Michael Crichton, RIP

Of all of the authors I’ve read, Crichton always delivered readability, a great story, and made science subjects I thought I had a handle on even more fascinating than I could have imagined. He embodied the premise of genius, where it’s said that the mark of genius is understanding something and then explaining it to the rest of us. Star Trek inspired a generation of electrical engineers to figure out how to make communicators, and we have them. Jurassic Park alone has had the same effect; we have a generation of bio-scientists who know that somewhere somehow it’s possible to resurrect a T-Rex. Mr. Crichton was a cultural icon.

I’ve read a number of posts, largely from the environmental crowd, dismissing him as a “hack” due to his work on State of Fear regarding global warming. Ironically the most vociferous denunciations prove the underlying thesis of that book and also condensed in his speech comparing environmentalism to religion. I tended to think he had it assessed correctly, and the vitriolic piling-on confirms it. Crichton bashers, take note: it’s usually not a good idea to dismiss the smartest guy in the room out of hand.

A Thought On Programming

“Programming” is a wierd job category if you work for a place that relies on software as either *the* revenue stream or is a large part of it. The reason is that the job requires the essential skills of how to do the technical end *and* a complete knowledge of the problem you are setting out to solve. So if your company sells paint robots you have to know everything there is to know about the physics of paint so that the robot can be user configured to do not only paint odd shapes but also different mixtures and application densities and a massive boatload of details that may not be readily apparent at first blush. And that’s just about paint itself, much less the knowledge required of how the robotic movements are made; e.g. a typical (smooth DC motor) robot arm movement can be graphed as a trapezoid. It comes up to speed slowly, runs 70% of the intended distance at full speed, and then at the 85% marker starts to slow down and come to a nice reliable stop.

But… how reliable *is* that stop, anyway? Is it really reliable or are we to take the word of the mechanical engineer that that it is? What do you do with your paint mixture in the ramp up/ramp down times? The ideal is to have the mixture spraying for the correct density/spread pattern at full speed, but how does the speed change impact this? Can we change the ramp attack/decay without overshoot? And here’s the $64k question — what do we do about paints etc. yet to be created? Making a system that can’t adapt isn’t worth a damn.

And so on and so forth. None of these issues have a thing to do with the ability to sling code, but rather the ability to solve the problem and then use code (taken as a given skill) to apply the solution. By the time you’re done you know pretty much all there is to know about paint and getting a robotic system (at least this particular model) to apply it.

This is one of the reasons software is still considered Art as opposed to engineering in a classical sense; the problem to solve is rarely limited to the problem presented but must be solved as a model of the problem as an archetype — which ultimately allows adaptation. There is no clear cut rule that governs how well a model must emulate reality. As such much of this stuff is neither clear nor necessarily repeatable, thus it’s Art.

No other job function in the world is like this. If you do accounting then yeah you may have to learn to use a given software system but your main function is still accounting. In the world of software design you have to be an expert at your ostensible function (coding) but then to design say an accounting system, you have to know every blasted thing an accountant knows to make it work. Four years down the road you may have to then learn everything a bricklayer knows, or an aircraft designer so that you can create a flight simulator, and so on. In other words, it’s the only job around where you have to be an expert in coding and also that which you are writing code for.

And good designers don’t exactly fall out of trees. It’s a bit rare.

Anyway the design is the key, and designers aren’t subject to the same whims that plague other jobs where what you do is easily replaceable or is an expense (or both, such as IT.)

Paid Denialists

A pro-GW poster on Anthony Watt’s Blog was “investigating” the claim that $50 Billion was spent on the AGW side and some $20 Million has been spent on the denial side. The poster claims to have tracked this to the nefarious Steve Milloy, the evil guy behind “denialist” site junkscience and frequent guest writer on — heaven forbid — Fox News.

I replied —

“This number looks to be an estimate, so why you would bother with going after Milloy seems to be pointless. The estimate would have to include greenpeace and similar group funding, the value of airtime wasted on CNN etc promoting what amounts to greenpeace press releases and calling it “news”, the efforts of governments to fund climate studies, satellite time that is used to study the alleged problem, climate conferences, and essentially, the entire ball of wax.

Assuming it’s Milloy’s estimate, it looks like he’s lowballing it. I’d put the number closer to 10x to 20x of that.

My guess is that this estimate is also a reaction/answer to the rather silly and otherwise idiotic allegations that some people make regarding “paid denialists” and so on as propagated by exxonsecrets and other such whistle blowing “public services.”

Assuming the peak oil crowd is correct, the allegations paint a picture of a world corporation chock full of some of the world’s brightest business minds plotting to quickly waste resources so as to go out of business as soon as possible and simultaneously be castigated by politicians and excorciated by the public at large. So, that’s how conspiracy theorists at places like exxonsecrets seem to assume highly trained and ultra-intelligent Ivy League business people think? The allegations are obviously absurd, mendacious rubbish and ludicrous even in the abstract.

