The planet, Gliese 581g, is a tantalizingly close 20 light years. Not close enough for a one-lifetime trek with today’s technologies, but certainly doable with some advances in propulsion and life support, volunteers willing to never see the other side, and a hell of a lot of luck.

Long story short, it’s now conceivable that Homo sapiens sapiens could become a multi-star-system species. How fucking awesome is that?

Rhetorical question. Very fucking awesome.

Or, at least, that’s what Kenneth P. Green and Hiwa Alaghebandian of the American Enterprise Institute want us to think. See, they did some research into how science is talked about in news sources. They conducted an experiment, which ran roughly as follows:

1.) They picked a bunch of “Authoritarian” sounding phrases.
2.) They counted up how often those phrases appeared in Lexis Nexis by year.
3.) Then they made a pretty graph.

No, seriously, that was about the extent of their argument:

To see if our suspicions were correct, we decided to do a bit of informal research, checking Lexis Nexis for growth in the use of what we would categorize as “authoritarian” phrasing when it comes to scientific findings. We searched Nexis for the following phrases to see how their use has changed over the last 30 years: “science says we must,” “science says we should,” “science tells us we must,” “science tells us we should,” “science commands,” “science requires,” “science dictates,” and “science compels.”

There are a few problems with this “research”. (To be fair, they did admit that it was “informal”, but that didn’t stop them from drawing some far-reaching conclusions from it.) The main one, however, is that the thing they are measuring isn’t correlated with what they’re trying to prove. They’re measuring number of references of certain “authoritarian” phrases as a function of time, but they’re trying to prove that the way science is talked about is changing. All that the authors really succeeded in proving is that science is being talked about more

The problem is that the number of references of these “authoritarian” phrases is not an independent variable. It is, in fact, linked very closely with another important number that the authors entirely ignore: the amount of text in Lexus Nexus by year. Sure, there are more mentions of the phrases the researchers chose now than their were 30 years ago. But I’m pretty sure that that’s true of any reasonably common, generic phrase.

I’m sure the number of times that the phrases “the investigation is ongoing” and “alcohol may have been involved” have also increased in the past three decades. Does that mean that investigations or alcohol consumption have suddenly skyrocketed? No. It means that people are writing a hell of a lot more for a wide variety of reasons. (I’m reasonably sure it’s significant that the start of the positive trend in the number of references correlates roughly with the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web.)

In order for their numbers to mean something even close to what the authors claim they do, they would need to be measuring something like “authoritarian references per column inch” or “authoritarian references per article”. Something that gives us a sense of the “density” of references in the larger (and changing) volume of media. Unless they can provide such a “density” style measure, we really don’t know if the tone of scientific discourse is changing (to be fair, it might be) or if people are writing more, or writing about science more, or if Lexus Nexus is just covers more sources for recent years than for previous ones, etc.

Now, to be fair to the authors, their argument might be entirely true. If it is, then their research is insufficient to show that. To be honest, I imagine that the way science is covered by the media probably has changed quite a bit in the past 30 years. I do genuinely think that part of that change revolves around writers trying to cast descriptive science in a proscriptive fashion. But if we’re going to try to reform the way in which science is seen by both the media and the public, it behooves us to be accurate in both our experiments (informal or no) and also our arguments.

So seriously, how cool is that? Human beings have officially created synthetic life! *Insert techno-utopian, geek-squee happy dance here.*

Now undoubtedly, there will be Luddites and Primitivists and other species of the deranged wringing their hands and wailing and gnashing their teeth about people “Playing God”. I have news for them. People have been playing God since people were people. Part of human nature is an insatiable curiosity to discover and to create and to engineer our world and our environs to better suit us. That is part of what makes us who we are. Really, such things shouldn’t be called “playing God”, but rather “playing Human.” Though I suppose “playing Human” doesn’t scan as well.

My point is that “playing God” is part and parcel of human nature. The entirety of human history has involved a long, hard, slow march towards better understanding of our world, and towards developing better ways to adapt to it. This is not some vain attempt to punch above our weight class and become like God. This trend is simply an elegant expression of the curiosity and drive that resides in the human spirit.

So do we “play God”? And are Venter and team doing so in this instance? Undoubtedly. But we human beings “play God” because doing so is a natural human behavior. And when we play God, just us squared off against an uncaring world and an apathetic universe, we play to win.

Skyonic’s plan to commercialize Skymine, a process that scrubs SOX, NO2, mercury, and other heavy metals from industrial plant exhaust and converts leftover CO2 into sodium bicarbonate, was just a glimmer in the company’s eye as recently as February. But this week Skyonic announced that it is opening a carbon mineralization demonstration facility at San Antonio-based Capitol Aggregates, one of the biggest cement plants in Texas. The plant comes courtesy of a $3 million DOE grant that also requires Skyonic to produce qualifying samples of its baking soda-like CO2 byproducts, which can be turned into animal feed, glass products, and even a growth catalyst for bioalgae.

