Thanks to an NPR article we have a concept worthy of a Phillip K Dick novel, with Orwellian commentary that should scare the crap out of you if you have any imagination— or remember the CIA’s history dealing with other chemical substances.

The money quote:

Does Biology Affect Our Trust In Government?

Zak first got interested in trust more than a decade ago after co-authoring a study that looked at trust levels in different nations and their economic stability. The study found that the higher the level of trust, the better the economic status of the nation.

The work got Zak thinking more generally about different ways to manipulate trust, and so starting in 2001, Zak began spraying oxytocin up the noses of college students to see if the hormone would change the way they interacted with strangers.

It did. Squirt oxytocin up the nose of a college kid, and he’s 80 percent more likely to distribute his own money to perfect strangers.

The denial now is occurring on the side of the global warming advocates who insist that there is no conspiracy, and that these are truly good scientists, and we should be really concerned about the idea that these hackers who stole these e-mails are disrupting scientific research.   To which I say; we have evidence of manipulation of the peer review process, the deleting of  raw data to avoid releasing the information to FOIA requests (or to other scientists attempting to duplicate results; it’s settled, you know) , the deliberate manipulation of data to force computer models to fit forgone conclusions, computer modeling software that is filled with buggy spaghetti code you wouldn’t trust to balance your checkbook, and an attempt to hide the fact that temperatures are actually declining at the moment.  It also seems more likely that we are dealing with a whisleblower upset about the stonewalling of FOIA requests than some hacker.  Frankly, it’s not just bad science these guys were engaged in at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, it was anti-science.  The “research” they did is toxic to the very idea of science.

Really, the only real defense in the end is going to be the claim that this bogus research was all confined to CRU in East Anglia.  Good luck with that.

Still, immobile as she is, she still looks up at us with the same goofy grin, and still has her tail waging for us all the time. So we’re not giving up on her yet. We can’t afford official hydrotherapy, but there’s a doggy “spa” just down the street that has a pool and a very nice staff person with experience in special needs dogs, which costs much less than having the vet do it.  So we have Truffles swimming again twice a week hopfully going to three), albeit with human assistance and a life-jacket.

And this past weekend we saw a guy who has made it his hobby building wheelchairs for dogs. Every job he does is custom work, which is good because Truffles needed some custom assistance. Unlike hip dysplasia, the strength is gone in her front so badly that she can’t support her weight, even if her back end’s supported.

With her new cart though, she actually managed to push herself along a few feet on the first try. Best case scenario, we’ll get enough muscle back on her so she can move around a bit on her own. But failing that, at least she’s happy to be out and about for even a little while.

I bet you thought I was kidding.

I bet you thought such things would never see any practical use.

I bet you believe them when they say that their mission is not to build “futuristic robots” to “feed on the human population”

Will you feel that way when they start building themselves?

(Props to Elizabeth Bear and Patrick Nielsen Hayden)

Of course the latter type of change is harder to write about. But small incremental shifts in sciences that we thought were pretty much settled will probably have way more impact on daily life than the detection of the Higgs Boson.

Via Io9 I read about some breakthroughs in fluid mechanics and the mathematical modeling of turbulence. You may stifle a yawn, but understanding this will have impact for just about every single thing we make that moves; cars, aircraft, boats, wind turbines, jet engines. In a few years our design process may involve specifying the parameters of a vehicle, and having a computer mathematically model the body for us. (Rather than having a human come up with the initial design then testing it.)

We may have some funky looking planes in our future that use a lot less fuel.

The belief/insistence that someone outside the group is somehow, “categorically, topologically, intrinsically, DIFFERENT.” Also, the use of this belief, the not-understandable “other,” to re-affirm the group’s “normalcy” and identity.

There you go, the human history of race, sex and gender identity wrapped up in a neat little package. Covers a hell of a lot of ground, that little word. I don’t think I’d get a hell of a lot of objection if I gave one of Mr. Card’s rants on teh ghays as an example of culturally-blinded othering.

Ah, but I won’t let my liberal friends off that easy. No, I have a prime example of othering that the author (and most of his readers) would not even subliminally realize is doing so: What makes people vote Republican? The title alone is problematic. Consider this quote from Jonathan Haidt’s first paragraph:

We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.

