Extremely Late and Mean-Spirited Entry

Back in September 2007 I found an interesting map of ancestry survey results, showing that a large swath of braindead Appalachians considered their ethnic background to be "American." Since it's 7% of people overall, but actually the most common response in those areas, it seems likely that most of those 7% are localized to that part of the country.

As you can see, it's very pronounced-- prompting me to disdainfully write:

This is a convenient map of stupidity, provided by the U.S. Census. The "Americans" live in the off-white counties, which trace a predictable outline. Predictable if you are a contemptuous New England elitist. Apparently knowing what the word "ancestry" means is enough to make you an elitist.

Evidently, calling a large fraction of the U.S. stupid wasn't such an overstatement. The NYTimes made this handy map of the way the voting changed from 4 years ago, county-by-county and it shows basically what you would expect: since President-Elect Obama (I've been saying that way more than necessary) won by a solid margin, you'd expect to see a large gains by him everywhere on the map, as indeed there are...everywhere except among people who don't understand the meaning of the word 'ancestry'. These are the places where either (a) the last 4 years have somehow improved their opinion of the Republican party, (b) people were blown away by John McCain's ideas and campaigning abilities, (c) people noticed there was something a little...how shall I put this-- "black" about this Barack Obama character. Whichever it is, I don't feel too bad calling them morons.


Hmm, Maybe it isn't that dramatic...

Oh wait. Yes it is.

Conclusion: In this election -- Contemptuous New England Elitists 1, People Lacking Basic Vocabulary 0.

Never Forget

Where the dumb people live

Seven percent of the U.S. population reported their ancestry as American.

The number who reported American and no other ancestry increased from 12.4 million in 1990 to 20.2 million in 2000, the largest numerical growth of any group during the 1990s⁵. This figure represents an increase of 63 percent, as the proportion rose from 5.0 percent to 7.2 percent of the population.

⁵American was considered a valid ancestry response when it was the only ancestry provided by a respondent.

This is a convenient map of stupidity, provided by the U.S. Census. The "Americans" live in the off-white counties, which trace a predictable outline. Predictable if you are a contemptuous New England elitist. Apparently knowing what the word "ancestry" means is enough to make you an elitist.

Stupid Bumper Sticker of the Day

"Abortion is the Ultimate Terrorism"

The thing that's so great about about this is the indescriminant use of the word 'terrorism.' Clearly people have been getting a little sloppy about the terror part. You know, where you scare the public through random violence to achieve a political objective? Who are you trying to scare with abortions? Gametes? "If you two even think about combining, we'll forceps you so hard you'll wish you hadn't!!"

Kansas: As Dumb As You Think

This Kansan version of the periodic table from the re-Discovery Institute says it all. It's called 'flyover country' for a reason.

[h/t Primate Journal]

Like Fish in a Barrel

More fun science from Conservapedia.

Big Bang Theory
You don't usually see something cite Max Tegmark and Answers in Genesis at the same time.

The Big Bang Theory has had many dissenters including the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, the Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfven, and astronomers Geoffrey Burbidge and Halton Arp. It was Hoyle who coined the term, although he used it disparagingly.

Well, Hoyle was a 'reasonable' dissenter when the Big Bang was still controversial, but since the evidence soundly defeated the steady-state model he's just been a crank. Burbidge and Arp are at least honest cranks, but they are not what you would consider 'relevant.' It also says something that all of these people are a bit past their prime. Hannes Alfven is actually so far past his prime as to be dead. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in Plasma Physics, not astrophysics, and his model is a joke which is conclusively ruled out by the existence of the Cosmic Microwave Background's blackbody spectrum. He thought that establishing a starting point for the universe was sneaky creationism. Which is interesting in light of the next passage:

Most Atheists believe in the Big Bang theory. There is active research and speculation into what caused the Big Bang, but atheists agree it was not a deity.

Many scientists who believe in the Big Bang Theory are Evolutionists, though not all are. One can believe that God both created the Universe AND laid out the plan for all life in the Big Bang, as opposed to the idea that life evolved randomly after the Big Bang.

Young earth creationist scientists contest the Big Bang Theory stating that it is scientifically unsound, though few creationist criticisms are found in peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Do I need to comment on this stuff? Scientists 'believe' in evolution because they are scientists, and the phrase 'Young earth creationist scientists' is an oxymoron.
I also enjoy this sneaky little phrase, which is backed up by nothing at all.

Professional cosmologists are actively creating models (some of which contradict the Bing Bang scenario) and collecting data that probe the specific nature of the earliest observable aspects of the Universe.

Actually, no professional cosmologists are creating models that contradict the big bang. Anywhere.

Isn't is sad that in this day in age blah blah blah...

