The Dog At Death’s Door

And now, please allow me the dubious honor of presenting this scene as it should have unfolded, in the form of a brief drama. The part of the sick man is being played in my mind by Greg Kinnear, and the part of the doctor by the incomparable Morgan Freeman. The scene is a doctor’s office.

Sick man: Doctor, I’m afraid to die. Tell me what lies on the other side.

Doctor: I’m a doctor, son. My job is to diagnose you and make you feel better, if I can. If you want spiritual guidance, you’d better ask a minister.

Sick man: But aren’t you a Christian?

Doctor: Yes. I’m also a golfer, but I’m not giving you advice on how to improve your putting.

Sick man: Don’t you know what’s on the other side?

Doctor: I have my beliefs, but I think you’re missing the point. Besides, you’ve just got a chest cold. Why are you so worried about death?

Sick man: I’m not worried about it. I was just making conversation.

(The sound of SCRATCHING comes from the door. The doctor opens the door and a DOG bounds in. He leaps happily on the DOCTOR and LICKS him in the face)

Doctor: Did you notice my dog?

Sick man: You mean the big slobbering beast who covered you with germs and is right now peeing on the leg of the examination table? Yeah, I did notice that. Can you please wash your hands again?

Doctor: Yeah, sorry about that. Anyway, he’s never been in this room before…

Sick man: He’s humping the biohazard container…

Doctor: He didn’t know what was inside…

Sick man: Now he’s scooting his butt across the floor. Doctor, I think I’m gonna go…

Doctor: All he knew was that his master was here, and when the door opened he sprang in without fear.

Sick man: And now I shall spring out, with great fear, and go see the doctor across town who doesn’t let his dog wander freely around the clinic. Um, thanks…bye.

And…scene!

Apply Respect As Needed

Not even YOLO packs so much stupidity into such a small space. That is some impressive stupidensity (I’m pretty sure that’s a real word).

This wretched phrase has roots in motorcycle culture, in hip-hop culture, and most noticeably, in douchebag culture. You see it printed on tee-shirts a lot, which is helpful because it alerts you instantly to the fact that the wearer of the tee-shirt is a tool. The problem with this expression is that except in a few rare cases (motorcycle gang members, for example) anybody uttering, wearing, or otherwise communicating this phrase is trying to sound a heck of a lot tougher than they actually are. Please stop. Everybody knows you aren’t that gangster.

The phrase itself is problematic even if you are tough enough to pull it off. Respect few? What kind of garbage is that? First of all, there are multiple kinds of respect. I humbly submit that there are four layers of respect, each of which applies to an increasingly exclusive group of people. Let’s start with the broadest.

There’s basic human respect – you know, the kind of respect encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It isn’t too hard to pay somebody this kind of respect. Just don’t be a tyrant. If you aren’t actively engaging in genocide, you’re already showing some respect to more than seven billion people. Congratulations. You won’t ruin the lives of millions, and you won’t eventually wind up in front of a war crimes tribunal.

And that’s a good thing, but it’s not enough respect for you to make it in polite society. You have to be concerned about your more immediate surroundings; your community and neighborhood. You have to eschew anti-social behavior on the homefront, including raping, murdering, stealing, and jaywalking. You have to hold doors (and not just for women), say “please” and “thank you”, and watch where you’re driving. This is a more personal level of respect; while you might not know all of your neighbors by name, you could potentially meet, dine, and twerk with each of the people whose lives your respect will positively influence, so choose your actions well when you’re out and about.

Above that, there’s a level of respect that you reserve for your friends. I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that you are going to show your besties a higher degree of respect; at least, you should. After all, they tolerate your company, so you’d better do something to deserve it. Respecting your friends means different things to different people, but in general you do things to show your friends that they’re special to you. You remember their birthdays, and listen to their boring stories, and when you’re out with a group of friends, you don’t insist that you all go to a five-hour-long interpretive dance show.

Finally, there’s the respect you reserve for the one person who has, for whatever reason, graced your life with his or her presence. I’m talking about your significant other, your life partner, your spouse, your lover, your confidant and co-conspirator. It should go without saying that this person is the focal point of your respect. In addition to affording him or her all the other layers of respect, you’ve chosen to open your heart and potentially make yourself vulnerable. If you cannot see that your significant other deserves a layer of respect above and beyond what you afford to the rest of humanity, then you should be single.

