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Snopes covers the myth that it is the rubber tires that makes cars safer in a lightning storm (turns out it's because the metal frame acts as an ad hoc Faraday cage -- who knew!).
They conclude with a list of tips to protect yourself from lightning strikes, which includes such gems as avoiding doorways (yes, doorways) whenever you hear thunder.
The article also mentions that 58 people per year are killed by lightning. I'm pretty sure at least 58 people per year are killed in auto accidents while they are on the way to the pet store to buy dog food, so therefore nobody should own a dog.
Seriously, for causes of death which are that rare, it does not make sense to change your behavior one iota to avoid them.
Okay, I'm halfway through the first chapter of Unscientific America, so it's way too soon to write a review -- but already, a couple of sentences have hit me right in the chest as being shockingly unsupportable.
First, some kind words. When I first got the book home from the library, I flipped through a few pages (I was mostly looking for the infamous Chapter 8) and actually found a few reasonable observations about the state of the blogosphere as it relates to science. I didn't really see much in the way of anything that could be changed, but Mooney and Kirshenbaum weren't wrong, and some of what was written seemed novel.
Also, I recall at least a couple of reviewers (PZ, I think?) criticizing the first chapter because they said M&K were never clear about exactly what should have been done about Pluto. On the contrary, I feel the chapter was quite clear: IAU should have just let Eros and the rest into the club, or at the very least grandfathered Pluto in, to avoid pissing off the public. So that criticism falls flat.
Of course, then M&K are faced with having to actually defend that position, which they don't really do; they simply assert that the scientists at IAU didn't think about the public fallout, and that if they had, of course they would have done it differently. I maybe agree with the first part of that sentence, but I'm not so sure about the second. Chapter One of UA briefly lists the (all very good) reasons why Pluto was de-classified, and then just hand-waves them like they don't matter. They also fail to make a case -- and I believe others have pointed this out -- that the Pluto controversy actually hurt science. While the adage that "There's no such thing as bad publicity" is clearly not always true, it's not at all obvious in this case whether the Pluto affair really damaged science's public reputation, or if the dominant effect may have actually been to spark a brief public interest in astronomy.
In any case, if M&K's point is just that the IAU didn't consider the public reaction, they have a point. I'll grant it.
Where the book really goes way off the rails is that it seems to have no real perspective on anything dating before about 1999. Perhaps it is because for Mooney -- or at least, for his writing -- the world really began with his first highly-praised book, The Republican War on Science. The picture painted by Unscientific America seems to be of science emerging from a several centuries-long Dark Ages spanning from 2001 to 2008, followed by all the scientists throwing a big party and declaring Science Wins!, with only M&K as the calm voice of reason reminding us we have more work to do.
At least, that is the only way I can explain this desperately-[citation needed] sentence from page 7:
For all these reasons, the rift between science and mainstream American culture is growing ever wider.
This is curious considering that only two pages previous, M&K cite examples stretching back to the 1830s of commentators bemoaning American anti-intellectualism. Yes, there is a deep rift between science and mainstream American culture, and it's true the rift does not appear to be shrinking, certainly not as fast as we would like... but M&K act like this is a new problem. It's almost as if Mooney had assumed all of the problems in science communication in the 2000s were a direct result of the Bush administration's overtly anti-science policies, and that he expected everything to turn rosy once Obama was voted in -- and then when that didn't happened, he decided the world must be going to hell in a handbasket. And indeed, this is supported by the following quote from page 8:
Yet we are deluding ourselves if we think all the problems surrounding science have suddenly been solved [by Obama's inauguration].
Yes, Chris and Sheril, I believing you are, in fact, deluding yourselves. Seriously, who the fuck actually thought that?!?
Maybe Chris felt that way, but I think most people had more perspective. It would be easy to chalk it up to his age -- the 2000 election would have been the first when Mooney was eligible to vote -- but he's actually about a year older than me, so that's no excuse either.
So we already know that M&K's description of a minimally century-and-a-half long American anti-intellectualism contradicts the idea of an "ever wider" "rift" between science and the American public... did they offer anything in support of it?