Galileo's luxurious house arrest

Conservapedia, as you may know, is the religious-right's answer to wikipedia. Most of us didn't know that wikipedia was a question, but these people seem to think it was. Evidently, just like everything else on the planet they live on, even wikipedia possesses a liberal bias. The humor inherent in making a Republican version of a well-liked and ubiquitous web encyclopedia is fairly evident, and others have picked most of the low-hanging fruit already. Their technique seems to consist mostly of unsourced little jabs about stuff running counter to what has been well established, thrust in nonchalantly. For example, "FDR is also famous for his New Deal, a set of economic planning reforms that were meant to bring about the end of the Great Depression, but instead may have prolonged it and caused American citizens to be burdened with unnecessary government programs for decades to come."

(Well the New Deal gave the South electricity, and I am feeling sort of burdened by looking through conservapedia...) So they still harbor long-lingering resentment towards political opponents of the 1930's, no matter how they were judged by history. Can the same be said of centuries-old scientists, whose discoveries and subsequent oppression made conservative religious forces of the time look bad? You know that it can. You would think that by now, we can all get together on a few things, like that figuring out the sun to be the center of the solar system was an decent accomplishment, and that being burned at the stake or imprisoned for trying to learn about nature is unfair, to say the very least. But no one is above the harsh, grossly misinformed scrutiny of conservapedia.

Copernicus

In fact the Copernican theory was no more accurate than the Ptolemaic model. It had no compelling physical arguments for its superiority, and it proposed no experiments for testing its novel features. In some respects, it was actually less accurate, as more epicycles had to be added (in place of Ptolemy's equant). Copernicus' main argument in favor of his theory was that it was aesthetically more pleasing as it allowed the planets to move in uniform circular motion, an idea later proven false by Kepler. Many of the ancient Greek arguments for and against heliocentrism remained unresolved for some time.

Kepler

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a Protestant in Germany, built on Copernicus's work and discovered that planets orbited the sun in elliptical rather than perfectly circular orbits. Kepler was a brilliant mathematician, astronomer and devout Christian who cited God many times in all of his writings. He felt it was his Christian duty to understand the creation of God, the universe. He also felt that man, being in the image of God, was fully capable of understanding the universe. Like Plato and Pythagoras, Kepler felt that God must have created the universe according to a mathematical plan.

Galileo

Galileo got approval from Rome to write his book Dialogue on the Tides, which discussed both the Ptolemaic and Copernican hypotheses, as long as it discussed both systems and did not draw a conclusion that would make the heliocentric world view be viewed as fact instead of theory [note bogus creationist-style fact vs. theory terminology]...Unfortunately for Galileo, the work was not made to be evenhanded. Indeed, the Ptolemaic character, called 'Simplicius' often stumbled over his own errors and seemed quite foolish. Galileo had moved out of bounds. The Church felt they had made themselves clear. At a different time, the reaction might have been different, but it was in the middle of the 30 Years War, the most deadly war in Europe ever fought between Catholics and Protestants. The Catholic Church had to show it had authority and strength.

The Church officials, who felt Galileo had embarrassed them, found that Galileo had erred by advocating heliocentrism as scientifically proven, which was not compatible with the Inquisition’s 1616 ruling or what Galileo had recently been told. In 1633 Galileo voluntarily submitted to Church authority and renounced his thesis of his book. At first he was sentenced to life imprisonment, but this was immediately commuted to luxurious house arrest. His book was burned, and the sentence against him was read aloud in public in every university. Galileo went back to studying motion and mechanics in his private villa.

His theory of tides turned out to be mistaken.

Relativity

Government Support for Relativistic research:
The Theory of Relativity enjoys a disproportionate share of federal funding of physics research today, much of it unsuccessful. The $365 million dollar LIGO project, for example, has failed to detect the gravity waves predicted by relativity....

There is a correlation between enthusiasm for the theory of relativity and political views, and there is an unmistakable effort to censor or ostracize criticism of relativity. Physicist Robert Dicke of Princeton University was a prominent critic of the theory of relativity and that may have hurt him professionally, even though his theory "has enjoyed a renaissance in connection with theories of higher dimensional space-time."

Other articles are rewarding in their own ways. Maxwell's focuses entirely on his possible opposition to the theory of evolution. Oppenheimer's repeatedly claims that he associated with communists and spied for the USSR. And this is just scratching the surface. What a goldmine.

Democrats and bad science, part 2

What actually got me going this morning was seeing this loony garbage by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the supposed connection between vaccination and autism. There are a number of parents groups who believe that their children's autism resulted from the mercury content in the standard vaccinations administered to children before the age of two. Apparently, there is some pending lawsuit on this matter, so has turned up in the news a bit recently.

