What I’m Reading, April 16, 2014

Posted on April 16, 2014 by wellsdc

By Novis-M (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons The irresponsibly stupid and dangerous camouflage patterns of the U.S. military, David W. Brown, The Week, January 22, 2013

When the Marine Corps selected a digital pattern for its combat uniform in 2002, the U.S. military as a whole seemed to fracture, with each branch wandering aimlessly in a bizarre search for sartorial identity. It’s been a long, strange trip since. So let’s take a brief look at the camouflage patterns of the U.S. military, and the sorry stories of their adoptions.

If You Don’t Like “Rape Culture” Then Focus For A Minute On Sex and Status, Soraya Chemaly, Huffington Post, April 7, 2014

The idea that we live with a culture that promotes rape is anathema to people who a) don’t want to believe it because, when you start to really think about it, it’s awful and scary and defies reason; b) live in communities filled with words used to deny, promote or camouflage sexual assault or c) are people who have power and benefit, in multiple, intersecting ways, from the status quo.

“Status” is the operative word. If you don’t like the words “rape culture” or you are uncomfortable with the idea that men rape women (and that is the vast preponderance of cases) in huge numbers, here is a different way to think about this: People with higher status are entitled to rape and abuse people with lower status in society.

Fear of becoming a racial minority makes white Americans more conservative: study, Scott Kaufman, The Raw Story, April 10, 2014 (h/t LGM)

Two researchers from the Department of Psychology and Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University demonstrated that the more white Americans know about the changing demographics of the United States, the more likely they are to endorse conservative policy positions.

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Maureen Craig and Jennifer Richeson conducted three studies in which white Americans were presented with information about the racial demographic shifts that have led the U.S. Census Bureau to project that “racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called ‘majority-minority’ nation.”

The result was that, “[d]espite being self-identified political independents, respondents who were asked about the [majority-minority] racial shift reported being somewhat more conservative than did respondents” who were asked the less salient question about Hispanics being roughly equally to African-Americans.

AA and Rehab Culture Have Shockingly Low Success Rates, Dr. Lance Dodes, Zachary Dodes, AlterNet, April 2, 2014

Twelve-step programs hold a privileged place in our culture as well. The legions of “anonymous” members who comprise these groups are helped in their proselytizing mission by hit TV shows such as “Intervention,” which preaches the gospel of recovery. “Going to rehab” is likewise a common refrain in music and fi lm, where it is almost always uncritically presented as the one true hope for beating addiction. AA and rehab have even been codified into our legal system: court-mandated attendance, which began in the late 1980s, is today a staple of drug-crime policy. Every year, our state and federal governments spend over $15 billion on substance-abuse treatment for addicts, the vast majority of which are based on 12-step programs. There is only one problem: these programs almost always fail.

Peer-reviewed studies peg the success rate of AA somewhere between 5 and 10 percent. That is, about one of every fifteen people who enter these programs is able to become and stay sober. In 2006, one of the most prestigious scientific research organizations in the world, the Cochrane Collaboration, conducted a review of the many studies conducted between 1966 and 2005 and reached a stunning conclusion: “No experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA” in treating alcoholism. This group reached the same conclusion about professional AA-oriented treatment (12-step facilitation therapy, or TSF), which is the core of virtually every alcoholism-rehabilitation program in the country.

Photo credit: By Novis-M (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

What I’m Reading, April 15, 2014

Posted on April 15, 2014 by wellsdc

"Dragons famili" by mapazhe [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)], via deviantART How We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons, Annalee Newitz, io9, March 26, 2014

[U]nlike my fantasy of being a hot half-elf, the Christians actually had some control over our lives. My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren’t getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.

It sounds crazy in our world today, where there are Dungeons & Dragons movies and a rich game industry full of titles inspired by those old paper-and-dice games we played back in the twentieth century. One of the most popular shows on television, Game of Thrones, features plots that my friends and I might have cooked up back on that playground at lunch. Somehow, the popularity of epic fantasy and role playing overcame America’s fear of young people making up stories about monsters and gods.

The Cost Of Permission Culture: Or Why Netflix Streaming Library Sucks Compared To Its DVD Library, Parker Higgins, TechDirt, April 9, 2014

The problem is that, unlike earlier movie-rental options, streaming rights fall fundamentally within a permission culture. Netflix is a great illustration of what’s gone wrong here. It’s gone from having a nearly unrivaled catalog of films available to rent to being the butt of Onion jokes. What happened: It shifted from a system where nobody had a veto power over its operations, to one where it had to get permission and make deals with Hollywood. Sometimes it’s difficult to find the concrete costs of living in a permission culture, but the decline of Netflix’s selection is an important cautionary tale.