I think the problem with a lot of people (certainly the type of people who say things like “respect few”) is that they think respecting somebody is an admission of inferiority. They say things like “You have to earn my respect,” which is really selfish and thoughtless. By virtue of the fact that I am alive, I deserve at least a modicum of your respect, as you do of mine. I deserve to be treated with an ounce of decency, whether you know who I am or not. I deserve not to be marginalized, oppressed, or in any other way mistreated – in fact, everybody deserves that. If you think that giving all people a crumb of dignity somehow makes you a punk, then you are the one unworthy of respect…not everybody else. Don’t worry, though…I’ll still afford you the basic human respect I give the rest of humanity. That’s just how I roll.

Now let’s talk about fear. Fear – in a proper setting – is a healthy emotion designed to assist you in your survival. It is perfectly acceptable to be afraid of somebody who has the capacity and determination to hurt you and/or your loved ones. Fear engages a set of survival tools that can make the difference between life and death. Don’t deny the fear…learn from it.

And stop being such an asshole. Seriously.

It’s 601.3952191 O’Clock Somewhere

Points for the idea; not so much for the execution.

I know this isn’t offensive like some (most) of the memes I cover, but there is a problem. If you’re going to make a clock wherein the numbers of the hours are written as mathematical expressions using only the digit 9, you probably want to check your math. Look at the 5 o’clock slot. You see that exclamation mark beside the first nine? No, the clockmaker is not expressing his enthusiasm about the number nine. I mean, it’s obvious that the designer really likes the number nine, but that’s not the purpose of the exclamation mark. In math, that bit of punctuation indicates a factorial. Since the name factorial does absolutely nothing to tell you what it is, I’ll elaborate.

To find the factorial of any positive whole number, you simply multiply all the whole numbers up to and including the number itself. So for example, 2! (read as “two factorial”) is equal to 1 x 2, or 2. Five factorial is 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5, or 120. As you may well imagine, factorials get pretty huge pretty quick.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the factorial symbol is clearly beneath the square root (or radical). Following any logical order of operations, you should evaluate 9! first, then take the square root. Nine factorial is equal to 362,880, and the square root of 362,880 is approximately 602.4. (It’s actually irrational, which means the digits run on forever after the decimal point without repeating or terminating. Sort of like pi.)

If you subtract 9/9, which is the same as 1, you get about 601.4, which is clearly not what the clockmaker was going for. He or she should have placed the factorial symbol outside the radical…maybe like this:

Or better yet, like this:

In either case, one would find the square root of nine first (which is 3), then evaluate the factorial. 3! = 1 x 2 x 3 = 6. And of course 6 – 1 = 5.

I have seen versions of this clock that had the factorial correctly placed, so I’m not sure whether the “wrong” version is the original or a copy-cat. In any case, it seems mildly ironic to make a clock that would appeal to math nerds, then make a mathematical mistake on it.

Kudos, though, for understanding that 0.9 repeating is exactly the same as 1.

Brain Drain

Ah yes, the evil, evil mainstream media…how dare they wreck our lives by filling us with unfounded fears of climate change?

Wait…exactly what is the mainstream media, and why do they want to lie about climate?

Says here that the mainstream media are the media distributed by the largest channels, and therefore most likely to reach the largest number of media consumers. I’m not sure how one consumes media (Eating a newspaper?) but apparently a lot of people do, and that’s raised concerns among liberals and conservatives alike that the tide of public opinion could be unfairly affected if too many media outlets are run by too few people with a too-similar set of core beliefs. If you ask who’s running this Big Brotherish behemoth, the liberals will tell you it’s the conservatives, and the conservatives will blame the liberals. In other words, they both say that the mainstream media is not controlled by their own side. It’s nice to see them agreeing on something.

Does the mainstream media lie? Well, that’s sort of like asking if sharks eat people. Some sharks eat people, but it’s not fair to think that any given shark is a man-eater unless you have strong evidence to that end. Similarly, it seems cynical to develop a knee-jerk distrust of every mainstream outlet just because some of them have a long dark history of ethically questionable decisions and sloppy reporting.