Heavens, I would have thought it apparent that this number was that type of estimate just on the face of it.”

***

Now, I’ve already written before about the absurity of the “paid denialist” claim, but I never have flipped the coin to look at the other side — but… how much money is chasing the GW message, anyhow?

Lots.

I know from reading the UK papers and from speaking to relatives overseas that the Brits are inundated in the propaganda on a daily basis. I did have one uncle who resisted, but then again he was also a special case of being a certifiably smart guy and former engineer in the UK nuclear power industry. The rest of teh relatives seem to have succumbed to the relentless, Borg-like onslaught. Certainly this onslaught isn’t cheap, and it appears to be a war waged on behalf of the hardline socialists. I can’t put a finger on the amount, but certainly the $50 Billion figure put on this by Milloy can’t even begin to cover the UK, much less the world at large.

All Your Ice Are Belonging To Us

Ahh, more stories in the news about arctic ice and global warming. Lots of ice covering the pole this year compared to last. The warmers claim…

“But it’s only one year ice. It’s the multi-year stuff that’s important!”

… and this means what, precisely? Is there some sort of magic ability of multi-year ice to resist melting? Seems to me that with soot etc. one could argue that multi-year ice is more prone to melt. Hard to say. I’m not an expert in ice physics.

What I do know is that the multi-year argument implies thickness. Implies it. It doesn’t say it, and it doesn’t say that thick ice melts less than thinner ice. Nor does it say that single season ice is thinner, although it sure as hell implies it. I guess single year ice can’t compress (if thickness is the basis of the argument.)

I therefore question this argument. Sounds to me like many other arguments that SOUND as if they’re solid but really aren’t. In addition, I have seen not one single shred of actual evidence that multi-year ice melts slower. No evidence of anything, really. Just the claims. Any evidence out there? Yeah…. that’s what I thought.

Technology Creationism

Endorsing the recent DNC/Obama stance on drilling, an article appeared that was interesting…

Asked what he would say to the G8 leaders if he was at their summit in Hokkaido this week, [Robert] Redford said he would challenge the argument that drilling in places such as Alaska was more essential than ever now that oil prices were so high.

“I would make a great case for why that’s absurd and why there’s a better picture to be drawn from new technologies. I would hit that point very hard.”

Well, then. That’s pretty simple. Rather than drill, which takes 5 years before you get results and all you get is oil, all we have to do is tell the scientists and engineers to poof new technology into existence. Why didn’t we think of that? (Probably because we’re only engineers, too dumb to do anything until we’re told to, at which point we bring light unto the firmament — or whatever’s required –upon command. We’re performing seals!)

And people like this laugh at creationists.

And to add to the irony, Redord et al can’t see any irony in this. Does it get any better than this?

ID Redux

Wow. Seems my timing as usual is pretty good. Underscoring my recent post re ID comes news that the LA legislature and Bobby Jindal (LA Governor) have put into law SB 733. John Derbyshire at national Review says this is really unfortunate (I’m paraphrasing here) because what the bill does is little more than encourage school boards to do silly things and think that adding religious stuff in science classes is proper. They’ll lose in court, of course, just as they should, because this is held as unconstitutional.

The purpose of my post here isn’t to argue the constitutionality of religion in classrooms (I agree with the current laws; if people want their kids to learn ID and not science, there’s a number of parochial schools) but to underscore my previous point that public school boards simply aren’t qualified to assess what science is or what science is not. Here we have a case of the Discovery Institute (oxymoronically dubbed as a “creationist think tank”) who seems successful at duping people at the state level, who are held to be a bit higher up the food chain than mere school board members. What chance does a school board have? None.

My solution? Do not let a school board have the power to change textbooks written by experts (not really, but they’re certainly experts compared to school board members) unless they can demonstrate the requisite expertise. Think about this for a moment. We have at any time in the US thousands and hundreds of thousands of degreed people in the sciences, in history, and so on. In other words, people qualified to hold an opinion about their field of expertise. I have an opinion about biology. Should you listen to my opinion of biological matters? Not really. I don’t have enough expertise to have an informed opinion. A biologist does. But you can trust what I think about my own field of expertise.

Dr. Jerry Pournelle writes that my view is “credentialism” which he holds is very bad, and this seems mostly in reaction to the well known excesses. Of course, many of these excesses are in soft sciences (e.g. psychology) ruled more by cult of opinion rather than hard core fact (e.g. physics, astronomy.) Credentials can be abused, yes, but in many fields this is desirable. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Salmonella. I want a qualified food inspector. I want my doctor to have credentials (preferably from an Ivy League school.) Not all credentials are bad.

