Willowbottom on humanity, Mozart, Bach, and more

My friend and colleague Willowbottom has an interesting post about how, unthinkingly, we risk our own humanity. Worth reading.

Her subsequent post contrasting the musical temperaments of Mozart, Bach, and Schoenberg is fascinating reading and as lyrical as her subject. But methinks it should be set to music somehow.

Me also thinks that while I agree that Bach is so effusive in his musical detail that he leaves little room for the imagination, I for one am very glad of it. The musically talented and educated Willowbottom may be very glad for the room to maneuver, but the musically untalented and uneducated me is very thankful for the ever-ebullient Bach having taken me many places that I could never have gone (or even imagined) on my own.

Stay smart: don't show up

I've always known this.

"We might kill, behead, or do torture..."

From a USA Today story about the alleged rape of a Sunni woman by Iraqi police, a comment by Ahmed Abdullah, a 29-year-old Sunni from Zaiona:

I don't believe that Iraqis will rape a woman. We don't have such a culture. We might kill, behead, or do torture, but rape -- I don't think so.

Well, I'm glad we cleared that up. I feel so relieved.

This is just downright mean

Even in murder-happy Colombia, this is beyond comprehension.

SETI finally finds something

After all those years of searching for E.T. and finding nothing, the SETI@Home program has finally found something: A stolen laptop in Minnesota.

This could be the basis for an interesting anti-theft strategy for your PC: Sign up for one of the popular network-computing volunteer programs (SETI@Home, Genome@Home, Protein Folding@Home, etc.). It helps a good cause and, if your PC is ever stolen, just wait for it to "phone home." Like the commercial PC-recovery services (like "Lojack for Laptops"), but free.

Worth considering, at least. And it gives your PC something to do while it's sitting there blinking its cursor, mostly bored all day.

Blame the user

The folks at Time Inc. (a multi-billion-dollar piece of multi-zillion-dollar TimeWarner) boast of "Trusted editing, the best brands in the business," but apparently no one in their image department is talking with their Web server people. I popped on a link to one of their magazines and got the following error message:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@timeinc.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

(Emphasis added, but the huge title font is theirs, not mine. -A)

How's that for a nice friendly customer-facing error message? ("Tell us what happened, and how it's your fault.") Yes, I realize that's probably a default error message on the server, but it's hardly the kind of thing a giant consumer-marketing company should show its customers in this Internet-savvy age. I'm sure Ted Turner would never have tolerated this if he were still alive. (And yes, I know he's still out there writing checks. But the original Ted Turner has been gone for at least 20 years now.)

So here's hoping that somewhere, somehow, some server admin at TimeInc.net gets a bit of time allocated to go script some friendlier messages on their servers. I no longer have a parakeet, so I no longer have any use for Time magazine, but apparently I still have to read their server errors once in a while.

Is Europe doomed to lag behind the U.S.?

Is European culture an increasing drag on its economic performance? An inquiring analysis of why European economies lag behind the U.S., by Edmund Phelps. (Name doesn't ring a bell? He's the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Economics.)

Cosmic rays, the Sun, and global warming

For the scientifically minded, a collection of research papers on recent findings about the effects of solar cycles and cosmic rays on terrestrial climate, posted at the Danish Space Research Institute.

For those not familiar with this, Space.com has a good layman's background on the theory of solar activity driving changes in Earth's climate, including global warming.

More on AEI, and "how science really works"

More on AEI: A recent article in The Guardian led off with strong accusations against the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a Washington-based think tank (which, contrary to the Guardian's lead, does not do lobbying, in fact AEI is forbidden to do so). The opening paragraph:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

The Guardian's charges have been widely rebutted, but an interesting perspective comes from David Frum -- columnist for the NY Times, commentator at the liberal-leaning National Public Radio (NPR), advocate of carbon taxes, and since 2003 a resident fellow at AEI. In a recent David Frum's Diary entry Frum discusses what really happens inside the American Enterprise Institute -- how much money comes from ExxonMobil (the company cited by the Guardian in its article), whether AEI dictates policy positions to its scholars, and how outside experts are paid. A good perspective from someone in a place to know.

