God: The Supernatual Watchmaker?

I've discussed this topic before, but I'm stimulated by various things to consider this again.  To begin, the believer line of reasoning goes something like the following:

When you see a building, you know it had a builder.  When you see a painting, you know it had a painter.  When you see the Universe, you know it had a creator.  This is God.  It's impossible for something to just come from nothing!

One rational response goes:

A builder takes existing materials such as bricks and concrete and re-arranges these to make a building.  A painter takes existing materials such as paints and canvas and re-arranges these to make a painting.  What existing materials did God use to make a Universe?  You mean he made a Universe out of nothing?  Didn't you just say "It's impossible for something to just come from nothing!"?

This response negates the argument by showing its internal inconsistency.

A typical response to such a negation is that "God" can in fact create something from nothing.   The believer following this line of "reasoning" is implicitly assuming that the deity is supernatural - that is, s/he/it doesn't have to follow the very laws of the Universe that s/he/it (pronounced 'shee-it') created!  I've encountered pushback from some believers on the notion that the deity is supernatural (for various reasons), but if you make this argument - that is, the so-called watchmaker analogy - then s/he/it must be capable of supernatural (i.e., outside of the natural laws of the Universe) deeds.  S/he/it is capable of doing what nature cannot do.  Indeed, if you also accept the omnipotence of the deity, then there simply can be no limits on what s/he/it can do.

I've argued in the past that the imposition of the God Hypothesis to explain the complexities of the Universe is both unnecessary and fundamentally useless, as it explains precisely nothing!  What value does it provide for understanding the origins of a watch  to "explain" its existence by invoking nothing more than the name of the putative watchmaker (say, Rolex)?  Even if the hypothesis were true (i.e., the watch was made by Rolex), this manages to say nothing of how the watch came into existence from raw materials or upon what physical principles it operates to keep time.  This form of mythical, supernatural 'explanation' is just what primitive people used to try to understand what we now know are entirely natural processes (thunderstorms, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.).  We now use science to explain many of those processes, and the gaps left for the s/he/it as an 'explanation' keep shrinking with time.

A key flaw in this fallacious builder (or watchmaker) argument for the existence of the deity is that if a deity created the Universe, who or what created the deity?  This is related to the notion (above) regarding the supernatural capabilities of said deity.  A common response is to claim that s/he/it exists entirely independently of space and time - the ultimate in universality.  A convenient escape hatch, this one, as it's utterly unverifiable and, if accepted, negates the possibility of any counter-argument.  This is an example of a deus ex machina - generally regarded as about as weak an argument as is possible to make, reminiscent of the famous cartoon by Sidney Harris in the New Yorker magazine.

Invoking a deity to explain the complexity of the Universe (or anything else) ignores the evident reality that the laws of the Universe permit certain forms of self-organization.  As a meteorologist, for instance, I know that weather doesn't happen randomly, but organizes itself into weather systems at various scales.  Such weather systems are governed by natural laws pertaining to the atmosphere.  Other examples in other sciences can be cited, of course.  Complexity "emerges" from simplicity precisely because of those laws of nature!  It happens all the time, so there's no obvious need to infer the existence of a deity to explain all the complexity we see.  Science can't explain everything, and makes no effort to deny that - whereas believers in a universal, supernatural deity think they can 'explain' everything by attributing it all to their chosen (mythical) entity.

Finally, another discipline of which the believers in the God Hypothesis seem to know little or nothing is quantum physics.  I'm no expert, but I know that it's entirely consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics for something to appear out of nothing.  In fact, it happens all the time, all around us.  Although such quantum fluctuations generally have little impact on the macroscale world we sense with our human senses, this doesn't preclude that quantum fluctuations could have had a huge impact at the time of, say, the so-called Big Bang.

At this point, such an explanation for the origin of the cosmos as a quantum fluctuation remains unverifiable and so is just speculation, but it's at least not inconsistent with the natural laws of the universe (as we now know them).  A supernatural deity is, virtually by definition, inconsistent with those natural laws!  Claims for the existence of such a deity are, in fact, utterly inconsistent with science.

Oh, the Agony of It All!

The self-righteousness, piteous wailing, conspiracy theorizing, and gnashing of teeth being put forth by certain teabagger conservatives in the media and the blogosphere has reached epic proportions.  This agony - of the Obama Presidency - is apparently unbearable to them.

Let me state from the outset that I'm no longer much of supporter of the current President, who has reneged on most of his promises to change the political landscape.  Whatever might have motivated his spineless inability to overturn many of the bad decisions made by his predecessor, the result has been a "business, as usual" administration.  The banking/corporate one-percenters continue to escape prosecution (for the most part) for their crimes and to enrich themselves on the backs of the American workers and middle class.  American constitutional liberties still are being eroded in the name of security.  American warfighters continue to die (and kill) in foreign interventions that can't possibly be ended by a battlefield victory (or loss).  The stock market prospers but the real economy continues to stagger toward potential collapse.  Many serious issues remain unresolved and mostly unconsidered in the political arena - violent crime, a disastrous "war" on drugs, climate change, genetic engineering controversies, intrusion of religion into public institutions, Guantanamo Bay, a crumbling infrastructure, etc.  Rather, we're spinning our wheels fighting about meaningless, partisan nonsense.  No, this has not become the best of all possible times.  Or even changed much.

The right-wing extremists continue to howl about the national debt, as they conveniently ignore the reality that their conservative GOP administrations have been the biggest contributors to that debt since WWII.  Their contributions to the deficit have come mainly through jingoist foreign policies that have embroiled us in pointless, unwinnable wars on foreign soil.  The mantra of "raise taxes and spend" Democrats is a mainstay of the conservative liturgy, whereas it seems the evidence favors a "cut taxes (for political gain) and spend" policy for the Republicans, which is a marvelous way to drive up the deficit.  The tax cuts have a trivial impact on the incomes of most Americans and haven't proven to be effective in stimulating the economy, despite the promises.  What this policy shows is the modern GOP wraps itself in patriotism by supporting the very military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned of, even as they run up the deficit.  If the Democrats truly were "tax and spend" then at least they would be honest about having the public support the favorite government programs of the Democrats (social welfare) through taxation.  The GOP drives up the deficit through spending on their favorite government programs (the military and corporate welfare) while cutting taxes (thereby increasing the deficit rapidly), and somehow claims the right to call themselves fiscally responsible!  A masterful job of propaganda "spin", but not very good for the nation.

Apart from the continuing crazed howls of "birthers" and those claiming the President is secretly a muslim, there is now the "He's coming to take away our guns, so we should barricade ourselves in our homes and fight it out with the police!" crowd of intransigent gun advocates.  Some of them see themselves as valiant soldiers, readying themselves to fight a treasonous civil war against the very same military most of them have been so eager to arm with modern weaponry of almost unimaginable firepower.  In their eyes, they're comparable to the patriotic militias of the Revolutionary War (who, by the way, were notorious for skedaddling as soon as the first shots were fired!).  Would you really not surrender your guns until they're taken from your cold, dead hands?  Really?

Yes, it's so painful for these teabaggers to go on through the remaining years of agony left to us by the existing President and his administration, some are willing to go to war against the elected government!  Curiously, the voters inexplicably seem unable to discern that the conservatives they're voting for are the very same folks responsible for so much that makes them unhappy at a personal level.  The GOP has admitted freely they want the President to fail as President.  So much so, they're willing to vote against the will of the majority of voters time and again.  They always claim that it's the riders and amendments that prevent them from voting for what the public deems appropriate legislation - but there are ways to overcome that.  No, this is a systematic policy of opposing most anything the President proposes, so that the administration can't succeed in accomplishing anything.  This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's fact to which the GOP politicians have admitted!  Yet conservatives complain the President has accomplished little or nothing during his time in office!  I don't believe the existing no-compromise policies of the GOP have any precedent in American history.  Perhaps a stronger leader than the existing President somehow could work miracles despite an uncompromising opposition, but it would have to be someone with so much 'clout' he could force things through by strongarm tactics (of the LBJ sort).

