Archive for the ‘education’ Category
fountains of good stuff 1: introduction
Here is my first podcast in the new series, which I hope to continue with into the future, having worked out a simple format.
fountains of good stuff 1: introduction
Hi, my name is Stewart Henderson, and this is my introduction to fountains of good stuff, a series which will explore all sorts of things we’re learning about the brain, the galaxy, the past, the laws of nature, the strange behaviour of humans, and anything else that happens to take my fancy and which I think may be of interest to, well, somebody out there. In my fantasy world, I’d love to be constantly immersed in all this good stuff, learning about it, reading about it, talking to clever people about it, picking people’s brains about it, arguing about it, and just generally wallowing about in the stuff. Okay, with a dollop of sex thrown in occasionally. It’s a kind of lifelong learning thing, because you know, you’re never too old to learn, and learning is the best way to keep you young and enthusiastic, and to maintain the plasticity of your brain, apparently.
Now it just so happens that I myself am very very old, so I think it’s most appropriate that I should be presenting this ‘fountain of youth’-type series which I’m hoping will flow on and on and on unto oblivion, you know, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. And I’m hoping you can follow me along the downward spiral. Should be fun, n’est-ce pas?
So what’s the purpose of all this? Well, in my dotage, I’ve become very interested in knowledge, in finding things out, and also thinking about how we know things. Not in a philosophical way, but in a naïve, childlike way – a sense of wonder, often confusion, sometimes excitement, and sometimes skepticism. And maybe, this is philosophy, I don’t know. It seems to me that, as I get older, I become almost panic-stricken about how little I know about anything, as if I’ve wasted my life, or as if haven’t sufficiently explored and exercised this amazing thing I have inside my head.
There’s a funny story told about Pliny the Elder, a great Roman intellectual who had a servant follow him around all day, reading to him from works of natural history, the science of the time, so that when he was in his bath, sitting on the dunny, or at the dinner table, none of his time would be wasted, he’d be absorbing information during every waking hour. How he’d have loved the modern world of podcasting.
Of course, this is based on the notion of the brain as a great big bucket which you can pour contents into until it’s full up and you know everything, but the brain doesn’t work like that, and Pliny would’ve been well aware of that, he would’ve known that memory is unreliable, that we forget more than we retain and so on, but I can certainly sympathise with his hunger for more knowledge, perhaps in the hope that it would all somehow combine together in his mind, and even that his mind would transform it into more than the sum of its parts, like an oven does to the ingredients of a soufflé. Incidently Pliny, Jupiter bless him, was exactly my age when he died, overcome, so it’s said, by the fumes of Vesuvius, on the same day that it buried Pompei under its lava and ash.
Now where was I? Knowledge. I’m no scientist, in fact through most of my life I’ve been an arty-farty bludger type, but I’ve always been impressed, in fact in awe, of the achievements of science, and I’ve certainly always been interested in the questions science seeks to answer. What does it mean to be alive? Why do we sleep for so much of our lives? How did the world we live in come to be? What do we mean by ‘the world’? Is that an obsolete term or does it still have its uses? How is it that my pet cat has the same shape face as a lion, or a tiger? Exactly how is it different, and how the same? Why does my shit smell so bad, though not as bad as that of other people? Why am I so struck by the beauty of women, while noting that beauty’s infinite variety? How long will our species last? Is there life elsewhere in our solar system?
The number of questions is infinite, of course, or potentially so, and some of these questions we already have answers for, though there may turn out to be better answers, and there are some questions we’re close to finding answers for, and some questions that are unanswerable, or badly framed, or not worth worrying about, or too much of a worry. There are questions we can answer in a jiff via Wikipedia, and questions we wonder if anyone has ever asked before.
Whatever the questions, they all have something to do with knowledge, and it seems to me that science can always be let in to lend a hand. I don’t think science is anything mysterious or scary, it’s simply the way to knowledge. At least, the knowledge I’m interested in. Science is whatever generates reliable knowledge about the world. I’ve heard people say that ‘science doesn’t know everything’, as if science was a person, probably male, obsessive and slightly mad. They say this as if they think this science bloke is getting too big for his boots and needs to have a wadge of humble pie stuffed down his throat. But if you just treat science as an attempt to arrive at reliable knowledge, you’ll see how absurd this statement is. People try to arrive at reliable knowledge because they don’t know everything. And I would say that the vast majority of scientists are happy to admit that they don’t know much about anything. That’s what makes it such a challenge and so much fun, that there’s so much to learn and so much to think about. And if you can think of any other approach to knowledge that is of any use at all, please let me know, I’d be fascinated.
