Topic Tuesday #64 2013/10/08 - "Rose Colored Glasses & BS Detector Goggles"

Topic Tuesday #64 2013/10/08 - "Rose Colored Glasses & BS Detector Goggles"

I am, by nature, an inquisitive person. I do not take anything at face value. Everything needs to be respected enough to first give it some thought before drawing any conclusion. There are always shades of grey and multiple points of view. What these POVs have in common are facts. It's been said you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts, and I adhere to that in my daily life. It is important to not get lulled into a false sense of reality, as many of the opinions you have were manipulated without your knowledge a long time ago (maybe generations in the past). This, at its core, is skepticism. Doubt.
We have many built in tools for detecting fraudulent things. The ability to recognize deception is something we have honed over millennia. At the heart of the matter is a misinformation maelstrom; an arms race of lies. Better detection, better lies. Many concepts are so susceptible to deception that we think they are true, time and time again. The rose colored glasses of what we wish to be true, regardless of facts. And then...  Conspiracy theories! Delicious tabloid lies!
I love a good conspiracy theory, as much as the next guy, and can certainly buy into them from time to time. It takes patient research to ferret the facts out of a "conspiracy" for one simple reason, most of the information is factual. The conspiracy just strings multiple facts together with leaps of logic that are just outlandish enough to be both interesting and possible, even if unlikely. The more grand and secret they are, the more they play on our psyche.
We have to bust out the BS Detector Goggles and put away the rose colored specs that make life just a beautiful and heart warming paradise. What we need are tools. Here is a list inspired and expanded from Carl Sagan's own "Baloney Detection Kit" born from "The Demon Haunted World".
* First, we have to have data. As much hard data as possible. Quantifiable facts are all you should be interested in until it is time to reason beyond them.
* Whenever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts. Verification is important.
* Now, quickly you can apply Occam's Razor, and then Hitchen's Razor in turn.
  Occam's Razor: "The simplest answer is often correct." (Very powerful tool.)
  Hitchen's Razor: "What which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
  With the one/two punch of these epistemological razors, you can quickly cut to the heart of an issue.

* Brainstorm. Don't simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy; spin more than one hypothesis.
* Tear it apart by yourself. Try to defeat the hypothesis. Can you falsify the argument? Is it testable? Can/have others duplicated the experiment and the result?
* In testing the arguments hypothesis, did it rely on shaky information? You've heard it before (and with good reason), a chain (argument) is only as strong as its weakest link.

**When dealing with people, I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with "Logical Fallacies". We use them all the time in our speech and politicians pop them out every few words. I suggest taking a look at https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/home and http://www.fallacyfiles.org/taxonomy.html but here are a few of the very popular:
* Begging the question (assuming an answer in the way the question is phrased).
* Ad hominem - attacking the arguer and not the argument.
* Straw man - caricaturing (or stereotyping) a position to make it easier to attack.
* Argument from "authority".
* Loaded Question - a question that couldn't be answered without appearing "guilty".
* Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavourable" decision).
* Appeal to ignorance (absence of evidence is not evidence of absence).
* Confusion of correlation and causation.
* Post hoc, ergo propter hoc - "it happened after so it was caused by" - confusion of cause and effect.
* Meaningless question ("what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?).
* Non sequitur - "it does not follow" - the logic falls down.
* Special pleading (typically referring to god's will).
* Observational selection (counting the hits and forgetting the misses).
* Statistics of small numbers (such as drawing conclusions from inadequate sample sizes).
* Misunderstanding the nature of statistics (President Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence!)
* Inconsistency (e.g. military expenditures based on worst case scenarios but scientific projections on environmental dangers thriftily ignored because they are not "proved").
* Suppressed evidence or half-truths.
* Excluded middle - considering only the two extremes in a range of possibilities (making the "other side" look worse than it really is).
* Short-term v. long-term - a subset of excluded middle ("why pursue fundamental science when we have so huge a budget deficit?").
* Slippery slope - a subset of excluded middle - unwarranted extrapolation of the effects (give an inch and they will take a mile).
* Weasel words - for example, use of euphemisms for war such as "police action" to get around limitations on Presidential powers. "An important art of politicians is to find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the public"

Now hopefully you have prepared your own kit and can interrogate the world for facts.
Don't let the skeptics of the skeptics get you down either. Just because you traded your rose colored lenses in for a magnifying glass and ask a lot of questions and seem rather contrary, doesn't mean that the reality we share has changed, or that something tastes different because you know more about it. What they will be unhappy with is not being able to get a fast one over on you any more.
I'm all out of gum, watch out for the weasel words!