I have my doubts the current administration will be viewed very kindly by history, primarily because it's done little or nothing substantial to alter the miserable policies of the administration that preceded it.  Where was all the weeping and teeth-gnashing about the national debt by the teabaggers when the GOP held the Presidency and ran up huge deficits?  Where were all the conservatives complaining about the erosion of American freedoms under the excuse of a bogus "war on terrorism"?  When liberals complained about GWB and Crime, Inc., the conservatives accused them of not being loyal to the nation by failing to support the President - so how is their whining about the current President and their lack of support anything other than a failure to be loyal to the nation?  Just how well has the conservative keystone of "trickle down" economics via giving the "job creators" a tax-sheltered free hand worked for the middle class? As my friend RJ Evans says, "The hypocrisy always reveals the lies!"

Look, liberals survived 8 years of GWB and Crime, Inc., the teabaggers will survive 8 years of Obama.  The issue is ... what comes after?  More of the same from our two major political parties?  More divisive, inflammatory rhetoric, full of lies, smokescreens, hypocrisy, and misrepresentation?  More partisanship, scandals, finger-pointing, and business as usual?  Voters have a chance to make a substantial change, despite the overwhelming dominance of lobbyists, PACs, corporate influence, and the like.  We can insist on real choice in the coming elections, rather than the miserable "lesser of two evils" vote, or the irresponsible "Why bother?" non-vote.  We can make ourselves heard by routing out the incumbents!  All of them!  That simply couldn't be ignored!

How Much Longer?

The news these days is filled with incidents of tragedy.  A teenager hangs herself in despair after being bullied.  Athletes commit gang rape and are given minimal punishment, if any, while the victim is demonized as a whore.  A group of men beats up a homosexual for no reason other than he was gay.  Sexual assaults in the military seem to be on the rise.  We lose 30,000 people to guns in the USA every year.  These are all violent acts.

Most all of us have learned that certain things are simply unacceptable.  We no longer have much tolerance for racially-motivated violence.  We no longer think it reasonable that some people can enslave others.  There is no tolerance for violent religious persecution.  So far as I know, pedophilia has been rejected as acceptable behavior for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 

I suppose at some point in history, it was felt that institutional slavery, and attacks on other races or religions were just part of "human nature".  That nothing could ever be done about those things because we humans are flawed and beyond any redemption.  So there would be no point to trying to eliminate such evil acts.

Nevertheless, a horrible civil war was waged in the USA that ultimately eliminated overt slavery as an acceptable institution in this nation.  Most nations around the world have, indeed, outlawed slavery - how well this is enforced is another issue.  Here in the USA, numerous laws to eradicate racial discrimination have been enacted, and the descendants of the freed slaves are now protected by law from the sorts of evil that had been perpetrated on them during the post-Civil War period.  Again, enforcement of these laws can be problematic, but the vast majority of Americans now reject racism as an institution.  Persecution and discrimination against jews (and other minority faiths) have been rejected by most reasonable people in the USA.  Atheist continue to be vilified and hated by many Americans, so there is work to do on that score.

My main point here is that the "human nature" argument is fundamentally flawed.  Humans are not entirely driven by self-centered instincts.  We can choose to disengage from those behaviors we see as immoral and evil.  But such choices must be made one person at a time.  Events might stimulate large numbers of people to repudiate a particular immoral action, but each individual human being  still must come to conclude that some aspect of their character must change.  Laws can be passed (usually when most people already have accepted some change) but no one other than the person can change his/her own mind.  We often resist changing our mind just because someone else thinks we should, in fact!  This can be considered "legislating morality" - a notoriously unsuccessful thing to try.

The key is our collective attitude toward something.  If most people feel that some behavior is unacceptable, then legislation can be passed by majority rule, subject to scrutiny regarding its constitutionality. So you have to ask - do most Americans actually favor bullying, gang rape, violence on the basic of sexual orientation, sexual assault in the military, etc.?  Is that who we really are?

When it comes to bullying, gang rape by athletes, or violence against people because of their sexual orientation, these will continue to occur so long as people continue to believe that such acts are more or less "harmless".  Yes, the victims of bullying, gang rape, or discriminatory violence can survive and may even go on to prosper.  But ask the victims what they think about such things, and I'm pretty sure they don't consider what happened to them harmless.  For some victims of such things, their lives are damaged forever and perhaps even destroyed, and a few of them commit suicide eventually.  Is that harmless?

So when are we going to start doing something serious about bullying, gang rapes, and other evil violence?  Spineless, willfully ignorant school administrators don't want to get involved in battles between families (the bullies, the rapist jocks, they have parents, too, who always believe their children are veritable saints).  There seems to be a "let things work themselves out" attitude, and that such violence is inevitable.

If pedophilia is inevitable, does that suggest we should ignore it?  Should we ignore religious and racial discrimination?  Should we ignore slavery, if it were to arise again?  If you give up a just cause using the "human nature" argument, you're simply allowing the evil to continue unabated!  You become part of the problem!  How much longer will we continue to tolerate these things?  Are we willing simply to let immoral, evil behavior go unchallenged?  Remember the words of Edmund Burke:

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.

Storm Chasing - Hobby or Profession?

In the years following the end of my university education, I've mostly done my storm chasing in a 2- or 3-week "chase vacation" mode, with only a very few "spot" chases (one noteworthy spot chase was on 03 May 1999!).  This essentially means that I have a fixed window for chasing, and if little or nothing happens during that window, or if I screw up the opportunities (which happens frequently) within that window, then my chase year could be seen as pretty much a dud.  I've gone entire years without seeing a tornado, and even a few years without seeing a good supercell storm!

The chase season for me sometimes boils down to one really dramatic experience, tornadic or non-tornadic, that can last only about 20 min or so. For me, it only takes one such experience to "make" the whole chase season!  Other chasers may set a much higher bar for themselves, of course.  That's their choice, but putting myself under that much pressure to achieve a particular chase experience detracts from my enjoyment of all other aspects of the chase. 

Consider my 1995 storm chase season:  it was a year when my cup ran over with powerful chase experiences.  Among those experiences was 08 June, when my chase partner Alan Moller and I witnessed the tornado in Pampa, TX.  The video I shot during that single event has earned me a great deal of money over the years since, right up to the present. 

But it also has taught me an important lesson.  Be careful when you sign a licensing agreement for the use of your images or video footage.  There are some things you should avoid in any such agreement:

1.  A licensing agreement should never be "in perpetuity" unless they are willing to pay an enormous licensing fee for that privilege.  An acceptable "in perpetuity" license for my Pampa footage should have been $50,000!  What The Weather Channel paid me was a little over $1000!!  The safest way to do this is via "one-time use" contracts for each specific use of the work, rather than long-term contracts.  The user might well prefer a long-term contract, but they should be willing to pay you properly for the value it represents.  At the most, the agreement should be for no more than two years.  Contracts for "in perpetuity" use should always command an extremely high price.  You can never know when (or if) the opportunity for that really dramatic image or video will ever happen again.

2.  The wording in the licensing agreement should never grant the licensee the right to use the footage "to produce, exhibit, perform, transmit, license, sublicense, sell, market, promote, distribute, and exploit in any and all media throughout the universe" (key wording in italics).  This wording makes my registered copyright protection virtually useless for anything The Weather Channel might choose to do with my Pampa footage, including charging a third party for a license to use the footage from The Weather Channel.  A proper licensing fee for such an outrageous freedom to exploit my video should have been $100,000 (in addition to the "in perpetuity" charge)!  Obviously, they would not have paid that price, and my video would never have become theirs to use as they see fit.

Potential customers for the images and video from chasers usually have legal teams who help them to exploit eager, naive chasers hoping to make some income from seeing their images and video on TV.  Read the details of any licensing agreement very carefully, and remember that any contract is negotiable.  If they're not willing to abide by what you believe are reasonable terms, then don't license your work to them!  Don't agree to be exploited!

It's not that the money means so much to me, at this point in my life.  I'm simply embarrassed by how easily I was duped by The Weather Channel to allow them to use my Pampa video with virtually complete freedom.   They're still showing it.  I wonder how many other chasers have been duped similarly.  Be wary of your dealings with The Weather Channel and other media.

It's because of the hope to make large amounts of money that chasers impose pressure on themselves to have multiple "successes" and, for most chasers, success is that "money shot" - dramatic tornado footage, with debris swirling around the tornado.  That's what sells, but represents only a tiny fraction of the range of chasing experiences.  If your goal is to be supported by earnings from your chasing, then you'll put a lot of pressure on yourself, and may become a very unhappy, bitter person.  I've seen this very thing happen to former friends of mine, who alienated themselves from the people who knew and liked them in an obsessive effort to turn their hobby into their profession.  This is literally the "dark side" of storm chasing.  You'll be exploited by the media, who are experts in exploitation, and likely wind up alienated and unhappy. 

