product and process

The inimitable J.E.H. Smith from 3QD, in the style of 18th century Scientific Society:

It is reported that with the aid of convex lenses a sharp-eyed Hollander has discovered countless little animals in the male seed, which do propel themselves about, like so many tadpoles, by means of a long, whip-like tail. We would like to know whether these spermatic worms might play a role in the generation of animals and men, or whether they are not rather the product of putrefaction, like the worms that we see spontaneously generated in rotten meat, and in the interstices betwixt our teeth. We would also like to know how this Hollander obtained his seed sample, whether his wife was not implicated in its procuring, and whether in his view the abomination of Onan is not in some way cancelled out by the great contribution this "waste" of seed has made to the advancement of medical knowledge.

A familiar story, indeed, to anyone who has sat through "Scientific Revolutions" at the University of Toronto. He continues:

We have received news of the "science wars" raging in the universities of lands less advanced than ours. It appears one of the belligerent camps asserts that science is only a "narrative," and is in no way superior to other folk practices, like musical theatre, or gin-rummy. Are these people mad? Could they perhaps use a drop of lamb's blood in their veins too? And what could they know of science? Do they belong to Scientific Societies, such as ours? Or do they teach English literature, like The Red Badge of Courage, Oliver Twist, and Old Yeller? Please tell us: what do these people know of science?

Would that we could return to days when readers could be trusted to draw the right conclusion from passages such as these.

subway shenanigans

To change or not to change? Toronto subway station heritage is being threatened. The 69 stations are stylistically linked with symmetric alternating tile colors, but the TTC recently decided to allow changes to 64 of those stations. Some renovations are already underway, including those at Museum station (before, above; after, below).

Some Torontonians are upset that "Museum station, a tidy, intact model of TTC subway design that will be tarted up with Egyptian caryatids."

I have to disagree. What "tarts up" the TTC are ads (revenues from which by the way cover less than 5% of operating costs).

The original subway design (minus the ads) had two virtues: simplicity and homogeneity. The design had little visual clutter and added visual cues (standard fonts and a colored band corresponding to the subway line) to help passengers orient themselves.

As long as the new designs tie in to their geographic surroundings--as the Museum Station redesign does--I see it as an improvement.

you can die from that -- UPDATE

Regular readers already know you can die from that, but here's the other piece of the puzzle: how likely is it?

1 in 4870 lifetime chance of dying in a fall from bed.
1 in undefined lifetime chance of dying by being bitten or crushed by "other reptiles."
1 in 125,655 lifetime chance of dying from hot tap water.
1 in 72,494 lifetime chance of being legally executed (should this be called a 'preventable death'?)
1 in 134,631* lifetime chance of dying as a result of operations of war and sequelae.

Surprisingly, there is only a 1 in 3,421 lifetime chance of dying from exposure to forces of nature. What the National Safety Council means by forces of nature, ironically, are what insurance companies usually call Acts of God -- cataclysmic events such as those described as miracles in the bible. Does the NSC have an agenda of which I wasn't aware?

* It should be noted that these numbers are for the United States. Since this figure counts 28 such deaths in 2004, it obviously refers to individuals in the US, not worldwide.

harsh

Kinda cool: /. is "reporting on what may be the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on victims." Using "JavaScript and strobing GIFs," bogus messages triggered migraines and seizures in users.
Definitely not cool: the target. The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation.

For about 3% of the 50 million epileptics worldwide, flashing lights and colors can trigger seizures. "'I don't fall over and convulse, but it hurts,' says [an IT worker in Ohio]. 'I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn't move and couldn't speak.' ... Circumstantial evidence suggests the attack was the work of members of Anonymous, an informal collective of griefers best known for their recent war on the Church of Scientology. The first flurry of posts on the epilepsy forum referenced the site EBaumsWorld, which is much hated by Anonymous. And forum members claim they found a message board thread — since deleted — planning the attack at 7chan.org, a group stronghold."

burying the lede

Scientific American, ever a bastion for good history of science and balanced coverage of social science, has it in for economics.

The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones. Utility (a measure of economic well-being) took the place of energy; the sum of utility and expenditure replaced potential and kinetic energy. A number of well-known mathematicians and physicists told the economists that there was absolutely no basis for making these substitutions. But the economists ignored such criticisms and proceeded to claim that they had transformed their field of study into a rigorously mathematical scientific discipline.