Physicist surprised to see himself in ‘documentary’ claiming the sun revolves around the earth, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, April 8, 2014

Like any other Christian pseudoscience theory, geocentrism is built upon the premise that humans are special and earth is special and God made them special, so any science conflicting with that must be wrong. Like, probably Satan somehow made it look like the earth is really old and revolves around the sun just to destroy our self-esteem. The film makes this premise clear, with its suggested hashtag, #areyousignificant.

How Hatred of Islam Creates Strange Bedfellows of Christians and Atheists, CJ Werleman, AlterNet, April 11, 2014

Despite claims by David Silverman, president of the 501(c4) political lobby group American Atheists, atheism does not earn an atheist the title of freethinker. With very few exceptions, movement atheists are not. They’re parrots. Don’t believe me? Ask an atheist to opine on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and he or she will invariably wax lyrical about religious motivated violence, Islamic extremism and suicide bombers. In other words, expect a recital from atheist luminaries Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

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Atheists, myself included, enjoy mocking religious fundamentalists for their inability to question authority or dogma. But very few atheists sound dissimilar to the aforementioned atheist heavyweights when it comes to assessing the roots of Islamic terrorism. In the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, American Atheists president Silverman tweeted, “Dear Peaceful Muslims: Sorry, but yet, that IS your Islam and your Prophet’s followers.” Silverman included the hashtag #IslamIsBarbaric. If you were told neo-con firebrand Ann Coulter had posted this careless tweet, you would have believed it.

No doubt, Harris (neuroscience) and Dawkins (evolutionary biology) are leaders in their respective fields. What they’re not is experts on terrorism and the Middle East. So movement atheism needs to stop pretending like they are, because the words of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens serve only to make movement atheists sound like neo-conservatives, Zionists and the Christian Right, which ultimately makes seeking peace even harder to attain.

[Ed. note: The URL slug for the above article is “how-atheists-are-complicit-atrocities-and-oppression-palestinian-people.” Just thought that was worth noting.]

Photo credit: “Dragons famili” by mapazhe [CC BY 3.0], via deviantART.

Test Your Geography Knowledge!

Posted on April 10, 2014 by wellsdc

This one’s a doozy. No multiple choice or “find X on a map.” You just type in the name of every country you can think of in twelve minutes (h/t Kerry).

I got all but three, although not many people get those countries right on the test: Antigua and Barbuda (12%), São Tomé and Príncipe (7%), and Fiji (29%). I can’t believe I forgot Fiji! My brain must have frozen or something.

Spelling can be an issue, too. I got lucky on Kyrgyzstan and the Philippines (one “l”), but kept misspelling Guatemala.

(I should note that I’m kind of a showoff about this sort of thing. None of my friends will play Trivial Pursuit with me anymore.)

The Deep End of the Indian Ocean

Posted on April 10, 2014 by wellsdc

"Illustration from the original 1870 edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by author Jules Verne" [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons An Australian ship my have detected pings consistent with a black box, and now a search plane has also detected a signal. The signal could be from the still-missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, but no one can say for certain. The main problem, of course, is that even if the signal is coming from the black box, the black box is somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

The Washington Post has a graphic illustrating just how freaking deep that part of the ocean is (h/t Georgette). The signal was detected at a depth of around 15,000 feet, which is also the deepest known part of that area. It’s also almost 500 feet deeper than Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S., is tall. The pressure there is 6,680 psi, or more than 454 times the air pressure at the earth’s surface (measured as 1 atmosphere). That amount of pressure is unhealthy for humans.

Despite all that, it’s less than half the depth of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, which at around 36,000 feet (about as deep as cruising altitude is high) is the deepest point on the earth. Only three people have ever been to the bottom, and one of them is filmmaker James Cameron. We should just put him in charge of the search. Continue reading →

Natalia Poklonskaya Is Not Your Waifu

Posted on April 2, 2014 by wellsdc

I suppose it is inevitable, in the era of internet memes, that a pretty blonde appointed to a prominent leadership position will become the subject of some creepiness.

But anime fan art? Really? (h/t Jen)

In Japan, people watching events unfolding in Crimea appear to have become captivated by the region’s newly-appointed attorney general.

Clips of a press conference with Natalia Poklonskaya have been shared widely on Japanese platforms, says website Rocketnews24. She was appointed to the post on 11 March and formerly served as a senior prosecutor for the city of Simferopol.

In particular, one video in which Poklonskaya listens to a reporter’s question has been viewed nearly 300,000 times since it was posted to a Japanese YouTube channel. There is no translation of her answer. Some people appear to be so taken with the seemingly charming prosecutor, they are turning out manga images and anime fan art inspired by her.

