There are times in your life that you have to engage in self-reflection. You know, that introspective soul searching we occasionally do in order to understand who we really are, what we want out of life, or just to get a bit more happiness or satisfaction out of life. Thankfully, Facebook can help. If you really want to dig deeply into the nooks and crannies of your personality, then consider taking a Facebook quiz or three. Be warned, some revelations may be unsettling.

First off, I wanted to validate my self-esteem and sense of identity, so I took the “What’s your ghetto nickname? quiz and the “What’s your Native American Indian name?” quizzes. Eerily, I found the results to be strikingly similar: “Stank Bug” and “Little Brown Cloud” respectively. Any close friend or family member can vouch for these results, and this told me I was clearly on the right path to a better understanding of me.

Next, I wanted to learn a bit more about my personality, so I took the “Which Harry Potter Character Are You?”, and “Which Tarot Card Are You?” quizzes. From the titles of these, I assumed they would speak to the aspects of my being that sincerely love and respect all things magical and wondrously mysterious about the world. Interestingly, I learned that I’m a forgetful geek like the Potter character “Neville Longbottom”, although I possess the “childish innocence” and “mystical cleverness bereft of reason” characterized by “The Fool”. Truly, I was getting somewhere. So I dove in and took quiz after quiz, popping through them like some ancient pac-man gobbling 8-bit dots.

I could recount all the wonderful and exciting things I learned, but that would take way more time than I want to spend. I’ll just hit some highlights: my hidden superpower is teleportation, my eyes say that I know how to fold a map correctly, I would most likely be arrested for helping a Harvard professor break into his own house, and I should probably move to Dublin.

Some Facebook quizzes don’t provide you with much actionable information. So my lightsaber is green, so what? Does it really matter that I’m not country, I’m as mature as a 15 year old, my emoticon is >=D, or I should get a patriotic pinup tattoo? Probably not. I learned that some of these quizzes are just there for fun. Seriously, I was surprised too, but there it is. Some people use Facebook as some kind of diversion rather than to become fully self-actualized.

So finally, inspired by my wife, I was able to come up with my own Facebook quiz. I thought it was time to give back, to provide something of equal or greater value than what I was able to receive from going through countless other quizzes. I created something that would let us peer deeply into ourselves, and determine how we really see the world. Of course, everyone should take the new “Which Photoreceptor Are You?” quiz today. You’ll be surprised at how similar we all are.

This image from a surveillance video at an adult video store on Airport Boulevard shows a burglar holding an inflatable sex doll after he broke into the business.

Let me count the ways this wingnut fails:

• First – he’s on video, so he will likely be caught, and we’ll get to put a name to that face.
• Second – While going to a store to buy your porn might be a little embarrassing to some folks in south Alabama, it’s probably not nearly as embarrassing as stealing your porn and having your picture plastered on the front page of the local paper. It would probably have been less embarrassing if Jesus, The Pope, and this guy’s mom all walked in the store and caught him in the act.
• Third – the burglar took no money, just, “an inflatable doll, a bottle of lubricant and a pocket-sized sexual stimulation device called “Devin’s Private Pleasures.”" WTF?
• Fourth – apparently inflatable dolls are not sold pre-inflated. The burglar is alleged to have inflated this one himself. Once again … WTF?
• Fifth – we think that stealing an inflatable doll should count as kidnapping, especially if you’re creepy enough to inflate it while you’re stealing it.

Stay tuned as this story blows up develops.

The Guardian reported the interesting story of self-proclaimed psychic, Patricia Putt, and her attempt to take home 1 million dollars from the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). While many “psychics” have tried to take home the top prize, which would be a scientific stamp of approval to their claims of esp or other super powers, not a single one has ever passed the preliminary round of testing.

The same can be said of Ms. Putt:

Did we make history last week? Is Mrs Putt now preparing to face that final challenge? The chosen readings were compared with the actual readings by Richard Wiseman and Mrs Putt together, with several observers present and the whole procedure recorded. The first volunteer did not choose the reading that had been produced for her. Neither did the second. Or the third. By chance alone, the most likely outcome was for one hit out of ten. Unfortunately for Mrs Putt, every single volunteer chose a reading that had not been written for them. It looks like JREF’s million dollars are safe for the time being.