Meanwhile, on the editorial pages of the London Times, former New Scientist editor Nigel Calder explains "how science really works" and mentions some interesting findings on the effects of solar activity on global warming.

"We've created a monster"

In a new article in The Weekly Standard Stephen Hayward and Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute respond to false allegations that AEI, a policy think tank, tried to "bribe" scientists to comment on climate change. The Weekly Standard article also comments on the growing backlash against what Hayward and Green term "the Climate Inquisition," quoting one of the leading global-warming proponents:

"[I]n December, Kevin Vranes of the University of Colorado, by no means a climate skeptic, commented on a widely read science blog about the mood of the most recent meeting of the American Geophysical Union, where Al Gore had made his standard climate presentation. "To sum up the state of the [climate science] world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension," Vranes wrote. "What I am starting to hear is internal backlash. . . . None of this is to say that the risk of climate change is being questioned or downplayed by our community; it's not. It is to say that I think some people feel that we've created a monster by limiting the ability of people in our community to question results that say 'climate change is right here!'""

Dr. Vranes was rather delicate in his phrasing, but President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, always a blunt-spoken man, stated it more plainly in a recent interview. President Klaus expresses his frustration a bit strongly, but at least he's shown the courage to give voice to the sentiment others feel, but have been afraid to state: That we should treat the debate about global warming as just another scientific question to be settled with reason and evidence, not political calculation and social ostracism. Let's hope other thinking people in the public eye find their courage soon.

The ethics of mind-reading

If there were an electronic means of reading people's minds and their intentions, would it be ethical to do so? Should it be legal? According to some neuroscientists, these are questions we may soon have to answer.

This brings up an even more difficult question: If technology is outpacing our ability to develop moral and legal frameworks (and it often looks that way), has technical progress become a game of Russian Roulette, with destruction of society a matter of inevitable chance rather than choice? Is each new technical advance another spin of the revolver's cylinder, not knowing when the bang will come?

If that's the case then our self-destruction is assured. Is there nothing we can do to stop the game before the hammer finds the bullet?

Enforcing "correct science"

Let's say you're a state governor and you're unhappy because the head of the state climate office does not fully agree with your views on global warming. Said climatologist agrees that global warming is going on, but questions how large humanity's role has been in causing it.

Well, if you're Governor Ted Kulongoski of Oregon, you try to have the legislature create a new office of State Climatologist that will allow you to put your own appointee in that role, someone who will hew to all the correct views on climate change. The new appointee will rid you, the governor of the grand state of Oregon, of the terrible embarrassment of a tenured academic (George Taylor of Oregon State University) at a state office questioning one of the tenets of what you consider to be "official state policy" on this scientific question. And the governor's scheme will probably succeed, because many in the legislature are just as outraged as the governor -- they find such deviation from correct belief by a state employee to be an unacceptable blemish on Oregon's green sheen.

As Gov. Kulongoski put it, "I never appointed him. I think I would know. He's not my weatherman."

But no matter what happens, it's clear that the academic Taylor, who has headed the state climate office at OSU since it was created by the legislature in 1991, is now learning how brutal can be the ways of eco-correctness attack politics. An article from the Portland Independent Media Center charged that Taylor "stumps for big polluting businesses," vilified Taylor as "especially dangerous," and quoted the head of Oregon PIRG accusing Taylor of "fiddling while Rome burns." The same article suggests Taylor might be a stooge for Big Oil or Big Nuke and even wonders if the problem is his religious beliefs. Other media pieces have publicly ridiculed him and even called him crazy.

Taylor has tried to defend himself, but his is one voice against a lot of media firepower, and it's virtually certain that Gov. Kulongoski will not only get "his" weatherman, but Taylor's personal and professional reputation will be shredded beyond recovery -- just one more bloody casualty caught in the crossfire of climate politics.

It's getting hot out there.

Go Porsche!

