Dean's World

I remember when this came around in 2003:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

Most people can read that paragraph just fine. But its claim is false. While it's easy for most people to read, not all such jumbles will work. For example, try this:

"The sprehas had ponits and patles."

Or this:

"A dootcr has aimttded the magltheuansr of a tageene ceacnr pintaet who deid aetfr a hatospil durg blendur."

Those aren't so easy are they? Here are the translations:

Matt Davis at Cambridge University has a lengthy examination of this charming meme.

Eliot Fang recently gave a talk at Sandia National Labs. He makes the provocative assertion that computers are so much more powerful today than they were 10-15 years ago that computer modeling today may in fact be more reliable than traditional laboratory and real-world monitoring methods:

Fang derided the pejorative “garbage in, garbage out” description of computer modeling — the belief that inputs for computer simulations are so generic that outcomes fail to generate the unexpected details found only by actual experiment.

Fang not only denied this truism but reversed it. “There’s another, prettier world beyond what the SEM [scanning electron microscope] shows, and it’s called simulation,” he told his audience. “When you look through a microscope, you don’t see some things that modeling and simulation show.”

This change in the position of simulations in science — from weak sister to an ace card — is a natural outcome of improvements in computing, Fang says. “Fifteen years ago, the Cray YMP [supercomputer] was the crown jewel; it’s now equivalent to a PDA we have in our pocket.”

No one denies that experiments are as important as simulations — “equal partners, in fact,” says Julia Phillips, director of Sandia’s Physical, Chemical, and Nanosciences Center.

But the Labs’ current abilities to run simulations with thousands, millions, and even billions of atoms have led to insights that would otherwise not have occurred, Fang says.

I know enough about computer technology to find myself uneasily beginning to agree with this assertion, at least in theory. It is not true that the performance of a circa 1991 Cray Y-MP supercomputer can be had in a PDA today, but it's nowhere near as much an exaggeration as some people would think. There are things possible with computer simulations now that would never be possible with traditional methods.

"Garbage in, garbage out" is still the #1 concern by far with any simulation. But the more simulations prove themselves able to make predictions that nothing and no one else can, the harder it's going to be for anyone to dismiss them.

Rest of the press release here on Sandia's page.

(Thanks Jeff.)

The journal Nature reports:

In a front-page article in The Guardian on 14 June, the newspaper's science correspondent describes how he arranged for a tiny fragment of the smallpox genome to be synthesized by a mail-order biological-supplies company and delivered to his home address. The company involved, VH Bio, based in Gateshead, UK, did not screen the sequence using software that checks orders against the genomes of dangerous microorganisms.

But:

Given that the issues have already been widely discussed, and that the synthetic biology community is attempting to address them itself (see Synthetic biologists try to calm fears), Endy is unimpressed by The Guardian article. "It slightly increases the risk of another stunt, and as such is irresponsible," he says. Bradley Smith, of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity in Baltimore, Maryland, is more sanguine. "It's not necessarily inappropriate to try to stimulate the debate — it was intended to grab attention and we'll see how that plays out." Endy notes, however, that "the debate is, unfortunately, extremely dramatic already".

Endy is particularly concerned that ill thought-through regulation might make the situation worse, not just in terms of hampering researchers, but also by driving the technology underground into grey or black markets. It is quite possible to buy or to build a DNA synthesizer if need be, and if commercial oligos get harder to buy, more people may do so. "It's not a straightforward lock-things-down situation," he says, "you could make things significantly worse that way." On the morning that The Guardian reported having bought its oligo for US$61.11, there were oligo-synthesizing machines available on web auction sites for less than $1,000 that could make any number of the things.

Poorly thought-out regulation is the biggest concern with these things. Clamping down on experimenting with gene sequencers would only cut our ability to respond to anything genuinely lethal someone might create. The equipment to synthesize DNA can now be had for a thousand bucks or less, and is only getting cheaper. A worldwide ban on it would just be a way of increasing vulnerability to those who ignored the ban.

Anyway, rest of the story here.

Last week, the sadly-deteriorated New York Times published a remarkably pompous and shallow editorial entitled Deadly Quackery, written by a Dr. John Moore with the help of a South African AIDS activist. In it, Moore and his sad little lackey repeated the beloved shibboleths of the HIV establishment: that "lately" a group of "denialists" (lovely anti-semetic imagery there), using "pseudoscience" have been questioning whether HIV really does all it's cracked up to do. The skeptics are supposedly endangering millions of lives by speaking their minds.

I am good friends with at least one of these "murdering quacks," a Dr. Harvey Bialy. He's a feisty, argumentative type who sometimes infuriates me, but he is definitiely not a pseudoscientist. Quacks may wish he was just stupid, but he is not: see this profile on Bialy if you have any doubts about his pedigree.