Okay fine, it’s a tribute or something. But serving as a senior prosecutor for a city of 362,000 people that serves as the capital of a disputed subnational territory, then becoming attorney general for that entire region, all by the age of 34, is at least as impressive as being really pretty. Just sayin’.

It’s also at least as impressive as being the main character in a Grand Theft Auto game, which she is also about to be (unless that was an April Fool’s joke on the part of the International Business Times).

Perhaps this is all best summed up by Tumblr user Kishona: Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, March 25, 2014

Posted on March 25, 2014 by wellsdc

By Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons The Breadth of Hobby Lobby’s Attack On Its Employees, Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money, March 22, 2014

Hobby Lobby et al. are citing a “burden” on religious practice so trivial as to be non-existent in order to impose actual burdens on the rights of their employees. This nicely summarizes how American conservatives think about “freedom.”

Nauru–From Island Paradise To Hell On Earth, Down With Tyranny! March 22, 2014

I remember Nauru from the time I was a pre-teen stamp collector. It was– still is– just a speck of a South Pacific Island, about 8 square miles and less than 10,000 people. Earlier, it had been a German colony that was taken over by the Brits after World War I– like Tanganyika (which, coincidentally, also has a village named Nauru). I haven’t thought about Nauru in half a century until last night. I didn’t even know that around the time Nauru became independent, phosphate mining had given it the highest per-capita income of any country in the world– almost all of which has been swindled. They went from wealth to poverty and Nauru was reduced to taking money from Australia to host a virtual concentration camp for refugees from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iran, Palestine and Pakistan.

Ladders on Everest are just the latest step in our commodification of nature, Philip Hoare, The Guardian, posted at Raw Story, March 20, 2014

For a place already blighted by litter, fistfights and unburied dead bodies, it’s not so much “health and safety” as “access all areas”. Its greatest hero, Edmund Hillary, declared in 2006, two years before he died: “I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.” His successor, Stephen Venables, the first Briton to climb the peak without oxygen, agreed. “The mountain has become a commodity, to be bought and sold like any other,” he said. We humans have come to expect the natural world to come commodified, negotiated, shaped to our needs. From high to low, there’s nowhere we can’t go, nothing we can’t do. In this age of the Anthropocene – the era of human manipulation heralded by the industrial revolution – it is a given that we have tuned the environment to suit ourselves. Dominion is all; human ingenuity has encompassed the planet. Now pass me the phone: “I’m on the mountain.”

More like the Dork Enlightenment, am I right?, PZ Myers, Pharyngula, March 7, 2014

I am told I’m supposed to take The Dark Enlightenment seriously. I can’t. I just can’t. What it is is mostly a bunch of pretentious white dudebro computer programmers with a fascist ideology who write tortuous long-winded screeds off the top of their heads, with most of their ‘data’ coming from pop culture movies like The Matrix, and a few similarly clueless nerds who think it’s neat-o. I take it seriously only in the same way I take Libertarianism seriously: it’s a nucleus for idiots to coalesce around.

They also throw the term HBD around a lot. If you’re not in the know, HBD is short for Human BioDiversity, and it’s the hot new sciencey word for racism. The only people who use it are racists.

Photo credit: By Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

What I’m Reading, March 21, 2014

Posted on March 21, 2014 by wellsdc

Micronesians Continue To Seek Justice On The 60th Anniversary Of The Castle Bravo Nuclear Test, Michelle Broader Van Dyke, BuzzFeed, February 28, 2014

The U.S. conducted at least 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. The nuclear test conducted at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954, Operation Castle Bravo, remains the largest test ever conducted by the U.S. and yielded 15 megatons, almost 1,000 times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Bravo vaporized two surrounding islets and sent a plume of highly radioactive debris floating over the lagoon and into the open water. Atolls downwind of Bikini, including Rongelap and Utirik, hadn’t been informed of the tests but were showered with dangerously radioactive ash, which residents believed was snow — something they had never seen.

In the years following the test, people who were exposed burned from the radiation, became nauseous, developed thyroid problems, had loss of blood cells, and women who were pregnant miscarried. And decades after the bombings, the health problems persist with unusually high rates of birth defects and cancer among Micronesians.

Keurig Will Use DRM In New Coffee Maker To Lock Out Refill Market, Karl Bode, TechDirt, March 3, 2014

The single coffee cup craze has been rolling now for several years in both the United States and Canada, with Keurig, Tassimo, and Nespresso all battling it out to lock down the market. In order to protect their dominant market share, Keurig makers Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has been on a bit of an aggressive tear of late. As with computer printers, getting the device in the home is simply a gateway to where the real money is: refills. But Keurig has faced the “problem” in recent years of third-party pod refills that often retail for 5-25% less than what Keurig charges. As people look to cut costs, there has also been a growing market for reusable pods that generally run anywhere from five to fifteen dollars.