But let’s get to the meat of this issue: climate change. If I distrust the mainstream media outlets on issues like politics, economics, and wars, must I also disbelieve the mainstream accounting of climate change? Well, as it turns out, the mainstream media are not my only source of information regarding this most important issue.

See, the scientific community has independently established the reality of climate change. It’s happening, people. Science-based websites like RealClimate make this abundantly clear, for anybody who cares to look. If mainstream media’s story on climate change mirrors that of climate scientists, then yes, I trust mainstream media as far as climate science is concerned. If mainstream media’s perspective on climate change does not mesh with that of actual scientists, then I distrust mainstream media. It’s really that simple.

Now some climate deniers will no doubt say that the climate scientists are bought and paid for by evil liberals who want to tax corporations into the ground, all under the guise of protecting the planet. In this paranoid delusion, mainstream media is simply the megaphone through which the liberal elite broadcast their lies. Of course there’s no merit to this fantasy. Skeptical Science explains succinctly how consensus is built in the scientific community, and how improbable it would be for a small cadre of paid-off scientists to swing the tide of scientific opinion. Any way you slice it, the verdict is in: climate change is real, people are causing it, and the mainstream media doesn’t enter into it (insert obligatory joke about blowing hot air). Regardless of whatever other lies mainstream media tells, their position on global climate change should be evaluated only in light of the available science.

On Aliens and Probability

I call this the Big Universe argument: the Universe is so mind-destroyingly huge that there just has to be alien life out there somewhere. There just has to. Unfortunately this is wishful thinking. In science we must be careful to distinguish between wishful thinking and actual evidence. Read on before you send me an angry comment about what a buzzkill I am.

If we’re discussing alien life, a reasonable place to start is with an American astronomer named Frank Drake. In 1961 Drake created a now-famous equation. The Drake equation was unusual in that it wasn’t intended to give a definite solution, but to stimulate discussion about the possibility of intelligent civilizations on other worlds. It worked beautifully.

In this formula, N represents the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in our galaxy with which radio communication might be possible. The rest of the factors are based on assumptions, and they become increasingly harder to estimate as you advance to the right side of the equation.

R* is the average rate at which stars are forming in our galaxy.
f_p is the fraction of those stars that have planets.
n_e is the average number of planets in each star system that are capable of developing life.
f_l is the fraction of life-friendly planets that actually develop life at some point.
f_i is the fraction of life-bearing worlds that go on to develop intelligent life.
f_c is the fraction of extraterrestrial civilizations that release some sign of their existence (radio waves, perhaps) into space, and
L is the amount of time over which each broadcasting civilization releases their signals.

As long as you’re using the Drake equation as a tool to encourage critical thinking, I have no problem with it. If you try to solve it, however, you have misunderstood its purpose. Drake made no effort to adjust the importance of each factor in his equation. A functional equation for calculating the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the galaxy would most likely contain exponents and logarithms and other scary math things that you haven’t thought about since high school.

Rather than evaluating each of the factors separately, I’d like to take the liberty of reducing the equation to two factors – sort of a Drake Lite, if you will.

N_l = P x n_p

In this shortened version, I am unconcerned with intelligent life. N_l represents the number of worlds in our galaxy that have life of any kind, from little green men to unicellular slime molds. P is the probability of life arising on a suitable world, and n_p is the number of life-friendly planets (and let’s be fair – moons) in our galaxy.

Let’s say that the more optimistic of these two memes is correct, and that there are 40 billion Earth-like planets. (By Earth-like, I assume we’re talking about a world with liquid water on its surface and a host of other factors that don’t automatically preclude the possibility of life.) Great…now solve for N_l!

And of course you can’t, because we still don’t know the value of P. P is a fraction somewhere between zero and one. If P is very close to zero, then Earth may well be the only planet in the galaxy that contains life. On the other hand, if P is very close to one, then there are billions of planets in our galaxy alone that support life.

So which is it? Is life on Earth a probabilistic fluke, not likely to be repeated elsewhere, or are life-bearing planets a dime a dozen?

To be fair, there are indications that life is not a fluke; after all, it got started on Earth just about as soon as it could, and once it got established, it took off in a big way. But I’d like to remind you that we’re still only dealing with one data point, and it’s dangerous to extrapolate from one data point to any valid conclusion about the universe.