Chapter One is filled with lots of hard numbers demonstrating the nature and scope of the problem, and M&K are to be commended for this research. But to support the idea that the rift is growing, these numbers can't be a snapshot in time; they must sample at least two data points. I can find only a single example of this type of data in Chapter One:
As for newspapers, from 1989 to 2005 the number featuring weekly science or science-related sections shrank by nearly two-thirds, from ninety-five to thirty-four.
A stark trend, to be sure. But I am not convinced this represents a re-prioritizing of science by the traditional news media. Rather, I think this is a manifestation of an ongoing indifference to science and science reporting, combined with a well-documented crash in print newspaper circulation. From 1980 to 2002, the number of print newspapers in the US declined by 17% (despite no significant decline for the previous three decades). More in line with the staggering drop in science reporting cited by M&K, the number of people employed by print newspapers declined by about 40% or so in the same interval they looked at. All we need to do to explain the drop-off in science reporting is to assume that when times get tough at American newspapers, the science staff are half again more likely to get fired than their counterparts. Does anyone really doubt that has been the case for several decades or more?
The rest of Chapter One makes a fairly convincing case, however, that the aforementioned rift -- whether it is growing, as M&K baldly assert, or if it is business as usual, as I tend to think -- will become more dangerous in the coming years. Really, one need point no further than the politicization of global warming, but M&K do go further, and highlight a number of other areas where a weak public understanding of science jeopardizes America's future and the future of the world.
In summary: The problem with this book so far -- and this seems consonant with other reviewers -- is that the uncontroversial statements are very well-researched and well-supported, yet they are intermingled with controversial and novel assertions that are not. At least in Chapter One, this problem seems to be result of historical tunnel vision. M&K's pronouncements on the past are rarely cited; and when there is data stemming from prior to the 21st century, it tends to support the opposite conclusions of what they are asserting.
I just want to highlight this CiF article from Ben Goldacre that was linked to from RichardDawkins.net. His first paragraph makes a point that I whole-heartedly agree with, though it's easy to forget:
This week the pope is in London. You will have your own views on the discrimination against women, the homophobia, and the international criminal conspiracy to cover up for mass child rape. My special interest is his role in the 2 million people who die of Aids each year.
Indeed, I have said before that as disgusting as the cover-up of child abuse has been, far and away the worst crime the Catholic church is committing against humanity is their efforts at African genocide. I mean, let's be honest, that's what we're talking about here, is effectively genocide.
Oh sure, they may tell all 1.1 billion Catholics not to use any form of birth control, but let me let you in on a dirty little secret: Western Catholics, especially the more affluent ones, routinely ignore this insane bit of doctrine. Those who actually obey the Vatican's breathtakingly stupid policy on condoms tend to be the poor and those in the developing world. And with AIDS rates as high as they are in Africa, this deliberately ignorant piece of dogma can only have one effect: It will disproportionately kill Africans in comparison to any other demographic, and it will do so by the hundreds of thousands. That's fucking genocide in my book.
As bad as the child rape cover-up is, as much hate and intolerance the Catholic church can manage to spread, the worst thing of all is the destructive campaign to stop condom use in Africa, perpetrated via what are nominally referred to as "charitable" organizations on the continent. Let's not forget that.
As a white male heterosexual, I know I am afforded a sick amount of privilege, and in ways I don't even realize. In my younger idealistic days, I wanted to deny this ("It wasn't me that did the oppressing!") and it led me to mildly oppose policies like affirmative action, a position which I have now reversed. Given some of my earlier errors in this regard, I try to exercise deep humility when it comes to matters of gender, race, or sexual preference, and pay a whole lot more attention to the people who have historically been shat on than to my own intuitions. And it ought to go without saying that I don't really get to pontificate on how members of these groups should feel or what they should call themselves!
And thus I'm loathe to admit what I'm about to admit. In a sense, this post is me officially letting go -- I've decided that, as much as the following bugs me, I'm just going to forget about it from now on. But before I do, I just have to say it one time in public:
"Person of color". I can't stand that phrase.
