Category Archives: Science & Tech

The Madness of President Ebola

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The suicidal impulse of the Left is unmistakable. At the core, these people want to die and take the rest of us with them. Judicial Watch, which has a really good record of unearthing embarrassing stuff on our rulers, has this:

While the bipartisan voice grows to ban Ebola victims from entering the United States, a new report claims that President Obama is considering a plan to bring the world’s Ebola patients to the United States to be treated.

Judicial Watch, the conservative public watchdog group, says in a shocking report that the president is “actively formulating plans” to admit Ebola-infected non-citizens just to be treated.

“Specifically, the goal of the administration is to bring Ebola patients into the United States for treatment within the first days of diagnosis,” said the group.

Such a plan would likely cause a political outcry throughout the nation, on edge over the spread of the virus.

Judicial Watch, which probes federal spending and uses federal and administration sources to root out corruption, said it is unclear who would pay for transporting and treating non-Americans.

But they have details nobody else has. “The plans include special waivers of laws and regulations that ban the admission of non-citizens with a communicable disease as dangerous as Ebola.”

The organization added, “the Obama administration is keeping this plan secret from Congress. The source is concerned that the proposal is illegal; endangers the public health and welfare; and should require the approval of Congress.”

This is madness for a number of reasons. The least obvious is how this policy further erodes the trust between the citizens and their government. Trust in the political class is at record lows, but most people still think the bureaucrats in the various agencies are at least trying to their jobs. They view them as lazy, but generally honest civil servants run by a collection of political hacks connected to a politician.

Getting new politicians is a simple thing, in the mind of the public, even though that is not our current reality. Getting a new new managerial class, on the other hand, means blood in the streets. Putting the CDC in a position to fail is a dangerous game. When even the aging lefties at the NYTimes think the CDC is incompetent, you already have a serious trust problem.

There’s another layer to the trust issue. When the Bush people allegedly failed to help the looters in New Orleans after Katrina, it was not because they did not know what to do. That was never the claim. The claim was they failed to do what was required for some reason. This, however, looks like the opening scenes of every disaster movie. The people in charge are either too arrogant to admit they are facing a disaster or too stupid to know they don’t know what they are facing. As Greg Cochran points out, arrogant ignorance has a long history in the epidemic game.

In a few weeks, there will be political consequences. When Obama feels the need to quit the golf course and show up for work, you know the politics are more lethal to his cult than Ebola is to Africans. That may be comforting to Red Team partisans, but it is still very bad for the health of the Empire. The near total lack of trust in the political class has made it impossible for them to tackle any of the systemic problems facing the country. Making Red Team less odious than Blue Team is not going to usher in a reform movement.

That’s really not the main concern. As Greg Cochran pointed out in that post, the people in charge of the science of Ebola may be ideologically wedded to ideas that are completely wrong. That’s not without precedent. The Obama administration appears to be acting on the belief, and it is nothing more than belief, that Ebola is mostly a poor African savage problem. In clever, white America we don’t have to worry about witch doctors and strange burial rituals. The two infections in Dallas suggest otherwise.

The column in the Daily News makes a good case for concern, if not panic. We don’t know a lot about Ebola.

As a rule, one should not panic at whatever crisis has momentarily fixed the attention of cable news producers. But the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has migrated to both Europe and America, may be the exception that proves the rule. There are at least six reasons that a controlled, informed panic might be in order.

(1) Start with what we know, and don’t know, about the virus. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other government agencies claim that contracting Ebola is relatively difficult because the virus is only transmittable by direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who has become symptomatic. Which means that, in theory, you can’t get Ebola by riding in the elevator with someone who is carrying the virus, because Ebola is not airborne.

This sounds reassuring. Except that it might not be true. There are four strains of the Ebola virus that have caused outbreaks in human populations. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the current outbreak (known as Guinean EBOV, because it originated in Meliandou, Guinea, in late November 2013) is a separate clade “in a sister relationship with other known EBOV strains.” Meaning that this Ebola is related to, but genetically distinct from, previous known strains, and thus may have distinct mechanisms of transmission.

Not everyone is convinced that this Ebola isn’t airborne. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy published an article arguing that the current Ebola has “unclear modes of transmission” and that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

The rest of that column is worth reading. Even if the President Ebola thinks the science is settled and Ebola is not that contagious, he clearly knows his apparatus for dealing with public concern is not working. He also knows the people running the CDC are struggling to deal with two, that’s TWO, cases of Ebola. Inviting a plague into the country just to prove some weird political point or spite his political opponents is madness. Given his views on Christianity, it is may be Domitian-level madness.