So we don’t know, and that’s the most important message. We simply do not know. If we’re being scientifically honest, we must concede that the critical bit of data we need is frustratingly absent.

That’s not the same as saying that aliens definitely don’t exist. I would not presume to know either way. In fact, I kind of hope that aliens do exist; if not the Star Wars variety than at least some single-celled organisms. But to re-emphasize my initial point, it is very important to understand that wishful thinking is not the same as evidence. Perhaps one day the evidence will come in, and we can modify the Drake equation as needed and finally solve it. Until then, we must remain agnostic as far as extraterrestrial life is concerned.

Whitney Houston, We Have A Problem

I remember seeing a meme similar to this a while ago, when some other minor celebrity died. For all I know, it might have been Chris Kyle. In any case, the message was the same: Obama ordered flags at half staff when the notorious junkie Whitney Houston kicked the bucket, but made no mention of (insert name of conservative darling), who was a True American Hero. I was certain that I’d already written about it, but apparently not. Oh well, let’s rectify that situation right now.

First of all, I have no idea what President Obama did or didn’t say in the wake of Shirley Temple Black’s death, either publicly or privately, and I sincerely doubt that the author of this meme knows either. I know that Obama did not interrupt prime time television to announce a ticker-tape parade around the national mall in honor of Mrs Black’s memory…and I would not expect him to. Let’s be honest here: Shirley Temple was an exceptionally cute child star eight decades ago, after which she pursued a moderately successful but not especially noteworthy political career. I’m not trying to put her down, mind you, I’m simply pointing out that Shirley Temple Black’s post-Hollywood career is not necessarily the stuff of legends.

So did President Obama disproportionately honor the memory of Whitney Houston after her 2012 death? In a word, no. The left side of this meme is entirely fictitious, except maybe for Ms Houston’s political leanings, which are irrelevant anyway.

Shall we begin with the cause of death? Whitney Houston was found submerged in a bathtub. The coroner described her death as an accidental drowning, although the cause behind the cause was most likely a combination of her heart condition and recent cocaine use. She did not explicity die from a cocaine overdose, although she had been using.

And how did President Obama respond to her passing? He didn’t; at least, not publicly. President Obama never offered any public comments regarding the death of Whitney Houston. His press secretary Jay Carney said: “I know that … well, I haven’t spoken with him about it, but … I know that his thoughts and prayers are with her family, especially her daughter. I mean, it’s a tragedy to lose somebody so talented at such a young age.”

And that’s it. President Obama never ordered any flags lowered to half-mast. But New Jersey governor and controversy magnet Chris Christie did. Governor Christie defended his decision by saying that Mrs Houston was “a cultural icon in this state and her accomplishments in her life were a source of great pride for many people in this state and for this state as a whole. On that basis, I think she’s entitled to have that recognition made for her.”

I’m not here to bash on Governor Christie either, by the way. If he felt it was appropriate to lower the flags for Whitney Houston, then so be it. It doesn’t really affect the health or well-being of New Jersey or the United States, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time worrying about it.

The content of this meme was so easily debunked by a nanosecond of fact-checking that it boggles the mind that it gets passed along at all. This meme can only be accepted by somebody who is willfully ignorant; somebody who wants to believe the absolute worst about President Obama, no matter how ridiculous it is. I’m not saying the man’s perfect – there are legitimate reasons to dislike his policies – but don’t be intellectually lazy. Find out what he really represents. If you don’t like that, fine. And if you want to make memes that accurately reflect things Obama has said and done and which you find distasteful, be my guest. But don’t be a parrot for the conservative noise machine. Don’t assume that every negative story about Obama is true just because you want it to be true. In the words of another meme – a wiser meme: I don’t mind if you aren’t a fan of the President. I do mind if the reason why is a lie.

Well, There IS An Abomination Here

In what way does this make sense?

Satan is the ultimate bad guy in many religions. He is the deceiver, the spinner of evil, the author of everything foul (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he created this meme). In the video game of spiritual warfare, Satan is the final boss battle. If you’re devout, there is nobody and nothing to be hated and shunned more than Old Scratch himself.