Apropos the global-warming debate:

To the U.S. political Left (and the EU political mainstream), one of the most attractive aspects of the humans-cause-warming hypothesis is that it serves as wonderful justification for a huge new revenue stream in the form of "carbon taxes." A carbon tax is a political diamond: You can claim the moral high ground, collect huge new revenues, and many of the booboisie will feel so morally righteous in paying it that they won't question where it's going. For spenders of public money it doesn't get any better than that.

But even in Europe not everyone is going along. Wendelin Wiedeking, CEO of Porsche AG, has joined several others in the German auto industry in questioning the politics of carbon taxes, claiming the reason France and Italy are so much in favor of such taxes is because carbon taxes favor French and Italian car makers over those in Germany.

As a Porsche owner (968 6-speed coupe) this is yet one more reason to be proud of Porsche. And as an American, I can only hope the E.U. carbon taxes drive Porsche to start manufacturing cars in America. Mercedes and BMW already build cars in the US, why not Porsche as well?

"Lab meat"

A future household term, coming soon to a store near you: lab meat.

Your read it here first.

"Eco-censorship"

In 2006 global-warming advocates (i.e., those who hold that the Earth is getting hotter and humans are the main cause) stepped up the PR campaign against their opponents by declaring that "the debate is over" and dubbing the skeptics as "deniers," explicitly linking them with those who deny the Holocaust. The intent is to end the debate by silencing the skeptics, or at least so discrediting them in the mass media that the doubters will be effectively banished from the public square. There have even been attempts by members of the U.S. Congress and the British Royal Society to pressure corporate contributors to stop funding research that casts doubt on global warming.

It's hard to say how effective this tactic has been. From what I see, the main effect has been to polarize the two sides even further: Those already predisposed to believe in global warming (per my loose definition above) now have fewer qualms about openly ostracizing their opponents, while the questioning skeptics have become ever more outraged about the attempt to silence and denigrate them.

In fact I'm starting to think that for the global warming side this tactic may be backfiring. Though the mantra of "the debate is over" has gotten lots of media play and its emphatic tone has probably swayed some of those who get their news from MTV, it looks to me like its greater long-term effect has been to energize those on the other side, resentful of the attempt to silence them. Examples from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Canada's National Post (the whole 10-part series is worth reading -- see links in the body of the article). Iain Murray provides a good description of what he terms "eco-censorship," and others are busy counter-attacking.

So where is the debate headed? At present the global-warming advocates have the mass media and political momentum going their way. But, in my contrarian mind, I think the tide may soon start running the other way. The next report of the IPCC (the U.N.'s climate-change panel) is due in May and early indications are that in the details (but probably not in its press releases) it will pull back from some of the more extreme views taken in past reports. The famous "hockey stick" temperature-rise graph, now discredited by further analysis of the data, will be gone from the report, and the panel is scaling back its temperature-rise and sea-rise predictions. In the meantime data keeps coming in to indicate that the real culprit may be changes in solar and cosmic-ray activity, which, if validated, would yank the debate from how we prevent global warming to how we adapt to it.

Aside: As one trained in astronomy, the solar- and cosmic-ray-effect hypothesis is of particular interest to me. The idea of solar fluctuations and cosmic-ray flux driving Earth's warming has not been widely discussed in the mass media, but it's been under serious discussion in the astronomy world for quite some time and it's not at all a crackpot idea. At present we don't have enough data to gauge the magnitude of these effects, but the mechanisms proposed are very real and there are some very interesting coincidences that the green-house gas theory does not explain, but solar and cosmic-ray effects do. This is one to watch.

Stay warm.

The definition of wisdom

Been mulling over the differences among knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom. This distinction and their associated values are an important, but seldom mentioned, aspect of the the current debates between science and religion and how much weight should be given to each in social governance.

The meaning of "knowledge" and even "intelligence" are fairly easy to define (see any good dictionary), but wisdom is a little harder to define in a practical, useful way. How about:

"Wisdom is the ability to apply judgment to bring about an ethical good without violating ethical principles."

To me the distinction between knowledge and wisdom is the fundamental reason why ethics can never be based only on pure data, and therefore why science can never be the definer of morals. But let me know what you think.