Category Archives: Politics

Is the Shoe on the Other Foot?

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Desmogblog: Are Liberals Science Deniers? Now’s A Good Time to Find Out

A centerpoint of this “nuclear counterargument” was that the left used fears of reactor meltdowns and the escape of radiation to unjustifiably scare the public. And if that’s true, then this is certainly the ideal moment for such misuse of science to occur again. So the question is, will it?

It’s almost like a natural experiment in the politicization of science.

You’re never going to eliminate denialism from either side of the political spectrum, but unlike global warming (the GOP members of the Energy and Commerce Committee just unanimously rejected an amendment acknowledging global warming is even occurring), we have the president already backing nuclear power.

As for the citizenry, I think it will break down the same way — some will throw whatever argument they can find into the breach, because they’ve already made up their minds and facts don’t matter, but most of the others will assess the situation rationally. I agree with Chris here — I think there will be measurably less denialism on the left. In case you couldn’t tell already, I’m not squeamish about nuclear power (up to the point where some tea-partier decides that it should not be regulated by the government because regulation is bad.)

MiniMe, You Retweet Me

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Yesterday I tweeted

Lesson from Japan is not that nuke power is dangerous. Tsunamis are dangerous. Four lost trains are not being used to bash train travel.

and frankly, it got a hell of a response (according to my modest standards) of 28 retweets (and a couple of copy/tweet RTs) at the time of this writing. With that comes a few responses that disagree. I’m not about to get into a discussion on twitter, explaining the details I couldn’t cram into 140 characters, into a series of messages limited to 140 characters.

I have a blog for that.

I was chided for the comparison with the lost trains

People would bash train travel too if one of the lost trains exploded and caused 1250 sq Km evacuation

This misses the point I was trying to make. Trains wreck and even explode (I’ve linked to some spectacular explosions from trains) and yet people are not widely afraid of train travel. In this particular instance, nobody is blaming train travel for the loss of the trains — they blame the tsunami. Why? because train travel is normally quite safe, and it took an unusual event — a rare, massive (especially for that fault line) earthquake followed by a wall of water to cause these events. Nobody has a problem identifying the trigger. The earthquake caused the Fujinuma irrigation dam to collapse. Do we now question the inherent safety of dams? Is there a call to eliminate them? Do dams, or trains, evoke the visceral response that nuclear power does? How much area was evacuated in response to the tsunami warning — was it more than 1250 square kilometers?

The issue is the asymmetric assessment of risk (or complete disregard for risk assessment, in some cases). There is a false premise used by some that if nuclear power is not risk-free then it cannot be permitted. This standard is applied almost nowhere else, because it can’t be. You are at risk if you get out of your bed in the morning, but you’re at risk if you stay in bed — there is always risk. In the time that Fukushima Daiichi reactor #1 has been operating, the US has averaged more than 40,000 automobile deaths per year. Why is that tolerable? It’s because we don’t assess the risk in the same way. A large number of people (potentially) dying all at once evokes a greater emotional response than the same number (or even more) dying over a period of time

Part of it is the same reason behind being willing to seemingly spare no expense to stop terror attacks, despite the relatively few who have died from them. We have a similar reaction to the term “radiation” as we do to “terrorism.” But coal plants are famous for the amount of radioactive material they spew into the environment. Hell, bananas are radioactive, as are people.

The bottom line is that, according to the available information, the almost-40-year-old reactors held up remarkably well to the earthquake itself, and it was the resulting tsunami that took out the backup systems that are now causing the (quite serious) problems. But one has to put this in context of the scope of the devastation, rather than holding the risk up to an impossible zero-tolerance standard. Put another way: how many people died in this tragedy, and what’s getting most of the press?

He Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks

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More scandalous news from court.

Got another update, and I can’t resist. I don’t think it’s the gossip (which isn’t really my bag, baby) so much as someone being wrong on the internet. And by wrong, I mean making-shit-up wrong. The latest update accuses the department chair of a nefarious scheme to get rid of Joshua Robinson, and the dastardly plan included a threatening letter. Which starts out

After consultation with your oral examination committee, and per the graduate handbook rules of NERHP, faculty of NERHP have voted on your status. The majority agreed that you have passed your oral examination and have therefore passed the Qualifying Examination.

That bitch! How dare she … congratulate him … on passing his quals …

Wow. That’s some threat, sending out a boilerplate milestone letter that every student probably gets when the pass their qualifying exam.