The reason it grates on me is because it's overly non-specific, and it doesn't really make any sense. First of all, the color of my skin is still a color. Even if you are of the mindset that white (as in pure white) is not a color, um, dude.. my skin is not actually "white" you know, that's just what we call it. (And incidentally, if white is not a color, than gray and black are also not colors, because the only thing that distinguishes them is relative intensity. Cool experiment: Use a laptop projector to display an image of a black square on a white background, and point it at a typical projection screen. What color is this patch I am pointing at? Black, right? Now turn off the projector. What color is it now? Oh crap, it's white!)
Second of all, how general is the term supposed to be? To whom does it apply? I'm just never quite sure. I guess the idea is to encompass all racial groups which have been kicked around by the past couple centuries' global dominance by white Europeans... but I dunno, it just falls flat with me.
Okay, okay, look, I'm starting to get over it. The main reason is that it appears to be Sikivu Hutchinson's preferred term, and I gotta say, I really love her writing. Her recent piece about mortality and about losing a child to congenital disease is particularly gripping and heart-wrenching. All her writing is just fantastic.
And as such, it seems rather silly if I let an arbitrary descriptive term -- especially one which my white male ass really doesn't have any right to complain about -- interfere with my appreciation of a really fantastic author. So I'm going to let go of it. Fine. "People of color" it is.
Given that I almost certainly make more money for the same work, have an easier time getting loans and housing, and reap all sorts of other hidden benefits just because of the color of my skin, it's rather unbecoming of me to be bothered by a term that sort of implicitly says my skin has no color, even though everybody knows what we mean and I suffer absolutely no discrimination or repercussions as a result of the use of that term.
So here it is: With that hopelessly white over-privileged rant out of my system, I now pronounce that I am officially down with the term "person of color" from here on out.
Edit: My wife points out that perhaps some of the reason why I tend to take the term more literally than I ought is because my job involves working in the same building with a bunch of color scientists. (In fact, it was a 3-day crash course in color science where I encountered the trick with the projector) I suppose it's not that surprising that I might read too deeply into an obvious metaphor in that context... heh... Silly me.
Much ado lately about the douchebag Florida pastor who is going to burn a bunch of Qurans this Saturday. Inevitably, the anti-gnu atheist crowd has occasionally drawn comparisons to PZ's infamous cracker mutilation. And indeed, the analogy had occurred to me even before I heard it invoked by critics. In both cases, we are looking at the desecration of a religious symbol. If we are going to view one of them as a vicious act of bigotry and the other as a legitimate act of protest, we ought to have our reasoning clear. So I think this is worth examining.
On a purely practical level, it ought to be obvious that one act is simply far more dangerous than the other at the present point in time. At the time of Crackergate, the US was not in the process of trying to extricate itself from a foreign war involving Catholicist guerrillas and terrorists. There was no open war between a militant form of theocratic Catholicism and American universities. And if there had, one probably could have argued that PZ's actions would have been reckless. If there were a serious possibility that PZ's cracker abuse could have resulted in, say, a Catholic terrorist group bombing a university... well, I'm not saying we should self-censor out of fear, but this does factor in.
More importantly, though, is that PZ was specifically protesting something -- the death threats and over-the-top rhetoric surrounding Webster Cook's fateful curiosity about the Eucharist -- in a targeted and specific way. There was a clear message to Catholics: You can believe what you want, but what you cannot do is force the rest of us to take your symbols seriously.
The Florida pastor, on the other hand, does not really seem to have a point, other than "Islam is bad, mmm'kay?" If the protest had a specific goal -- protesting female genital mutilation, or the practice of taking child brides, for example -- then a protest along the lines of what the pastor is proposing might make sense and, though perhaps still ill-advised, would not necessarily be hate speech. (Though surely these cretins must be aware of the history they are invoking when they choose to use book-burning as their medium... Yeesh!)