The market for storm chase images and video was always a niche market.  The opportunity to make good money selling images and video hasn't vanished completely but the market now is flooded with the work of the now-numerous chasers with good quality digital cameras.  Making a life-supporting income from storm chasing is an unrealistic expectation, so I recommend chasers abandon that goal.  It's possible you can earn enough from chasing to pay for your chasing, which therefore is a reasonable objective.  Relax and enjoy the experience ... it should be about the storms, not about you and your financial solvency!

A teaching moment ... weather versus climate

This spring of 2013 has been on a roller coaster so far.  Today is 01 May and there's snow on the plains, with the prospect of record low temperatures for this time of year, even as I enjoy a day with spring-like warmth (and a cold front bearing down!).  Facebook is agog with the weather, even among my weather geek friends.  The persistent weather pattern has favored sending powerful arctic air masses into the USA repeatedly.  That pattern itself is, at any instant, the result of many processes interacting in complex and rather poorly understood ways.  At times, the weather pattern is "locked in" to a certain structure, so that it can stay more or less unchanged for many weeks, or even whole seasons.  So what we're getting from this pattern is alternating warm-ups and cool-downs.

It's a cliché (for good reason) that the climate is what you expect, but the weather is what you get.  I wrote an essay about this some years ago, when I was upset about the widespread use (and misuse)  of the word normal.  In that essay, one topic was the standard averaging period in use for what is the so-called climatological normal period (30 years) used by the National Weather Service.  The NWS is careful to point out that "Note that the climatological normal taken over different periods of time (30 years, 1000 years) may be different."  Thus, what's considered officially "normal" by the NWS can change with time, and of course, it does change!  30 years isn't a particularly meaningful number of years - it's short and it's arbitrary.

This highly variable spring is a classic example how the real atmosphere works, and how the climate is not the same as the weather.  Despite everyone's real experience, many people persist in the belief that the changing weather is automatically an indication of the changing climate.  Let me illustrate with some typical expectations: we expect daytime to be warmer than nighttime, although most of can remember situations where the opposite was true.  We expect colder temperatures in mid-winter than in spring, although most of have experienced situations where the opposite was true.  And so on.  Despite our own personal experiences, weather changes seem to catch many people by surprise (and unprepared).

In my professional work with tornadoes, I often say that the weather producing tornadoes doesn't know anything about the calendar, the clock, or the map.  It can happen in places and at times where it's unusual to experience tornadoes.  Tornadoes have occurred all over the world, at all times of the day, and in all seasons.  When the atmosphere assembles the ingredients for a tornado in an atypical place or time, the tornado will occur despite being particularly infrequent at that place or time.  In the very same way, if record low temperatures are set this week as we move into May, the weather is not "wrong" or "crazy" and these aren't necessarily "freak" events.  What is typical of the weather is that it varies, sometimes to an extreme!!  Who has not experienced a mid-winter warm-spell, or a summer cool snap?

We don't know the absolute limits on that variability, because our sample of the weather with modern instruments only goes back about 150 years.  Do you really think that all of the possible weather events have happened within a record of 150 years?  Guess again - even if we had accurate quantitative weather data that went back a thousand years, or ten thousand, that record would still fail to sample the full range of what the weather is capable of doing.  Climate scientists have come up with some ingenious ways to estimate average temperatures many thousands of years ago, thereby extending our record back well before the invention of meteorological instruments - these are the basis for our current understanding of how the climate has varied over very long periods, but superimposed on that long-term graph are large fluctuations from one year to the next.  We have something similar in the climatology of tornadoes:

The figure is for the number of days with 7 or more reported tornadoes, but if it were simply the number of tornadoes, the result would be similar.  The real climatological long-term average by day of the year is not known, but it likely would be quite similar to the red line produced by a smoothing of the data.  There's no reason to believe that particular dates are favored over adjacent dates - the climatology should be a smooth curve, like the red line.  Evidently, there's wide variability from one year to the next.  In effect, the red line is a proxy for the climate and it can be seen that on a particular day of the year, the number of days with 7 or more tornadoes can be quite far from the climatological expectation.

If there were ever to be a year that was perfectly "normal" (however you choose to define normal) every day, everywhere, it would be the most unusual event in human history!!  A perfectly normal year would be a freak event!!

This year's spring is a perfect metaphor for the difference between weather and climate.  Keep this in mind when you see media coverage that confuses the difference.  Be informed.

A Pox On Both of Them!

In the backward politics of this vividly crimson red state of Oklahoma, last November in the presidential election, I was not given any acceptable options.  Only the Republican or Democrat candidate.  No write-ins allowed.  No other candidates were allowed on the ballot.  And there was no option to vote "NO!" for President.

So my only option was the inevitable:  the lesser of two bad choices.  This seems to have become the default situation in American politics these days.  Yes, there were clear differences between the Republican and Democrat candidates, making it relatively easy to choose between them.  But I was not permitted to vote my conscience, not permitted to reject both in favor of a third party candidate, or to simply vote "NO!" - to express my profound displeasure with the candidates offered to me on my ballot.

With time, I'm becoming less and less satisfied with the current sitting President.  I'm not one of the lunatic fringers who thinks Barack Obama is a foreigner, or a closet muslim, or a communist-socialist, out to take away everyone's guns before installing a dictatorship.  But I do find his performance in office to be mostly about maintaining the status quo established by his predecessor.  Guantanamo remains packed with prisoners being held without charge or trial.  A war continues in Afghanistan, taking American lives, to say nothing about those of innocent civilians.  Drones can now target pretty much anyone in the world on the whim of the President.  No charges, no evidence, no trial - judge, jury, and executioner by remote control.  The Patriot Act remains in effect.  Universal health care has stopped far short of where it should be.  Corporate and banking executives responsible for the plundering of our economy and ruining the lives of millions of Americans go unpunished and unchecked in their greed. I could go on and on.  The President simply has not even come close to living up to his promises and has caved in to conservative political pressure with hardly a whimper, over and over again.

No, the default assumption that if I take a position proudly that would be called "liberal" (as if that's some sort of vile curse word), I must be a supporter of Barack Obama's administration (or that of Bill Clinton, or whomever) - is simply not valid.  I think I can discern things I dislike about all the recent liberal Presidents in my lifetime.  It's  true that I dislike the conservative Presidents even more, of course.

American politics is such that political parties now act against the will of the American people in many ways.  They're no longer responsive to the electorate.  They're bought and sold in a cynical 'market' where political office can be subverted to support the highest bidder, not the Constitution.  Although I certainly believe a lot of my conservative friends have been duped into supporting things that are contrary to their own best interests, I detect a growing dissatisfaction within the ranks of the 'moderates' among them.  Not all conservatives want to force the christian religion onto the secular American government and its public institutions.  Not all conservatives favor a jingoist foreign policy, where American warfighters are mired in endless, pointless conflicts in which America's freedom and liberty are not at all at stake.  Not all conservatives want to replace science in the classrooms of our public schools with religious dogma and denial of the reality of anthropogenic climate change.  Not all conservatives are adamantly opposed to reasonable enhancements to gun control, such as universal background checks.  And not all conservatives are in favor of the misogyny and bigotry embodied in the statements of some Republican politicians.

It is high time we all stopped voting for those craven politicians offered to us by the two dominant political parties.  It's time that we voters began to take political office away from the corporations and the demagogues - push all these bastards out of office!  Centrist conservatives and liberals can unite to propel a positive change in the political atmosphere!  Rather than wasting our time talking past each other and promulgating divisive propaganda, we can unite to reject politics as they have become, in favor of politics as they should be!  Let's work to have more than two alternatives included on our ballots, so we can begin to find a consensus that rejects both the dominant political parties as failures to represent us.  Give us a choice beyond the lesser of two evils!!

One Among Many Speculative Notions

I was watching a cable TV segment on "The Origins of the Universe" - it featured a theologian amidst a number of scientists - and clearly was centered on the idea of whether or not the universe was created by "god".  Of late, there seems to be a lot of cable "history" and "science" programming that has a focus on religion.  A curious trend, that.