 

The Cult of Fake Nerdism

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There is a cult like quality to the fake nerd stuff we see in the culture. A lot of these people, particularly the young ones, think they are part of a movement that will make this world like the imaginary one in sci-fi movies. The web site Tech Crunch seems to be one of their propaganda organs. It looks like they are also organizing a hajj for their followers this fall.

Haven’t gotten your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe yet? The hottest tech conference of the year is coming to London this October, and to celebrate we’re giving away another free pair of tickets to the main event. All you have to do is enter to win. We’ll randomly select the winning entry, and the winner will be notified by email.

About TechCrunch Disrupt:

    • Disrupt is one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year.
    • We start each day with panels and one-on-one chats featuring our writers, special guest speakers, leading VCs, and fascinating entrepreneurs.
    • Each afternoon, we host the Startup Battlefield competition which culminates in six finalists taking the stage at the end of the event for a shot at winning the Disrupt Cup.
    • The event takes place from October 20 and 21 at Old Billingsgate, London, UK.

The word “disrupt” is a buzzword borrowed from economics that is very popular in the fake nerd world. Every startup begging for money peppers its prospectus with this word. The reader is supposed to think the new company is a part of the glorious future where we all live in gleaming cities run on rainbow dust, where everyone is happy and there are no poor people. The future for these people is a sanitized San Francisco without the gays.

I’ll note the picture they use. You have two sexless people who possess that innocent, Eloi quality so popular with the fake nerd crowd. The one on the left is slightly Oriental, while the one of the right is Occidental. Maybe they are boys or maybe they are girls. We’re not supposed to know. If someone used this picture for a NAMBLA campaign, no one would be surprised. That’s the creepy part of the glorious future. It’s primary appeal seems to be to men who really like boys.

Gaia is a Fascist

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The climate change cult is very weird. This is a good example.

Climate change could affect the ratio of human males to human females that are born in some countries, a new study from Japan suggests. The researchers found that male fetuses may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Since the 1970s, temperature fluctuations from the norm have become more common in Japan, and at the same time there has been an increase in the deaths of male fetuses relative to the number of deaths of female fetuses in that country, according to the study.

Over this period, the ratio of male to female babies born in the country has been decreasing, meaning there have been fewer and fewer male babies born relative to the number of female babies born.

Got that. Your lawn mower will result in a race of Amazons enslaving men!

There’s one of these “studies” every day it seems. All are intended to add another log to the scare fire these strange sub-cults use to fuel their movement. Smoking used to be like this. Twenty years ago there were scare stories about how smoking was making everyone’s penis small. It is amusing how Mashable puts a pic of a retarded looking kid at the top of the story. Nice touch.

Then this in Maggies Farm last week.

Last week’s People’s Climate March drew 400,000 people onto the streets of Manhattan and a great deal of international attention to a subject of dire urgency. But some were skeptical about the event’s overall significance. “The march slogan was, ‘to change everything, we need everyone,’ which is telling, because it won’t change everything, because it didn’t include everyone,” wrote David Roberts of Grist. “Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.” True enough.

First off, the picture is classic. Imagine instead of sunflower standards they had eagles clutching a bundle of wooden rods and their shirts were black instead of orange. Same crowd, different uniforms. Second, overstating the crowd size is common with these neo-fascist groups. It’s argumentum ad populum with a lusty “or else” tacked onto it. Notice also the use of the word “conservative” to mean those outside their movement.

If there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of climate change — a divide that can approach 40 points on some polling questions — the political situation would be very different. So if any progress on climate change is going to be made through the American political system — apart from executive orders by Democratic presidents — it is going to have to somehow involve convincing a lot of conservatives that yes, climate change is a threat to civilization.

The stark divide between “conservatives and almost everyone else” is another way claiming they are an ascendant movement about to sweep aside the deniers, accept for the recalcitrant conservatives. Hitler used the same phraseology with the Jews. It is a tactic that dates to the dawn of written history. The fact that the deniers are a sizable majority suggests these people are following the path of The Seekers.

How do you do that? The answer has more to do with psychology than politics.

The practice of tailoring a political message to a particular group is commonplace, of course. But the climate activist community has broadly failed to understand just how differently conservatives and liberals see the world on certain issues, and, as a result, just how radically different messages targeting conservatives should look.

The first step would be to recognize “conservative” is a world like capitalism. It is used by the hive minded as a label for those outside the hive. In this case, it simply means non-liberals.

“Although climate scientists update, appropriately, their models after ten years of evidence, climate-science communicators haven’t,” said Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale who studies how people respond to information challenging their beliefs. Luckily, social and political psychologists are on the case. “I think there’s an emerging science of how we should talk about this if we’re going to be effective at getting any sort of movement,” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford.

They should probably start by talking about the fact global warming has been on a two decade pause. They should also think about why all of their predictions have been wrong.

