Lance Mannion

"You live by political motivations, you die by political motivations...”

Posted Sunday morning, June 2, 2019.

NASA charged them room and board?

[Jack Burns, the director of Network for Exploration and Space Science], who is sixty-six years old, remembers the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions—the Cold War-era efforts, beginning in the late fifties, that put men in space and finally landed them on the moon. He teaches a course on the history of space policy. “The U.S. had already lost the start of the space race,” he said, of the origins of Apollo. “The Soviet Union was first with a satellite in space. They were first with an astronaut in space.” Yuri Gagarin’s journey into outer space took place in April, 1961. President John F. Kennedy delivered his moon-shot speech the following month, and Congress eventually allocated 4.4 per cent of the national budget to nasa. “But, if you live by political motivations, you die by political motivations,” Burns said. “Apollo died. Nixon killed the program.” Only twelve people have walked on the moon, all of them between the summer of 1969 and Christmas, 1972. All the moonwalkers were men, all were American, all but one were Boy Scouts, and almost all listened to country-and-Western music on their way to the moon; they earned eight dollars a day, minus a fee for a bed on the spacecraft. Since the last moonwalk, humans have launched crafts that have orbited the moon, crashed probes into it, and taken increasingly detailed photos of it. But no one has been back.

---from “The Eighth Continent” by Rivka Galchen in the New Yorker.

Image up top is a detail from a photograph of astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, in the Sea of Tranquility, July 1969. The first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, can be seen reflected in Aldrin’s visor, taking the picture. Courtesy of NASA via Wikipedia.

To read Galchen’s article about the race to develop the moon follow the link.

Filed under Your Morning Paper and That's SCIENCE!

Alpher, Bethe, Gamow: A Greek alphabet of famous physics professors I have known...of

Mined from the notebooks Tuesday, April 23, 2019. Posted Wednesday morning, April 24. Revised and corrected below, Thursday morning, April 25.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe at the blackboard at Cornell in 1967, around, I’d guess, fifteen years after the young RPI physics major Pop Mannion attended one of Bethe’s seminars. Photo courtesy of the Department of Physics at Cornell University.

“Bethe is an odd figure, large and clumsy with an exceptionally muddy old pair of shoe. He gives the impression of being clever and friendly but rather a caricature of a professor; he was second in command at Los Alamos, so he must be a first-rate organizer as well.” ---from a letter by Freeman Dyson dated September 25, 1947, collected in Dyson’s autobiography in letters, “Maker of Patterns”.

I wonder if Pop Mannion would have recognized Freeman Dyson’s description of the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe. It’s from a letter Dyson wrote in 1947, when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was his professor. That was at least around five but maybe ten or even fifteen years before Pop himself met Bethe.

Pop counted Bethe as one of his teachers. It was a minor point of pride with him. Minor as in he kept it in perspective. Bethe taught at Cornell. Pop earned all three of his degrees---Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D.---at RPI. But at some point in his career as a student, Pop took a week-long seminar with Bethe. I can’t remember exactly when. My impression has always been it was when he was an undergrad. That would put it in the early 1950s. But it might have been while he was working on his masters. At that point, Pop was running the computer department at GE’s atomic power lab (and, incidentally, managing the department’s softball team to the company championship.) That would put it in the late 50s or early 60s and Pop would have been around thirty years old. I like thinking it was when he was a degreeless student, no more than twenty. It’s hard for me to imagine Pop as a college student. Not because he was “born older” like George Bailey. He was. But that’s not the point. It’s simply that he didn’t tell us many stories about that part of his life that didn’t include the girl he was dating at the time, and Mom Mannion wasn’t in college with him, or the United States Air Force, which had him in its ranks as an ROTC cadet. His post grad career I remember because he worked on his Masters and Ph.D. at night and on weekends when I was a little kid and that meant he often wasn’t at home when we Mannion kids wanted to play with him, he was at class or in the library or lab at RPI, and when he wasn’t there he was working and studying at his desk in his “den”, not to be disturbed. The other thing about his seminar with Bethe I can’t recall is where it was held. Bethe might have visited RPI. He might have visited GE. But I like to imagine Pop went down to Cornell when he was an undergrad because Pop lived at home when as an undergrad and I like picturing him making his first long trip away from home. Like I said, having taken that seminar with Bethe was a minor point of pride for him, and he didn’t crow about it. What he was prouder of---well, vainer about, as much as Pop allowed himself a vanity---was the joke he got of it.

Pop also counted George Gamow as one of his teachers, along with Ralph Alpher, who was a friend and a colleague at GE. Gamow he knew through Alpher. It’s more accurate to describe both as mentors. But it was better for the joke to call them his teachers. Here’s the joke:

Pop liked to tell people the list of his physics teachers was so long it ran the whole twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet, starting with Alpher, Bethe, Gamow.

His jokes were usually funnier than that.

He was proud of the joke, but he wasn’t satisfied with it. It bothered him that he didn’t have any famous professors whose names could be used for a pun on Omega.

Think about it.

I took my copy of “Maker of Patterns”, Freeman Dyson’s “autobiography through letters” with us on our trip up to the Old Mannion Homestead to celebrate Easter with Mom Mannion and various friends and relations. I’d have taken it up to show him if he was still with us, expecting of course that he already owned it himself. “Maker of Patterns” would have been a perfect gift for his birthday, which is coming up on Saturday. That’s why I’m convinced he’d have owned it already. Pop had a habit of buying himself books that would have been perfect birthday, Christmas, or Father’s Day presents for him. It was frustrating. But he didn’t do it to be perverse. He bought books for himself regularly---too regularly in the opinion of Mom Mannion, who had to find a place for them all. If it was left to Pop they’d have piled up in the living room to the point that eventually they have walled him in in his favorite reading chair and eventually one of the towers would have toppled and crushed him where he sat reading his newest acquisition. It was one of his indulgences, of which, like his vanities, he allowed himself few. But if, wonder of wonders, on the off-chance he didn’t already own it, I’d have gotten a kick out of showing him the series of letters Dyson wrote to his family in the late 1940s when he was a doctoral student at Cornell and Bethe was not only his teacher but the head of his dissertation committee. And I’m sure Pop would have especially enjoyed this story, because it includes as a character another physicist he greatly admired:

Dyson writes:

The event of last week has been a visit from [Rudolf Peierls, an old physicist friend of Bethe’s who’d, at about the same time as Bethe, escaped Hitler’s Germany to England where he’d become one of the leaders of the British nuclear bomb project] who has been over here on government business and stayed two nights with the Bethes before flying home. He gave a formal lecture on Monday about his own work, and has been spending the rest of the time in long discussions with Bethe and the rest of us, at which I learn a great deal. On Monday night the Bethes gave a party in his honour, to which most of the young theoreticians were invited. When we arrived we were introduced to Henry Bethe, who is now five years old, but he was not at all impressed. The only thing he would say was “I want Dick. You told me Dick was coming, and finally he had to be sent to bed, since Dick...did not materialise. About half an hour later [Dick] burst into the room just had time to say “so sorry I’m late. Had a brilliant idea just as I was coming over,” and then dashed upstairs to console Henry. Conversation then ceased while the company listened to the joyful sounds above, sometimes taking the form of a duet and sometimes of a one-man percussion band.