I know some philosophers say there’s no such thing as the scientific method, and I agree. There’s nothing you can point to, or write down, or put into a formula, and say, there’s the scientific method. I think of science as using an open-ended set of methodologies, each one more beautiful than the other, for arriving at reliable knowledge. They generally involve a lot of prior knowledge, a fair degree of creativity, and a balance of open-mindedness and skepticism. Now, I think I understand the Darwin-Wallace theory of natural selection. I can’t say that I fully understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, but I know enough about it to be pretty sure that the methods Einstein used to arrive at his theory have pretty well nothing in common with the methods of Darwin and Wallace. In fact I’d say that even Darwin and Wallace arrived at much the same theory using different methods, according to their different natures and experience. That’s the beauty and creativity of science, and there’s plenty of that around.
Science is essentially a way of life, and it’s the best diversion from the perils of self-absorption ever devised.
So I want to celebrate science and its achievements from my lay perspective, very much in the spirit of Bill Bryson in his wonderful book ‘A short history of nearly everything,’ and I immediately identify with Bryson when, in the beginning of his book, he recalls a text-book diagram from his school-days, which cut through the Earth’s inner layers, and the text told him that the inner core was made of molten nickel and iron, at a temperature something like the surface of the sun, and he asked himself – how did they know that? And still asks himself, as I do. How do they know that light travels at about 300,000 kms per second? How do they know that Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us apart from the sun, is 4.24 light years away? How do they know? Well, it’s not really a mystery, and I’m hoping, as maybe old Pliny did, that it’ll all come together in my mind one day. With a bit of work.
I won’t always be talking about scientific knowledge, though, and how we come to know things. I have an interest in history, in biography, and in religion, its psychology, its history, and its claims to knowledge and influence. I’ll be talking about important and fascinating figures in intellectual history, from Hypatia to Antoni van Leeuwenhoek to Harry Hess. I’m doing it for self-education and for communication, so if you hear any of these talks, and think you’ve learned something from them or been stimulated by them to learn more, I hope you’ll recommend them to your friend. And some people, I hear, have more than one.
So that’s my introduction to these fountains of good stuff. I hope it wasn’t too discombobulating, and I’m hoping that one day, if I get rich, or meet someone who’s a techno wizard with a bit of time on their hands, that I’ll be able to add a few bells and maybe even a whistle or two, to make it all sound really cool.
Meanwhile, I hope you tune into my first fully gushing podcast, which will be about dolphins and their brains. See you then.
just touching base
Just to say that I’m currently quite busy, under pressure to come up with good teaching for my Certificate 4 in TESOL, and under pressure to present evidence for my accredited teaching at the community centre I’m attached to, so blogging and my future podcasting projections are taking a back seat for a while, but I’ve been thinking a bit about my lifelong learning project, which I planned to associate with a new blog. I’ve decided that’s a bad idea and I need to keep everything under the umbrella of this blog. I’ve also been thinking that the title ‘lifelong learning’ is a bit naff, and I need a more lively one for the podcast. My current thought is for ‘A fountain of good stuff’, which might attract more young people, and has a kind of casual enthusiasm about it. Such a title might also encourage me to be more casually enthusiastic in my presentation. So, when I get a bit more time, I’ll transfer the lifelong learning stuff I’ve already done, podcasts and transcripts, to this blog, with a bit of enthusiastic tweaking. I’ve done two podcasts, which I’ll re-record, and I’m halfway through writing up a third. When that’s all done I plan to submit them to itunes, and we’ll see what happens.
All this by way of apology…
what is naturopathy?
see what i mean?
Here are a couple of quick definitions of naturopathy, found online, to get us started.
To judge from these, naturopaths put a lot of faith in the body’s capacity to heal itself, with minimal guidance and intervention. Conversely, they put little faith in drugs and ‘medications’, and there is no mention here of the various tools and terms of modern medicine; vaccination, viruses, antibiotics, antigens and the like. It all sounds very gentle and soothing, if a little too much so – not the sort of treatment you would seek for a massive head trauma or a dose of bubonic plague, or one of its modern equivalents. Rather, it’s the sort of treatment that just helps you through the day, when you’ve got a bit of a sniffle, some tummy trouble, the odd twinge, or you’re just a bit down in the dumps. Some particular treatment terms – reflexology, aromatherapy, massage, herbalism – seem designed to make you feel better already. Certainly better than chemo.