The whole situation is pretty unfortunate. Basically, the way autism works is that the child starts out normal and healthy, making progress in a completely ordinary fashion, learning to speak, getting along with siblings and animals and all that. And then somewhere between age 1-2, abruptly slides backwards into wordlessness and anti-social behavior. Prior to the age of 2 also happens to be the time where children recieve a good deal of their vaccinations. As a further potentiality, it is not uncommon for children to respond adversely to vaccines sometimes.

Therefore, looking at it from a statistical perspective, there will be a certain number of cases where everything starts out normally, then the child is vaccinated, gets sick for a while, and then, by the time they've gotten over the vaccine effects, has begun progressing into autism. And given a large enough sample of people, it would almost be unusual if a bunch of parents who are distraught, upset, and irrational in the first place didn't make some kind of connection between these two things. It is only natural. At this point, the nutty, poor-understanding-of-medicine people step in and ride the parental anguish as far as they can by coming up with bizarre connections justifying what they already want to believe. Unfortunately though, there is no connection between vaccination "mercury containing" or otherwise and autism -- and it isn't for lack of looking. No causal link has been demonstrated in any of the epidemiological studies testing for a relation. Denialism blog has a thorough takedown of RFK Jr. of his wretched article.

By coincidence, I had heard a program about this on NPR last week, and I was very impressed by the moderator's decisive portrayal of these bogus claims as bogus. Not the usual "both sides deserve equal representation" approach that is so disasterously wrongheaded when it comes to reporting on global warming and creationism. Instead, they basically went into what causes these folks to hold these unsupported views and reassured jittery parents that it is far more dangerous to not vaccinate a child than to ignore a bunch of know-nothing cranks who feed on the ill-deserved respect of frustrated people.

But these kind of poorly thought out health scares aren't restricted merely to random outliers like RFK Jr. Walk into any Whole Foods, the modern-day fortress of American liberalism, and tell me how many different kinds of echinacea they have in stock. I'm betting it's more than 5. And who knows how many types of bottled water. Do you think those crystal healing types voted for Bush? I don't think so. Again, it isn't like there is some party plank about delivering herbal remedies to all taxpayers, yet to pretend that politicians who support good science are supported only by clear-headed people who actually know what good science is, is pretty naïve. As a group, they are definitely better than the alternative, but I am growing less convinced that it is a systemic phenomenon when it comes to general non-religious quackery.

Democrats and bad science

Democrats take a lot of pride in their generally 'reality-based' approach to the important questions. For the most part, they should be proud of this. For the mainstream party line stuff on the war, global warming, stem cells, etc where the conservative view is fairly illogical or outright denialistic, this is definitely true. It seems a good number of Republican positions are based on what they would like to be true (see, again, Iraq, Global Warming, anything related to religious superstition), and are not particularly concerned with the balance of evidence. Looking at the most contentious issues of the day, it seems that disdain for scientific and rational thought is a problem exclusively of the right. But this is not so.

When it comes to actual politicians this is actually true. You won't see many Democratic presidential candidates proudly declaring their ignorance to the world by stating that they don't 'believe' in evolution. Nor will you hear them regurgitate talking points on how 'the Earth is getting warmer, but we don't know whether it is man-made. You know, there are temperature cycles...'

And yet, the liberal demographic is still home to more than their fair share of fringey elements. Take for example the fact that in response to the question "Do you think that George W. Bush knew about the attacks of 9/11 in advance?" 35% of Democrats answered yes, and 26% said they were not sure. Even given that this question could be misinterpreted to include that August 'Bin laden determined to strike within the US' memo, that is still at least around one fifth or one sixth of the these people subscribe to the abhorrent '9/11 Truth' conspiracy theory business. This is in no way a mainstream view among influential Dems (unlike how the view that Iraq is or was related to terrorism in some way before we invaded is among the GOP), but still too large a fraction of their supporters to be comfortable with. Few groups manage to blend quite the same amount of paranoia, irrational thinking, and general offensiveness than these people. Other than the obvious affront to decency that they represent, they also happen to be an affront to reasonableness.

Conspiratorial thinking itself is stupid enough, but the garbage these folks turn out to justify it is even worse. "The way Building 7 collapsed was just like a controlled demolition!" WTC Building 7 was a nearby office building that collapsed later that afternoon from fires started on its lower floors. Nobody was killed, but apparently, the completely pointless and unnoticed destruction of this building is evidence of a sinister plot. Better yet, one of the dumbest arguments ever for anything has to be the claim that fire could not have caused the buildings to collapse. In a news clip on the radio a while ago, I recall hearing undisputed, noted materials science expert Rosie O'Donnell stating vociferously "Miraculously, the first time in history, steel was melted by fire. It is physically impossible...To say that we don’t know that it imploded, that it was an implosion and a demolition, is beyond ignorant. Look at the films, get a physics expert here from Yale, from Harvard, pick the school—[the collapse] defies reason."