Nadeau criticizes economic theory for two deadly sins: stealing methods from physics and then not updating methods when the physics changed. The first is on the right track, the second is simply absurd.

Nadeau's criticism of neoclassical economics should be as follows: The physical calculus introduced to economics because of familiarity carries with it ontological implications that do not hold for economic systems. Economists failed to learn this lesson and improve the calculus, and as a result economics remains unable to deal appropriately with environmental problems.

In fact, Nadeau runs his argument almost completely off a cliff. He pollutes his account with distracting tidbits about how the "old" physical theory has since been updated--in physics. What happened in physics is irrelevant to his argument: it might have been the case that the calculus of the old physical theory was the correct basis for economics. It isn't, and that should be the focus of his criticism.

A few of Nadeau's specific criticisms of neoclassical economic theory are worthwhile. For example, under such a theory, "the market system is a closed circular flow between production and consumption, with no inlets or outlets." This seems not to be true, and altering the calculus to allow for inlets and outlets might, as Nadeau suggests, better allow for the inclusion of natural resources within economics.

In the end, Nadeau gets it about right:

If the environmental crisis did not exist, the fact that neoclassical economic theory provides a coherent basis for managing economic activities in market systems could be viewed as sufficient justification for its widespread applications. But because the crisis does exist, this theory can no longer be regarded as useful even in pragmatic or utilitarian terms because it fails to meet what must now be viewed as a fundamental requirement of any economic theory—the extent to which this theory allows economic activities to be coordinated in environmentally responsible ways on a worldwide scale.

Why not lead with that?

philosophy of stamp collecting

Ernst Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, once airily declared "In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting". By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.

John Wilkins is amused because string theorists are beginning to classify their zoo of theories. "The last significant English speaking philosopher of science to discuss classification in science at length," he says, "was W. Stanley Jevons in his 1873 book, second edition 1878." After that, "Classification dropped out of philosophy of science for a century." That's a little pat, but Wilkins is largely right: until fairly recently, philosophy of science was about scientific theory, not scientific practice. Wilkins wants philosophy of science to attend to "a slew of scientific activities that can include the field biologist, the museum curator, the naive experimentalist, and so on, all of which was excluded from 'real' science by the analytic post-logical empiricist tradition."

Wilkins proposes to chart the activities of science on theory-classification and experimental-observational axes. This brings home the point that philosophy of science has focused on the upper left quadrant to the exclusion of all else.

The exclusion of classification from 'real' science has always irked biologists and other scientists who actually do it. "Hence my amusement," explains Wilkins.

While these physicists are trying to order the vast field of possibilities into a logical structure, which is only one kind of classification, they are not, as yet, happy about passive observation, and indeed in the context of string theory, or physics in general, it is hard to see what might count as passive observation. But there is a kind of passivity to observation even when it relies on technical apparatus like the Large Hadron Collider - you see the readouts, displays or cloud chamber photos without much in the way of theory - the interpretation is what requires theory.

But here Wilkins goes too far (or not far enough?) To take technical apparatus like the Large Hadron Collider as given is as much a mistake as ignoring classification. What enables the interpretation of results from the LHC is the design, construction and tuning of the instrument, and none of these is passive.

you paid HOW MUCH to destroy the universe?

There is a nonzero chance the Large Hadron Collider's attempt to create black holes will result in a kind of matter called strangelets, which like cooties transform everything they touch.

It's somewhere in the region of the same nonzero chance that your underpants will instantly quantum tunnel their way out of your pants and onto your head, but nevermind; it's still enough for some folks (NYT) to litigate. There is even a facebook group devoted to the, um, cause.

I don’t know how you ever get comfortable with any level of risk of destroying the universe....

After all, the whole point of the Large Hadron Collider is to create conditions that are not predictable....

I can’t see the management of this project spending $8 billion, realizing it was a huge boner, and then holding a press conference suggesting it be turned into a parking garage. I’ll bet a lot of people in that position would take at least a 5% risk of incinerating the galaxy versus incinerating their own careers. I know I would.

As usual, it takes a cartoonist to get to the heart of the issue.

CERN's own cartoonish response is a 4-minute youtube video, with bonus soundtrack "From Yesterday" by 30 Seconds to Mars (who knew Jared Leto could sing?).