Topic Tuesday #53 2013/07/23 - "Climate Cycles"

Topic Tuesday #53 2013/07/23 - "Climate Cycles"

If we are to be skeptical and honest with ourselves about the world we live in, we need facts. LOTS of facts.
I am going to highlight some facts that are not often brought to the table when discussing climate change. I am only going to present the items. In general this is all from the field of applied mathematics and earth sciences known as Geodesy.

Earth's Path

The earth's orbit is not circular. It is elliptical, an oval.
We are closest to the Sun around January at a distance of 147,098,290 kilometres (91,402,640 mi) [0.98329134 AU] and farthest from the Sun around July at 152,098,232 kilometres (94,509,460 mi) [1.01671388 AU] Nearly 3 million miles difference.

The reason we have seasons is due to the Earth's axial tilt. The Earth wobbles a little. Over 41,000 years, the tilt fluctuates from 22 to 24.4. The average tilt today is about 23.5 degrees, roughly in the middle of a diminishing tilt trend. The more perpendicular the planet to the Sun, the more uniform the heating, and the higher the average temperatures. Based on the current figures, the Earth will be at 22.6 degrees tilt in 8,800 years.

Rotation (green), precession (blue) and nutation in obliquity (red)

The tilt undergoes an irregular motion known as nutation with a period of 18.6 years.
The orientation (rather than the angle)of the axis changes over time following a circle with a cycle of 25,800 years. This is the determining factor between sidereal and tropical years.
These changes are known as Axial precession.

The poles also migrate (Polar Motion).  The collective term for all the factors in its movement is "quasiperiodic motion". There are several periodic affects. A circular motion occurs annually while others have longer periods, one of which is the Chandler wobble with a 14 year cycle but a period of 435 days.
The rotational velocity along the axis is variable. The phenomenon is known as the length-of-day variation. Think of an ice skater, spinning with their arms in tight and then to stop they put their arms out. As the earth bulges out in the middle more, be it from continental drift or from glacier melt raising the sea level, the planet will spin slower, increasing the day.

Temporal Changes - Surface changes, and things over time.

• Plate Tectonics
• Episodic fault-line events.
• Tidal shifts
• Postglacial land uplift
• Temperature cycles: Ice age

Human interaction

• Material extraction
• Material relocation
• Teraforming
• Directed phase change of material. Fuel consumption

There are thousands, if not millions, of data points that go into climate science, and I don't want to blowup a single thread with all of them. Some of them, nay, most of them are deserving of a day in the sun and I will revisit them in time. Knowledge of your current situation is not enough to determine any kind of model for the future. We must study the rich past.
I hope that this has opened your eyes a little to the nature of our home planet. It is ever changing. Dynamic. Chaotic. Fragile- but only for us. It will go on spinning.  The thing to remember is perspective.

"Let's be clear. The planet is not in jeopardy. We are in jeopardy. We haven't got the power to destroy the planet - or to save it. But we might have the power to save ourselves." - Ian Malcom - Jurassic Park

Topic Tuesday #49 2013/06/25 - "The Middle Mind"

Topic Tuesday #49 2013/06/25 - "The Middle Mind"

I was chatting with an older Hungarian immigrant about cosmology, and he started to get visibly uncomfortable. I recognized this, and it redirected the conversation. We were outside of his comfort zone. This is a reasonable thing to have happen. Thinking about very big things, and very small things, can make your head hurt. These are realms that do not make sense to us, as we are of the middle. To our middle oriented mind, things appear smooth, water appears as a fluid, the sky appears blue, and pin points of light in the night sky appear as single stars. 