If we license teachers to teach what’s in the textbook, then by logical extension we ought to license the bodies that seek to influence what’s in the textbooks. No expertise? No license. School boards are intended to figure out how to pay for a new roof, band uniforms, and do bus schedules; i.e. things they are suited for by nature of who sits on such a board and how they got there (politics!) They are neither suited for nor qualified to hold an informed opinion on what science ought to be taught.

Dr. Pournelle’s counter is that if the good people of Resume Speed KS want their kids to learn ID, let ‘em. But this too is wrong. If **everyone** in Resume Speed was on that page, I might be able to see the point. But let’s face it, there are going to be any nunber of people who are NOT on that page. Should their children be taught this silliness because a local majority decided for it? Ummm… No — what is their alternative? Move? Yeah… who’s going to pay for that? This is freedom? The necessity to move about the country until one winds up in a suitable locale or collapses from mental or financial exhaustion is NOT freedom.

Limiting school boards to what they have expertise in IS freedom (everything but textbooks!)

Intelligent Design

Seems Jerry Pournelle (view of Sunday Jul 7th 08 at jerrypournelle.com) can’t seem to understand why otherwise sensible people are so adamant about not letting ID be taught in schools. The argument is that if the people represented by a given school board wish to have it taught, then let them teach it. Local control is superior to being dictated to by well meaning faceless beaureaucrats at the State level, and so on.

Here’s the problem with that thinking.

School boards are composed of a wide variety of people, most of whom aren’t scientists. School boards are qualified to name the football team, hire teachers that aren’t child molestors, and so on. There is a mix of serious and responsible things and the frivolous. These things are well within the purview of what a school board is designed to do. But as a rule these same school board members are NOT qualified to decide what gets taught as science.

So, I’m advocating credentialism, is that it? Yes. I am. Teachers have to have a license to teach, so why shouldn’t school boards be likewise regulated if you intend to let them influence what gets taught?

Dr. Pournelle correctly points out that science doesn’t know how the universe was created. A big bang has been postulated which isn’t provable with present day knowledge. Strictly speaking, magical creation is just as valid a guess as far as mankind’s knowledge allows. Science by definition requires repeatability, so in a certain sense how the universe was created is beyond the purview of day to day science and more of a philosophical matter. How did life start on earth? Panspermia? Emergent property? We don’t know. Evolution theory tells us how life adapts to the environment, not how it came to be. Since we don’t know, goes the argument, then ID ought to be discussed as being just as valid.

The problem with that thinking is that of all possible hypotheses, ID deliberately invokes magic. While it can be philosophically argued that the big bang may well have used magic, note that the underlying thinking is that the big bang used a natural process, albeit one that we don’t know much about… yet. In other words, saying “we don’t know” is *not* equivalent to a claim of magic.

Also note that I have referred to the beginnings of life as competing hypotheses. Not theories. This is important. What we teach in school about science is theory. We teach how hypotheses work and how they are different from theories. Meanwhile advocates of ID refer to their pet as a “theory” and ask for it to be taught in school. Well, let’s see now… a theory ought to be able to make provable predictions as well as explain the past. So what possible prediction could ID offer… more magic? That’s not a theory. And to be blunt, I don’t think it qualifies as hypothesis, either. In fact, anything that invokes magic ought to be disqualified on account of failing the laugh test. My scientific hypothesis is that my cat is under the control of supernatural, magical beings who originated in another galaxy. And since you can’t prove that it’s not, my hypothesis is just as good as yours. And I demand that it be taught to your kids in public school because I have convinced the local rubes that I’m right. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it? It IS stupid. ID isn’t a hypothesis that passes the laugh test, much less a theory.

As a last item, we’ll talk about the elephant in the room. ID is a “wedge” designed to give scientific sounding cachet to an otherwise religious point of view. Here’s a scientific test: using a random poll, ask say 100 scientists for a thumbs up or thumbs down on ID. I’m thinking you’ll usually get 100 out of 100 thumbs down; once in a while you’ll get a thumbs up, but that’s because there are trained people who lose it (“flood geologists” come to mind.) In other words, ID isn’t a science issue supported by scientists. ID is believed in by fundmentalist religious types (for obvious reason), the woefully ignorant, and the left side of the bell curve types who at any other time would be just as fervent about astrology.

Isotopes Redux

Earlier I posted about how the ratios of certain CO2 isotopes could show the amount of CO2 that was released as the result of fossil fuel use. This apparently is actual settled science. I’d asked what these ratios were; i.e. what percentage is fossil fuel? Second, I’d wondered about FILO (first in last out) meaning that CO2 most recently absorbed by the oceans is the first to be released. Third, I’d wondered how long CO2 hangs about the atmosphere. The answers ought to tell us how much of a threat fossil fuel use actually is.