Except for the female reproductive system, apparently. I’m not sure in what way the female reproductive system is comparable to the Prince of Darkness, but then again I’m not a misogynist. In order to understand this meme, I have to step inside the mind of somebody who hates and fears women and the things they can do with their wombs.

Unfortunately, finding somebody to serve as my woman-hating avatar is frighteningly easy. The Southern Poverty Law Center presents a list of blogs and websites that are overtly misogynistic in their message: the overarching statement from each of these sites is that women are evil, slutty, disease-ridden whores and that feminism is a terrorist movement whose only goal is to further torment the long suffering male of the species. I’m not even putting words in their mouths…the SPLC page provides snippets from each blog and that’s pretty much what they say.

If you’re angry about the plight of males in this increasingly female-dominated world, then you are clearly living in a constant dream state. I believe this is another instance of Perceived Reverse Victimization. I’ve written about this before, and it doesn’t seem to have gone away. The people that have been in charge for most of history suddenly feel oppressed when they are asked to stop being such jerks and to treat others with fairness.

With no evidence, I would be willing to bet that each of these men has had their fragile egos bruised at some point by a woman. Maybe the girl of their dreams rejected their prom invitation. Perhaps they were fired from a job after sexual harassment charges were lodged against them, and they just don’t understand what everybody’s so upset about – it must be women’s fault. In any case, I believe they are projecting deeply closeted concerns about their own adequacy onto an entire half of the population. In a way, I feel sorry for them; their attitudes probably stem from the culture of misogyny in which they were raised. Parents, take note: if you raise your children in an atmosphere of misogyny, don’t be surprised when your sons grow up despising women and treating them like filth. There’s a clear cycle of cause and effect.

Now let’s talk about the people that pass this meme along. I don’t know that all of them are woman-hating ass-hats, but they clearly thought this image was funny, so maybe they aren’t thinking hard enough about what the meme is actually saying. Let me put it into terms that everybody can understand: if you pass along this meme (without tearing it apart as misogynistic and stupid) then you give your assent to its message: that the part of a woman responsible for creating life – the part that may one day give shelter to your own children – is a dark and frightening place and the only apt comparison is the most evil being in all of Judeo-Christian mythology. Is that what you meant to say?

Shirting The Issue

Okay, a couple of things:

1. If a woman is wearing a shirt of any kind, she isn’t technically naked, is she?
2. Also, the conquering of a fortress is usually a pretty violent process, and performed against the will of its inhabitants. Are you sure this is the analogy you want to make?

Okay, I get it: if you’re a man who has managed to convince a woman to have sex with you, against all odds, you’re feeling pretty good about yourself. And if she puts on one of your work shirts to lounge around in, well, that is pretty hot. No doubt you’re feeling like quite the stud, and that’s okay. But be careful not to let that testosterone rush go to your head. Remember this: if you’re any kind of man at all, then she gave her love to you willingly. There was no conquering involved, nor should there ever be (unless she specifically asked to be conquered, with safe words and all). It’s a horrible metaphor for getting laid, and if you can’t figure out why, then maybe you should stay out of the dating scene until you get it all worked out.

It’s not that difficult: women are people, and as such they have basic rights, including the right to have sex with anybody they want to as long as that person is legally, psychologically, and in all other ways capable of giving their consent. If you are the other consenting adult in this equation, be grateful, but don’t be a lout. There are enough of those in the world already.

Swing And A Miss

And this isn’t it.

I’m going to tell you what is so beautifully ironic about this meme, but first let’s talk about that (maybe) huge gaping hole in the Universe. This demands a little historical background, so stick with me.

When scientists were trying to piece together the history of the Universe, several things became clear. First, the Universe is expanding, and there is no reason to think that it ever didn’t expand. Ergo, the Universe was much, much smaller in the past, and it must have also been much, much hotter. As space expanded, the intense energy of the Big Bang dissipated and cooled, but it’s not entirely gone. It’s still there in the form of microwave radiation permeating the Universe.

The cosmic microwave background, or CMB, has a temperature of 2.73 kelvins, or about -455 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s not far above absolute zero, so the radiation is pretty puny. Nevertheless, it can be detected by sufficiently sensitive radiotelescopes as a faint microwave “glow” that seems to come from every point in the sky and which isn’t connected to any known stars or galaxies.