I think it sort of speaks volumes all by itself. What is remarkable is that, in large part, the article in question is a self-congratulatory reflection on Mr. Haidt’s intellectual journey from the belief that conservatism should have a DSM IV code, to the realization that “Republicans” are simply an alien cultural group that use a moral value system that Democrats do not understand.

Mr. Haidt, I’m sorry, you’re a bigot. A highly intellectual, well educated bigot, but a bigot nonetheless. You lose. Just based on the fact that the entire article, and most of the responses, are written with the following implicit assumptions.

• conservative ideology is monolithic.
• conservative ideology shows no rational basis, so adherents must have non-rational motivations.
• conservative ideology is purely an envelope over conservative Cristian morality.
• conservatives are largely ignorant of the reasons they are conservatives.
• conservatives think differently than liberals, their brains work differently.

In the end, Mr. Haidt has transformed the conservative American into the transcendent alien, someone who doesn’t act like us, doesn’t think like us, and has a fundamentally different moral core. The Republican in Mr. Haidt’s article is the same alien creature who was behind the Yellow Peril, the Red Scare, and the Zionist Conspiracy.

The sad thing is, Mr. Haidt believes himself enlightened. He thinks he has actually achieved some sort of understanding. The sadder thing is, compared to his peers, he is probably correct.

In this particular case, it starts off by noting that female reproductive parts et al. tend to be named after male doctors, scientists and so on. It got me thinking less about the patriarchy of it all (since, one presumes, as gender becomes more equitably represented in the sciences, the number of female eponyms will likewise increase) but about the narcissism of it all. The fact that science is rife with terms originating with individual people seems an interesting quirk, and it would imply something very “other” about a society that doesn’t do so.

A lot of the other contributors to the film at least have the excuse of having been lied to by the producers, producers who then banned some (but not all) of those same people from a pre-screening of the film. (Come on, you filmed the guy and didn’t expect him to try and see the movie? WTF you smoking?)

Worse for ID proponents, the film commits a classic blunder and wastes little time in invoking Godwin’s Law. . .

From Fox News:

The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this.

From Richard Dawkins’ review:

The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage [...] Stein has no talent for comedy [but] his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.

It is truly hard to believe that people making such pathetic arguments actually believe in their subject matter. In fact, given the rampant lying and deliberate re-editing of interviewees, I can’t help but think Mark Mathis is in the midst of some elaborate scheme to siphon money from gullible creationists or engineer an elaborate tax dodge. Or, perhaps this case of epic fail is itself a pro-Darwinist conspiracy designed to make Intelligent Design proponents look like raving loons.

ADDENDUM: A link to show there are people who actually get the point.

Yea me!

I now have a long weekend ahead filled with a buttload of SF movies and office furniture assembly.

Of course, these genetically-engineered fluorescent cats were created to deal with the epidemic of fluorescent mice.

If you’ve read my earlier post on Science <> Religion you probably know why, though I’m respectful of people’s belief systems, I find the concept behind the Creation Museum eminently mockable. Here’s the point:

Faith = The belief in a spiritual or moral truth without need of empirical proof.
Science = a systemic method of using empirical data to explain observable phenomena.

Please note the problem with mixing one with the other. By necessity, the scientific method is open to continual challenge by new data. Creation “Science” by definition is not open to any challenge, because it disregards data that contradicts the proponent’s particular interpretation of scripture. Rhetorical tricks invoking “starting points” and “differing theories” a just that, tricks just to make scripture sound scientific— “because the bible said so” might be the basis of a philosophical axiom, or a moral code, but isn’t a good basis to explain empirical data because, in the end, if you observe empirical data that contradicts your axiom you are forced to disregard the data. (This is the same reason mixing political “truths” with science is an equally bad idea.)

As corrupting this might seem to science, I think it has an even worse effect on religion. The Creation Museum is a temple to people’s lack of faith. Think about this: The creator is omnipotent, and is easily capable of creating a universe that’s 5 billion+ years old in seven days or so. In fact, those seven days could take an arbitrary length of time if God was in a reference frame traveling significantly close to the speed of light. There is no need to shitcan everything we know about biology, geology, plate-tectonics, physics, stellar evolution, down to the half-life of carbon-14, for someone to have faith in God and believe in the redemption of Jesus Christ. But the Creationists are so insecure in their own faith that they can only believe in a God that presents them with significant, definitive worldly proof of His existence. It’s a faith that’s so timid that it is threatened by any sort of inquiry, and crumbles at the slightest challenge.