Anyway, it was interesting to watch the show because I suspect that many non-scientists failed to grasp the amount of misinformation generated during the course of the show.  It always seemed the rather arrogant theologian got the "last word" a lot during the discussions, which represented something of a religious bias in the show.  He always was able to get in some dig about the science, without the scientists being given the chance to respond to his "arguments".

A key notion in the whole discussion of the origins of the universe is that all of the proposed versions of how the universe began are nothing more than speculation.  No one can actually claim to know the answers, for sure.  (Unless they're religious believers who always know all the answers!)  For the purposes of this discussion, I'm using the word "speculation" in this context to mean unvalidated hypotheses.  Ideas are a dime a dozen - anyone can have an idea that purports to "explain" something.  The tough part is to develop convincing evidence to substantiate an idea.  The 'god hypothesis' is nothing more than one among many speculative ideas.

Diverse ideas are out there in the physics/cosmology community about what caused the universe to come into being with the so-called Big Bang.  The science underpinning the Big Bang itself and its aftermath is on pretty firm ground these days.  That the universe began in an unimaginably powerful singular event can be, and has been, tested with observations.  The preponderance of the evidence supports the idea.  The evolution of the universe from that moment to the present is mostly in very good agreement with what we think we know about the laws of the natural world.  Given the Big Bang, it seems that science has a pretty good handle on what happened later - not every detail, of course.  One sticky detail is the origin of life on the Earth - but given life, it seems that evolutionary biology can take it from there.  A key principle in science is to know the limits of what science can say about a subject.  Scientists are generally pretty careful about that.

The issue we constantly confront in arguments with religious believers is that science can offer no evidence to confirm (or deny) their ideas of how the Big Bang (or the first life on Earth) came to be.  Scientists can speculate, but we presently don't have the capability even to test any of the scientific ideas that seek to explain these mysterious events.  Therefore, all those scientific ideas are on the same playing field as the ideas of religion - with the very important exception that scientific ideas must conform to logical principles (including mathematical logic) and be plausible in the context within which science operates.  Religious "explanations"  seem to be little more than modest elaborations on the notion that "god did it" - an idea that actually explains nothing!  If our "answer" is "god did it", that gives us absolutely no useful information.

Imagine someone from another planet landing on the Earth and finding a watch.  On the face of the watch is the word "Bulova".  A watch is obviously a manufactured artifact, but the fact that it was created by "Bulova" gives our alien visitors absolutely no information about its intended use, or how it works to accomplish that intent, or how it was manufactured, or why it was made in that particular way.  Science seeks to "explain" things in terms of how and why natural objects and processes work the way they do.  It does not seek to associate those objects and processes with some entity.  That some entity might have created natural objects or processes is to postulate something that may or may not even exist.  Before seeking to "explain" things in terms of a proposed entity, one first would  have to establish that such an entity exists.  This, of course, has never been done.  The fact that there is no absolute proof this entity does not exist is completely irrelevant!  If the evidence of how and why some object or process works leads us to the hypothesis that a creating entity was involved, as it surely would for our watch example, that remains at least a logical possibility.  Distinguishing natural objects and processes from those created by an advanced entity should be easy.  Certainly, if alien visitors found a watch, it would lead them to postulate a 'watch creator' that understood the operating principles and possessed the capability to assemble raw materials into a watch.

But what about a rock?  Or a bird?  Or the weather?  What evidence about these objects and processes leads us to postulate a creator?  Complexity?  Hogwash!  Complexity arises spontaneously in the natural world from the nonlinearity of the physical processes.  Simplicity would be far more demanding of an explanation than complexity!

The 'god hypothesis' is exactly on a par with all the competing ideas of scientists about the origins of the universe (and life on Earth).  Except that it's possible in the future that science will find ways to test the scientific hypotheses and perhaps a comprehensive explanation will emerge from the scientific method.  Unfortunately for religious believers, unless the putative 'god' chooses to reveal himself in some obvious and unambiguous way, there is no such possibility for finding evidence on behalf of an entity that can do acts of creation without following natural physical laws.  You can't use logic and evidence to underpin an irrational belief.  Religion recognizes no limit on what their putative "god" can do, and believers assert that they know the explanation for everything - their god did it!  End of story.  Their arrogance (and ignorance) is palpable!

This will upset some of my friends ...

With the Congress having just rejected the notion of universal background checks before gun sales, I just have to write this.  I know I have friends who are very adamant about opposing any enhancements to gun control in the USA.  Some may be offended.  So be it.

I'm a gun owner.  If someone wants to confiscate my gun, however, they won't have to kill me.  Frankly, I find rather scarey those who claim to be willing to die before having their gun(s) confiscated.  One wonders if that might qualify as grounds for denying them the right to own a gun!  Anyway, a law enforcement officer can confiscate my gun if there is reasonable cause to do so.  At the moment, there is no such reasonable cause, so I would protest such a confiscation through the courts, should it happen.  This is how a society under the rule of law is supposed to operate.  Sane people don't barricade themselves in their homes and shoot it out with law enforcement officers just to keep their guns.  Does it make sense to resist law officers to the point of shooting at them?  Is this something we want to embrace?  I think we know where that leads, and it's not good for anyone.

The "logic" used by many gun owners (evidently, a majority of them) is that any enhancement to gun control legislation is another step down a slippery slope to an inevitable confiscation of all privately-owed firearms.  Yes, this is a wildly speculative, even absurdly exaggerated argument.  Background checks already are required for many retail gun purchases.  The new law would've extended that to gun shows and online sales.  The basic idea is that we don't want to allow legal gun sales to the criminally insane, convicted felons, terrorists, etc.  I don't know of anyone who would admit to favoring such sales, but nevertheless, many gun owners oppose universal background checks!  The phrase "cognitive dissonance" comes to mind.  How can anyone be opposed to universal background checks for any reason other than the "creeping confiscation" argument - which is such a paranoid delusion, it amazes me that anyone thinking this through could arrive at such a position.

Some gun owners see their guns as protection against a government gone wild - this has come into vogue among some conservatives who are apoplectic over the election (and re-election) of a Democrat President.  Good luck with that war against the government (i.e., treason), folks.  If the government goes insane and starts confiscating legally-owned guns for no good reason, you might be able to find enough public support to sustain a guerilla war against the government, but with the weapons at their disposal, the government will seriously outgun you!  You're living in a Red Dawn movie fantasy - it would be a slaughter and your piddly AK-47 or AR-15 with your favorite 30-round banana magazines won't be worth much against government firepower.

Yes, I know guns don't kill people - people kill people.  I get that.  Many gun owners advocate the solution to the gun violence problem is more guns in the hands of more people!  Tell you what - people with guns are much more likely to kill than people without guns.  To say nothing of suicides and accidental shootings - guns are primarily tools for killing and they're effective.  It's what guns enable humans to do.  Some people use guns responsibly and without any intent to kill other humans whatsoever.  But the more people that have guns, the more likely those guns will wind up in the hands of someone quite willing to kill someone else.  And the gun in those hands will do what it always does so efficiently - enable that killing.

I'm not in favor of outlawing guns, and no reasonable person wants that.  So why is it that the 'logic' against any enhancements to gun control is that any new restrictions will inevitably lead to gun confiscation?  That line of 'reasoning' just paralyzes a rational discussion of what to do about gun crimes in this country.  If any enhancement of gun control is going to be opposed on the "slippery slope" argument, then there can be no meaningful discourse on the subject.  Ever hear of the word "compromise"?  Isn't that how our republic is supposed to operate?

At one time in USA history, we had no gun control whatsoever.  The romantic image of the "Wild West" where everyone carried guns is pretty much a sanitized fantasy.  Lots of people were killed by guns, including those who weren't even being targeted by the shooter(s) - that was a violent society.  Does anyone really want to go back to a society with no gun control whatsoever?  Is that the power of that fantasy - that it deludes people into being nostalgic about those times? 

Most of the civilized people in the Old West didn't want that sort of killing in their towns, and law enforcement often implemented a gun ban in towns to cut down on the gun violence.  Laws against uncontrolled ownership of automatic weapons were instituted in part because of Mafia violence using fully automatic guns, even though most of that violence stayed within the Mafia.  Who wants gunfights raging in their town, especially at that level of firepower, even if they're only targeting other gangsters?  Does anyone really want to go back to that sort of society?  In urban ghettos, that "Old West" or "Gangland" society is being played out today.  Is that really what we want?

