost in the vicinity of $200 billion (that’s billion, with a ‘b’).

As always, we are very impressed with President Bush.

Meet The Fockers

Let the reviews begin!

I predicted a few days ago that the movie Meet The Fockers would receive horrible reviews, based upon the commercials that I saw. So, what did the reviewers on Cold Pizza have to say Thursday morning? Two reviewers felt the movie wasn’t the least bit funny, saying something like “absense of laughter is a good sign the movie isn’t funny”. One reviewer felt that it was mildly funny, and one reviewer, Dr. Dre (yes, that Dr. Dre) felt it was funny.

A Letter To Time Magazine

Cindy Sheehan objects to Time choosing George W. Bush as its man of the year. She claims it was “rewarding incompetence”.

Dear Time Editors:

My son, Spc. Casey Sheehan was killed in Iraq on 04/04/04. This has been an extraordinary couple of weeks of “slaps in the faces” to us families of fallen heroes.

First, the Secretary of Defense—Donald Rumsfeld—admits to the world something that we as military families already know: The United States was not prepared for nor had any plan for the assault on Iraq. Our children were sent to fight an ill-conceived and badly prosecuted war. Our troops were sent with the wrong type of training, bad equipment, inferior protection and thin supply lines. Our children have been killed and we have made the ultimate sacrifice for this fiasco of a war, then we find out this week that Rumsfeld doesn’t even have the courtesy or compassion to sign the “death letters”—as they are so callously called. Besides the upcoming holidays and the fact we miss our children desperately, what else can go wrong this holiday season?

Well let’s see. Oh yes. George W. Bush awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three more architects of the quagmire that is Iraq. Thousands of people are dead and Bremer, Tenet and Franks are given our country’s highest civilian award. What’s next?

To top everything off—after it has been proven that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, there were no ties between Saddam and 9/11 and over 1,300 brave young people in this country are dead and Iraq lies in ruins — what does Time Magazine do? Names George W. Bush as its “Man of the Year.” The person who betrayed this country into a needless war and whom I hold ultimately responsible for my son’s death and who was questionably elected, again, to a second term, is honored this way by your magazine.

I hope we finally find peace in our world and that our troops who remain in Iraq are brought home speedily—after all, there was no reason for our troops to be there in the first place. No reason for my son and over 1,300 others to have been taken from their families. No reason for the infrastructure of Iraq to be demolished and thousands of Iraqis being killed. No reason for the notion of a “happy” holiday to be robbed from my family forever. I hope that our “leaders” don’t invade any other countries which pose no serious threat to the United States. I hope there is no draft. I hope that the five people mentioned here (and many others) will finally be held responsible for the horrible mistake they got our country into. I hope that competence is finally rewarded and incompetence is appropriately punished. These are my wishes for 2005.

This isn’t the first time your magazine has selected a questionable man for this honor—but it’s the first time it affected my family so personally and so sorrowfully.

Cindy Sheehan

Kos Goes On A Rant

Who’s to blame for the mess in Iraq? Kos tells us:

Bush claims Saddam is a threat. Bush claims Saddam has WMDs. Bush claims Saddam has ties to Al Qaida. Bush and his administration promote questionable intelligence that supports their preconceptions and prejudices, and reject that which counters it.

Bush puts Rummy in charge of the war. Rummy fires general who says “we need more troops”. Rummy says we can do more with less. Rummy says “lighter is better than armored”. Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld say we’ll be met with flower petals. They say the war will be entirely paid for by oil revenues. They say the reconstruction will be paid for entirely by oil revenues.
...
Bush declares mission accomplished. Bush taunts the insurgency. The insurgency kills our men and women. The commanders on the ground scream for more troops. They scream for armor. They scream for protected mess halls. Those screams fall on deaf ears.

More soldiers are killed. 1,320 Americans, 74 Britons, seven Bulgarians, one Dane, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Hungarian, 19 Italians, one Latvian, 16 Poles, one Salvadoran, three Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and nine Ukrainians. The wounded number in the five figures.

Nevermind the innocent Iraqis who have been “liberated” to death. And while we scream about Saddam’s torture chambers, we create new ones of our own.

There’s a lot more.

Why Do Conservatives Hate America?

Avedon Carol at The Sideshow has some pretty good comments today about why conservatives actually hate America.

What they love is their hatred of liberals and liberalism. And hating liberalism is hating America. Make no mistake about this: the foundation of America is liberalism. Our form of government, from the very beginning, is liberal democracy. And, while they talk about how they love America while liberals do not, and how it is conservatives who adhere strictly to the Constitution, it is also abundantly clear that when they are given an opportunity to prove such things, they do the reverse.

[...]

What makes it so easy to hate France, and any other nation that shows every sign of being a liberal democracy, is that they've got liberal democracy. In the parlance of conservatives, any government that shows a concern for the welfare of its people is practically a communist state. But, wait:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And that, my friends, is the organizing principle of liberalism. The “general Welfare” and “the Blessings of Liberty” are meant to be the goal of the United States of America — it says so in the very first sentence of the Constitution. It is the obligation of the government to “secure” these things for us.

But France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have “socialized medicine”, so they are obviously indistinguishable from Stalinism, to hear conservatives tell it. That’s why it was so easy for conservatives to start accusing Bill and Hillary Clinton of being communists when they campaigned for “Hillarycare”. Although they sometimes claimed to despise this program because it was supposedly complicated or bureaucratic, the truth is that they opposed it precisely because it might actually work. The same reason they despise Social Security, which clearly does work. Because such programs promote the general welfare.