And that's exactly why I get so frustrated when people leave out the important details of Crackergate. If PZ had just woken up one morning and said to himself, "You know, I really hate Catholics. I'm gonna stab myself a Eucharist!", then I think that might count as hate speech. Though even if that had been the case, the public reaction was still way over-the-top. And surprise, that's exactly the point PZ was making!
In fact, if this pastor's point was that people get way too upset about Quran abuse, then although I would still find the planned protest to be ill-advised, I would not necessarily find it hateful. Indeed, it's very silly how apoplectic people get about their religious symbols, and the Islamic reverence for the Quran is no exception. I am wracking my brain to try to think of any symbol that I hold so dear that if someone were to desecrate it I would do much more than call them an asshole. The closest I can think of is if somebody befouled a picture of my family, but that's different because a personal threat is implied.
I think the very closest I can come is an example like Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. But even then, it's the captive-ish audience that is the problem. (Not technically a captive audience I suppose, but are you going to leave your own son's or daughter's funeral? Please.) If Phelps and his spawn simply planned their disgusting protests on the same day as military funerals, but across town, it wouldn't warrant much more than a shrug at the existence of yet another sick malicious fundie.
There's just no way that somebody could desecrate a symbol, that did not relate to me personally, in a venue where I was not forced to watch it, and really manage to bother me all that much.
But let's remember: That's not the point this Florida pastor is trying to make. He is simply making a blanket criticism of Islam, which due to the protest's violent overtones and undirected nature, translates to a blanket indictment of Muslims themselves. And that's when it crosses the line from legitimate critique into hate speech: When you stop criticizing the philosophy and start dehumanizing or threatening the people.
Paula Kirby, in an article on RichardDawkins.net, provides a perfectly understandable (though still shocking) reason behind the Vatican-ordered cover-ups:
As soon as we understand that canon law deals only with sin and ‘the drama of redemption’, and that its foremost preoccupation when it comes to child sex abuse is the soul of the abuser, closely followed by the perceived need to protect other souls which might fall away if the church were brought into scandal and disrepute, everything about the shameful non-response of the Vatican falls into place and becomes clear.
Damn, she's right. It makes perfect sense: If we assume a priori that leaving Catholicism or failing to repent for a serious sin will result in eternal hellfire, then the rational decision stemming from that a priori assumption is to do exactly what the Catholic church did for decades. The emotional trauma of the victim is trivial compared to the perceived costs.
A conditional afterlife is perhaps the most poisonous religious belief, because it obliterates any proper evaluation of earthly (i.e. non-fake) priorities. Those religions that believe everybody gets to heaven can still distort priorities -- after all, everything in this life becomes less important if it is to be followed by an eternity of bliss -- but since it devalues all priorities by roughly the same amount, it does not have nearly the potential for disruption and hence is not nearly as dangerous.
Coyne and PZ are making much of this quote from The Times in reaction to Hawking's proclamation that there is no need for a creator:
When it comes to religion, Stephen Hawking is the voice of reason. Not for him the polemical style that has propelled Richard Dawkins to the fore of national consciousness in the God debates. His argument is likely in the long term to be more dangerous to religion because it is more measured than The God Delusion.
Irritating, I know, since Dawkins' arguments are generally pretty measured. But I have an alternate take on this quote. This quote actually demonstrates just how successful Dawkins and the other Gnu Atheists have been, and reaffirms their importance!
Without books like The God Delusion entering the public consciousness, can you really honestly picture a major newspaper reacting positively to Hawking's proclamation? They'd be painting him as the mean nasty atheist who is spoiling all of the fun, rather than revering him as the wise and humble oracle who perhaps we ought to listen to after all. The public perception of Dawkins, regardless of its accuracy, paves the way for mainstream media to embrace messages like this.
I have written before about the importance of a multi-pronged strategy for social change. This silly little opinion piece from The Times just goes to show how crucially necessary such a strategy is. We need the entire continuum ranging from Mooney to Hawking to Dawkins to, well, someone like Pat Condell.
Without dicks, we are lost.