To her credit, Ms. Putt declined to make any excuses for her failure, at least not until a day later. Many of her predecessors have done the same before her, complaining that the JREF tests are unfair, rigged, or influenced by James Randi’s own powers. As with all JREF challenges, Ms. Putt agreed beforehand to the testing procedures as outlined by JREF staff, and she certified that they were a fair way to demonstrate her psychic powers to the world.

Later, in an email to JREF, Ms. Putt explained her failure:

“With them [the volunteers] being bound from head to foot like black mummies, they themselves felt tied so were not really free to link with Spirit making my work a great deal more difficult.”

Of course, Ms. Putt never spoke with any of the volunteers in her test, and the guardian reporter was correct to point out that she must have picked up on their sense of “being tied” using her extrasensory gifts.

Or not.

You’re about to travel through another dimension, a dimension not of logic and reason, but of political influence and deep pockets. Your are journeying into a land where up is down, and more pollution is less pollution. If you could read that signpost through the smog, you would know you’ve entered the Alabama Department of Environmental Management Twilight Zone

In the past two days, there have been three major reports concerning the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) that makes me wonder what kind of wacky weed these guys must be smoking.

First, there were two yesterday concerning Alabama’s air quality. In the first, we learn of the State of Alabama’s proposal to codify ADEM’s illegal practice of allowing the largest air polluters in Alabama to exceed the maximum limits set by the US Clean Air Act.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management has been seeking federal approval for the rule change since 2003, when ADEM’s Environmental Management Commission adjusted the existing smokestack law at the behest of major air polluters in the state, including the power, paper, chemical and cement industries.

The rule change that’s mentioned is one in which ADEM routinely allows some large polluters in the state to exceed the limit of soot they discharge into our air by an average of 2%. In 2005, the ADEM practice was ruled illegal in federal court, although ADEM and other State entities have been in negotiations with the EPA to allow the practice (which is actually still occurring). Interestingly, ADEM is selling this proposal as an effort to improve air quality, and Alabama Governor Bob Riley is in a buying mood:

Riley’s office argued that the new rule change “ensures that air quality (in the state) will continue to improve.” The governor’s e-mails also state, “we are not asking for a relaxation of air quality regulations. In fact, Alabama has proposed more stringent standards for our state.”

Dear Mr. Governor, allowing more pollution isn’t actually more stringent. You see, pollution is generally bad, so any standards that allow more of it would actually be less stringent. I know the whole more/more thing has a cool syntactic symmetry, but sometimes you have to leverage the actual meanings of words to make your arguments less insane.

When you think about how ADEM and the Governor’s office could claim that allowing more pollution into Alabama’s air would improve Alabama’s air quality, you have to ask yourself just what would motivate seemingly bright and intelligent people to act so stupidly. It turns out that there’s a clue:

… the rule change the judge objected to came about because the state’s biggest power providers – including Alabama Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority – and other industrial polluters asked for it.

Oh, right. If big polluters ask for it, it must be a good thing.

In the second report yesterday, we learned about ADEM’s failed attempt from the 1990′s to block the use of electronic pollution monitoring equipment, in favor of using trained monkeys to spot excess soot emitted from smokestacks. OK, trained monkeys may be a bit over the top, but given that ADEM wants to use “trained smoke readers” instead of more reliable and precise monitoring instruments, the metaphor is completely appropriate.

The report points out that critics of this Monkey’s Eyeball method makes it impossible to effectively monitor and enforce federal clean air standards. The EPA, for it’s part, would rather have something called “credible evidence” of whether a company was complying with clean air limits. ADEM, however, would prefer the Monkey’s Eyeballs to modern measuring instruments, because they think it would be impossible to requiring polluters to meet clean air standards.

And finally, there was a report today about how ADEM testing over the past year show high levels of mercury contamination in some species of fish. Mercury contamination has been linked to several birth defects and developmental disabilities, and the ADEM is pointing out that this is a particularly good year to avoid eating largemouth bass caught in south Alabama. Of course, what is missing from the report is the fact that the largest source of mercury contamination in lakes and streams is industrial air pollution that eventually falls as contaminated rainwater, pollution that is commonly emitted from coal-fired power plants like the ones that ADEM is OK with emitting more soot.

So – there you have it – the perfect storm that is the ADEM twilight zone: ADEM wants us to believe that more pollution will give us better air quality. They also want us to believe that trained monkeys are capable of monitoring soot emissions as well as automated instruments. And finally, they want us to make sure we don’t eat the contaminated fish.