The one-man percussion band was---you guessed it---Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman with students at a coffee hour at Caltech’s Winnett Center, June, 1964. Photo by Kent McCaulley, courtesy of Caltech Magazine.

It’s possible Pop met Feynman at Cornell. Barely possible. But only if Pop took that seminar with Bethe at Cornell and when he was a freshman at RPI. Feynman left Cornell in 1951. Fact is, however, I’m pretty sure he never met Feynman. He’d have never stopped talking about it if he had. It would have been more than a minor point of pride for him and he wouldn’t have cared if he got a good joke out of it. Feynman was one of his heroes.

So he’d have enjoyed this from Dyson’s letter home, dated November 19, 1947:

“Just a brief letter before we go off to Rochester [New York, about a two-hour drive from Ithaca]. We have every Wednesday a seminar at which somebody talks about some item of research, and from time to time this is made a joint seminar with Rochester University. I am being taken in Feynman’s car, which will be great fun if we survive. Feynman is a man for whom I am developing a considerable admiration; he is the brightest of the young theoreticians here and is the first example I have met of that rare species, the native American scientist. He has developed a private version of the quantum theory, which is generally agreed to be a good piece of work and may be more helpful than the orthodox version for some problems. He is always sizzling with new ideas, most of which are more spectacular than helpful and hardly any of which get very far before some newer inspiration eclipses them. His most valuable contribution to physics is as a sustainer of morale; when he bursts into the room with his latest brain wave and proceeds to expound it with lavish sound effects and waving about of the arms, life at least is not dull.”

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Updated and corrected Thursday morning, April 25, 2019 because DAMMIT! there are holes in my memory that need to be plugged: The Alpher, Bethe, Gamow joke wasn't Pop's. He appropriated it---from Gamow. Gamow wrote a seminal paper on the Big Bang with Alpher, who was his doctoral student at George Washington University, and he added his friend Bethe's name so that it would always be cited as Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. The paper was published in 1948, when Pop was in high school. But Pop read it, although probably not when it was published, and of course understood it and appreciated its ramifications, as well as getting a big kick out of the joke, which he told me about and explained to me when I was just out of grad school and reading Richard Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", one of my and Pop's favorite books. I'd asked him in he'd met any of the physicists mentioned in the book. That's when he told me about taking the seminar with Bethe and about the paper and the joke and his connections to Alpher and Gamow and how he liked to tell people about the paper, the joke, and how the joke could be applied to his own resume. Pop never took credit for somebody else's work or their jokes.

As it happens, Pop's connection to the Manhattan Project and the making of the atomic bomb and probably initially to Bethe was through his boss as GE, Richard Ehrlich, known to Pop and Mom Mannion as their good friend Dick but to us Mannion kids as Dr Ehrlich and someone we had to be on our best behavior around when he visited our house, although I remember him as a kindly, avuncular, and always broadly smiling man. Dr Ehrlich had worked under Bethe at Los Alamos, amd since Dr Ehrlich and Mrs Ehrlich were regular dinner guests at the Mannion Homestead, I can claim one degree of separation form the bomb dropped on Nagasaki and isn't that special? But it makes it likely that Pop took that seminar from Bethe when he was working at GE and not when he was a student and that it was held in Schenectady. One other thing about Dr Ehrlich. His influence on Pop was political as much as professional. He was the chair of the local Democratic committee when we moved to Niskayuna and he recruited Pop to run for town board. Pop got skunked that time out. But he learned valuable lessons that he put to work when he ran for supervisor a few years later.

All this came back in a rush last night when Mannionville stalwarts Joel Hanes and Kaleburg reminded me in the comments here and Facebook pal Neil Calkin reminded me over there about Alpher-Bethe-Gamow. Thanks, old chums, for calling attention to the paper and to my incipient senility.

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“Maker of Patterns: An Autobiograhy Through Letters” by Freeman Dyson is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon.

Another of Pop Mannion's favorite books by about science was Gamow's "One Two Three...Infinity". He cherished his first edition copy all his adult life. It was published when Pop was in high school so it may have been the first adult science book he owned. His affection for it wasn't just nostalgic either. He thought it was a classic of its kind and recommended to everyone as the best introduction to scientific and mathematical thinking about how the world works. He might have known this, but if he didn't it would have done is heart good to find out it's still in print. "One Two Three...Infinity" is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

Pop would also recommend Feynman's "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

God's in his heaven---all's right with the world's climate change

Posted late Tuesday afternoon, January 29, 2019.

Just catching up with this one. The quote’s from an article by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist by way of Salon:

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s urgent calls to action on climate change: “Look, I don’t think we’re going to listen to her on much of anything, particularly not on matters we’re gonna leave in the hands of a much, much higher authority, and certainly not listen to the freshman congresswoman on when the world may end.”

“Higher authority.” That would be the Right Wing Christian version of God, a capricious demon with an allegedly benevolent plan for humankind which requires millions of innocent people to suffer and die every year but which ends with Christians being rewarded in the next life while rich Republicans get richer in this one. This notion that God is in charge, he knows what’s best for us, and we should leave things up to him isn’t really an article of faith. It’s an excuse not to care about other people’s unhappiness and misfortune.

“I’d like to help you friend, but God know what he’s doing, and who am I to question God?”

At any rate, coming across the article this morning reminded me I wrote a post on the subject back in November. I think it’s worth reposting, so here it is…

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“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.

Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

Ernst missed her chance.

“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.

(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.

“Climate is what we expect,” said Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)

I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”

One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.

The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.

They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.

It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out  The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.

The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.

This is the way God wants it!

Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.

Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.

Iowa? An oil state, Lance?

Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?

Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.

“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”

Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.

The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.

Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.

The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.

Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.

To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.

Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel

under the name Evangelicals.

(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)

These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.

Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.

Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment,  all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.

In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.

Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.

Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best  because God only wants the best for us.

The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.

Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.

And amen to that, say the rich greedy bastards in the choir.

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Back to today…

Ocasio-Cortez responded the way you’d think would shut a Christian like Sanders up. She quoted the bible at her. Trouble is AOC’s Catholic. Catholics think the bible means what the words in it mean. Right Wing Christians think it means whatever they need it to mean to serve their self-interest at the moment. Right Wing Christians are convinced they’re the only ones who know what God wants, which always turns out to be what they want. Convenient, huh?

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To read Thompson’s whole article, follow the link to “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets biblical on Sarah Huckabee Sanders” at Grist.