You’ll find naturopathy advertised in leaflets and magazines in your local pharmacy. They’re the ones featuring pastel colours and glowing, youthful bodies ready to float off the page, faces smiling blissfully at the sky.
Key terms are: natural, holistic, herbal, balance, toxins, spiritual, healing, and ancient.
So what’s there to criticize? Well, indeed, the body does have a great capacity to heal itself. The key is to understand just how it does so, and to understand its limits. Obviously, a severed limb won’t grow back, but can a cancer-riddled body rid itself of its cancer? Can a type 1 diabetic heal herself of her diabetes? What about schizophrenia? Amoebic meningoencephalitis?
Clearly, naturopathy has its limits. In fact it’s very limited indeed. In rejecting drugs, it largely rejects targeted treatment, and evidence-based approaches to medicine, which isolate the causes of an illness or bodily or brain dysfunction, and seek to understand the mechanism and pathways of dysfunction so that an intervention, in the form of a drug, or vaccine, or change of diet, or surgery, or whatever, can be effected. Instead it tends to rely on arguments from antiquity for the ‘healing powers’ of echinacea, aloe vera, or even garlic, as well as ancient ‘healing systems’ such as ayurvedism and TCM [Traditional Chinese Medicine].
I’m not necessarily denying that some of these treatments might work in some cases, But I’m overwhelmingly interested in how treatments work. And I’m interested in these questions in the context of how our bodies fight infection, how our immune system works, how things are happening on the microbiological and chemical level. I’m certainly not interested in practitioners who ignore as irrelevant and ineffectual the vast amount of insight we’ve gained into this level of function – really the cutting-edge – in the past century or so. If garlic ‘cleanses the body’, as I’ve often heard said, then how does it do that? What aspect of its chemical make-up performs this function [whatever the function of ‘cleansing’ actually means]? What are ‘toxins’? How many of them are there, what’s their chemical structure, and how, precisely, do they interact with the body’s chemistry?
For the most part, naturopaths seem reluctant to even ask these questions, let alone answer them, and in so doing they allow in obviously bogus ‘treatments’ such as homeopathy and iridology. If you’re powerless to explain how treatments actually work, within the context of our vastly improved understanding of how the body works [though of course there’s still plenty to learn], then it seems to me you’re more of a hindrance than a help, especially in serious and life-threatening medical scenarios.
Of course you could say that, outside of these scenarios, naturopathy is relatively harmless, and might do some good. Some herbs will work for you, and rarely will any do you harm. Aromatherapy will lift your spirits, a good massage will relieve some of your tension, etc. None of that, though, is particularly mysterious, it can all be explained in terms of modern knowledge of the body, and none of it will cure you of cancer or the next viral epidemic.
My response to naturopathy is to question and learn. What do we know of the body, its immune system, and how it works? Of course it would take a lifetime to get your head around only a small part of that knowledge, but it would be an enlightening journey. What do we know about particular naturopathic remedies and how they work? Well, seriously, it would take barely half an hour of research to eliminate some of them as worthless. Others would take much longer to research, and again, the journey would be worthwhile, because it would involve connecting claims with evidence, separating facts from myths, and bringing some depth and clarity to overly clouded and often deliberately obfuscating field of practice and belief.
alternative medicine, some introductory reflections
mmm, more snake oil, please
I rarely post about so-called ‘alternative medicine’ as there are so many people more qualified to do so. Steven Novella, David Gorski, Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh immediately spring to mind. I seethe over it a lot, though, particularly as there are people I know who pedal the stuff to other people I know.
Several years ago a person very close to me trotted off to a ‘naturopath’ [who, I’m told, specialized in chiropractic, with a bit of iridology on the side] upon the recommendation of her daughter, a smart and well-informed woman in some areas, but with a strange sort of wilful ignorance with regard to medical science. Now, at that time, though I was sceptical of non-mainstream approaches to healing, I wasn’t particularly informed about them. If I’d been asked what iridology, raiki or homeopathy were, I wouldn’t have been able to answer. In fact my friend’s encounter with this naturopath prompted my first real exploration of an ‘alternative’ treatment. Not that it was a particularly awful encounter. She was told she should give up her favourite tipple, tea. I knew enough about tea to be aware that it’s a notoriously harmless beverage, and I knew enough about naturopaths, and human psychology, to be aware that the most simple trick in their reportoire would be to enquire about their clients’ diet and ask them to cut out or cut down on their most favoured indulgence – whether tea, chocolate, potato chips, scotch whiskey or heroin.