Herein lies the critical flaw of science when studying the creation of our world. Science cannot observe and therefore cannot test the creation, nor can scientists examine any of the so-called “Big Bang” scenarios. These singular events are far beyond any application of the scientific method. Since they happen but once, they can never be reproduced or observed by any scientist.

Observation and reproduction of studies and experiments are essential to the scientific method. Therefore, because the creation and associated theories cannot be observed or tested, responsible scientists will avoid aggressive assaults upon that which they cannot test by present methodology.

[emphasis added]

Again, this writer is probably well-meaning, and most likely educated. But as in previous instances, this is another great example of why we absolutely must improve science education – not only in Alabama, but throughout the US.

In this instance, the writer’s argument suffers from two fatal errors. First, he conflates Darwin’s Theory of Evolution with cosmology, and in particular “Big Bang” theories in Physics. Evolution makes no claims whatsoever concerning the origin of the universe. Instead, it’s simply a coherent, tested, and testable biological theory about how species change and adapt over time. For nearly 150 years, it has been the unifying theory of biology, and while biology and physics are indeed both sciences, Evolution only has cosmological importance if it violates your religious comfort zone. Scientifically Evolution and Cosmology are apples and oranges.

The second fatal flaw in the writer’s argument is the misunderstanding of the notion of historical sciences. Different sciences can be placed on a continuum ranging from experimental sciences to historical sciences. Physics is largely an experimental science, as is chemistry and psychology, and these would sit near the “experimental end of the continuum. Toward the far end, we have sciences that are largely historical in nature, such as paleontology and astronomy. Within the philosophy of science, it’s well understood that many sciences have aspects that are experimental and those that are historical. In all these cases, however, the methods and rigor used by all scientists, even those who use mathematical models and known physical properties of the universe to describe the conditions at one ten-billionth of a second after the Big Bang, are valid scientific methods.

So I ask how dumb dead matter and dumb dead light arrived at the system called vision without the input of intelligence.[sic] My answer (and the answer of most people) is: They didn’t. Darwinian evolutionists do not like that answer. But they cannot disprove it …” [emphasis added]

Another recent letter claimed that:

First of all, the last time I checked, evolution was still listed as a theory. Certain people in the scientific community seem to think that it has been proven as a fact.

Quotes like these from well-meaning (and likely reasonably well educated) people highlight the importance of improving science education. In every expressed opinion in favor of intelligent design, the authors demonstrate a clear and fundamental misunderstanding of science and what the words “Theory” and “Fact” mean within a scientific context.

There have also been a number of recent “pro-science” letters and opinion pieces. While well-meaning, these too have missed the mark with respect to the key misconceptions about science that lay people clearly demonstrate in their “pro intelligent design” tirades. Recently, the most cogent discussion to appear locally concerning some of the problems with the intelligent design movement appear in Dr. Albert Gapud’s piece (Don’t be distracted by intelligent design, May 25). To his credit, Dr. Gapud recounted the famous Dover trial (Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District et al.), but I don’t think he went quite far enough.

In the Kitzmiller opinion, the court concluded that it was unconstitutional to require teaching intelligent design in the public schools, saying:

The proper application of both the endorsement and Lemon tests to the facts of this case makes it abundantly clear that the Board’s ID [Intelligent Design] Policy violates the Establishment Clause [of the US Constitution]. In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

While this court decision makes it equally difficult for fundamentalist Christians as well as radical Moslems to impose their religious ideals upon our children within public schools, citing it doesn’t do anything to educate the many ID supporters who mistakenly contend that scientists “believe” in evolution, or that ID stands as a viable scientific alternative to Evolution, or that science is or should be democratic. Let’s examine each of these misconceptions.

First, scientists don’t believe in evolution, certainly not the way that religious people have faith in God. This gets back to those words I mentioned earlier, “Fact” and “Theory”, and what they mean in a scientific context. To the lay person, facts are irrefutable truths that can be proven. The situation in science is similar, with the exception that in science, facts are simply data. They are the pieces of information that are collected through careful observation and measurement. For example, it is a fact the half-life of Carbon-14 isotope is 5,730 (plus or minus 40) years. It’s also a fact that many species that existed in earlier times are now extinct. Given enough facts (or data), scientists will attempt to organize them into a conceptual framework that describes them, and explains how they came about. These conceptual frameworks are known as theories.