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Photo up top is by yours truly. I took it back in the fall. October 24, 2018, to be precise. It's the marquee in front of one of the loneliest looking chruches I've ever seen. Seems like there's never more than five or six cars in the parking lot even on Sundays.

God's in his heaven---all's right with the world's climate change

Posted Thursday evening, November 29, 2018.

Marquee outside a local church. Shwangunk, New York. Photo taken back in October, 2018.

“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.

Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

Ernst missed her chance.

“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.

(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.

“Climate is what we expect,” siad Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)

I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”

This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.

“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”

One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.

The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.

They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.

It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out  The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.

The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.

This is the way God wants it!

Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.

Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.

Iowa? An oil state, Lance?

Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?

Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.

“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”

Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.

The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.

Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.

The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.

Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.

To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.

Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel

under the name Evangelicals.

(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)

These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.

Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.

Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment,  all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.

In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.

Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.

Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best  because God only wants the best for us.

The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.

Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.

And amen to that, say the rich rich greedy bastards and their choir.

Then it started adding up to real money

Posted Friday, May 18, 2018.

Acid rain, still a thing. Photo via worldatlas.

Once upon a time, even conservative Republicans could be environmentalists. But they noticed that it was costing them real money:

Soon, though, business interests realized that these rules were just the beginning. Dirty air was succeeded by new alarms about the atmosphere, one after another. The ozone hole. Nuclear winter. Acid rain. Each was more abstract than its predecessor, but larger in its immediate economic impact. Industry, sensing a trend, became wary. What had begun as a feel-good movement against a limited tally of palpable local harms seemed to have become an endless crusade against ever-larger and ever-remoter targets. A stream of “capitalism vs. ecology” manifestos led many in the business world to conclude that destroying the corporate world from the beginning. Ranchers, farmers, loggers, and miners, touched by environmental laws, came to the same conclusion: a cabal of urban snobs was bent on destroying their livelihoods…

---from The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

Flying our tribal flags

Posted Friday morning, May 18, 2018.

Spotted Owl: Symbol of the movement or Public Enemy Number One, depending on how your tribe ranks its totems. Photo copyright Max Leibowitz, courtesy of the Macauley Library, via All About Birds, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Yeah, I know. One party elects many more tribalists than the other, but the point holds:

Environmental issues became ways for politicians to flag their identity to supporters---less statements about practical problems with solutions that people could debate than symbols of identity. They signaled membership in a cause: taking back the country, either from tyrannical liberal elitism or right-wing greed.

---from The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann.

"Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair"

Posted Sunday afternoon, May 6, 2018.

An abandoned hacienda on a still-thriving farm in the Bajio region of Mexico. Photo courtesy of photographer Andres Gonzalez via Wikipedia.

In 1945, the environmental scientist Norman Borlaug, the wizard of Charles C. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet”, was working for the Rockefeller Foundation as a field botanist in the Bajio, a wheat-growing and wheat-dependent agricultural region of Central Mexico, trying to figure out how to beat the stem rust that afflicted the wheat crop and caused poor yields. His own living conditions in the were rough. The heat was suffocating. The food was lousy. The work itself---planting maize and then inspecting the young plants for stem rust---had to be done on hands and knees and was exhausting and painful. But it’s what he saw of how the farmers lived and how a culture based on centuries of economic abuse and political injustice and nature’s cruelty affected their thinking and their spirits that got to him...

Much worse was the poverty. Borlaug had been poor all his life but always well fed and decently clad. In the Bajio he first encountered  destitution on a geographic scale. Women walked for miles to carry water from contaminated wells. Men scratched at the earth with wooden hoes and slashed at weeds with sickles as ancient as time. Plumbing was a distant dream. Children died from diseases that were treatable nuisances in richer places. Again and again, he encountered people who had been so badly abused by authority that they clung to beliefs Borlaug found irrational. If Borlaug offered to procure steel plows and hoes, they told him that metal siphoned “heat” from the soil. If he asked about fertilizer, they told him it was a government plot against the farmer. Each conversation was like being thrust into a wildland of confusion and despair…

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

The REAL scientific method

Posted Saturday evening, March 31, 2018.

A prerequisite for a successful scientific career is an enthusiastic willingness to pore through the minutiae of subjects 99.9 percent of Earth’s population find screamingly dull.

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

Me and the mice, in it for the long haul

Posted Thursday morning, March 29, 2018.

“What a mouse! WHAT A MOUSE!”

I was only planning on making it to seventy-five, but the way things are going it’s looking like I have to last until at least I’m a hundred and twelve. So this article by Sharon Begley in STAT got my hopes up…

In the latest advance, biologists reported on Thursday that a molecule already sold by supplement makers (even as scientists scramble to understand it) restored youthfulness to blood vessels in 20-month-old mice, an age comparable to 70 years in people. The research supports the idea that boosting certain genes and molecules that fade with age could keep people functional, resilient, and even spry well into their 80s, even without living longer.

“I think it’s quite an important paper,” said Dr. Eric Verdin, of the California-based Buck Institute for Research on Aging, who was not involved in the new research. “It’s probably not the magic pill everyone is looking for, but it’s one more brick in our efforts to understand aging and healthspan,” or how long people can stay biologically young(ish) even as their birthday candles proliferate.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? The supplement is Nicotinamide Mononucleotide, popularly known as NMN.

After two months of NMN, more blood vessels sprouted in the old mice’s muscles. The density of the smallest vessels — capillaries — became comparable to that of young mice. Blood flow increased, and the animals’ endurance, measured by how long they could run on a treadmill before becoming exhausted, was 56 percent to 80 percent greater than that of untreated old mice: 1,400 feet compared to 780 feet.

The treated mice also benefited from exercise like mice half their age. In young animals, exercise spurs the creation of new blood vessels and boosts muscle mass, but that effect weakens with age in both people and mice. NMN restored the blood-vessel- and muscle-boosting effects of a good treadmill run, basically “reversing vascular aging in the mice,” said study co-leader David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School.

But then I read on…

New blood vessels could also be a mixed blessing. They support the growth of tumors, which is why anti-angiogenesis molecules have become cancer drugs. The scientists found no excess cancers in the mice given [NMN], but “more study is warranted,” they wrote.

As Rosanne Rosanadana used to say, “It’s always something.” Still, it appears that NMN boosts Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+, a coenzyme naturally found in all living organisms that’s important for metabolic energy production in a way I don’t understand and which NMN appears to increase the body’s production of:

Thanks to negative studies, the jury is still out on whether anything related to sirtuins will extend lifespan, but the Cell study offers some hope for extending healthspan. If boosting NAD+ promotes blood vessel formation via SIRT1, it might “rescue muscle mass” that otherwise decreases as blood vessels atrophy, Guarente said. That could prevent the bone loss, frailty, and falls that can be fatal in old age.