The naturopath came up with a scientific-sounding, chemistry-based explanation as to why the tea was very likely affecting her adversely, naming it as cyclo-something-ate – I can’t recall the term now, and the fact is that tea, like coffee, is an enormously complex beverage, chemically speaking, so there are plenty of chemicals to target as nasties, if you feel so inclined, or if your living depends on it. My friend took the advice seriously, cutting down on tea as much as her passionate relationship with it would allow, and even claiming that the reduction gave her renewed energy, but it wasn’t to last, and today she’s back to her profligate ways, drinking as many as four or five cups a day, with no apparent ill effects.
I’m afraid that I may have had a hand in my friend’s recidivism, too, because, as I said, her encounter prompted a bit of research on my part. The term I focused on was ‘iridology’, and what I came up with was so negative and scathing that I just had to share it with her. I will carry the guilt to my grave.
All of this is by way of an introduction to a series I want to do on alternative medicine, largely in order to educate myself about its various sub-divisions, its claims, and the evidence, if any, supporting them. I’ll have a look at reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture and various other approaches [but not homeopathy, which I’ve already dealt with] and of course the list won’t be exhaustive, nor will my treatment of them be as in-depth as what you’ll find in more specialist blogs [many of which I’ll be depending on in my research]. It’s just that I find that I learn more about things by writing about them. It keeps them in my head better.
how to avoid insulting a prophet?
The term ‘insult’ is probably impossible to define objectively. We all know of people who have been genuinely insulted at what we thought was a valid criticism, and the sceptical and atheist movements in particular have been strong lately on the idea that religions shouldn’t be exempt from valid and robust criticism, and even mockery when it’s called for. After all, there are some quite bizarre and ludicrous claims made from time to time in the name of religion. For example, the Catholic Church’s procedures for establishing a person’s ‘sainthood’ are laughable, and their regular calls for more exorcists to cope with demonic possession are best dealt with by a mix of mockery and the bringing of criminal charges.
With Islam, though, we’re in different territory. I know quite a few Moslems – I work with them and I teach them English. I get on well with them all, and never mention the subject of religion, and neither do they, except, say, to mention Ramadan and the practicalities around that. I don’t doubt though, that my avoidance of any mention of religion has a a degree of self-preservation about it. As an atheist I don’t want to put people on the defensive, but more importantly, don’t want to make myself a target. Watching demonstrations of hatred against those who ‘insult the prophet’, though those demonstrations might take place on the other side of the globe, is an intimidating experience for those of us – and there are many – who happen to believe that all human prophecy is bunk.
And the fact is that, as communities become more mixed and mobile, Moslem demonstrations are taking place in every major western city these days. Like most demonstrations, at least in the west, the majority of participants have peaceful intent, but there is a hostile and violent, usually testosterone-driven periphery.
But demonstrations in the west in recent decades have not featured religion as a major theme, and this raises the question of whether Islam, though still a minor presence, population-wise, in Australia as in other western countries, is a potential threat to the secular state. When we look at countries where Islam is the dominant religion we find it also playing a dominant role in the political organisation of those countries, and recent calls by the President of Indonesia, the world’s largest Moslem country, to criminalise blasphemy [worldwide?], incoherent though they may be, should be a warning to us all of the dangers of religious dominance of any kind.
And I mean of any kind, for anyone familiar with European history will know how horrifically dangerous it is when political figures claim the backing of religious authorities, and, worse, supernatural creator beings, with all the righteousness that this entails.
Moderate Islamic leaders have expressed dismay that legitimate demonstrations against those who refuse to respect long-held beliefs have been hijacked by the angry few. While I sympathise to some extent, it’s clear to me that a long-held belief, or a belief system that has a long history, doesn’t automatically deserve respect on that basis. The argument from antiquity is a well-known logical fallacy. The real form of the fallacy is that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on its truth. I’m taking the slightly different line that a belief’s antiquity has no bearing on whether or not it should be respected – though you can tie those together by arguing that only the truth is worthy of our respect.