Continue reading →

What I’m Reading, March 18, 2014

Posted on March 18, 2014 by wellsdc

By JPL [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Nick Sagan Speaks About His Father Carl, Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, March 17, 2014

Dad was a difference maker. He reached out to people. He took them by the awe and wonder we feel over the most important questions we can think to imagine. He pulled them away from blind faith, away from pseudoscience, toward a deeper, richer understanding of the universe.

Russian Aggression Deserves a Response, But U.S. Lacks Credibility to Lead It, Stephen Zunes, Yes! Magazine, March 17, 2014

As someone who has spent his entire academic career analyzing and critiquing the U.S. role in the world, I have some news: While the United States has had significant impact (mostly negative in my view) in a lot of places, we are not omnipotent. There are real limits to American power, whether for good or for ill. Not everything is our responsibility.

This is certainly the case with Ukraine.

Continue reading →

You’re Probably Doing Occam’s Razor Wrong (UPDATED)

Posted on March 18, 2014 by wellsdc

William of Ockham, from stained glass window at a church in Surrey, by Moscarlop (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Perhaps the most plausible hypothesis for the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that I have seen comes from former airline pilot Chris Goodfellow. He posits that a fire could have knocked out the airplane’s communications. This would have shut off the transponder and, eventually, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), possibly unbeknownst to the crew. The fire could have been electrical in nature, but fires have also started because of an overheated landing gear tire. The pilot would have tried to divert to the closest available airport, and Goodfellow believes that the plane’s course change could have been intended to get the plane to an airstrip on Pulau Langkawi, an island just off the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. The possible changes in altitude could have been the pilot’s effort to put out a fire by minimizing the amount of oxygen around it. The whole article is worth reading.

I’ve seen several people refer to the “fire hypothesis” as the best possible explanation if one applies Occam’s Razor. The problem there is that, while fire may prove to be the most plausible scenario, it still requires a substantial number of assumptions not currently supported by the available evidence.

People tend to think that Occam’s Razor means that the simplest explanation out of a set of possible explanations is usually the right one, but that’s not exactly it. For starters, have you ever wondered why it’s called a “razor”? The purpose of Occam’s Razor is to “cut” away all of the assumptions, biases, and other parts of an explanation that are not supported by the evidence.

William of Ockham, who didn’t invent the concept but gets the credit for it, stated it as “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate” or “plurality should not be posited without necessity,” according to the Skeptic’s Dictionary. Stephen Hawking described it as “cut[ting] out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.”

Occam’s Razor would therefore eliminate any explanation that involves assumptions or embellishments beyond what the evidence says, even if it is entirely plausible. If they were to call off the search for the plane today, Occam’s Razor would not make the fire hypothesis the “correct” explanation for what happened. Only direct evidence of fire, like charred electrical circuits, burnt tires, or whatever else would serve as physical evidence of a fire aboard an airplane could do that.

UPDATE (03/19/2014): As my friend Jeff pointed out (see also here), Occam’s Razor is not so much a means of finding the “correct” answer as finding the most likely explanation out of a given set of explanations. That is not how most people seem to use it, though, so it’s important to note that it is still possible, in many situations, that none of the available explanations are “correct,” so to speak.

And, as it turns out, quite a few people have expressed their opinions, applying more knowledge and information than is available to me, that Goodfellow’s hypothesis is wrong.

Photo credit: William of Ockham, from stained glass window at a church in Surrey, by Moscarlop (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

America at War

Posted on February 24, 2014 by wellsdc

By Lordkinbote at en.wikipedia [Public domain or Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons Wikipedia has a page showing all (or at least many) of America’s military engagements at home and abroad in two timelines, 1770 to 1900 and 1900 to present (h/t Juan Cole).

The first thing you might note is that we have gone to war a lot. Most of the 19th-century campaigns were against this or that Indian nation—manifest destiny stuff, mostly—but there are also lesser-known foreign engagements like the Philippine-American War (1898-1902), which resulted in more than 4,000 American deaths, mostly from disease, and as many as 1.5 million Filipino civilian deaths. We also seemed to like to do some occupying back in the day, including Nicaragua (1912-33), Haiti (1915-34), the Dominican Republic (i.e. the other half of the island with Haiti) (1916-24), and the Dominican Republic again (1965-66).

The timelines color-code each war or conflict to indicate whether the conflict is ongoing or whether the U.S. was the winner, loser, or neither. It identifies seven “ongoing” conflicts: Continue reading →

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