Although the CMB is fairly uniform, there are minor variations across the sky, owing to the fact that the Universe isn’t empty. Distant galaxies add to, subtract from, and generally play with the microwave radiation as it zips around the cosmos, causing minor peaks and valleys in the intensity of the radiation. Regions where galaxies are a dime a dozen show up as slightly “hotter” – not because the galaxies themselves are hot, but because they tend to intensify the CMB radiation as it passes through their space. Galaxy-poor regions – often called voids – appear colder.

In the direction of the constellation Eridanus, in southern hemisphere skies, there is an anomalously wide cold spot in the CMB often called – wait for it – the CMB cold spot. If the cold spot represents a void, then the size of this void is staggering, and that’s saying a lot when you’re talking about intergalactic space. This supervoid would be centered between six and ten billion light years from Earth and would be about one billion light years across. That’s roughly 1000 times greater in volume than “normal-sized” voids, and while it’s not impossible for such a huge void to have formed in the Universe, it is statistically unlikely.

That’s one of the reasons why many scientists do not accept that the Eridanus cold spot is a supervoid. While some astronomers claim to have found a suspicious dip in the number of galaxies in the direction of the cold spot, others have used different sampling techniques and more conservative statistical calculations to show that the correlation between the supposed galaxy shortage and the cold spot is weak to non-existent. In other words, the existence of a supervoid is not established fact in the cosmological community. Although hypotheses abound, nobody actually knows what caused the CMB cold spot.

So that’s strike one for the meme: like many other gee-whiz scientific memes, it presents a disputed hypothesis as revealed truth.

Then there’s the image. That’s not the CMB cold spot; that’s Barnard 68. Barnard 68 is a molecular cloud, and it’s just about as different from an intergalactic supervoid as anything can possibly be. For one, it’s not intergalactic; at a distance of 500 light years, Barney (It told me to call it Barney) is well inside the boundaries of our own Milky Way galaxy. Secondly, it isn’t a void; in fact, it’s full of dust that blocks out the visible light from stars behind it, which is why it appears so dark. And it isn’t one billion light years across; it’s barely half a light year wide. Okay, half a light year is still huge by human standards, but it’s no supervoid.

So strike two for using the wrong image – either by accident or because the author assumed nobody would know the difference – and strike three for picking an image that is pretty much the opposite of what the author was talking about. If the author of this meme reads my blog and decides to remake the meme, here’s a false-color image of the CMB cold spot.

You’re welcome.

Rogan On Pot

You know what? Even though I don’t use marijuana and don’t have much of a desire to try it, I can’t think of many good reasons why it should be illegal. Studies suggest that it is much safer than either cigarettes or alcohol (like the meme says), so I guess I don’t have much to say about this one…

Except for this: it might not be accurate to say that marijuana has a zero-body-count. Joe Rogan is undoubtedly referring to the oft-cited statistic that deaths from pot overdoses are virtually unknown, although “family-oriented” websites like this one claim that while reefer may not kill by overdose, there may be other ways for weed to do you in. The article cites three case studies in which healthy teenagers suffered strokes due to dangerous blood pressure drops following marathon weed binges. They argue that other weed-related deaths may be underreported, perhaps because of weed’s reputation as a “harmless” drug.

It’s hard to know who to believe. Pretty much every website that even mentions pot has an agenda one way or the other; finding neutral statistics on cannabis-related injuries and deaths is nigh impossible. In the end, neither side is likely to budge from their position; ergo the issue of weed’s non-lethality remains controversial.

In any case, the coconut statistic is most likely utter bunk invented as a baseline for comparison with other unlikely events, such as, say, being eaten by a shark, or so says The Straight Dope. There are no reliable figures for the number of people killed by falling coconuts each year.

So what are we to do with pot? Well, as I said before, I can’t see much of a reason for keeping it illegal (despite all the breathless warnings from conservative family groups), but pot-lovers do themselves no favors by using spurious statistics in support of their cause. If the pro-marijuana crowd really wants to build inroads with their conservative opponents, they’ll have to talk money: imagine all the revenue that can be generated from legalized cannabis sales.