Theories in science are as good as science gets. Interestingly, theories are also incapable of being “proven” in any way (google : falsifiability for the roots of this). What sets a scientific theory apart from a non-scientific explanation of things (like ID) is that real scientific theories (like Darwin’s Theory of Evolution) are capable of being proven wrong.

Since Evolution makes testable predictions, and is capable of being proven wrong, you would think this is something that should cause creationists and other “evolution deniers” to rejoice. Science provides this very elegant mechanism to get rid of bad scientific theories. Instead, however, we only hear wailing and gnashing of teeth, since creationists don’t use the only vehicle by which Evolution could be properly rejected: amass a body of independently verifiable facts that refute evolution and provide a compelling, falsifiable alternative theory. Rather than searching for a scientific alternative for Evolution fundamentalist Christians (as well as fundamentalist Muslims) use political and religious arguments and stunts that waste your taxes in their attempts to refute the Theory of Evolution.

This brings us to the second point, that ID is not a viable alternative to Evolution. There are several reasons for this, but I’ll mention just two. First, as we have seen, ID isn’t really a scientific theory since it makes no testable predictions and is therefore not capable of being proven wrong. The second main reason that ID can’t possibly replace Evolution is that it simply has no explanatory power. This is due to the fact that the central claim of ID is that we cannot know how the diversity of life came about, because the development of species on Earth was the result of an intelligent designer (but not God, someone else) that worked in some mysterious ways (but not God’s way) to bring it all about.

Theory construction in science requires that your alternative to an existing theory must account for all (or at least a large proportion of) the data that supports the theory it’s intended to replace. The classic example in Physics occurred when Quantum Mechanics replaced Classical Newtonian Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics explains everything that Isaac Newton did, but it also explains phenomena that Newton could never have considered, like what happens to matter at subatomic scales. ID doesn’t even come close to explaining anything that Evolution explains without the need to appeal to supernatural intervention. Indeed, where ID absolutely needs to provide an alternative to the mechanism of natural selection, it instead offers an empty box labelled “a miracle happened here.” It’s your prerogative to believe in miracles. Just don’t teach your special brand of miracles as science in biology classes on the Federal dime.

Finally, there’s this mistaken notion that we should teach ID because it offers a counterpoint to Evolution, as if these were two great political parties engaged in some sort democratic contest for truth. Central to this mistake is the idea that it’s somehow unfair to present only one side of a story. In this case, the side of scientists who provisionally accept Evolution is presented without any sort of rebuttal by the other side. There are a couple of problems with this way of thinking about science. First of all, it is common to present competing theories in the classroom, but with respect to Evolution, there simply isn’t any scientific competition, and there hasn’t been any for almost 150 years. There are some details that scientists argue over, but there aren’t any viable alternatives waiting in the wings. Also, this argument is also typically raised by Evolution deniers who have political rather than scientific motives, and who foist the false dichotomy of Evolution versus ID upon us in an attempt to get more fundamentalist Christianity in our public schools. Science progresses by replacing old theories that fail to account for the facts with newer ones that do. In this sense, science itself uses a sort of Natural Selection to weed out bad theories to make room for better ones.

Someday, a scientist or team of scientists may come up with an alternative to Evolution. That alternative, however, won’t be any form of ID, no matter what you call the God-Designer. It will instead be some other similarly naturalistic framework that will also cause much consternation among those who want to teach about Allah, or Yahweh, or Jesus in our public science classes. Until that alternative shows up, however, we should be teaching Evolution in publicly funded science classes, and leave religious instruction to our children’s parents and clergy.

In the movie Expelled, Ben Stein gives a compelling argument for Intelligent Design.

Having not seen the film yet, I can’t really comment on how compelling his argument actually was, but I suspect that it wasn’t a compelling scientific argument. If you follow the Intelligent Design controversy at all, then you’re probably well aware that ID lacks all the hallmark features of a true scientific theory. The two most critical components that ID lacks are the requirement that the theory be potentially falsifiable (ID is not), and that it leads to testable hypotheses (ID doesn’t make any).