The recent Islamic protests, resulting in the loss of scores of lives, are supposedly caused by an apparently shoddily-made video [I’ve not seen it] which mocks the ‘prophet’ Mohammed. I say ‘supposedly’ because any of us who write about and research religion on the net will know that there are a multitude of anti-Islamic hate sites out there, sites that would certainly out-insult this particular video by a mile, as well as Islamist anti-western and anti-Christian sites of a similar nastiness. Hard to imagine that these protesters, or a proportion of them, don’t know about these sites.
Anyway, regardless of the trigger, the fact is that there are a lot of angry and intolerant Moslems out there just itching for a bit of mayhem, and we need to hold our nerve. I was happy to hear Obama speaking up for free speech, with an almost casual dismissiveness, in response to Yudhoyono’s call for blasphemy laws, just as I was disappointed that a New Zealand politician expressed approval at the arrest of the video’s maker [apparently unaware that the arrest was on unrelated charges]. As far as I can see, the only thing this individual has done wrong is to make a crappy, dishonest video. If this was a serious crime, most of Hollywood would be in jail right now. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
We live in a bitsy, complicated world, in which neuro-anatomists, paleo-anthropologists, not to mention doctors, lawyers and tribal chieftains live alongside fervent religionists who know nothing about evolution and would hate it if they did. We have children in our neighbourhoods who are sent to special schools or no schools, to avoid their being tainted with any kind of modern knowledge, while others are groomed to be cutting-edge theorists of the coming singularity. Holding all this diversity together and trying to be optimistic about it is no mean feat. It’s a diversity that we’ve created through our belief in freedom, in non-coercion, with regard to knowledge and behaviour – within obvious limits. I share this belief, together with the hope that, given all the options, we’ll find our way to the best understanding of our world and ourselves, and how that understanding can best guide our actions. It’s on this basis that I hope we can stand firm, defend and argue for the spirit of inquiry and constant questioning – of religion and science and everything else. Inquiry involves criticism – of the claims of so-called prophets, of saint-makers and the producers of crappy videos. They’re all fair game.
a new project
Here’s something new and, so far, very amateurish, technologically speaking. For me, though, it’s a fun thing to occupy my time with, and maybe over time it’ll get a bit better.
I’m going to set up a now video blog for these, if I can manage it.
on thinking like them to learn how they think
An interesting conundrum from Clive Wynne’s book Do Animals Think?
First, imagine you are given four cards and told to test the rule that a card with a vowel on one side must have an even number on the other side. Let’s say the cards in front of you show an E, a K, a 7 and a 4. Which would you turn over? Most people find this a very difficult problem. Most turn over the E and some also turn over the 4. And yet the 4 can tell you nothing: Who cares what’s on the other side of an even number? The rule being tested does not say that the flip-side of an even-numbered card can not be a consonant, only that the flip-side of a card with a vowel cannot be an odd number. So you would learn nothing by turning over the 4. The correct answer is to turn over the E [see if the vowel has an even number on its reverse] and the 7 [check that there’s no vowel there]. Only about 5% even of the college-educated population give the right answer to this one. It’s a tough logical nut to crack.
Now consider this problem. Imagine that you are shown four people and told to test the rule that a person must be over the age of twenty-one to drink beer. One person is drinking Coke, one is drinking beer, the third is twenty-three years old, and the fourth, fifteen. Whom must you check [what they are drinking or what age they are] to ensure that the rule is being followed? Here nobody has any trouble. We don’t care what the twenty-three-year-old drinks, nor what age the Coke drinker is, but we do need to check the age of the beer drinker and the beverage of the fifteen-year-old. Nothing could be simpler. Hardly anybody gets this one wrong.
And yet logically these are absolutely identical problems. There is no difference in the type of reasoning required to solve these two puzzles. Why the big difference in performance?
Wynne, a psychologist with a strong interest in, and a wide knowledge of, research in other-species reasoning, is making a very important point with application to the testing of other animals and their ability to solve problems. It’s hopefully obvious that the reason we do so much better with the second problem is that it’s a recognizable real-world problem about obeying the rules and not cheating or doing the ‘wrong thing’. We’re much more motivated to come to a quick and accurate solution than with the much more abstract first problem. So when we set problems for other species to solve, we need to understand that what motivates them to solve a problem might be very different to what motivates humans.