“Anything that contributes to muscle health through vascular health is likely to be quite important,” said the Buck Institute’s Verdin, who takes a daily NAD+ precursor…

Sinclair and his team are now studying whether raising NAD+ might also spur the creation of blood vessels in the brain. There and in other organs, said Sinclair, “the lack of oxygen and buildup of waste products” that results from loss of small blood vessels “sets off a downward spiral of disease and disability.” In the brain, that would include vascular dementia.

Sinclair takes NMN to boost NAD+ levels. “In someone my age [49], it’s probably harder to see immediate benefits,” he said, though he said he feels sharper and younger on it. After his 78-year-old father began taking NMN “he started climbing mountains and going whitewater rafting and looking forward to the next five years,” Sinclair said. “It might be psychological, but it isn’t hurting.”

Climbing mountains at seventy-eight would be nice, but I’ll settle for being able to climb stairs. So should I rush out and get hold of some NMN?

One concern is that boosting sirtuins could backfire. An excess of the molecules, Verdin said, can promote autoimmunity, which causes diseases such as Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis.

Swell.

And science is littered with examples of compounds that worked in mice but not people.

Even sweller.

Sometimes I hate science journalism. See what you think. You can read Sharon Begley’s whole article by following the link to A dietary supplement makes old mice youthful. But will it work in people? at STAT.

Hat tip to Mike the Mad Biologist.

Just another briefly successful species

Posted Saturday morning, February 24, 2018.

“A three-foot deep pile of zebra mussel shells about 50 yards long are piled up along the Lake Winnebago shoreline in April 2012 at Wayside Park just north of Fond du Lac. Scientists want to use an experimental chemical on an inland lake in Wisconsin in hopes of finding a way to stem the spread of the invasive mussel.” Photo by Mark Hoffman courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

This is objectively, scientifically fascinating, until the end, when it gets subjectively, scientifically scary…

By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while…Their populations grow at a terrific rate; they take over large areas, engulfing their environments as if no force opposed them. Then they hit a barrier. The drown in their own wastes. They starve from lack of food. Something figures out how to eat them.

When I lived in New York City, zebra mussels invaded the lower Hudson River, the western boundary of Manhattan island. An inch or two long with wriggly bands of brown and white, zebra mussels are capable of spitting out a million eggs a year apiece. The species originated in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas on Europe’s Russian- and Turkic-speaking periphery. Globalization has been good to it. Escaping their native waters, zebra mussels hitchhiked around the world in ship bilges and ballastwater. They have been recorded in Europe since the eighteenth century. The Hudson first saw them in 1991. Within a year zebra mussels constituted half the mass of living creatures in the river. In some places tens of thousands carpeted every square foot. They covered boat bottoms, blocked intake tubes, literally smothered other species of shellfish with a blanket of striped shell…

Bust followed boom; the population collapsed. In 2011, two decades after the mussel was first sighted in the Hudson, its survival rates were [according to one long-range study] “1% or less of those in the early years of the invasion…They [exhausted] their food supply, but they were also attacked by a local predator, the blue crab, which had learned to eat the newcomers…Fifteen years ago, when I went to a park at the edge of the Hudson, I couldn’t step into the river---the sharp edges of open mussel shells were too thick underfoot. Nowdays at the park the creatures are mostly gone. Children splash happily in the shallows. Crumbled shells lie in the sediment, testament to the mussel’s collapse.

Humans are no different [microbiologist Lynn Margulis believed]. The implication of evolutionary theory is that Homo sapiens is just one species among many, no different at base than [zebra mussels]. We and they are controlled by the same forces, produced by the same processes, subject to the same fate…Homo sapiens, in Margulis’s eyes was just another briefly successful species.

---from “The Wizard and the Prophet” by Charles C. Mann.

Pro protist

Posted Monday morning, February 19, 2018.

Blepharisma japonica, “a free-living ciliated protozoan” found in Japan. Protozoans, according to Wikipedia, are “single-celled non-photosynthetic protists.” And protists, according to Charles C. Mann in his book “The Wizard and the Prophet” are “anything living that is not an animal, plant, fungi, or bacterium.” Got that? Me neither. Photo via Wikipedia.

Remarkable a scientist as she was, Lynn Margulis isn’t one of the two remarkable scientists of the title of the book the quote below is from, “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World” by Charles C. Mann. The two are the influential environmentalists Norman Borlaug (the Wizard) and William Vogt (the Prophet). Mann brings Margulis into his story as an ironic commentator on how Borlaug’s and Vogt’s fields of inquiry and their visions of how to solve what they both saw as the major threat to human survival, overpopulation, were narrowly circumscribed by their individual biases and why what should have been complementary approaches to the problems caused by more and more people coming into the world and needing to eat, drink, wash, and irrigate crops, clothe themselves, go from here to there, heat and cool their homes, and occasionally treat themselves to a movie or ice cream or whatever turned into competing visions, a competition, Mann posits still persists even though both Borlaug and Vogt have long since shuffled off this mortal coil.

A researcher who specialized in cells and microorganisms, Margulis was one of the most important biologists of the last half century---she literally helped to reorder the tree of life, convincing her colleagues that it did not consist of two kingdoms (plants and animals), but five or even six (plants, animals, fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria)…

…Margulis couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ fixation on birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and portists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms, Margulis liked to remind people. Heck, there are as many bacterial cells in our body as there are human cells.

Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant super-colonies, reproduce either sexually or by swapping genes with others, take in genes from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings---the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to [say], pandas and polar bears were epiphenomena---interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

---from The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow’s World by Charles C. Mann.

I’d have thought cities counted as super-colonies, but like I would know.

Lance Mannion has come unstuck in time again...and again...and again

Mined from the notebooks, October 5, 2017. Posted Sunday morning, November 5, 2017.

“Brendan Foley, an underwater archaeologist, holds a 2,000-year-old bronze arm recovered from the Antikythera shipwreck.” Photo by Brett Seymour EUA/Argo courtesy of the New York Times.

I know I come across as a solid citizen of the Reality-based Community. Mr Facts. Mr Logic. Mr Does His Homework. I follow the links, do the reading, listen to the experts and trust the scientists. I'm a hard-headed materialist. If it can't be seen, toughed, tasted, measured, and quantified, it doesn't exist. If I'd been the thirteenth apostle, the expression would be a Doubting Mannion not Doubting Thomas. Only I'd have put my hands in the wounds. That Thomas, he calls himself a doubter? What a piker.

But skeptic and rationalist that I am, I have moments of weakness. When my mental discipline slackens and restless imagination takes flight. Then the universe seems to me a magical place, God exists, Martians do too, and all kinds of things are possible. It's not that I start believing in magic. It's that the magic that popular science fiction passes off as future science really does seem like future science. Warp drive, teleportation, whatever supposedly goes on to make food synthisers and the Holodeck work, truly intelligent artificial intelligence---I accept that it will all come to be. And given the way technology has developed and science has advanced in just my lifetime, it may be that the most unscientific part of my thinking is thinking that accepting it is believing in magic.