If we venture to the level of insects the surface tension of a drop of water is as solid, and likely very bizarre, in comparison to soil or plant material. Further into the microscopic, we find that nothing is very smooth, not even our beloved nonstick pan coatings. If we go further still, the very components of what we are made of appear and behave in ways that are completely counter intuitive to our observable reality. The fundamental building blocks of even atoms has yet more structure.

   Everything, everywhere, is made up of 12 building blocks (6 quarks and 6 leptons) and 4 force carriers that hold them together and 'guide' their interaction with each other. This may  change as the standard model adjusts for new discoveries, but right now, it's the best we have, and it works (albeit in not quite as elegant a way as would be preferred).

Now, up to bigger things. It is hard for us to comprehend the immense nature of the world around us. We may stare at a desk globe and see all the geopolitical dividing lines and vast expanses of blue, but that is only a pale resemblance of what this planet is. With the circumference of the earth, at the equator, being 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers) [more or less...] the farthest away you can be from anyone of your fellow human beings is around 12,450 miles, 8,000 or so if you could go through the rock beneath you.
While talking about going through things, let's consider the atmosphere. Easy for us to move through, yet it has a density. There are just as many molecules in a since centimeter of air as there are in a centimeter cube of titanium.  Everything around you has something in it. We breath air to consume the nutrients it provides. It is colorless. Or is it? The sky is blue, but the air in the room around us is clear, what gives? Perspective. A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the Sun, more than they scatter red light. When we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colours because the blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight. From space, we see our oceans reflecting blue light, giving our world its pale blue appearance.

The structure of the world is amazingly large compared to ourselves. However, Earth isn't that big, all things considered. When we examine our bright neighbor, the Sun, is roughly 109 times the size of the Earth; 865,374 mi (1,392,684 km) in diameter. It is so massive that it makes up 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar System.

The Sun is also a relatively small main sequence star. There are others in the sky that are much much larger and could swallow up our star like the Sun could gobble up any of our neighbor planets.
If we keep looking outward with a modest telescope we find that the pin holes of light in our sky is almost never a single star but a cluster of hundreds. Get curious enough and we up the magnification, and we find that those may well be more galaxies. When you look up, you see trillions of stars, you just can't tell. You are also time traveling... sort of. These points of light are so far away, that in the time it has taken for that glimmer of light to reach you, the source may no longer be there. Distances are the trickiest part of cosmology. Just consider the fastest thing in the universe, light, still takes 8 minutes to make the trip from the Sun to the Earth.

These are just numbers... They are unnervingly difficult to relate in your head, since we are of the middle realm of reality. (Maybe not even the middle, but that is my artistic license.) All we have is the math to even try and comprehend the vastness of the universe and the infinitesimally small nature of the things that it is made of. As Richard Feynman said, "If anyone tell you they understand quantum mechanics, they don't understand quantum mechanics." It's easy to say, "Don't be afraid of the vast unknown. Don't let it make you terribly uncomfortable." The truth is we are not built to interact with these scales. We can only do so with tools and not everyone swings a hammer with the same skill. If you feel dizzied by the world around you, be it large or small, take heart. You are not alone. For all those of the middle mind, water is wet, glass is smooth, and the sky - a wonder.

Topic Tuesday #38 2013/04/09 - "Are we alone?"

Topic Tuesday #38 2013/04/09 - "Are we alone?"

It's a classic question isn't it? It this planet the only one in the universe that has fostered life in many forms? Worse, perhaps, are Homosapien-sapiens the only "intelligent life" in the universe capable of asking the question?
There are a few facts that I am aware of that are amazing at giving a hint to an answer. Some of these facts do little more than to bend the mind and pose more query.

How many stars are in our home galaxy, the Milky Way?
(2×10^11 to 4×10^11) For those that don't like exponents, that's 200,000,000,000 to 400,000,000,000, or 200 billion to 400 billion stars. 

How many galaxies in the observable universe?
1.7×10^11 or 170,000,000,000 or 170 billion

How many stars in the observable universe?