Wynne’s book, which I was motivated to read as further background to, and an extension of, my animals r us post, makes for excellent reading, as he’s healthily sceptical of, and pokes some holes in, research claims about other-species reasoning and mental processes, such as they are. He also provides some fascinating information, scientific and historical, about, inter alia, bats, bees and pigeons. My only quibble, perhaps a minor one, is that, both in the title of his book and throughout the writing, he refers to animals as though we’re not one of them. Not that he has any truck with the ‘we’re special and the proper end of evolution’ view. In fact I really don’t know why he writes of animals in this way – it’s as if he’s half-convinced that our development of language and our complex ‘theories of mind’ have really taken us to some level beyond the mammalian. They haven’t. We’ll never stop being mammals, though we’ll continue to amaze ourselves with what we can do with the difference between ourselves and other mammals.
atheism plus comes to town, perhaps
The other day I attended my first local atheist meetup here in Adelaide for quite some time. Not that I was particularly avoiding them, they’ve just been clashing with other commitments, but it turned out to be an interesting time to return, because it was posted that we might like to have a semi-formal discussion on the ‘atheism plus’ push which is causing a bit of a stir on Free Thought Blogs and elsewhere, and if and how we want to incorporate it.
Controversy! Flying Sparks! Noses out of joint! Death threats! Trolls! Witches! Indifference!
In other words I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. What I did find pleasantly surprising was that the topic got a reasonably good airing and the group came to a more or less loose consensus about behaviour at meet-ups, in order to maintain the sorts of standards that might be expected at club meetings, gabfests and the like. That’s to say, no blatant sexism, racism, intimidation or offensive behaviour, with the convenor, presumably after consultation with the respective parties, or having witnessed the abuse, making an executive decision about behaviour having crossed the line sufficiently far as to require intervention, such as politely but firmly asking the offender to desist, or to leave, or even imposing a ban. Doubtless none of this is particularly binding or enforceable, but it’s only a pub meet-up group after all, Amazing tho’ our Meetings might be.
All of this is certainly Good Progressive Stuff, and it might open up an avenue of complaint for some who have avoided meetings because of one or two blowhards who’ve behaved offensively in the past, but does it put as all in the Atheism+ camp? In other words, is Atheism+ anything more than a movement to encourage or impose civility?
This issue was discussed at the meeting, as were the origins of this movement, or proto-movement; the experiences of Jen McCreight, the elevator affair [not so much a storm in an elevator as a storm outside one], the Dawkins response, and harrassment in general, with a variety of views expressed and criticised. Also discussed was the general issue of the way men treat women, and vice versa. I detected plenty of underlying tensions between some males and some females [for the record, though I can’t recall all the conversation, I can say with some certainty that seven males and two females spoke up on this issue, which is almost more revealing than what was said], with the ‘males don’t have an easy time of it either’ line featuring heavily.
We’d just about reached a positive conclusion on the matter, despite the slightly grumbling note of one or two men, when a late male arrival was asked his opinion of the whole A+ thing. He announced to us all that he considered feminism ‘a travesty’, a remark obviously intended to create a splash. A moment later, he added ‘I mean academic feminism’. Needless to say, academic feminism, and whatever reaction one might have to it, was not at issue at the meeting. What was at issue was civility, particularly between men and women, and the creation of an atmosphere that would make everyone, but particularly women, comfortable and enthusiastic and willing to go on attending and contributing – especially given that the group, like most atheist meet-up groups – was dominated by males. To arrive late to a meetup in which he knew that Atheism+ was to be discussed [the same individual had earlier posted a response to the convenor’s announcement about the topic, which clearly mocked the whole thing], thus indicating his lack of interest, and then to state, as his first contribution to the meetup, that feminism is a travesty, was clearly a deliberate provocation, and it had the obviously desired effect of upsetting at least one of the female minority attending, who was passionately concerned to raise the issues around A+, civility and inclusiveness, precisely because she’d been avoiding meetups in which these kinds of arrogant and bombastic statements were being aired.
There are a few lessons to be drawn from this. First, that it only takes one or two insensitive males, or one or two insensitive comments, to spoil a whole evening, or even a whole movement, for those who feel targeted by them. We should all be aware of this, as we all remember the nasty comments directed at us more clearly than a thousand compliments. Second, it’s very important not to let those comments go unchallenged, as silence will feel like assent to those who feel offended by them.
And to describe feminism as a travesty is offensive. I felt personally affronted, and I’m only a male, but a male who grew up in the seventies, at the height of second-wave feminism, with its vital historical perspective on patriarchy’s distortion of female value. It profoundly influenced my intellectual development, and still does. Of course I didn’t agree with all feminist discourse, just as I disagreed with some of the discourse on black power that was prevalent at that time, but I fully agreed with the prime thrust of both these movements, equality. Equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, equality of power. How could anyone object to that?