Perhaps extremists opposed to any gun control should consider moving to the "freedom" of Afghanistan.  There, you'll find a society completely unencumbered with the onerous burden of gun control.  Pretty much anything goes.  Enjoy!  Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

More Thoughts on Education

As we approach the end of the spring semester, graduations loom on the horizon for some.  Thus, I'm reminded of our obligation as educators to prepare our students for their lives and careers.  Many business leaders are dissatisfied with the education system, as many new graduates don't have have a functional grasp of critical skills that they should be obtaining from their educational experience.  And it's evident that the US public, on the average, is embarrassingly ignorant about many things:  history, math, science, etc. 

It also appears that K-12 teachers and university faculty are feeling various sorts of negativity from certain circles (notably, the teabaggers).  K-12 teachers are terribly underpaid for what they do, and the poisonous two-headed monster of politics/bureaucracy has definitely muddied the waters for K-12 educators and for university faculty.  I have always been puzzled by the poor salaries paid to our public school K-12 teachers who, after all, are charged with educating our children, who in turn represent our future.  Does it make sense to pinch pennies when it comes to our future?  School is not always what it should be - see here and here for a somewhat more extended discussion - but the failings in our education are not solely the fault of teachers and professors.

Nearly everyone knows one or more "educated idiots"- people with post-baccalaureate diplomas who manage to be incompetent in their profession and/or seem to have little or no common sense.  A diploma is mostly about being persistent, and doesn't depend much on intellectual horsepower.  There is no basis for the widespread academic elitism - not in science and not in any other aspect of life.  Just because you have a diploma (or even more than one) doesn't guarantee a thing about how smart you are compared with someone lacking such a diploma.

As I was nearing the end of my undergraduate studies, I discovered something wonderful about education:  if you accept responsibility for the success of your education, rather than depending on anyone else, then you can take control of your educational outcome!  I call it "taking ownership of your education" - and you can "cheat" the system by getting precisely what you want from the process, no matter what obstacles they might throw up in front of you, like bad teachers.  Of course, this presumes you have some reason to be in school that makes sense to you, rather than being there because someone expects you to be there, or whatever.  If you have what you believe to be good reasons for obtaining a diploma - in some career paths, a diploma is mandatory, for example - then you have an unending motivation to get something from the experience.  And when you take possession of your education, you almost certainly will be successful along the way.

A while back, I wrote two 'books' about how to be a successful college student in science or engineering - one for undergraduate students and one for graduate students.  Although I necessarily had to write about science/engineering education, I believe many of the things mentioned in those 'books' can be applied by anyone participating in college education, regardless of their career path.

I've also written about the broken promises of the American educational lie - sadly, an education is no guarantee of anything, despite its heavy cost in both time and money.  Done successfully, it may prepare you for success in life and career, but that success is not automatic.  In bad economic times, the promise of a rewarding job in your chosen profession can be elusive.  Having said that, if you don't get your educational outcome, then the chances of your being allowed to pursue what you've dreamed of doing are even smaller, and may be nearly impossible.

Education is not so much about memorizing facts, although some poor teachers seem to behave as if they think so.  It's mostly about learning :

  (1) how to answer your own questions,  
  (2) how to think logically and solve real-world problems (big and small), and
  (3) how to recognize bullshit when someone is attempting to feed it to you. 

You should also take the opportunity to make a serious effort to learn communication skills (via both the written and the spoken word) because everyone needs those! 

For all the graduates-to-be, congratulations!  Whether you are done with school or have the prospect of more in front of you, ask yourselves if you've accomplished these educational goals.  If not, you probably need to take responsibility for learning these things on your own.  You will need them!

The NWS Reward for Employee Idealism - Revisited

Some time back, I posted a Web essay regarding how the National Weather Service (NWS) rewards the idealism and dedication of its employees.  Recent events have pushed me toward an update of that essay.  Nothing has changed fundamentally, however.  NWS management has, by and large, continued to be ignorant of and uncaring about how their counterproductive choices and management decisions can affect their employees negatively.  And the employees have, by and large, doggedly persisted in the face of rampant mismanagement to put out the best forecast products they can, given all the constraints imposed on the process by their managers.

In other words, the employees must struggle to find ways and means to work around the challenges and obstructions forced on them by their managers.  And their reward for managing to accomplish this end year after year, decade after decade?  More of the same nonsense, often redoubled in its inept stupidity!  Many NWS managers continue to live in a bizarro world, where they think their employees are working for them!  The fact is, the vast majority of NWS employees are busting their asses to serve - not their managers, but rather their customers, the American public!  These incompetent managers should be working to help their employees become successful, but most of them clearly demonstrate, day in and day out, that they believe it's the duty of the employees to make the managers look good!

The economy is in deep trouble right now and the government bureaucrats (from the politicians down to the middle-level managers - like NOAA management) have no clue how to make the hard decisions about where to cut their budgets.  So they decide that across-the-board cuts are the way to avoid having to make any difficult decisions.  And that's true - it does indeed prevent them from making any tough choices.  Rather than reward their productive employees and penalize, or even eliminate the unproductive drones (yes, Virginia, there are unproductive drones in the Civil Service!), they simply spread the burden equally among them all.  They thereby penalize the  productive employees and organizations, while effectively rewarding the drones!  I saw this happening when I was still a NOAA employee, and my sources make it clear that this has never changed.  It remains true today.  Why is that?  One obvious explanation is that the people making the selections for NOAA and NWS management positions are either political hacks who have no understanding of what these organizations do and how they really produce anything useful to the taxpayers, or they're clueless careerists who don't really care a whit about the organizations they're pretending to manage.  The net result is the same:  remember the old saying "shit rolls downhill"?

As it stands, my friends at the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) have been unable to fill vacancies in key forecaster positions for quite some time, now.  This works a hardship on everyone in the SPC.  It might be possible, through some questionable practices indulged in by some other NWS organizations, to overcome some of the resource limitations plaguing the SPC.  But they (the SPC)  steadfastly have refused to engage in shady administrative practices, preferring instead to do things "by the book".  Here's the most likely outcome to the process:  as their budget limitations force them to deal as best they can (via legal means) with the cutbacks, someone is watching them, ready to pounce.  If they continue to maintain the high standards of productivity and product effectiveness they've achieved in the past, then someone is bound to say "Well, things seem to be going along just fine with your limited resources!  Why should we restore them? You obviously didn't need them!"  In other words, by making the system work with less support, they may never get back the resources they had before the cuts!  Even worse, deeper cuts might well follow - "If you're getting by so well with less, then we should be able to reduce your resources still farther!"  That is their "reward" for their hard work and sacrifices!!

As I noted in my essay, the dedicated, productive public servants of the NWS - the forecasters and their support teams - are trapped by their own ethics.  They can't bring themselves to fail to serve the public just to make a point!  Until they fail in their duties, everyone in the management chain above them is happy and secure in their positions.  They have nothing for which to apologize or to explain because the workers refuse to allow failure to occur!  And their employees' reward for that inevitably will be more cutbacks, more inept, stupid management decisions, more worthless hardware and software procured by a system destined only to fail until the forecasters figure out how to make the clunky systems actually work, despite their patheticaly bad designs.  Forecasters don't want to look themselves in the mirror in the morning and see the face of failure to serve the public.  So they keep the system from failing, despite the efforts of their managers to screw it up.

But the incompetent, worthless managers likely contemplate their faces in their mirrors and congratulate themselves for having figured out a way to be totally incompetent and still get performance bonuses and promotions for their mismanagement.  Perhaps they feel the stupid ones are their employees, who work so hard making the system work and getting little or nothing positive in return!

This is how we repay our dedicated public servants.  Is it any wonder they often give up and become cynics (i.e., they become what they despise!).

I'm not ready yet to throw in the towel!

From time to time, I'm reminded of the times of pure goodness brought into my life when in the company of friends and family.  Pink Floyd said it well in their song Free Four from the album "Obscured by the Clouds"-

The memories of a man in his old age
Are the deeds of a man in his prime.

I was struck by the importance of that when I first heard this song - as a relatively young man.  Time has only heightened my perception of the significance of the message therein.  In today's electronic world, where so much of what passes for communication is by electronic means, the simple act of meeting and spending time together requires more commitment than sitting at a keyboard.  Personal, physical contact is an act, a deed, if you will, that requires effort and often involves costs.

