In This Corner…

Climate Skeptics v. Climate Deniers

Excellent discussion of the difference between a global warming skeptic and a denier. I don’t think the author misses anything.

Alas, a much larger number use the term “skeptic” as a re-labeling trick, while wallowing in the standard narratives of distraction and delay, exhibiting patterns described in Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things and Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. Only now, as more recently related in Chris Mooney’s The Republican War on Science and in Denialism, by Michael Specter, the trend toward dismissal of science has gone into overdrive, propelled by forces that are intensely political.

So here is the problem: What discrete characteristics distinguish a rational, pro-science “climate skeptic” who has honest questions about the AGW consensus from members of a Denialist Movement that portrays all members of a scientific community as either fools or conspirators?

And if you want to know a few of the shadowy ones behind the deniers, there’s a story in the New Yorker: Covert Operations

In the Whole, I'm Glad I'm not in Philadelphia

Pay Up

After dutifully reporting even the smallest profits on their tax filings this year, a number — though no one knows exactly what that number is — of Philadelphia bloggers were dispatched letters informing them that they owe $300 for a privilege license, plus taxes on any profits they made.

Even if, as with Sean Barry, that profit is $11 over two years.

My blog is purely a hobby, but I’d probably get nabbed for selling a t-shirt

Politics and the Star Trek Effect

There are a couple of episodes of Star Trek that I can recall having some fundamental physics failures, which would lead one to believe that in the Star Trek universe, one cannot do an integral over time. The episodes that come to mind (and it’s been a while, so I may have some details wrong) are The Paradise Syndrome from ToS, and Déjà Q fom TNG. In both episodes, the Enterprise needs to transfer some energy and momentum to an object, and in each episode, they go for the Big Effort™ and lose.

In The Paradise Syndrome, Spock tries to deflect a large asteroid and fails to budge it, so he goes for broke and zaps it so hard he burns out a whole bunch of circuitry — the sci-fi equivalent of overexerting one’s self and pulling a muscle — and can subsequently only match the speed of the asteroid. It’s after this that we learn that the asteroid is two months away from the planet; a force exerted continuously for two months would transfer half a million times more momentum than their ten-second attempt, so they could have even tried a smaller force for that duration and deflected the asteroid. But that makes for boring TV. (And they could have increased their speed my throwing junk out of the rear shuttle bay, with bonus points if the projectile hit the asteroid, since the collision would slow it down. This would have been slightly more exciting than two months of pushing, but still not very much excitement) Similarly, the attempts to restore a moon’s orbit is made in fits and starts in Déjà Q, though in the plot there is at least an excuse for interruptions to their attempts, from some attacking Calamarains, but that’s after they gave up a few times. Forces cause accelerations and change momentum of an object. With the exception of the static frictional force on a surface, these don’t turn on and off only when a threshold is reached*.

\(p = int F dt\)

For a constant force this is just p = Ft. Linear in force, but also linear in time.

What’s the connection to politics? The US government seems to approach solutions to problems like the Star Trek folks do. Wait until the problem is a crisis and then try and exert a huge force to correct it, when a much gentler push would have sufficed if you had simply started earlier. We have been seeing this with Social Security for decades now — we know the system is going to go broke, and yet nothing is being done to fix it. Had we started when I first started paying into the system, the adjustments could have been relatively small. But like the transfer of momentum, the longer we wait, the force needed to achieve the desired result gets larger. The occasional nudge does only a little; it needs to be sustained.

Similarly for global warming. Our government hems and haws and does very little to actually address the problem. Even those politicians who are still doubtful (or whose palms are being greased so that they act doubtful) should be able to recognize that there is value in weaning our country from foreign energy sources, and that the kind of technology adoption involved takes decades to realize.

Of course, getting them to do something would be asking them to do their job, and we can’t have that, can we? Star Trek ignored physics because slow-and-steady makes for little drama, and TV, like sex, is all about having a climactic ending. Our elected officials have no such excuse. They are distracted by the manufactured controversy du jour, and are more concerned with not upsetting their benefactors and voter base than doing the business that’s in the best long-term interest of the country.

*which really isn’t how the frictional force behaves, but it’s a reasonable first-order approximation for its highly nonlinear behavior

Simple Skulduggery

I should probably just let all of this crap about the Conservapedia’s odius maltreatment of science, in the abuse of relativity go; in case you missed the addendum, drkyskull has an extensive debunking up at his new digs (he gets most of them, with one exception being the “clocks on the geoid” issue I tackled)

But I just can’t.

And it’s not because Schlafly’s blathering about the tenuous connection to moral relativism, when his argument for scientific relativism (his version of science being just as good as the “liberal” science) melts my irony meter. No, it was a footnote on that page that got my attention:

Contrary to the claims of Relativists, the GPS system has never been based on Relativity. The Time Service Department, U.S. Navy, observed that “the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would seem to require” in part because “the effects of relativity, where they are different from the effects predicted by classical mechanics and electromagnetic theory, are too small to matter – less than one centimeter, for users on or near the earth.”