It seems to me that a job of empowerment, in gender terms, still needs to be done within the atheist community, if we’re to call ourselves a community. That might need more than just civility, but it’s a damn good place to start.
is there life on enceladus?
a cool place – and note the tiger stripe
The Curiosity landing has been fabulously successful, and it’ll certainly be worth keeping tabs on the rover’s findings. I posted recently on the possibility of life on Mars, not a couple of billion years ago, as many Mars experts think probable, but right now. The Curiosity rover, as we know, will be investigating this possibility further, but meanwhile there are other possibilities of finding extra-terrestrial life in this solar system, and one of the best places to look, I’m reliably informed, is Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn.
Enceladus is only about 500 kilometres in diameter, but its surface has intrigued astronomers ever since Voyager 2revealed detailed features in the early eighties, indicating a wide range of terrains of varying ages. Data from the Cassini spacecraft that performed fly-bys in 2005 showed a geologically active surface, with the most spectacular feature being a large volume of material, mostly water vapour, issuing from the southern polar region. This indicated the existence of ice volcanoes, or cryovolcanoes, which have also been observed elsewhere, and were in fact first observed by Voyager 2 on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. However, on Enceladus what we have are more like geysers spewing out material from an area known by observers as ‘the tiger stripes’, a series of prominent, geologically active ridges. This material is now known to account for much of the outermost E ring of Saturn, within which Enceladus has its orbit, though a certain amount falls back onto the moon as snow.
Finding water on any object in the solar system obviously excites the souls of astrobiologists. A report from a May 2011 conference on Enceladus stated that this moon “is emerging as the most habitable spot beyond Earth in the Solar System for life as we know it”. However, there are plenty of sceptics, or I should say cautious questioners. First, the existence of water vapour spumes doesn’t necessarily entail liquid water below the surface – for, in spite of the thrill of detecting snow in large quantities on the surface, liquid water is generally regarded as essential to finding life. And even if we assume liquid water…
Some analysts argue that the spumes may be a result of sublimation – a change from a solid, icy state to a vapour, missing out on the liquid phase – or of the decomposition of clathrate deposits. A clathrate is a type of ice lattice that traps gas [methane clathrates are found at the polar regions of Earth]. However, the recent discovery of salt in these plumes has made these possibilities less plausible. Salt is more likely to be associated with liquid water, but hydrogen cyanide, also recently found, would have been expected to react with liquid water to form other compounds, not found as yet. In short, the jury is still out on the presence of liquid water.
And assuming there is liquid water, how could we test for life within it? With great difficulty, obviously. Analysts would be searching for biomarkers, ‘chemicals that appear to have biological rather than geophysical origins’ [Cosmos 44, p78]. Photosynthetic production wouldn’t be an option, so other systems are being hypothesised, including a methanogenic system in which methane is synthesised from carbon dioxide, or a system of metabolizing acetylene, which occurs on Earth. Traces of acetylene have been found on Enceladus. Other biomarkers include amino acids with the right chirality – that’s to say a strong chiral preference, one way [as found on Earth] or its opposite. Amino acids with no chiral preference are likely to be abiotic.
To test for such biomarkers would require new instrumentation and another visit to this intriguing moon. Something else to look forward to. What would we do without anticipation?
let’s talk about the weather
Well there’s much politicking going on currently about the carbon tax, or carbon pricing, and its impact on agw and on the economy, it’s likely impact, or non-impact, on our energy and environmental choices, and also, of course, whether we need worry about climate change generally. In Australia, for those concerned about agw, the local weather has become a mite uncooperative over the past few seasons.
We’ve experienced a double La Nina event since 2010, with memories of the long drought preceding it fast receding, at least for city slickers. 2011 was Australia’s coolest year in a decade. 2010, the drought-breaking year, was Australia’s third wettest on record overall, and the following year, 2011, was our second wettest. The only year, in the past century, that has beaten these, was 1974, also a La Nina year. 2011 was the wettest year on record for the Murray-Darling basin.
The Australian government’s Bureau of Meteorology has produced a handsome volume detailing the 2010-2012 La Nina events, and it’s available free in PDF form from this site.
The El Nino Southern Oscillation [ENSO] is a semi-regular cycle which affects weather conditions in countries and islands within and around the rim of the Pacific Ocean. ENSO events generally last from one southern hemisphere autumn to the next, but it’s not unusual for a La Nina event to last two or three years, as for example the 1998-2001 event, from autumn 1998 to autumn 2001.