In the electronic sphere, where most of the conversation is through a keyboard, we have the sorry spectacle of flame wars, miscommunication, divisiveness, outright nastiness, anger, and just outright ugliness.  Such "communication" doesn't involve the intimacy of physical proximity, where your nonverbal communication is at least as important to the process as your spoken words.  It now often involves Internet "memes" - mostly graphic images with a few words - that inevitably oversimplify and serve only to divide us with slogans and generalizations or to reinforce existing beliefs.

If you go only by the torrent of what passes for communication via the keyboard, it's not difficult to become cynical - disillusioned - with humanity.  Yes, there are some efforts to communicate at a deeper level than political/religious/social memes, and there some items that carry messages of hope and happiness.  But I sense a growing alienation from one another and anger in the USA and the world.   Perhaps we are building toward a James Kunstler-esque apocalypse that will shatter today's world and leave us with a "Mad Max" nightmare of predatory gangs, dying technology, and violence.  That is certainly one possible future for us.   But it's not the only one.

The electronic media are full of dire predictions - doom and gloom that will proceed if we continue to depart from a (largely mythical) ideal past state, if we continue toward a theocratic oligarchy, if we continue toward socialism, if we continue toward thought control, if we continue toward a "one world" view that abandons our national chauvinism, if we continue toward atheism, if we continue toward ecological disaster, if we continue down any of a vast array perceived paths to dissolution and degradation.  And the Internet allows free rein to pessimistic slogan-mongering and superficial thinking.  We as a species are vulnerable to demagogues of all sorts, who claim to see evils around every corner and are trying to rally us to them for guidance about what to do.  And all too many of us are willing to follow them, unable or unwilling to pierce the fog of words and slogans.  There are few voices calling for thoughtful, careful, honest appraisals these days.  It's mostly about rallying against something, not something positive.

But when I pause and ponder those moments in my past to which I look back with the most happiness, they're dominated by occasions when I was in the company of certain people.  Friends and family who've somehow managed to pierce the barriers that separate our seemingly isolated minds.   We've achieved real communication by the simple act of being in each other's company, sharing something we enjoy - food, drink, the natural world in all its beauty and harmony, art in its many forms - and, above all, that companionship of others in our journey toward personal death.

What we say in our words is nothing when compared with what we do with our lives.  And what we do usually falls short of what we say.  Few of us can say we've availed ourselves of every possible opportunity to be with friends and family.  Social media can bridge that gap only so much.  Treasure those moments.  The act of sharing space and time together with friends and family will produce the memories that comfort you on your deathbed.  I doubt that "keyboard moments" are capable of that.

The Arrogance and Injustices of the Nobel Prize in Physics

Shortly after the turn of the century, Vilhelm Bjerknes published his hydrodynamic theorems regarding circulation.  It turns out that there are strong analogies with regard to this mathematics with some aspects of electromagnetic theory, such that Bjerknes' theorems are relevant even outside the domain of hydrodynamics - the physics of fluids (and meteorology, which can be thought of as a subset of hydrodynamics). 

Bjerknes was acquainted with the Nobel laureate Hendrik Lorentz, who was very much impressed with the work of Bjerknes.  Even with such a famous supporter, however, Bjerknes was not to receive the Nobel Prize in physics.  The history of the prize is that astrophysicists and geophysicists have been systematically eliminated from consideration for the prize in Physics.  While many important findings in astrophysics and geophysics can be argued to be of too narrow a scope to be eligible for the award, this seems notably inappropriate when it comes to Bjerknes' work, which had important impacts outside of geophysics and even outside of hydrodynamics.

Subsequently, it turns out that Carl Gustaf Rossby was also mentioned as a potential recipient of the Nobel Prize in some circles.  Unfortunately, I can find no documentation of that, nor can I track down what I heard about that episode.  At some point long ago, someone (I don't recall who) told me that not only was Rossby eliminated from consideration, but it was rumored that there was an unwritten rule within the prize selection committee that no meteorologist would ever even be considered for such a distinction.  This story may or may not be apocryphal.  I'd appreciate any information about that that anyone can offer!

But the main injustice of the exclusion of meteorologists from the prize is the case for Edward N. Lorenz, the person who was the first to recognize the sensitive dependence on initial conditions of nonlinear dynamical systems.  That this discovery would be made by a meteorologist isn't particularly surprising, given the challenges associated with weather forecasting.  What's important is that the theory he first documented, now often referred to as "chaos theory" is widely recognized to be important in any field where the governing processes are nonlinear, which includes most of science, including not only physical science, but biological science, and even social science!!

Now that Lorenz has died, it's no longer possible for him to receive the award - it isn't awarded posthumously.  This is a great stain on the record of the selection committee for the Nobel Prize in Physics.  They have shamed themselves by missing the opportunity to recognize one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th Century - Chaos Theory - which surely is on a par with both Relativity Theory and Quantum Physics in terms of far-reaching impact.  The enormous injustice of not awarding a Nobel Prize to Lorenz can no longer be rectified but it does serve to put the Nobel Prize in Physics in a shameful light!  They are extremely arrogant, evidently, despite being presented on a daily basis with the humbling experience of trying to understand the natural world.

I had the opportunity to meet Ed Lorenz on two separate occasions - Ed Lorenz was a wonderful man, easy to talk to, and who wasn'ot particularly impressed with himself, despite his having made many exceedingly important contributions in addition to Chaos Theory.  As discussed here, he likely wasn't particularly bothered by not receiving a Nobel Prize.  He certainly received a lot of awards, and deservedly so.  For Ed Lorenz, though, the work itself clearly was all the reward he really cared about.  This makes him such an awesome role model for aspiring young scientists.  The lack of a Nobel prize in no meaningful way detracts from the valuable legacy his career left us.  It only brings shame on the prize selection committee!

So, the story goes ...

So there's this deity that's infinite in all respects - been around infinitely long, has infinite powers, infinite knowledge, infinite benevolence, etc.  Let's put aside the logical conundrums tied to those infinities and contemplate the biblical story.

Apparently, sitting in some unknown location other than the Universe, this deity decides to create the Universe for some unknown reason.  Maybe he was lonely or bored?  Anyway, the job is done in 6 days (Why did it take 6 days?  Why not create all of it in an instant?), so this whirlwind of activity inexplicably has exhausted the supposedly infinite deity, and he needs to rest for a day.  Then, presumably, he resumes his chores - including monitoring everything everywhere within the Universe.

During the creation of the Universe, this deity chose to create a man and a woman (Rumors of the woman being created from the man's rib are not confirmed by all biblical accounts.).  This first couple gets free run of a wonderful place called Eden on Earth.  It's not entirely clear what purpose our first couple was created to serve, but it turns out they apparently were imbued with insufficient intellect to grasp the deity's fantastic plan for them, anyway.  Hence, they simply have to obey!  It must be a pretty complex plan, because the infinite deity knows all and can do anything - but it should be straightforward to make a plan perfect for all time when you control everything and know everything! [The deity evidently wants you to beg him to change his plan (interceding on your behalf) through the process of "prayer" - but it would seem that unless your requests match the plan precisely, it's not likely he'll change it just for you. Or, in other words, he won't change it at all.  Perhaps he just enjoys hearing you beg for stuff?]

Anyway, perhaps the man and woman are there to form a two-person cheerleading squad for the deity - I suppose everyone needs to be recognized for their accomplishments.  But why does an infinite deity need that from humans?  Sounds like a narcissist to me. I guess that would be infinite narcissism!  Well, anyway, we have two cheerleaders on the whole Earth, which is nothing more than an infinitesimal speck in an enormously vast universe, created just for them!  A very generous allotment for lebensraum, that!