Time travel, though, I can't think of as anything but magic. Probably a result of too much TV and reading of comic books. Whether it's via the Wayback Machine or the Tardis or the Flash running backwards or the Enterprise slingshotting around the sun or the flux capacitor kicking in at the last, crucial second, it's all a version of Dorothy closing her eyes, clicking her heels three times, and saying, "There's no place like home, circa [fill in the date]."

Travel to alternate universes seems as plausible to me as falling down the rabbit hole or passing through the looking glass.

But even though I don't accept that time travel is possible, I believe the past is there to be traveled to.

I've seen it.

I see it.

Routinely.

Usually happens when I'm somewhere the past is still a physically functioning part of the present, not there as an artifact, a museum or museum piece, but as a building still in use as what it was built for or tool or machine or even article of clothing still being used the way it was the day it was first put to work. And then I see not just the things themselves but the people using them and all the things around them the people used to fashion and maintain their lives and the landscapes and cityscapes in which they lived those lives and them living their lives, which is to say, I seem living, alive in the past, the past alive in the present.

Used to happen almost every day when I lived in Boston. Happens most regularly and most vividly now when I'm driving along a country road and a remodelled vintage auto comes into view,  tooling towards me in the opposite lane.

In Boston I'd leap between centuries in a matter of blocks. One moment I 'd be jostling through Fanueil Hall and suddenly I'd see  myself rubbing shoulders with people who rubbed shoulders with Samuel Adams. Another moment, making my way to my apartment in Allston I'd pass by the doorsteps the young Jack Kennedy would have climbed to knock on the doors of the residents he was going to ask to vote for him for Congress and I'd see those steps and those doors and the people opening them and the hallway behind them and the rooms opening on those hallways and I'd see them as they'd have looked to JFK. I'd even hear the telephones ringing and the radios blaring. I would catch glimpses of the tiny screens of the TVs in the few houses that had them.

Out driving, when I see an old car approaching, a Model T, a ‘54 Chevy, any make and model with real fenders, any make and model with tailfins, any make and model pre-dating my first driver's license, in fact---because the past doesn't include my life, of course. That's still the present.---right before my eyes, the roadside changes, the road signs change, trees grow taller or disappear, farms appear and disappear, fields clear themselves or are overgrown, barns are raised or collapse or vanish into the woods entirely, the number and style of the houses change, accordingly.

Some of those roads haven't changed. The houses and farms along them have been there for a hundred years. The past isn't all in the past. It's even wrong to say Kennedy's Boston was part of the past. There were still plenty of people alive who'd voted for him in his first campaign for Congress. Still living in those same houses, very likely. There were still people alive who'd voted for his grandfather for mayor.

What I most like to see is that the people are like us. Are us. The changes in fashion, in technologies change some things about how they go about their lives, but the lives they're going about aren't that different from ours.

They don't think about all the same things, but they think along the same lines. We have lots in common to talk about. We make the same jokes. I know I'm not being profound here. I'm being sentimental. Can't deny it. Not trying to. It's what I'm being when I see the past. I know it, and I know what's going on. I want those people to be there because I want to still be here a thousand years from now when some sentimental descendent looks into the past and sees life going on in 2017. It's me imagining that life is eternal and we all live forever.

But knowing what’s going on doesn't stop me.

It also happens when I look at old photographs and certain paintings, although not, oddly, the most photographic ones like Vermeer's, probably because I'm so overawed by the technical achievement I forget to think about the subject. It happens when I watch old movies but rarely when I watch contemporary movies set in the past no matter how meticulously the designers have recreated that past. And it almost never happens when I read novels no matter when they were written, probably because I'm not seeing with my own inner eyes---the writer's vision takes over my imagination but at some level I'm aware of that happening and a stubborn part of me resists.

It happens more frequently when I read non-fiction and journalism, and then usually most vividly when I'm reading a newspaper or magazine article, probably because I'm not expecting it and I'm taken by surprise, with my intellectual defenses against it down. Which is what happened when I read this story in the New York Times, Bronze Arm Found in Ancient Shipwreck Points to More Treasure Below:

Measuring an estimated 160-feet long, the ship was like the Titanic of its time. It met its iceberg in the form of a violent storm that smashed it against the island’s cliff, scientists believe. The ship then had a turbulent trip to the bottom of the ocean where it most likely rolled several times, flinging its treasure, and goods across the seafloor. In the two millenniums since, earthquakes and landslides have rocked its remains, further breaking and burying its trove of Hellenistic and Classical pottery and artwork.

It's an interesting article, full of fascinating details about what's down there, the history of explorations of the wreck. the work of the archaeologists, how they go about that work underwater, and what they hope to learn from what they've been able to bring up. But here's the part that launched my imagination into time travel:

The ship that carried the treasures of Antikythera was something like an ancient supertanker or luxury liner that carried grain and artwork for trading in the Mediterranean, including marble and bronze statues being shipped to the richest of the rich, according to Dr. Foley. The site thus provides a peek not just into the lives of the elite, but also into the blooming global and urban society at the beginning of the Roman Empire.

On the face of it, that’s one of the blandest paragraphs in the story. Rich people spending lots of money in order to flaunt their wealth? Where's the news in that? But here's the thing.

I didn't see those rich people. I saw their agents coming down to the wharf collect their purchases. I saw the merchants and middlemen who were there to take their orders to their shops and galleries and showrooms. I saw the stevedores and longshoremen and other dockworkers unloading the cargo. The carters there to haul away the merchandise. I saw the shops and stalls and taverns and inns that catered to the dockworkers and the sailors come ashore and the townsfolk who'd come to the waterfront to shop and gawk. I saw the waterfront come to life and behind it the whole seaport town going about its daily business. And I saw the whole culture that sustained and maintained it, the customs and traditions and bureaucracies and legal systems, and the offices where those things were negotiated and bargained and contracted, and the workers in those offices doing the negotiating and bargaining and contracting, and it was all familiar.

The people wore sandals and tunics and togas, their tools were all hand tools or hand operated, there were many more animals about, but it was still a scene I knew first hand from my own wanderings along the wharfs and docks of port towns on Cape Cod and north and south of Boston and Boston itself. The people were people I recognized, engaged in the business and busy-ness that people alive today engage in in ways that are so similar as to be almost a continuation, as if I was seeing ancient Ostia and 20th Century Boston (when I knew it best) as existing and thriving together in the same web of international trade. Ostia might as well be Boston. Both might as well be London in the 18th Century, Shanghai in the 19th, Lisbon in the 16th, Venice in the 15th...you get the picture.

Anyway, enough magical thinking. To read Nicholas St Fleur's whole article, follow the link to Bronze Arm Found in Famous Shipwreck Points to More Treasure Below at the New York Times.

We should all be so smart

Posted Tuesday morning, August 1, 2017.