And yet curiously, although some claimants will mention the CO2 isotope stuff as a proof, they back down upon further inquiry (I’m not claiming dishonesty; rather, details are probably not well known) and there is little mention of this by the big AGW sites. Seems to me that this would in fact be the smoking gun. Why so shy?

Finally, some answers seem to be appearing. One place reluctant to answer had a discussion on their site where they were discussing a paper related to the above questions. Buried in the paper was one answer: 2.75%. That’s how much of the atmospheric CO2 can be attributed to fossil fuels. Doesn’t sound like much. After a dozen inquiries to the experts at climate expert sites, we can also conclude that nobody knows how long CO2 stays aloft, and the estimates range from 25 to 200+ years. It’s widely asserted that the correct answer is 100 years, but this appears to be a guess back in the 90’s that’s been simply re-asserted. I also reviewed the IPCC-AR4 report… and after a lot of hand waving and super-secret tech babble, the bottom line remains the same: nobody knows. That’s curious; there’s a great deal of claim regarding global warming, and one of the fundamental data points is unknown? So how do the models work? (Or better yet — do they work at all?)

And nobody has an answer to FILO either. If there were answers, they’d be trumpted.

So here’s where we are — it appears that the sum total of all fossil fuel emissions by man since 1800 or so are reasonably accounted for and comprise less than 3% of the CO2 that exists in the atmosphere. I’m going to stick to this figure until I see some proof otherwise.

My guess is that this figure is correct. Why? Because if the number was 30%, does anyone think this wouldn’t be all over the news? Does anyone think that the AGW crowd wouldn’t whip out the big gun every possible chance?

We Own The Night

That’s what the military says. In fact they prefer to fight at night these days.

Back in the 80’s while building measurement instruments based on CCD’s, it was apparent from looking at the spec sheets of the devices used that although all attempts to tune them were to have them peak at say 500 nm, these things were quite sensitive to near infrared. Military thermal imaging sensors are the same type of things: sensitive to IR. At night, the temps cool down. It becomes a lot easier to detect vehicle engines and people. Anything that generates heat. An enemy that doesn’t have the same technology can’t see you, but you can see them. Tactics are created to maximize the technology you have at your disposal. The military has a lot of that.

It’s no great wonder then that the military prefers to launch attacks at say 1 AM. Not only is this disruptive to the enemy sleep patterns, it’s also easier to target the enemy, and harder for them to target you. It’s also no great surprise to learn that the Iraqi attacks that seemed most effective were in foul sandstorm weather in the daylight.

So… “We Own The Night” is a function of the technology used.

Computer Models Redux

Being a software engineer, I think I’m somewhat qualified to talk about computer models, at least moreso than my other musings about science in general.

In a converation on a climate site, I replied to someone inquiring about modeling. I said –

“Climate science is very difficult. Climate scientists don’t have a planet sitting nearby that they can use to run experiments with, so they’re limited to simulating things with computer models. I’m not going to argue GIGO (garbage in garbage out) because it’s not accurate. But say you are looking for a specific thing, like trying to guess how much CO2 it takes for the climate to do something wierd. Your model looks at that, but that’s because the model is made to look at that. It’s not made to discover new physical processes or climate influences. It can only use the influences assumed at the start.

You can therefore trust that scientists are working diligently and reporting to the best of their abilities. Nor are they misguided; they don’t know what they don’t know, so they are telling you what they DO know to the best of their ability.”

Now, to put this in some perspective, a recent paper from an astrophysicist (Svensmark) postulates that changes in the sun’s geomagnetic flux changes the amount of cosmic rays bombarding earth, and these rays play a fairly big role in cloud formation. Cloud formation changes the temperature. From what I can tell from reading the paper, this looks to be correct in essence, although the significance of the role is unknown until experiments are run (and they are scheduled to run soon at the CERN facility.)

Now, back to models. As I’d said, models do what models do and can’t discover processes; they have to have known processes as inputs so that they can simulate. Thus we have a case where ALL current models are ignoring a previously unknown physical process and one that a model can’t guess at; this reinforces the point that models don’t discover processes. More importantly, it says that models can only be trusted as far as how well the science of the inputs are understood.

Models are evolving. In the late 80’s models used by James hansen at NASA treated the oceans in a fairly primitive matter because the assumption was that this explained things well enough to model for CO2. Ahhh, but later it was discovered that this was inadequate, so more recent models do a better job of handling oceans and currents. The question is whether this is adequate now or merely “somewhat less inadequate” because important physical processes are being downplayed, aren’t known, or perhaps even wrong. (This happens.)

Overall the point is that models used by the climate guys are designed solely to simulate the effects of CO2, so when the conclusion reached of the interpreted data has something to do with CO2, are we supposed to be surprised?