Unfortunately for our cheering couple, the deity also saw fit to create an "evil opponent" (called satan) to his plan.  I guess without opposition, it would be too easy and might possibly become boring.  Satan takes the form of a talking snake (Why not a talking lobster or a talking aardvark?) and convinces the woman to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, which had been forbidden to the cheerleaders (Why is it forbidden?  If it's forbidden, why even put it there in the first place?), and she compounds the problem by convincing the man to eat that fruit, too.  This enrages the deity (Didn't he know that was going to happen?), so he expels them from Eden, makes them ashamed of their bodies, and curses them with the blame for their original sin (the fruit, remember?).  The blame for this horrific original sin (eating fruit) is to be visited on all generations of all humanity from that moment to the end of the Universe.  Note that satan was created with inferior power, so he must ultimately lose - the game is "fixed" in the deity's favor!  The deity allows satan complete freedom to promote evil for the time being, but for reasons of his own (mysterious plan, inferior intellect - remember?), this evil will go on only until some unspecified future date, at which time the Universe will end and the deity will proceed to kick satan's ass and put a permanent end to evil, apparently by ending the entire Universe! 

After being cast out of Eden, the man and the woman have two sons, but one kills the other in the first "documented" incident of sibling rivalry.  Somehow, these three people manage to populate the Earth with other human beings (in a classic case of an extremely limited gene pool).  Unfortunately, all those humans are stained by original sin, and many of them descend into various other forms of forbidden activity (eating pork and lobsters, same-sex intercourse, etc.) as well (Again, didn't the deity know that was going to happen?  Did he not create those humans to do precisely what his fantastic plan called for them to do?), so he decides to kill everyone off, except for one notably righteous family, who must build a boat big enough to hold male/female pairs of all the creatures of the Earth (except for the dinosaurs and all other species now known only through fossils).

Then a great flood kills everyone and all living things on land apart from those lucky enough to be riding it out in this magical boat.  (Evidently, sea creatures were spared, but then what killed off the dinosaurs in the oceans, and other currently extinct marine species?)  When the floodwaters recede, the family and all the creatures on the boat re-populate the Earth (Again, a pretty limited gene pool!).  Good for the pairs on the boat (lots of acceptable procreative sex!), but not so good for all the other land-dwelling creatures killed off by the flood.  Thus, an apparent mistake in the deity's creation (How does such an infinite being make such an egregious mistake?) is corrected - just wipe the slate clean by killing almost everyone (genocide) and start over.  Oh by the way, why not just re-create everything from scratch?  Why did the deity need to use procreating pairs of critters?  Would it be too exhausting for this infinite deity to do it all over?  Maybe he enjoys watching humans and animals have sex?  He is watching everyone and everything, all the time, of course - think about that next time you're considering oral sex!!

Well, moving on, the deity decides that staining everyone with original sin might have been another blunder (!) in his fantastic plan, so rather than simply forgiving us that sin, he decides on a more complex procedure:  it begins by creating a duplicate of himself but in human form.  This he does by sending the holy ghost/spirit (the deity in yet another form) to impregnate a woman (Mary) without engaging in sexual intercourse, thereby conceiving the deity in human form.  An angel explains to Mary what's going to happen.  Angels represent another one of the deity's creations but are, apparently (with one notable exception) unstained by sin. Not much is known about angels, actually.  The one sinful exception amongst the angels seeks to become the deity for some reason (Was that part of the fantastic, mysterious plan, or just a flaw in his design?), and so is cast down, thereby becoming satan, in a huge philosophical role reversal - from pure servant to evil opponent.  Hmmmm ...

Anyway, the deity-fetus is born as a jew to Mary and Joseph, into the humble world of the Middle East and becomes a great preacher (rather than following the family business of carpentry), attracting hordes of followers.  But the plan is that this pisses off the evil jewish clergy so much that they enlist the Romans to kill off this preacher muscling in on their territory - as the plan calls for them to do.  It's natural (for late Bronze age people, anyway) to use a blood sacrifice to wash away the original sin (previously imposed by the deity in his fantastic plan, recall).  So the deity-human is executed in the particularly grisly fashion of being nailed to a cross.  However, because this particular human is not what he seems to be but is, in fact, the deity himself (overheard praying to himself, thereby asking favors of himself in an apparent schizophrenic episode), the story has a happy ending.  Two days later, lo and behold! - the deity resurrects himself from the dead!  (Why 2 days?  Why not right away?  Hmmm - no answer.)

So now the original perfect (?) plan seems to have changed - under the new deal, everyone who accepts the deity (called "jesus" in his human form) as their savior is forgiven the original sin and spared the necessity of spending an eternity in hell.  It's rather like showing your loyalty within a biker gang - be a loyal, obedient gang member and you're in for all the fun and games.  But if your loyalty and obedience waver, then it's curtains for you!  A carrot and a stick, if you will.  Why is it so damned important to accept jesus?  Well, clearly, your own self-interest is at stake!  That's not too hard to fathom, is it?  Just like the Hell's Angels (or the Mafia).

By the way, the infinite deity knows what choices you will make throughout your life, and he created you expressly to make those choices according to his fantastic, but utterly mysterious plan.  He only gave us enough brainpower to worship him and obey the rules - not enough to understand his plan.  That was his choice during the creation process.  Nice deal - that way, he doesn't have to try to explain things to his dumb-ass kids.  He knows they're too stupid to even try an explanation.

Of course, you might have the misfortune of not being born into the right time and place to learn about jesus.  Too bad for you!  Sorry, but the escape clause in the revised plan only works for those who accept jesus.  That's why christians work soooo hard to convert you!  Christians always have your best interests at heart!  And they need money for their churches (which are tax-exempt!) for some reason.  Their deity forces them to go on endless fundraisers (and missions to convert heathens)!

Moving on with the story, after jesus died and was resurrected, the deity completely ceased any activities here on Earth that might actually reveal his existence on the basis of tangible evidence.  After all, now that the revised plan is in place, it would be far too easy for humans to believe in a deity who actually showed himself on a regular basis.  Why just about everybody would be "saved" in that case!  We can't have that!  (Why not?  Paradise might get overpopulated, I guess.  Must be some limits on how big the place can be.)  So now, everyone who wants to be saved from eternal torment (who wouldn't?) must accept jesus entirely on faith (i.e., without tangible evidence) - and/or on the words within late Bronze Age scriptures written thousands of years ago by people who had only myths and legends to call upon for explanations of what was going on.

In addition to offering the carrot and the stick to humans (Calling it free will, even though he already knows what they're going to choose and must have created them to do just that in accordance with - wait for it - the perfect and utterly mysterious plan!), the deity is everywhere watching, and he knows not just what we're doing but what we're thinking about doing!  Like Santa Claus, he knows if you've been good or not - and he disapproves of most of those urges and impulses he created within you (like sex) unless they're narrowly confined to certain forms.  Any "deviation" from these forms and you're in deep trouble! By the way, he also disapproves of using the brain he gave you to think for yourself - you simply must obey his rules (which he sees fit to change from time to time), and you certainly shouldn't be asking impertinent questions!  How dare you question the perfect, mysterious plan?

Yeah, it's a great, eternal story, all right.  As I write this, it's "Good Friday" when we "celebrate" an agonizing blood sacrifice intended to fix a mistake made by an infinite deity.  I could go on, but this is already long enough - it all sounds like utter nonsense to me.  If it somehow manages to bring you comfort, I'm okay with that, but don't expect me to buy in.

A Paroxysm of Political Paranoia Paralyzes NOAA/NWS Participation in Science

A long-time friend brought to my attention the following statement of "ethics" for NOAA/NWS employees (copied here verbatim, in its entirety):

The following is a summary of Ethics guidelines which pertain to NWS employees attending professional conferences.  This includes conferences sponsored by organizations such as The National Weather Association (NWA), American Meteorological Society (AMS) and American Society of Engineers (ASE).  Everyone should be aware of these to avoid inadvertently violating government ethics rules and inappropriately using government resources for personal use.

Professional organizations hold conferences which NWS employees frequently attend as part of their official government responsibilities.  The NWS pays for travel to the event and the employees are on official time.  Employees frequently present research or papers which they have developed as part of their NWS responsibilities, or interact as a participant with others.  Here are the general guidelines applicable to all employees.

1.      Employees attending a professional conference at Government expense in their official capacity as an NWS employee must be on approved travel orders.   Authorized costs for the conference are to be paid by the government or approved gifted travel.  Employees may not pay all or part  of these costs from their private funds.

2.     NWS may pay conference registration fees for employees attending a professional conference in their official capacity as an NWS employee.  Employees may not pay these costs if they are attending on official time in their official capacity.

3.     Supervisors must certify that costs paid by the government to send the employee to the conference are in connection with the NWS mission and the employee’s responsibilities.