AS HE WAS brushing his teeth on the morning of July 17, 2014, Thomas Royen, a little-known retired German statistician, suddenly lit upon the proof of a famous conjecture at the intersection of geometry, probability theory, and statistics that had eluded top experts for decades…

Royen hadn’t given the Gaussian correlation inequality much thought before the “raw idea” for how to prove it came to him over the bathroom sink. Formerly an employee of a pharmaceutical company, he had moved on to a small technical university in Bingen, Germany, in 1985 in order to have more time to improve the statistical formulas that he and other industry statisticians used to make sense of drug-trial data. In July 2014, still at work on his formulas as a 67-year-old retiree, Royen found that the GCI could be extended into a statement about statistical distributions he had long specialized in. On the morning of the 17th, he saw how to calculate a key derivative for this extended GCI that unlocked the proof. “The evening of this day, my first draft of the proof was written,” he said…

To read the whole story by Natalie Wolchover, follow the link to A Retiree Discovers an Elusive Math Proof—And Nobody Notices at Wired.

God saves the planet

Posted Friday morning, June 2, 2017

The way he takes care of tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, famine, forest fires, and droughts?

From Huffington Post:

Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) told a constituent last week that God can solve the problem of climate change if the global phenomenon truly exists.

The 66-year-old Republican, who is a climate change skeptic, made the remark at a town hall in Coldwater, Michigan, on Friday.

“I believe there’s climate change,” Walberg said, according to a video of the exchange obtained by HuffPost. “I believe there’s been climate change since the beginning of time. I believe there are cycles. Do I think man has some impact? Yeah, of course. Can man change the entire universe? No.”

“Why do I believe that?” he went on. “Well, as a Christian, I believe that there is a creator in God who is much bigger than us. And I’m confident that, if there’s a real problem, he can take care of it.”

There are plenty of Americans living in the 21st Century who still think the world runs on magic and is ruled by a meddlesome but beneficent wizard---the new Congressman from Montana, for one---but Walberg’s theological maunderings here sound like the standard-issue “God's in his heaven and all’s right with the world” pieties invoked from time immemorial by the comfortable and complacent to justify their comfort and complacency. It’s all as God intended and we shouldn’t mess with his plans, his plans being that things continue as they are with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. God will provide, but in the meantime there’s no reason oil and gas companies shouldn’t keep pumping the earth dry, no reason factories shouldn’t save themselves the trouble of scrubbing their smokestacks, no reason auto companies---like the ones based in Michigan. Fancy that.---should have to waste time and money designing and engineering even more efficient hybrids and electric cars and no reason those of us with the money should hold off on buying gas-guzzling Hummers and oversized pick-ups, if that’s what we want.

The attitude behind this thinking is that this is the best of all possible worlds, no matter how it inconveniences those of us without money and power sometimes, and whatever is, is right---“an aphorism,” Dickens wrote in A Tale of Two Cities, “that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.”

Well, this explains why my solar battery-powered camp lantern doesn't work in the dark

Posted Friday morning, June 2, 2017.

Next time you’re in a debate over who’s to blame for Trump, neoliberals, the coastal elites, Democrats, point out that this man was a United States Senator and the only serious challenger to Mitt Romney in the Republican primaries in 2012---he’d have been an even more serious challenger but he didn’t have the money. So the answer is: Republicans like the ones who voted for Santorum.

Sad to be criticized by the left for something as obvious as solar (clouds & darkness) and wind (calm winds) are not reliable or consistent. https://t.co/tkNrTRbk1u

— Rick Santorum (@RickSantorum) June 1, 2017

And it's one, two, three, four, what are we experimenting for?

Posted Saturday night, April 22, 2017.

Our Man on the Scene for the March for Science in New York City was fellow blogger, Twitter pal, and regular visitor to Mannionville, Yastreblyansky, who sent this post card. Scientists love being wise acres.

Central Park West. Saturday afternoon, April 22, 2017. Copyright Yastreblyanksy.

Make sure you swing by Yastreblyansky’s blog, The Rectification of Names.

At home on the third rock from the sun

Monday night, March 6, 2017.

Reminder: At some point in the past you found out you lived on a rock hurtling around the Sun at 30km/s & you were basically cool with that.

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) March 6, 2017

Men...and Woman...of Science!

Posted Saturday night, January 28, 2017.

Saw Hidden Figures tonight. (Thanks to the generous readers who bought our tickets and popcorn.) I think it was a very good movie. I think it was. I’m not sure it was because I feel like it was a great one. It really hit me where I live. But it wasn’t just the subject. There was the nostalgia factor, of course. But the nostalgia was personal as well as generational. These photos might explain.

Here’s Taraji P. Henson as Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician and physicist who’s the main character of the film, with other members of the Space Task Group whose job was doing the math and science that put the first Mercury astronauts, including John Glenn, into space.

This is one of my favorite images from the movie, because of it’s symbolic import, and because it reminds me of this…

It really was a uniform.

I’ve posted this picture before, but in case you don’t remember or didn’t see it, this is General Electric’s Knolls Atomic Power Lab champion softball team circa 1960. The 14-0 on the blackboard is their record for the season. The short guy with pompadour in the center is the team’s captain and manager, Pop Mannion.

You can tell by their ties that some of these guys were rebels and mavericks compared to the guys in the photo from the movie. Pop Mannion’s brightly striped rep tie, for instance, is a pretty bold fashion statement for the time and place, but get a load of the tie on the cat to Pop’s right! I’ll bet he had a jazz collection. Beatnik.

Pop and his colleagues didn’t do any work for the space proram that I know of. They helped build the power plants for nuclear subs.

Doing the math

Updated below, Tuesday afternoon, January 24, 2017.

Adapted from the Twitter feed December 10, 2016. Posted January 23, 2017.

Math ain’t natural. But it is beautiful.

Taraji P. Henson as NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson doing some of the math that would send the Mercury astronauts into space and bring them home again in the movie about the team of African American women computers who helped get the United States space program underway, Hidden Figures.

Personal prejudice: Most people can’t do math. What we call math is actually simple arithmetic. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Calculating. What Jethro Bodine in his pride at his sixth grade education called cipherin’. Nobody does math, and can do math, until they understand why multiplying two negative numbers together produces a positive number. I’ve never understood that one. So I can’t do math.

I can cipher like a wiz, though. Like a sixth grader, at any rate.

This Paley Center panel discussion on Hidden Figures was interesting  and I can't wait to see the movie but I was a bit disgruntled by the way people on the panel who know better talked about math as if it's all arithmetic and anybody can do it and do it well if they put their mind to it and  get over the idea it’s too hard.