Harvey, a respected scholar, recently published a biography of another infamous "denialist," Professor Peter Duesberg, himself a National Academy member (the highest honor that can be accorded an American scientist by his peers). Bialy's biography of his fellow scientist Duesberg has received effusive praise from Walter Gilbert and Kary Mullis (two Nobel laureates) and from such scientific luminaries as Charles Cantor, Gunther Stent, Sir. Henry Harris, Gerry Pollack, George Miklos, and Lynn Margulis. Professor Pollack's review of Harvey's book can be found right here on Dean's World, and reviews from other distinguished scientists can be found right here on Amazon.

The desperately-wish'd desire is that all of these scientific luminaries should be denounced as crypto-Nazis and pseudoscientists. Sadly, not a one of them matches that description.

Dr. Darin Brown, a respected mathematics professor at Eastern New Mexico University, has recently tried to sponsor a debate on the subject. Sadly, all the pathetic wanna-bes like Moore could come up with in response was name-calling.

So tell me, Dr. Moore: did you think that being published in the pages of the New York Times made you obviously right? Did you think it made you axiomatically correct?

I ask Dean's World readers to read Moore's editorial and laugh as I did, and also maybe weep a little for the sad state of biomedical science. The emperor is not only buck naked, but has blue balls and a shriveled pizzle.

No? You think I'm wrong? Answer Harvey's challenge then, you coward.

When it becomes non-falsifiable dogma. Peter Woit has recently written a book, reviewed in the London Times:

In his view, string theory offers no foreseeable prospect of making predictions, a crucial criterion for any theory worthy of the name. Matching the theory with the way we see the world, he argues, depends on believing in sixseveral tiny unobserved spatial dimensions wrapped around each other. Hence there is an infinite number of possible choices as to how one would make predictions, and nobody knows how to determine which choice is correct. The objection invokes the late Karl Popper’s widely accepted definition of science. An explanation is scientific, according to Popper, only if it can be used to make predictions of a kind that can be falsified: in other words, can be checked to be right or wrong.

Woit’s second main objection is that string theory offers no possibility of producing experimental evidence. Even the proposed prodigiously expensive class of accelerators known as Superconducting Super Colliders (SSCs), he claims, would have failed to provide the merest clue as to whether the theory had merit. In the event, the SSCs fell victim to the hubris of physics. An infamous example is the one at Waxahachie, Texas. Budgeted at $11 billion, and designed to be 87km, it was cancelled by Congress in 1993 when $2 billion had been spent and 22km of tunnel constructed.

Woit’s most compelling accusation, however, is that the domination of string theory in universities has stifled progress in alternative research programmes within theoretical physics. As long as the leadership of the physics community refuses to accept that string theory is a “failed project”, he writes, “there is little likelihood of new ideas finding fertile ground in which to grow”.

You can read the rest right here.

I've always thought there was something deeply fishy about string theory myself.

Those mathematicians are always making trouble for the other sciences, aren't they?

One argument by warming skeptics is that the Kyoto Protocol would 1. do nothing to stop warming and 2. would utterly obliterate the US economy.

To answer point 1, Kyoto alone would not do enough, but it would be a good start. But doing nothing is worse.

With regards to point 2, I believe that is a gross underestimation of the strength of American innovation and ingenuity. I mean, how can we be talking about the Singularity one moment and then cowering in fear at a few mere engineering challenges the next? If anything the development of new technologies to implement Kyoto will be as much a stimulus to the economy and entrepeneurship as was the introduction of CAFE standards for automobiles - which stimulated the development of hybrids, continously-variable transmissions, and even "clean diesel" engines.

But all that aside, in fact we actually bear a gross ecconomic burden already by NOT having ratified Kyoto. Rather than make a clumsy attempt at explaining economics despite my lack of training in that field, I will leave it to the following expert to make the case:

The Kyoto Protocol is a key first step to help slow the onslaught of global warming and benefit conservation efforts…Until the United States passes its own limits on global warming emissions, innovative companies based here will lose out on opportunities to sell reduced emission credits to companies complying with the Kyoto Protocol overseas. Additionally, without enacting our own emission limits, U.S. companies will lose ground to their competitors in Europe, Canada, Japan, and other countries participating in the Protocol who are developing clean technologies.

That's the new treasury secretary nominee by President Bush, Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry M. Paulson Jr. Count him amongst my ilk.

National Public Radio's All Things Considered interviewed Al Gore a couple of days ago, about his film An Inconvenient Truth. There's also an excerpt from his book's introduction at that link.

I encourage everyone - warming skeptics and believers alike - to listen to the man in his own words and draw your own conclusions.

There was also a previous interview with Gore on Fresh Air, though in my opinion the ATC interview is better.