Science 2.0

Sometimes the precautionary principle can run amok.   Anti-science people who don't accept climate science use it to prevent meaningful policy actions related to the environment while anti-science people who don't accept biology block efforts to improve food sources so crops can grow in areas where the world's poorest live, or improve yields to feed more people, and use silly labels like "Frankenfood."

This afternoon we had the first formal meeting for product planning of the Science 2.0 television pilot.   As you can imagine, there was talk of technical details, how the creative guys will set up the shot lists and storyboard the segments, what segments we will use, and then some of the philosophical stuff.Like, what will make Science 2.0 a science show for the next century?I told the agency and the producer what a fond recollection U.S. scientists of today have for shows like "Nova" and Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" - but noted that at the time, those were not regarded as stodgy, traditional ways of doing science on television, they were cutting edge.

Proofiness, slightly different than Stephen Colbert's truthiness, is basically finding statistics you want to believe to enhance your confirmation bias.  It was coined by Charles Seife, a long-time science writer who teaches journalism at New York University, because he was outraged at skewed representation on both sides of the aisle, like Al Gore for cherry-picking data about global warming and George Bush for cherry-picking data about how tax refunds would save poor people money.   He wrote a book on it called "Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception" to clobber everyone he found doing it.

My wife and I once saw a rainbow and we discussed how it happened. She listened somewhat patiently for the first few sentences and then told me I was spoiling the magic of the rainbow, like it was somehow less romantic if she knew how it happened.(1)Men, you are with me on this; she has a man who can make a rainbow for her any time she wants - and will. That's a higher order of romantic, I think you will agree. Plus, I have to defend all rainbow-making men and note that because my rainbow is a special distribution of colors whose reference point is her eyes, no one else will ever see it. Is it literally for her eyes only.

Some stereotypes are self-reinforcing.   If someone tells you over and over that you are oppressed, if you hit an obstacle and fail, like all of us do at some point in our lives, a convenient excuse is that you are discriminated against.(1)There is zero data showing women are discriminated against in science, math or engineering - none.   But because there used to be far more men and those men were not lined up against the wall and shot to make room for women in faculty, the claim is that science academia is still prejudiced against women.

Science 2.0 favorite Lawrence Krauss of ASU tackled the James Webb Space Telescope issue on the Richard Dawkins website and a commenter there linked to my rationalization that canceling it might be okay, with the hasty disclaimer that he does not agree with what I write - the Dawkins site moderators, and perhaps Dawkins himself, have made their distaste for anyone outside the echo chamber well known so perhaps his rapid disavowal was necessary, though it seems odd Krauss would have the same conce

I have always liked dolphins but I can't pinpoint why - maybe it was "Flipper" when I was a kid, it can't be "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" because a whale was saving the Earth in that one.    It could certainly be Manfred Mann's Earth Band.  If you aren't familiar with Manfred Mann, he was a keyboard player from South Africa who made it big in England in the 1960s and then quit to simultaneously be more cynical than the pop hit factory his band had become and more pure at the same time; by doing jingles to pay the bills while he made the music he wanted on the side.

Thomas Edison did a lot right but there is one thing he got very, very wrong.Namely, a talking doll that was sure to be an inspiration for generations of future horror movie fans.   It was a bold idea, of course, Edison had a lot of those, but sometimes even a marketing juggernaut can't make something work for the public given technological limitations - we are also talking to you, 3-D movie makers.   

But...but...you have to love journalists, according to journalists.  Only we hold government accountable and gotcha videos and bloggers rehashing what we come up with or they see in press releases can't be the same thing, they insist.Well, it can, actually.  Journalists stopped being trusted guides long ago and the public caught on.   Journalists can complain about how much more vitriolic the discourse has gotten, but that's really only because the Internet has made it possible for both sides to get coverage.    

Most scientists and science journalists argue vehemently for basic research - and even more taxpayer money should be devoted to it, they say.   Politicians usually disagree and feel like taxpayer-funded research should have a goal or at least a defined result in its framework.

With the end of the space shuttle, we may also be seeing an end to manned space travel as a science endeavor.  I am not saying we shouldn't send people into space, we certainly should, but it should be just that - a bold voyage into the unknown and not rationalized with science, where it is not a very good one.  Robots are cheaper and better and the Congressional hearings are less messy if a robot dies.President Obama likely agrees about robots, since he canceled the manned successor to the space shuttle, the Constellation project and there is no valid replacement in sight.

The LHC and its lower-energy counterpart in the US, Tevatron, have reported some important Higgs news this past week - details of six searches for the Standard Model Higgs boson at CERN and another in Chicago coming up.