The panel included the movie’s director Ted Melfi; author Margot Lee Shetterly, who wrote the book the movie’s based on; Dale Davis Jones, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM; astrophysicist Jedidah Isler; and actor Aldis Hodge, whom I know best as the supernerd and hacker Hardison on Leverage and who was introduced, to my delight, as a “micro-mechanical engineer”---he designs and builds watches. The moderator was Dr. Knatokie Ford, senior policy adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a post you have to wonder’s going to exist in the Trump administration. If it does, it’ll probably be held by a Baptist Minister. The audience seems to have been made up of junior high and high school students. I think the panelists were trying to encourage kids, particularly girls and young women, and even more particularly girls and young women of color, to take up math and stick with it in order to go on to careers as scientists and engineers. This is a good thing.

But I didn’t like it that learning to do math got implicitly compared with learning how to write a sentence that parses.

As the son of a physicist and computer scientist who, hard as he tried, never could get me to follow his math when he helped me with my homework, and as someone who was an A student in math in grade school but was stymied by ninth grade algebra and defeated in eleventh grade by calculus, and as the father of someone who has struggled with a severe math learning disability---dyscalculia they’re calling it these days---and is two daunting math courses shy of completing his degree, I’m here to tell you...

Math ain’t natural.

We don’t think in numbers. We’re not good at holding them in our heads. Most of us count “One, two, three, many” and then, if we’re forced to go higher, “Many more, and a lot!”  and that’s as high or as complex as our numbers get.

Some of this is the result of biology, anatomy, and evolution---the evolution of bodies, and then the evolution of culture.

Evidence suggests that humans were talking to each other from the start, putting words to their feelings, coming up with ideas that could only be created with words, naming things. Naming things is what made us human. We evolved to speak and we evolved from speaking. Culture, art, and society are the result of words. We didn’t start counting until later when societies became more complex and more things needed to be sorted out. We can see our ancestors inventing math.

Some of it is a matter of habit and training.

The writing skills required to write a decent cover letter or quarterly report aren't much different than those required to write a novel.  But the math the heroines of Hidden Figures do to send astronauts into space and bring them home again is a little different than what you use to balance a checkbook. I can teach students to write a good cover letter using a poem by Adrienne Rich, or a play by William Shakespeare, or a blog post by Ta Nehisi Coates. In fact, I have. But I would be in awe of the professor who can teach her students how to do math using the General Theory of Relativity. And in the course of a day having to know what words mean precisely and how to use them effectively---having to make yourself understood and having to understand what others are trying to mean by using the words they’re using---comes up more often than having to cipher.

Sometimes “You know what I mean” covers it. But, generally, “you” doesn’t. That kind of sloppiness with words leads to fights, lawsuits, and messy divorces. People have to be more precise in their use of words, if only to stay out of trouble. More precise than they usually have to be with numbers. To take care of most of our daily business we can get by with simple arithmetic. Often, we’re not really using numbers at all.  We don’t calculate. We don’t cipher. We don’t have to. We remember. If we paid attention and studied and did our homework in grade school, we memorized just about all the calculations we’ll ever need. We don’t have to calculate that 2 + 2 = 4 or 10 x 10 = 100 every time. And handling more complex numbers is a matter of remembering our way through columns of numbers. If we remember to carry and know how to round off, we’re usually fine. Close enough is good enough.

That’s in casual conversation. In practical situations, when numbers matter, we still get by without doing math or, much arithmetic. Instead, we guesstimate. We eyeball. We measure by matching the lines on a measuring cup and count out the required amounts according to the instructions. We look for the sign that says “SALE” and---if we can’t remember what we paid for the same item last time, and we probably can’t, because, like I said, we’re not in the habit of keeping numbers in our head---trust that “SALE” equals “cheaper”.  To “do” a lot of everyday math, you need to be able to read more than add and subtract, and tell a good story.

If you’re painting your living room, it’s useful to have a rough idea of how many square feet of wall you have to paint so you can estimate how many gallons of paint you have to buy. Saves money and extra trips to the paint store. But an important part of the job is telling the clerk mixing the paint what you hope the room will look like when you’re done and another is describing the result to your friends at work when the photo on your phone doesn’t capture the full effect. And you don’t need to keep whatever measurements and calculations you started with in your head once you’re done. Nobody at the office wants to hear exactly how many square feet of wall you turned from taupe to eggshell white. They might want to know how many gallons of paint you had to buy and what that cost, but they’re more likely to ask you to define taupe and eggshell white and explain why you chose the color change.  What they’re really asking for is a story. “Tell us the story of how you painted your living room.”

Learning to write is learning how to tell a good story. Sometimes it’s a better story if there are numbers to illustrate it with. Sometimes the stories are about the numbers. But the ability to tell the story gives the numbers meaning, purpose, and effect.

Even at work, if you’re not a scientist, engineer, or an accountant, and math is called for, you don’t have to do the math yourself. You can use a calculator, ask Alexa, read the fine manual, check the price list, or call Bob over, he’s good with numbers. But then you better be able to explain to Bob what the problem is and what you’re looking for him to help you with. You need to be able to tell him that story.

So...as a self-important writer and as someone who has taught writing, I can’t help thinking that after elementary school, taking courses in composition, rhetoric, and literature is more not only more useful than taking classes in math, I think it’s more important!

The ability to think clearly requires you to have the words for you mean and be able to put them in the best possible order.  But communicating effectively, telling good stories, requires a breadth of knowledge about how the world works and what makes people tick and that imagination that requires a liberal education and the development of a sympathetic imagination.  After a certain point, teaching reading and writing becomes teaching history, philosophy, psychology, ethics, and morality, and even science. Teaching math is always a matter of teaching harder and harder math.

Math is about itself. Reading and writing are about everything else.

So, as someone who’s earned his bread teaching in the humanities, I’m jealous of the attention and the money directed at the math and science and engineering departments. I resent that the humanities have to justify their continued existence with crass economic arguments.

“Hey! Our students can get good jobs too! Well, at least they learn some stuff that can help them once they get good jobs, like how to write a memo or make an effective sales pitch!”

I hate the word neoliberal. But I only know it as an online epithet. Certain cadres of internet "Progressives" like to use it as an all-purpose insult for liberals and Democrats who don’t adhere to any point of their programmatic political doctrine, and as such it has whatever meaning the user gives it because it suits his purposes or feelings at the moment. Which is to say it has no real meaning. But if it does have any meaning in the analog world, it’s when it describes the self-interested principle that social good is best achieved by letting capitalism take its natural course. If it saves money or makes money and some of that money is used to promote the general welfare, then hooray! And if that’s what it means, then our colleges and universities have become hotbeds of neoliberalism.

STEM is a neoliberal dream.

Promote STEM and the government will throw money at your school. Promise the kids good jobs and they’ll flock to your school and more government money will follow. Target minorities and girls in particular and even more money sluices in. And look at the good you’re doing while you build the endowment and hire more administrators. Those kids get a first class education (Never mind that most of their classes are taught by grad students and adjuncts.) and will likely get good jobs when they graduate. They’ll become productive members of the wealth producing elite and isn’t that the whole purpose of education and of life, in general?