Time Service Department, U.S. Navy? Hey, that sorta sounds familiar!

(At one point I ran across a statement to the effect that this “GPS has never been based on Relativity” was endorsed by The Time Service Department, but I can’t find it now. No hits to Conservapedia show up in Google, so I assume they don’t crawl the site, but that means no cached pages). Time Service being the department at the US Naval Observatory, since that’s where the link to the paper leads; I’m not aware of there being some other Time Service department within the navy. If there is we’ll go clean their clock.

The paper in question (PDF) is by Henry F. Fliegel and Raymond S. DiEsposti of the Aerospace Corporation, and was presented at a Precise Time and Time Interval (PTTI) Conference; all that’s going on here is a web site hosting some conference proceedings. So in general, to say that Time Service “observed” this is way too strong of a statement. And I’ll go a step further. I’m not an official spokesman, so nothing I say has any kind of official weight or sanction, but I’ll step up just as close to the line as I can and say that I can’t see any circumstances where the Time Service Department would claim that relativity is not part of GPS, because it’s blatantly untrue! I’ll decipher the chicanery that’s going on here.

The statement is paraphrased from the abstract, and that’s apparently as far as anybody involved with this claptrap bothered to read. What is actually written is this

The Operational Control System (OCS) of the Global Positioning System (GPS) does not include the rigorous transformations between coordinate systems that Einstein’s general theory of relativity would seem to require

See what he did there? He omitted the first clause of the abstract, and made it sound like GPS doesn’t incorporate relativity. But what the paper is really saying is that the OCS doesn’t incorporate relativity. Why? Because it’s incorporated in the satellites! If you read the paper, or any of the many, many, many descriptions of GPS, you’ll see that the kinematic and gravitational time dilation effects are compensated for.

[E]ach GPS space vehicle (SV) clock is offset from its nominal rate by about -4.45×10^-10 (= -38 microseconds per day) to allow for the relativistic offsets between the differences between the SV and the ground. Of this -38 microseconds per day, about -45 are due to the gravitational potential difference between the SV at its mean distance and the earth’s surface, and +7 to the mean SV speed, which is about 3.87 km/sec.

This intellectual dishonesty is, unfortunately, par for the course for this strain of crackpot.

Public Service Announcement

Taking Photos In Public Places Is Not A Crime: Analysis

Here’s how bad it has gotten: Not long ago, an Amtrak representative did an interview with local TV station Fox 5 in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to explain that you don’t need a permit to take pictures there–only to be approached by a security guard who ordered them to stop filming without a permit.

Legally, it’s pretty much always okay to take photos in a public place as long as you’re not physically interfering with traffic or police operations. As Bert Krages, an attorney who specializes in photography-related legal problems and wrote Legal Handbook for Photographers, says, “The general rule is that if something is in a public place, you’re entitled to photograph it.” What’s more, though national-security laws are often invoked when quashing photographers, Krages explains that “the Patriot Act does not restrict photography; neither does the Homeland Security Act.” But this doesn’t stop people from interfering with photographers, even in settings that don’t seem much like national-security zones.

Appetite Wins

Daniel Okrent has book out on Prohibition and was on The Daily Show the other night. George will has an op-ed that uses some of the information from the book.

Another round of Prohibition, anyone?

[B]y 1830, adult per capita consumption was the equivalent of 90 bottles of 80-proof liquor annually.

Although whiskey often was a safer drink than water, Americans, particularly men, drank too much. Women’s Prohibition sentiments fueled the movement for women’s rights — rights to hold property independent of drunken husbands; to divorce those husbands; to vote for politicians who would close saloons. So the United States Brewers’ Association officially opposed women’s suffrage.

(George still writes well, as long as the topic isn’t global warming.)

Okrent mentions the parallel to marijuana in the interview, though the op-ed doesn’t go there.

Falling into The Canyonero

ScienceBlogs, we have a problem

Much consternation over at the home of science blogging, ScienceBlogs. The forum for the brilliant Orac, Pharynula, Molecule of the Day, and countless other insightful, funny and informative blogs has decided upon a bizarre new strategy in sourcing new posts. As of yesterday, the platform will host a new blog written by food giant PepsiCo, all about the company’s specialist subject of refreshing sugary drinks and their benefits for dental and dietary health.

Sorry, no, PepsiCo’s scientific staff will be writing about nutrition on the new Food Frontiers blog. I’ll give you a moment to get back on your chair.

They also host several of my favorite physics-y blogs, though I’ve only seen action-reaction (as of writing this) from The Quantum Pontiff, who is leaving, but mostly for other reasons and Science After Sunclipse, who is also eclipsing.

I can’t see this as anything but an advertising platform for a corporation. Which raises the question — will Scienceblogs be paying Pepsi to blog there, (as is the arrangement I expect it has with the rest of its bloggers) or is it the other way around? If it’s the former, why would you bother? Is this a Pepsi blogging juggernaut that they’ve assimilated? If it’s the latter, and the article implies that this is the case, then the sellout is blatantly obvious. Krusty, what were you thinking?