[Clearing throat] Let's pick Dartmouth, I'm no expert, but this isn't difficult. It is really more engineering, but actually is so simple that anyone with a rudimentary understanding of how materials work can understand this. How do you think they shape steel, genius? Ordinary fires that we encounter in our daily lives aren't hot enough to liquify steel, and neither are the ones that were ignited in the twin towers or this other building, but they don't have to melt it to make the building collapse. Just weaken it enough that the weight of the stories above it are more than the steel beams can support, which happens at around 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Remember Fahrenheit 451? That is the temperature of burning paper -- the towers were exposed to burning jet fuel, and who knows what the hell was burning in 7WTC. Either way, getting the beams up to that point, and probably much higher, is not an unlikely thing. In fact, it is what happened. Popular Mechanics has a more thorough and excellent debunking of this particular nonsense, and Penn & Teller have an excellently angry debunking of it in video form. (Quoth Penn "Wow! Did you do that hard-hitting data research...in your ass?!")

In any case, to get back to my original point, though these people are by no means spokesmen for the 'reality-based' party, they are definitely a non-negligible slice of their supporters. How are these people better than the assholes in the middle east (and some here) who still believe, by overwhelming margins, that a group of Arabs were not responsible for the 9/11 attacks? In fact, they are probably worse, since there is widespread misinformation in that part of the world on that issue, here we've been inundated with evidence for years. (This American Life had an interesting account from one such, shall we say, 'willfully misinformed individual' a few years ago, it's Act 1.) Whether or not it is good that these nuts are supporting the right people, it is not a good thing to be associated with them.

I had planned on diatribing on a few other things but this ended up being quite long enough, so I may make it a series instead to fulfill the destiny of blogs everywhere: eventual decent into semi-political rants.

Terrible job, NPR

Yes, I'm one of those goofy tote-bag toting public radio listeners. I love their obsession with pronouncing foreign names correctly, and playing ambient noise about things that they are reporting. Nobody does a better job incorporating jungle sounds into their coverage of the South American economy. Nonetheless, nobody is perfect and I have heard a few atrocious things in the past few days that went uncontested. Ordinarily, I wouldn't think much of it, but I suppose I hold them to a higher standard, so it annoyed me. Here is the first:

Newt Gingrich spouting, unchallenged in any way, a bunch of patent falsehoods about global warming. Though he purported to express nominal support for the scientifically-supported position, he almost immediately lapsed back into the usual coterie of pseudo-scientific talking points about how global temperatures have varied over time (a fact, of course, that no one disputes). Repeated a bizarre claim that some climatologists of the 70's were worried about a coming ice age (claims made by a few stray researchers before we started to seriously study climate are not equal to a universal consensus made after decades of extensive research by people who actually know what they are talking about), and utterly embarrassed himself by parroting a rumor started by Erik the Red, that Greenland "is called 'Greenland' because it used to be green." Um, no. Every 2nd-grader knows that the Vikings named 'Greenland' to draw settlers away from the more attractive 'Iceland,' which is actually much greener. The Greenland thing is a retarded lie, spread by global warming deniers. Did other people not learn this stuff in elementary school geography?

Am I naïve to be outraged by the presumption by politicians that they get to make up their own minds about issues with which they have no expertise? If you asked one of these goons how to replace their water heater they would laugh at you and say that their plumber worries about that kind of thing. Yet when it comes to matters far more complicated and important, they mouth off with the kind of solemnity you would expect from somebody who peer-reviews evolutionary biology articles for Nature in their free time. (Except that they are probably spouting opinions that no sane person (or reviewer) would be caught dead with.) Even the assumption that it matters what politicians think about things with which they have no expertise whatsoever is laughable, it is hard to understand why the news media, which (in some imaginary utopia) serves the purpose of fact-checking these propositions, reports on counter-factual views with undue reverence. You don't get to decide what you think about issues that are a matter of scientific judgment. The only aspect of scientific issues that politicians get to have any involvement with is in deciding what to do about things. And then, only a little. Scientists tell you how the world works, and you manage the suggestions of what to do about it. That's how it works.

This is something I think about almost every day, but I don't think I've blogged about practically at all. The old aphorism that 'we are entitled to our own opinions, but not our own facts' is never more relevant than now, with public distortion of science that now seems to be frequent than ever. And if crunchy NPR is letting people get away with it, it doesn't look good for anyone else.

Creationism Officially Proven

Cosmic Variance digs up what is surely one of the finest examples of creationist thought yet enunciated:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

Checkmate.

Just like those other people living in darkness in the allegory of the cave, the last thing these folks see when dragged out into the light is the sun. Zing.

[credit, via]