It turns out the oral exam was not the acceptance oral exam, in which one outlines the proposed research. In an interview with the CorVegas paper, it’s pointed out that the oral exam was a followup for “conditionally passing” the written exam (details of these circumstances are spelled out in the graduate student handbook). I find it a little weird that he’s passed this in his fifth year in grad school (one possibility being that it was not his first attempt), and his response of saying he has a job lined up sounds premature, considering he still has to do his thesis research. Whatever he had already done would have probably counted toward a Masters degree, not a doctorate.

One of the really silly things about all this is that if the faculty really were conspiring to kick someone out of school, an oral exam is the perfect time to do it. Ask hard questions, and then say, “Sayonara!” That’s the scary realization that I think all grad students who go through this type of system have — that your committee could fail you if they wanted to. They have the experience in their respective fields and can ask questions you can’t answer. And that didn’t happen, which doesn’t speak highly of the abilities of our “conspirators.” Fear not, though, since I’m confident that some new machination will be conjured up soon.

The Wonderful World of Palace Intrigue

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Nothing like a little scandal to perk one up.

Just got an email pointing me toward a “travesty” that is occurring, and hoping to enlist my aid in the fight. Somebody named Art Robinson is screaming about his kids being a victim of political retribution. I felt obligated to look into it, and found a WorldNet Daily article (no, this is not starting out well), written by Art Robinson himself (continuing along the path of not going well). I’d heard of him before, in the context of being a global warming denier extraordinaire, but there’s more, unless you think all of his bad press is conspiracy.

He ran for congress and lost, and is now accusing Oregon State University of kicking his kids out of the nuclear engineering program as retribution for running. There’s really no corroborating evidence and other than denial of the allegations, the university can’t comment on the details because the students’ privacy is protected by law. But after reading

OSU is a liberal socialist Democrat stronghold in Oregon

I wondered if the emailer realized that I went to grad school at OSU. I also can’t help but wonder why his kids would go there if it was such a horrible, nasty, smelly place.

More blips on my BS detector make me wonder how much of this is fabricated.

Democrat activist David Hamby and militant feminist and chairman of the nuclear engineering department Kathryn Higley are expelling four-year Ph.D. student Joshua Robinson from OSU at the end of the current academic quarter and turning over the prompt neutron activation analysis facility Joshua built for his thesis work and all of his work in progress to Higley’s husband, Steven Reese. Reese, an instructor in the department, has stated that he will use these things for his own professional gain.

Once you get past the smearing, what’s there? Any apparatus that is built by a graduate student belongs to the university, and would be controlled by the student’s advisor or the department. Of course they are going to use it for “professional gain,” i.e. further research. Grad school isn’t camp, where you make something in arts and crafts and take it home to give to the folks.

Lots more smearing and innuendo (it is also rumored that…) which may play to his audience but makes me tune out. If you have to lead off with ad hominem, I have to think you don’t have much in your hand.

Robinson also makes a point of revealing his kids’ GPAs (all around 3.9), but doesn’t mention that in grad school, any grade below a “B” is considered unacceptable. There is no curve, so a 3.9 GPA is not the indicator it is for undergraduates.

The department is now controlled by ideologues, most of whom do not have Ph.D.s in nuclear engineering.

Slander and misleading; it’s the department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, so you might expect some radiation health physics-realted faculty as well, and the mix depends on what the department does. They all have PhD’s, and the claim is actually false as 7 of the 13 have PhDs in Nuclear Engineering. The last time I checked, more than 50% counts as “most.”

Forgive me if I don’t step up to fight alongside Mr. Robinson.

Added: (It occurs to me that if this is all a fabrication, OSU does nothing, and Robinson gets to claim victory. All because there is innuendo and no evidence.)

Free Sample! JK, You're Under Arrest For Theft

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How “CSI:NY” Most Definitely Didn’t Steal My Story

When I first saw this, I was relieved it was not the original CSI, for that would have implicated my friend Naren (who is no longer with the show; rumor has it he’s working on a reboot of the Wild, Wild West TV series. That’s TV series, not movie. It also buffers the realization that the show has jumped the shark, which has become blatantly obvious in recent weeks)

The comparison to the Cooks Source plagiarism, and the whole “web is public domain” fiasco of an attitude resonates with me at some level. I’ve seen my cartoons show up on websites stripped of their attribution, and declarations of “reproduced by permission” when no such permission was requested. I have only registered some of my cartoons with the copyright office, so I have no real legal recourse for unregistered works — I can’t show monetary damage for cartoons I’m not selling to anyone. (Registering the copyright allows you to sue for statutory damages. Were I being ripped off more than epsilon of the time, I would be more diligent about registering)

But this case turns out to be different. I don’t have nearly as much sympathy for the author as I did from the set-up of the article, and here’s why: the material that was used was a hoax. That is, it was originally presented as being the truth, not a work of fiction, by an online publication that prints news stories. OK, it’s a tabloid, so “news” is Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan, but the point stands. If the hoax were obvious it wouldn’t be much of a hoax, and by the accounting, it was pretty successful at taking people in.