Now I’ll take a deep breath and try to explain how these cycles work. Between ENSO events, which of course vary in strength and complexity, the Pacific is described as being in a ‘neutral phase’. But even in this state, temperatures vary throughout the Pacific. For example, in the western tropical Pacific, above New Guinea, there’s an area known as ‘the warm pool’ which regularly has some of the highest ocean temperatures in the world. This has something to do with the thermocline, the region separating warm, well-mixed surface water and cool, deep ocean water [which is richer in nutrients]. The thermocline is deeper in the western Pacific than in the eastern. These temperature gradients, and the way they vary across the Pacific, are the single most important drivers of ENSO events.
In normal conditions, trade winds blow from east to west across the Pacific. These winds are a feature of what is known as the Walker circulation, a current and convection cycle in which the winds drive warm moist air and warm surface waters westward, while the central Pacific remains relatively cool. These warm western waters pump heat and moisture high into the atmosphere, where moist air forms clouds and rain, and the air moves eastward, and then falls in the eastern Pacific. So we have eastward-moving air in the upper atmosphere and westward-moving air at the sea surface.
The Southern Oscillation Index [SOI] is a measure of the endlessly varying strength of the Walker Circulation:
The SOI measures the difference in surface air pressure between Tahiti and Darwin. The index is best represented by monthly (or longer) averages as daily or weekly SOI values can fluctuate markedly due to short-lived, day-to-day weather patterns, particularly if a tropical cyclone is present. Sustained positive SOI values above about +8 indicate a La Niña event while sustained negative values below about –8 indicate an El Niño.
The 2010-11 La Nina event was a particularly powerful one. Although it produced only 11 tropical cyclones during the cyclone season [November to April] – which, though it sounds like a lot, is actually less than the average number of cyclones [12] in any particular year, La Nina or not – it produced some 29 tropical depression systems, one level below a cyclone, and well above the usual number of such systems. More importantly for Australia’s north-east coastal residents, 5 of those 11 cyclones were in the severe category, which was well above average. Three of them, Tasha, Yasi and Anthony, crossed the Queensland coast, with Yasi being the most severe cyclone to hit Queensland since 1911, when there was a double cyclone event, again during a La Nina year. Double or multiple cyclone crossings have always been associated with La Nina events, at least as far as our brief recorded history can tell.
The factors affecting the strength and duration of La Nina and El Nino events are, of course, enormously complicated, and further complicated by other weather patterns such as the Indian Ocean Dipole [IOD] and the Southern Annular Mode [SAM]. The IOD, as its name suggests, is a measure of the difference in ocean temperatures at two ‘poles’, in the eastern and the western Indian Ocean. This shows another complex pattern of temperature and pressure variability, both oceanic and atmospheric, with probable throughflow from the Pacific leading to an association between positive IOD events and the El Nino and negative events with La Nina. The SAM, a weather pattern in the Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Oscillation, obviously impacts our southern coastal areas in particular, either enhancing or diminishing ENSO events regionally:
In recent years, a high positive SAM has dominated during autumn–winter, and has been a significant contributor to the ‘big dry’ observed in southern Australia from 1997 to 2010.
The south-west region of Australia, a vital agricultural region, missed out on the wet conditions experienced by the rest of the country as a result of the 2010-11 La Nina. In fact this region experienced its driest year on record in 2010, and this appears to have been at least partially caused by a record high positive SAM event of that year.
Of course the point of this post is to show how complex weather patterns are as a background to climate change. Overall oceanic warming due to climate change increases convection which leads to higher rainfall, air turbulence and storm conditions, none of which are precisely predictable, though our monitoring has greatly improved over the years. I’m sure that most farmers, whose livelihoods are so greatly affected by these conditions, are keeping a ‘a weather eye’ on cycles and oscillations, but city-dwellers are naturally less sensitive to them. For many of them, well, the long drought and the water restrictions are over, the temperatures are far from unbearable, and now the money-grubbing government is slapping on a carbon tax after promising not to. My response would be – inform yourself, learn more about the causes of local, short-term weather conditions as well as global, long-term climatic ones, examine the evidence, and only then start to draw conclusions. And thanks a lot to the Bureau of Metereology for their contribution to informing our understanding.
the height of the 2010-11 La Nina – cold surface waters in the mid-Pacific, warmer waters in the western Pacific