I don’t like any suggestion that the reason for going to college is job training. Students shouldn’t learn the principles of science, technology, engineering, and math just because that’s where the money is.

In no way am I saying students don’t need to learn to do math. It’s critical to critical thinking. It teaches them to recognize patterns, make associations, see things individually and grouped rather than lumped together.

The country would be better off if everybody knew how to use words precisely and how to think with numbers.

Like I said, we often get by with “You know what I mean.” Donald Trump ran his whole campaign depending on it. Of course what he really depended on was people not knowing what he meant and, it turns out, they didn’t.

Trump may not have won even the first Republican debate if more people knew how to use their words and knew when others didn’t or were using them to mean what they don’t mean, they being the words and politicians on the make using words to dissemble, distract, and deceive.

And he might not have won if more people could handle numbers on the fly.. If they could evaluate the numbers politicians throw around instead of react to them. “Gee, that sounds like a lot!” But is really it a lot? Is it too much? Or too little? Better if they understood the system and how things work and have worked or ought to work, realistically as opposed to how they wish it did.  More of those more people should include journalists.

“Drain the Swamp means what? The alligators get to come live in my swimming pool?”

“You’re not going to cut Social Security or Medicare but you’re going to sign Paul Ryan’s budget? But destroying Social Security and Medicare is built into Paul Ryan’s budget. Paul Ryan’s budget doesn’t balance unless there’s an economic miracle but it’s that balancing of the budget that brings about the miracle. Which is circular non-reasoning, but on top of that, in order to even come close to the point where the economic miracle will take care of things, Ryan has to get rid of Social Security and Medicare.”

Now, of course, the world needs scientists, engineers, and mathematicians. More of them and better ones. The world needs poets and painters and musicians and actors and dancers and historians and philosophers too. More of them and better ones too. The world must be peopled and the people must be educated, liberally, so that they know to treat each other as people and how to do that. Which sounds very egalitarian of me but my idealism has an hard, pragmatic, elitist, and, well, neoliberal core.

One of the goals of good teaching is identifying, nurturing, and helping to hone talent.  And while talent has a way of discovering itself sometimes, often it needs someone to come looking for it. A kid might not know she has the talent. He might not know he’d enjoy using that talent. They might not know opportunities are there for them to live lives built around and out of using their talents. And then they take a class, the get a teacher, they meet a friend and...their world opens up! They’re not just on their way up and out by way of a good job. They’re on their way to careers that will make them happy and productive, productive in the sense of making the world a better place to live in and not just a place with more money circulating. Their happiness and the hopefulness that follows from it spreads and the moral and spiritual wealth of the People increases. That’s true for children with any sort of talent, not just a talent for doing math.

That’s the ideal reward of good teaching. The practical side of the job includes teaching skills that allow less talented and untalented students how to do competently what their talented classmates do with mastery. This helps them to be better in the fields where they are the talented ones and, where it doesn’t help with that, a sense of competency---real competency, being able to do something well if not expertly---it still helps them on to happier, more hopeful, more productive lives.

There’s more. In learning the skills that allow the less talented and untalented to do competently what their more talented classmates do with mastery they learn what it takes to be a master of a talent or a skill. They learn how things work, and they learn what it takes to make things work. They don’t learn to be experts themselves, necessarily, but they learn what expertise is and where it comes from.

You can’t confidently hire an expert and put their expertise to work for you if you don’t understand what beyond their degrees and credentials make them expert. You either take them at their word that they know what they’re doing or...you don’t. You resent and reject them on principle, and get Brexit and Trump as the reward for your skepticism.

At any rate…

Jedidah Isler was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Yale. Dale Davis Jones is the first African American woman to be named an IBM Distinguished Engineer, which is a job as well as an honor. Mentoring younger engineers is one of a Distinguished Engineer’s responsibilities. I would guess this is the basis of Jones’ and Isler’s stake in STEM education and in education in general. They want kids to have the same opportunities they’ve had.

And it appears that that’s one of the lessons of the movie Hidden Figures. More than being able to do math that sends the Mercury astronauts into space, it’s about being able to put your talents, skills, brains, ambitions, and dreams to work for your own happiness and for the betterment of the world, and that requires getting an education and making the most of your advantages and finding the courage and strength---in yourself and from the company of others of like minds and like dreams.

So, despite my disgruntlement, I’m as whole-hearted a champion of kids taking math as I am of their taking every other subject.

But there is one more thing, another reason for taking math classes all the way through grade school and up into college.

I can’t do math. But I’ve seen it done often enough to know something about it.

Math isn’t natural. But it is beautiful!

And I think everyone can and should learn to appreciate its beauty

I wouldn't compare learning to do math to learning how to write. I'd compare it to learning how to compose music.

Maybe this is why so many mathematicians and scientists are also good musicians.

I don’t know about engineers, but I have this about mining engineers.

They rock.

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Updated to reflect my final grade: I liked this post when I was finally done with it, but Sherri's comment had me feeling like I didn't read the question correctly and blew the assignment, and now that PZ Myers has taken his red pen to it, I feel like I flunked the final. To tell you the truth, though, I haven't had this much fun being wrong in a long time. Here's Professor Myers' corrections: Being Human Ain't Natural.

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The Pope does SCIENCE!

Posted Friday morning, December 30, 2016.

As the folks at the Daily Edge point out, it’s an “awkward moment when the Pope is 800 years more scientifically advanced than America’s ruling party.”

Pope Francis: "Never been such a clear need for science" to protect the planet. https://t.co/f3D2Htjd6y

— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) December 29, 2016

“It is worth noting that international politics has reacted weakly — albeit with some praiseworthy exceptions — regarding the concrete will to seek the common good and universal goods, and the ease with which well-founded scientific opinion about the state of our planet is disregarded,” the pontiff said, according to a translation provided by the Vatican. He added that the “‘distraction’ or delay” in implementing global agreements on the environment demonstrates how politics have become submissive “to a technology and an economy which seek profit above all else.”

Won’t it be ironic if we liberals wind up looking to Francis for leadership in the fight against the rising tide of Trumpism here and in Europe?

This is the rare case when clicking on the tweet will take you straight to the article and not over to Twitter, but if you want to get to Brady Dennis’ story the conventional way, follow the link to Pope Francis: “Never been such a clear need for science” to protect the planet at the Washington Post

Meanwhile, New York’s own Cardinal Dolan has agreed to say a prayer and read a little scripture at the inauguration. Well, he would. And I guess somebody has to be on hand to pray for a miracle. But I Dolan has criticized our Know-Nothing President-elect’s xenophobia before and I pray he’s gutsy enough to do it again right there on the podium by quoting this passage from scripture, Matthew 25: 31-40:

“When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.  Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee? And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me….’”

Matthew 6: 19-21 would also be appropriate, I think:

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also…”

I know. Like I said. Praying for a miracle.