Carbon capture and storage (the current leading method of reducing industrial CO2 emissions) was never a very good idea. Skyonics’ method, on the other hand, turns CO2 and other waste materials into usable products. It even plans to beat its competitors on efficiency, compete in the market, and turn a profit.

Pollution reduced, value added to the economy, and novel scientific processes refined and better understood. It’s hard to find such win-win-win scenarios in life, and yet science and technology seem to deliver them with stunning regularity.

That seems like hyperbole, but I really don’t think it is.  They’re advocating for children to fall sick and face the real possibility of paralysis, disfigurement, disability or death.  They’re advocating for millions in Africa to starve for lack of the crops that have saved millions in India.  They’re advocating for the repression of the human knowledge at the cost of human life.

Now I, for one, will never suggest that they should be muzzled.  But at the same time, they should not be suffered in silence.  Vaccines and GM foods save lives.  And those that oppose them also oppose those lives.

But enough of my babble, here’s the video.  Despite my political objections to some of Specter’s commentary, I think it’s excellent overall:

The last time Neptune was at this time of its year, the Mexican-American War was just warming up and hadn’t even become a shooting conflict yet.  It hadn’t even been discovered by human beings, yet.

A year ago on Mercury was in early January here on Earth.

An ongoing challenge is the tendency of Eureqa to return equations that fit data, but refer to variables that are not yet understood. Lipson likened this to what would happen if time-traveling scientists presented the laws of energy conservation to medieval mathematicians.

“Algebra was known. You could plug in the variable, and it would work. But the concept of energy wasn’t there. They didn’t have the vocabulary to understand it,” he said. “We’ve seen this in the lab. Eureqa finds a new relationship. It’s predictive, it’s elegant, it has to be true. But we have no idea what it means.”

So some smart folks created a smart application.  The application is so smart, in fact, that seems to be returning equations that are true, but beyond our current ability to understand.

Welcome to the future.

Please read that last sentence again.

Alan Kaufman – sophist, moral idiot, and fallacy factory extraordinaire – suggests that the fact that a large number of people prefer to read their books on electronic paper, is isomorphic with the facts of the murder of more than 6 million people.  This insipid, self-important ass spends hundred of words braying out the notion that the kindle amounts to a “Concentration Camp of Ideas”.  He does so in all apparent sincerity and self-belief.

I contend that any person who cannot tell the difference between an e-book reader and the murder of 6 million Jewish, Romani, Disabled and other minority individuals is at best a moral cripple and at worst a full-on sociopath.

Now I originally sat on this for a few days, because I thought it best if I were able to regard it with a calm, detached, intellectual air.  I thought that the best way to address this would be to reasonably and rigorously point out the massive holes in his reasoning.  But after thinking on it awhile, it occurred to me that what Kaufman is attempting here isn’t logic.  It isn’t reason.  It’s sophistry.  Kaufman’s not trying to put forth an argument of merit, rather he’s trying put forth most damning accusation possible, and then paint it over with a thin veneer of false respectability.  He draws a connection between something personally dislikes (e-books) and one of the most evil acts of the 20th century, not because such an argument is true, but rather because if it were true, it would be damning to the object of his ire.  After that, any sops to reason he throws into his essay are an after-thought.  Though calling them any kind of thought might be a bit overgenerous.

So I came to the realization that in the face of such sophistry, there can be no reasoned response.  Arguing with a Sophist isn’t just tilting at windmills, it’s tilting at the very wind itself.  The more you try to wield logic and evidence in an effort to defeat them, the more they’ll simply flit about to raise the banner of whatever argument seems expedient to them at the time.

I don’t think Kaufman truly believes that the Kindle and the Holocaust are morally equivalent.  To be honest, I don’t think that Kaufman believes much of anything of all.  Rather I think he feels that he dislikes the Kindle and, lacking even the most basic flickerings of intellectual honesty or moral sense, he jumped to the most hyperbolic argument he could come up with to express his disdain.  That he could defend this hyperbole by hiding behind the shield of iconoclasm (as he does in the comments) was simply bonus, I imagine.

So when it comes down to it, Kaufman’s essay isn’t an argument.  It’s a simpering cry.  A cry for attention, a cry for relevance, and a cry of fear over the fact that the world is moving forward.  And the fact that Kaufman, with his broken morals and his insipid, sophistic thinking, can do nothing to stop it.

Resquiescat In Pace, Dr. Borlaug.  And thank you.