Interestingly, I see many who mistakenly claim (as I’ve heard Stein claim in the Expelled trailers) that the “scientific community” (interestingly, not individuals, but the community as a whole) have an almost religious belief in Evolution, which is absurd for anyone wanting to call themselves a real scientist. Indeed, this would be equivalent to saying that the religious community has faith because of the results of careful experimentation.

No, as I’ve written before, scientists don’t believe in Evolution – they accept it provisionally as good theory. If Evolution were really such bad science, maybe as some in the ID community would like it to be, then it would not withstand the internal pressure of real scientists who really test it. So far, the testable hypotheses that Evolution has made have supported it. One of the implications of Evolution, unknown even in Darwin’s time, was that the Earth has to be much older than Darwin originally believed. We now have confirmation from multiple independent sources that point to a very old earth, unless you would prefer to reject several distinct branches of science. Evolution also predicts the relative orderliness in the fossil record – and the discovery of just one counter example would completely destroy the theory. Interestingly, Evolution also predicts the genetic differences found between humans and other major primates. The recent discovery that the human chromosome 2 is a fusion of two distinct chromosomes found in the great ape species not only accounts for the the observation that humans have 23 chromosome pairs and the apes have 24, but also supports the notion of a common ancestor. If the genetics worked out any other way – then it would be reason enough to toss the theory in the bin.

The principle issue I have with ID is that, since it isn’t really science, members of the ID community have attempted to get it into our public school science classes through the tactic of redefining science itself. I think scientists take issue with that, and rightly so. Again, the equally absurd tactic would be to force churches to teach Evolution in sunday school classes by successfully redefining what the tenants of christianity are.

Nope – the Expelled hype aside, it all comes down to this: Evolution isn’t “special” in a scientific sense. It makes predictions that can be tested, and if those tests fail, then the theory will be discarded for something better. I can guarantee, however, that ID isn’t a viable alternative, since, well, it isn’t really a theory in the scientific sense of the word. And THAT’S what matters to scientists.

In the second piece, Ed Brayton examines the film’s “central claim of persecution, that of Richard Sternberg” – who Shermer earlier says is, “portrayed in the film as a martyr for free speech”. Apparently, Sternberg was involved in the publication of a somewhat embarrassing paper while he worked as an unpaid research associate at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum. Brayton goes into great detail about how Sternberg impropriety brought him distrust of his fellow scientists, and criticism and condemnation of his actions. Hardly the martyr, the record regarding Sternberg isn’t quite worthy of a feature film:

Here’s the bottom line: Richard Sternberg went to great lengths to sneak a substandard and inappropriate paper through the peer review procedures of the journal he was editing. His actions, unsurprisingly, caused a great deal of embarrassment to his colleagues and some of them were quite angry about it and wanted him fired. But despite a few harsh words contained in emails that he never saw prior to filing his OSC complaint, ultimately nothing discriminatory or retaliatory ever happened to Sternberg. To this day, he retains the same access to the collections at the NMNH that he had prior to this incident. The worst thing that happened to Sternberg was that his clearly unethical actions were met with the disapproval and criticism of his colleagues, which is a far cry from violating his civil liberties.

And the paper Sternberg snuck through peer-review? It’s the most famous pro-ID paper ever published because it’s the only one to ever appear in a peer-reviewed journal: The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, which apparently has a circulation around 300 people. Maybe IDiots like Stein and Sternberg should do better science so they don’t have to use stealth to vanity publish in 2nd and 3rd tier journals.

Nobody should be required to take a neutral stance on stupidity. Indeed – here at SmugBaldy, we’re vehemently anti-stupid, so this is the sort of thing that really irks me. I had previously written a short piece about how creationists were trying to worm their way into the hall of power in Texas, and expand the role of the Judeo-Christian creation story in science classes. Here’s a bit more about how politically charged things are becoming for science education in Texas.

BUSH: A clear lesson I learned in the museum was that outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive. In other words, people came from other countries — I guess you’d call them colonialists — and they pitted one group of people against another

Bush used this bit of logic to apparently defend his administration’s do-lessness with respect to the ongoing Darfur genocide, as well as an excuse for America’s lack of response to the Rawandan Genocide. If that doesn’t peg your irony meter, maybe this will: The WAR President just called American troops in Iraq a colonialist force, while admitting that their presence was “unbelievably counterproductive”.

Sounds like Bush is getting a bit liberal in his loafers, no?