3×10^23 or 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 300 sextillion or 300 thousand billion billion

(according to research by Pieter G. van Dokkum and Charlie Conroy published in December 2010)

This number is comparable more than the number of grains of sand on Earth.

When was the first optical telescope invented?
The year  was 1608, or 405 years ago.

When was the first radio telescope invented? 

The year was 1937, or 76 years ago.

What is the first known use of written language on Earth?
The Kish tablet dated to ca. 3500 BC is the oldest surviving example of proto-cuneiform signs.

This places evidence of language and recorded history being a time period of roughly 5500 years.

When was the first broadcast of a terrestrial radio signal?

The first experimentation with radio was done in the late 1800's. Marconi made the first radio transmission in 1895. This was 118 years ago.

What does all this amount to? What does this mean?

Every star observed could have planets. Statistically, some of those stars will have planets in the theorized "Goldilocks Zone" where the conditions are just right to promote the conditions to bear life. In short, to think that we are alone, could be attributed to egotism. The odds are not in favor of that conclusion. Then you might think of Martians and crop circles and cattle mutilations and  so on. There is a problem with that. It's the problem that we are dealing with every day as we keep looking up. The fundamental speed limit of the universe. The speed of light.

Effectively, looking into space is time travel. No really. Think of it this way, the light or radio signals that we are observing here on our planet, had to travel across space to get here. Radio and light, being energy waves, travel at the same speed. Our closest neighbor, Alpha Centauri, is 4.39 light years away. This is where your head may start to hurt, when you realize that whatever we observe from the 3 stars in the Alpha Centauri system, happened 4.39 years ago. The stars in Alpha Centauri could explode today, and we wouldn't notice until August 29, 2017. 

Our star, Sol (aka the Sun), is classified as a G2V main sequence star, roughly middle age at 4.57 billion years. We estimate it has another 4.5 billion years left before it expands to a sub giant, then  red giant, then a planetary nebula, and finally, a white dwarf. Our own solar system tells us much of our galactic neighbors. How many planets are possible, what types of planets are likely, the practical ages of stages of star systems. Basically, a wealth of information that builds upon itself to tell us what happened to stars thousands, millions,  and billions of light years away from us. 

The trick is time and distance. There are stars that we can observe that have already passed through their main sequence (where life is most likely to form). So then we can ponder, what could have happened. As we are aware at this point is that the world will go on without us. The solar system will change, but will go on for billions of years. We are a young species and just dipping our impatient toe in a vast ocean of the unknown. 

To reach out to a species on the other side of the galaxy, we will need to learn how to overcome the speed limit. Have other species done this? Impossible to confirm, until they stand here and show us. But it would be  unwise to underestimate any possibility. We don't know they would even be interested in talking to us, or eating us. 

We are young; our period of intelligence (based on written communication) being less than 6,000 years. The signals that are most likely to be noticed, to say that we are here, have been traveling into space for no more than 118 years. We need to take the long view and have patience.

Our culture has been shaped to be very self centered. For examples;

"The world was made for man."

"The Sun revolves around the Earth, and the Earth does not move."

"The stars revolve around us, if not Earth, certainly the Sun."

"Certainly we are at the center of the universe."

"Everything was made for us, for our time here. It all lead up to this moment."

Seeing stars explode and scatter their enriched guts across space to feed the creation of another world, I find it remarkably egotistical to think that; our small planet, in an average solar system, around an average star, in an equally unremarkable arm of one of 170 billion galaxies... could somehow be more special than any other. 

We are very lucky to have made it this far. It is doubtful we are alone, but it is even more doubtful that the other intelligent life has survived to make contact with us, or that they would have even noticed us yet. Should we stop looking? Never. There is still a chance, even if it is small. While we look, we learn. One day, when we take to the stars as a space faring race, escaping from an expanding star (or whatever else we may have done), we will need to have a destination. 

We need to survive long enough to do this, so smile and hug your fellow man. Know we are children. We will make mistakes. We just need to keep some perspective. We're only human.