This is why conservatives must lie about what they are doing. They are trying to destroy Social Security while claiming they mean to save it. They have to lie, because no one with any sense, or any concern for our nation, would want them to succeed at destroying it. They make up reasons why any proposed national health insurance plan would fail, because they do not want one to succeed. They claim they want to stop abortion “to save lives” while instituting programs that are known to increase the likelihood of unwanted pregnancy and abortion. They empty our treasury and cut taxes to the rich while claiming to “improve” our economy. They construct a program of theocracy while claiming it's in aid of “freedom of religion”. They claim to be “Constitutional constructionists” while stripping the Constitution of any meaning. They even restrict our travel and threaten to remove our citizenship for political reasons while claiming to “protect our freedoms”.

Oh, they hate America, there's no question of that. The only question is why liberals hesitate to say so.

Ben Stiller Is Back — Too Bad

I see the commercials are airing now for the new movie Meet The Fockers. And my least favorite actor of all time, Ben Stiller, is one of the stars. See, I have yet to see Stiller do anything remotely funny. Instead we see Stiller suffering every imaginable injury. I can’t believe that anyone finds this humorous.

In the commercials for Meet The Fockers, we see Stiller getting a head-butt from an infant, when he is handed that infant to hold. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Someone stop me from laughing, my sides hurt so much! Later, he tells someone (I think its his mother’s character in the film) that “You were riding him like Seabiscuit.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! I’m going to pass out from laughing so much.

I await the horrible reviews.

Psychic Predictions 2004

Psychic predictions 2004:

Time is running out. Over the next few days, Osama bin Laden will die of kidney disease. Saddam Hussein will be shot to death. Fidel Castro will die. A live dinosaur thousands of years old will be captured. The Hoover Dam will collapse. And Rosie O’Donnell will adopt Siamese twin girls. That’s what the world’s best psychics predicted for 2004.

While we are at it, check out this ridiculous quote in the January/February 2005 Skeptical Inquirer (sorry, no online version) from psychic Stan Alexander, who was asked to explain why he failed to predict the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. Said the psychic: “While many, including myself, may have had intuited something along those lines taking place, it is not something that one puts out as it can cause too much alarm and panic.” So let me get this straight — saving the lives of thousands of people was not a consideration? Being a hero for disclosing this plot and preventing a catastrophe was not a consideration? Give me a psychic who has the guts to predict these horrible events and tell us about them in advance, instead of a weasel who claims he knew about it beforehand when in fact he is just covering his behind!

Kevin Drum on Social Security

Over at Political Animal, Kevin Drum makes the following salient points about Social Security. Seems that way back in 1999, President Clinton wanted to divert 15% of the Social Security reserve funds into the stock market to take advantage of the higher returns, but Republicans in Congress didn’t approve.

Clinton’s plan was perfectly doable with the right kind of regulation and would have taken advantage of the stock market’s higher returns. So why didn’t Republicans like it back in 1999? Because it would have kept Social Security as a government guaranteed pension program. It’s not stock market returns these guys care about, it’s an ideological drive to get the government out of the safety net business and force individuals to bear ever more risk in their daily lives. Don’t ever forget that.

Now, that would be bad enough, but Drum also reports that social security privatization has been tried around the world. And the results are uniformly unpleasant.

And while he is on the case, Drum also reports on executive compensation. Did you know that the average CEO’s salary is 500 times that of the average worker’s salary? Did you know that average CEO salaries continues to rise even though average company performance is relatively stagnant. Or that last year, average CEOs received a $400K raise in pay. Or that a full ten percent of corporate earnings go to the top five people in the company. Drum offers some ideas about what to do about this.

Update (12/13): Here’s another post from Kevin Drum which shows that the so-called “social security crisis” isn’t a crisis at all — full benefits can still be paid out for another 38 years. When the President says that we have a “social security crisis” that must be fixed, he is incorrect.

Welcome, New Blog “Real Climate”

From Real Climate’s welcome message:

Climate science is one of those fields where anyone, regardless of their lack of expertise or understanding, feels qualified to comment on new papers and ongoing controversies. This can be frustrating for scientists like ourselves who see agenda-driven ‘commentary’ on the Internet and in the opinion columns of newspapers crowding out careful analysis.
…
RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.

Happy Hanuka

Tonight is the first night of Hanuka. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday, and may the dreidel spin your way tonight.

I cooked a garlicky roast chicken for dinner, with potato latkes, applesauce and sour cream on the side. Yummy!

I received several gifts tonight:

A box of Dots candy
Because no one circles the wagons like the Buffalo Bills, I now have a lovely wagon-circling hoody with the Buffalo Bills logo
And because that’s what dreams are made of, I received what every 40 year old man needs, a Hilary Duff 2005 calendar! (And incidentally, kudos to Hilary for staying away from the very sexy, show-lots-of-skin type calendar.)

Scientific Consensus on Global Warming

Chris Mooney has the details:

The latest issue of Science contains a short paper by Naomi Oreskes which reports on a literature review of peer reviewed papers on climate science between 1993 and 2003. The idea was to test whether any of them challenge the consensus view that human emissions are causing warming. The results are astonishing:
The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.
The drafting of such reports and statements involves many opportunities for comment, criticism, and revision, and it is not likely that they would diverge greatly from the opinions of the societies’ members. Nevertheless, they might downplay legitimate dissenting opinions. That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change.”
The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position.
Admittedly, authors evaluating impacts, developing methods, or studying paleoclimatic change might believe that current climate change is natural. However, none of these papers argued that point.

Never fear, folks — the doubters will certainly have some response to this. I can’t imagine what it will be, but they’re very creative people.