4.     Approval for groups of twenty (20) or more employees on domestic travel and ten (10) or more employees on foreign travel, including invitational travelers, regardless of whether or not NOAA is funding the travel must be submitted to the Deputy Under Secretary for Operations prior to travel to the conference.  NWS Deputy Administrator approval for meetings, conferences, symposiums involving less than these thresholds may still be required.  Please check with the Chief, ASD prior to coordination of travel and/or conference planning.

5.     Employees attending a professional conference who are not on approved travel orders must be on a day off or on approved annual leave.  No expenses will be paid by the government, including registration and/or abstract fees.  The employee will be in a private capacity and cannot present research or papers developed as part of their NWS responsibilities, nor represent NOAA/NWS.

In addition to the above, we’ve received additional guidance from NOAA Office of General Counsel regarding Ethics Issues for NWS personnel that serve on the boards of other organizations.  These restrictions are as follow:

1.     Persons serving on the boards of an organization are required to disqualify themselves from any NWS matter that could have an effect on the financial interests of that organization.

2.     You may not use any Government resources in connection with your personal activities with the organization.   This means that you may not use any duty hours or your NWS email account for any NWA, AMS or similar organization activities.  You may not use your NWS title for such activities either.  (For example, you may not list your NWS title or email address on an AMS or NWA website.)  You may not disclose any nonpublic Government information and you may not take any action to imply NWS endorsement of NWA, AMS or similar organization activities.  See 5 C.F.R. § 2635.701-705.

3.     Criminal statutes bar you from contacting NWS, or any other Federal agency or Federal court, on behalf of a professional organization, to influence Government action.  See 18 U.S.C. § 205(a).  For example, if NWA plans to recommend a policy position to NWS, you may not sign a letter to NWS and your name may not appear on the NWA letterhead, even if a different NWA officer sends the letter.

4.     You may only travel to an organizations conference on official time and at government expense  if your supervisor assigns you to attend, without your input, as part of your official responsibilities.  If you are assigned to attend a conference, you may only be a passive participant, meaning that you may attend all conference activities but may not be listed on the agenda as a speaker, nor may you present materials at the conference. 

5.     If you wish to conduct activities relating to your position within an organization while at that organizations conference in your Government capacity, you may only do so while off duty.  This means, for example, that you may meet with other officers of the organization in the evening, as long as you are technically off duty at that time.

6.     In the alternative, you may take leave and attend a conference in your personal capacity.  In that scenario, the Government cannot pay for your travel to the conference and you cannot use any Government resources (such as your NWS title) while at the conference.  While you would be permitted to present remarks or materials at the conference in your personal capacity, you would not be able to present scientific papers that you developed as part of your NWS duties.  Generally, you may accept travel payments from the organization (i.e., NWA)  if you travel in your personal capacity, but you may not receive any other form of payment (such as an honorarium from NWA) if any remarks that you deliver at a conference contain references to your Government duties or NWS programs or operations.  See 5 C.F.R. § 2635.807(a).  If you are offered payment of any sort, you should contact NOAA General Counsel to confirm that such payments are acceptable in advance.

This represents a dramatic break with previous ethical boundaries and will eviscerate any opportunities for NWS employees to participate in conferences, thereby representing a policy that threatens the very existence of the NWA and, ultimately, the AMS.  Once again, it seems that NOAA, acting through the advice of its General Counsel, is responding to political pressure in a way that is destructive to the NWS.

I have long considered NOAA to be a bloated bureaucracy of incompetent parasites.  But this attack on the scientific activities of NWS employees is both inexplicable and unconscionable.  What possible reason could there be for these ridiculous new policies?  What political pressure is creating this response from NOAA General Counsel?  What ethical abuses will this prevent?  Has it ever been shown that any abuses resulting from NWS employee participation in conferences have been detrimental to NWS forecasts or to the science?   Can anyone show there is any real need for this massive change in NWS policies regarding the participation of their employees in conferences?

Of late, attendance at scientific conferences by NWS employees has been on the wane.  Presumably, this reflects a short-sighted policy in response to budget pressures associated with federal budget deficits.  The recent tendency has been to reduce the presence of NWS forecasters at scientific conferences, where a good deal of the business of science takes place.  Some NWS forecasters have been participating at their own expense and on their own time - the new policies apparently will prevent even that!  This not only inhibits the dissemination of NWS research findings, but it limits the opportunity for scientific peers to provide direct feedback to the authors of that research.

The dramatic reductions in participation in science by NWS employees we have seen will pale to insignificance when these new policies are implemented.  The impact on the NWA, which is dominated by operational weather forecasters, could be devastating.  Even the AMS will suffer as a result of the non-participation of so many operational weather forecasters.

There can be no good reason for this unnecessary change in policy.  If NWS managers buckle under the pressure of NOAA management, this will constitute a huge blow to the entire science of meteorology, which has long struggled with the operations-research interface.  An "iron curtain" will have descended on that interface, to the detriment of all.  For shame, NOAA!

The Myths of Objectivity

In my profession, there is this apparent obsession many scientists have with all analysis being utterly "objective".  What does the dictionary say about the meaning of objective?  The word is being used not as a noun but as an adjective, and dictionary.com offers the following:

objective - adjective:
1. not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased: an objective opinion.

2. intent upon or dealing with things external to the mind rather than with thoughts or feelings, as a person or a book.

3. being the object of perception or thought; belonging to the object of thought rather than to the thinking subject (opposed to subjective ).

4. of or pertaining to something that can be known, or to something that is an object or a part of an object; existing independent of thought or an observer as part of reality.

A group of people, such as scientists, can agree upon the meaning of a word that might have a completely different meaning in a different context (i.e., outside that group).  For instance, scientists and laypersons (non-scientists) have different meanings attached to words like theory or chaos.   But I believe the main intent of the emphasis on objectivity in science is meaning #1 above.

If I draw lines by hand on a weather chart, this is considered to be non-objective (often referred to as subjective) analysis.  The way I draw those lines is influenced by my thoughts and personal feelings, no doubt.  What many scientists seem to call "objective" would be what a computer program would do to draw similar lines on the same chart - if we feed the same data to that program, it will always produce the same lines (to within the numerical precision of the computer).  A large number of scientists think that non-"objective" analysis by humans is always flawed and worthy only of contempt.

But let's think this one through.  Who wrote the program?  What algorithm was chosen to do the analysis?  The analysis scheme often depends on "free" variables decided upon by distinctly non-objective criteria.  And there are numerous analysis schemes from which to choose, all of which might accomplish a similar end product.  What is typically called "objective analysis" involves a number of non-objective choices!  The only objective thing about objective analysis is its reproducibility - the same data run through the same program always gives the same results.

Put the identical data in front of human science professionals and let them each do their own non-objective analysis and you will get as many different results as there are people in the experiment.  Each such analysis is simply one interpretation of the data - presumably each is in some sense constrained by the data, but it's not rigidly defined by the data.  There are many different interpretations of the data, and who is to say that any one is right and all the others wrong?

Reading carefully into the definitions above, it seems that a synonym for "objective" is "mindless"!  Is the ultimate criterion of the value of an analysis determined by the degree to which it's utterly mindless?  I would like to think that most rational people would give an answer to that question resoundingly in the negative!!

Given that science is done by humans, we scientists should all be willing to acknowledge that not one of us is ever entirely "objective" about anything!  We also should acknowledge that other points of view can co-exist with our personal favorites.  In many cases, the data can be interpreted in more than one way, and many of those alternative interpretations can be as legitimate as those that we choose to embrace.  The degree to which different interpretations disagree gives us an opportunity to test those interpretations against one another.  This is an opportunity to learn!  Disagreement is good, not bad!!  Which interpretation gives the best fit to the data?  What about new data from larger samples?  What about those data values that seem to contravene a hypothesis (interpretation) - can they be explained away?  Are they noise in the sample or are they indicators of a problem for a particular interpretation?  This is the crux of scientific arguments.  It's all good ...

But "objectivity" is a false god.  It's an illusion that many hide behind in their eagerness to reject the work of others.  We are, after all, human beings engaged in a very human activity.  We can be so wed to our own ideas, we seek any and every means to discredit the ideas of others.  If we detect anything other than perfect objectivity, is that cause to reject the analysis?  I think not.  Just because an analysis is 'non-objective' by some standard doesn't mean it's necessarily incorrect or unworthy of consideration!