Facts, as the article points out, aren’t copyrightable — they’re in the public domain. It seems to me the author is complaining that people were duped by the hoax, but it raises the question of whether you could sell the story in the first place, if nobody would be taken in by it. I don’t know what the legal standing would be, but it seems like the author wants both of those conflicting circumstances to be true.

The Sniff Test

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One of the benefits of having a background in science is that it tends to enhance your BS detector. One can take information and make a try at assessing the veracity of it — is it consistent with things that I know to be true? Does it follow valid models of how things behave? You can’t accept or reject all information this way, because some of it will be outside of your experience or ability, but it’s a first cut at the problem. One of the major stumbling blocks is that “things I know to be true” can’t be “things I want to be true;” we have to keep ideology out of the process.

Take as an example the ongoing political unpleasantness (in many cases, this phrase is redundant) regarding budgets. I keep hearing that reducing the budget is reeeeaaaally important, and moves are being taken to reduce spending. But if moves are being taken that don’t actually reduce the deficit, our model breaks down — either the proponents have some other agenda, or they’re bad at math, or stupid, or some combination of those things.

We find out that cutting spending on poison control centers will actually cost money. I don’t see what the possible hidden agenda is there; this is just plain stupid. Rachel Maddow points out (at about 19:00; the segment starts at about 17:30) a dollar spent trying to find tax cheats nets more than ten dollars in revenue; as long as a dollar spent results in more than a dollar’s worth of revenue, you should be increasing the budget, because it pays for itself! I don’t see how the standard GOP line of loving America plays here. Regardless of where you’ve drawn the line of what the tax rate actually is, cheating on your taxes is not what I would call patriotic. And going after high-income people who are cheating is where the money is, so proposing cuts means its more important to let tax cheats go, which goes along the lines of letting them pay fewer taxes in the first place. Jon Stewart reminds us of the hypocrisy of calling a ~$50k salary too large, making the de-facto 10-20% salary cuts justifiable, while claiming that $250k is not a lot of money when faced with a 3% tax increase. Something is not adding up.

On the topic of Wisconsin teacher salaries, I’ve seen it compared to the state average salary. Once again, let’s use the BS meter. Different jobs have different requirements, and as we require more in the way of qualification, the pay generally goes up. Part of that is simple supply and demand. To be a teacher, you are generally required to have at least a Bachelor’s degree. The most recent statistics I could find were from the 2000 census, when less than 25% of adult Wisconsinites had college degrees. So why wouldn’t a person with a college degree be expected to earn more than the state average? Bachelor’s degree holders earned a median salary of just above $40k back then; if we allow just a 2% per year increase for inflation, that brings us to $50k for this year. Teachers make, on average, about what you’d expect someone of their training to make, without allowing for the ones who have even higher education levels, who might be expected to make even more money. They make more than average, because your average Wisconsinite doesn’t have a college degree.

ORLY, O'Reilly?

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The Bill O’Reilly “God of the gaps” incredul-o-fest video spawned a number meme-o-grams, some of which I have seen on reddit. Now I see links to collections of them over at Bad Astronomy.

The comments in the BA post are interesting, too, especially the ones with the “why are you picking on him” flavor. It’s because he’s embracing willful ignorance and encouraging people to run away from critical thought. It was bad enough that he had repeated the “you can’t explain tides” canard until it blew up. But the kicker is defending his “facts don’t matter” attitude with his fallacy-laden argument. With that he’s inviting scorn and ridicule. It would be rude not to accept.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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Citizen activist grates on state over traffic signals

Cox has not been accused of claiming that he is an engineer. But Lacy says he filed the complaint because the report “appears to be engineering-level work” by someone who is not licensed as a professional engineer.

This seems rather silly, and I suspect it’s just payback. I can tell you when some piece of work is done by a professional engineer: it has a stamp on the document, and it’s signed. I am at a loss as to why it would take “three or four months” to figure this out. Because if simply using engineering equations is illegal without professional certification (as if you need an engineering safety course to handle them correctly), then anyone training to be a professional engineer is breaking the law.

The Non-Physics of Rockets

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Space Stasis: What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.

The development of rockets — driven by war and the invention of nuclear weapons, and the relationship the story has with recent economics and innovation.

The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.