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that for many conservatives (and liberals), the current debate about climate change isn’t really about competing piles of evidence or about facts at all — it’s about identity. Climate change has come to serve as shorthand for which side you’re on, and conservatives tend to be deeply averse to what climate crusaders represent (or what they think they represent). “The thing most likely to make it hard to sway somebody is that you’re trying to sway them,” said Kahan.

This reminds me of how liberals, when exposed to Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, think he is talking about right-wingers. It is certainly true that most think the warmists are more than a bit nuts. They latched onto to something that is a mix of Old Testament prophesy, new age paganism and political fascism. Facts and evidence are not important to these people. It is about identity. That’s why they are the ones in the uniforms in that picture.

Ebola and You

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I’ve developed an interest in Africa of late. A few books got me going and I find the place endlessly fascinating. The English have always had an obsession with Africa and I’m starting to appreciate why. It is a complex riddle. The Ebola outbreak has therefore caught my attention. An epidemic like this tests a lot of theories popular in population genetics. You get the hardcore HBD’ers jumping in, but also the more nuanced types looking for a way to stay between the lines of acceptable opinion.

The left-wing media outlets are largely oblivious to this growing underground. Instead, they stick with the old time religion and produce articles like this one in the New York Times. There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but the headline makes people like me chuckle. The near total lack of self-awareness from these folks is amazing. I often wonder if they bother having mirrors in their homes. What would be the point?

More than 5,800 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone have contracted Ebola since March, according to the World Health Organization, making this the biggest outbreak on record. More than 2,800 people have died.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that in a worst-case scenario, cases could reach 1.4 million in four months. The centers’ model is based on data from August and includes cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but not Guinea (where counts have been unreliable).

Estimates are in line with those made by other groups like the World Health Organization, though the C.D.C. has projected further into the future and offered ranges that account for underreporting of cases.

There are roughly 209 million people in the countries affected by this outbreak. Nigeria has a murder rate of 20 per 100,000. The other countries on the list have slightly lower rates, but those are guesses. Even assuming a much lower rate, about 20,000 people are murdered in these countries annually. That does not count warfare, which is a regular feature in places like Sierra Leone.

The point here is to put the numbers in perspective. The best case scenario makes the epidemic something close to a massive spike in violence. The worse case puts it on par with a bloody civil war. The difference is the inevitable refugee problem it brings, along with people carrying the disease to new areas. The people in those areas will most likely respond with force to keep them out. The neighboring countries probably lack the ability to do it peacefully so it will get very ugly.

Another difference is the domino effect. Millions of Africans are moving north in hopes of making their way into Europe. The nations of the Maghreb are being paid to block their path, but how long that lasts is anyone’s guess. It’s one thing to block people carrying their belongings. It is another to block people carrying a deadly virus. It’s not the zombie apocalypse that causes the mayhem; it is the fear of the zombie apocalypse.

Interestingly, no one bothers to ask why Ebola is an African problem. The reason for that is the answers don’t fit into the narrative. Everywhere on earth, except Africa, humans are an invasive species. There are a lot of things different about Africans beyond skin color. They evolved alongside their environment. Everyone else evolved outside their environment, for the most part. But, we are not allowed to think of these things so it is best not to ask.

What are the chances of the disease reaching the West? Unless we take up bat hunting, there’s little to no chance.

Ebola was discovered in 1976, and it was once thought to originate in gorillas, because human outbreaks began after people ate gorilla meat. But scientists have since ruled out that theory, partly because apes that become infected are even more likely to die than humans.

Scientists now believe that bats are the natural reservoir for the virus, and that apes and humans catch it from eating food that bats have drooled or defecated on, or by coming in contact with surfaces covered in infected bat droppings and then touching their eyes or mouths.

The current outbreak seems to have started in a village near Guéckédou, Guinea, where bat hunting is common, according to Doctors Without Borders.

There’s an expression old Africa hands used to use. It is “AWA” and it means Africa Wins Again. The Europeans tried everything they could to turn their colonies into outposts of civilization, but they all failed. No matter what you do, Africa can’t stop being Africa and Africans cannot stop being African. That’s been the lesson in America since the Civil War. You’re not allowed to think that so we think other things.

Bad Time For Fake Nerds

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Looks like one of their icons is a serial fabulist:

Religious fanatics have an odd habit of overreacting when people have the audacity to question their fanaticism. In Iraq, radical Islamic jihadists are systemically murdering and beheading Christians, Jews, and even Muslims who do not pledge fealty to ISIS’s religious tenets. Hundreds of years ago, church authorities and Aristotelian acolytes imprisoned Galileo for having the audacity to reject geocentrism in favor of heliocentrism. The bible recounts how Christians were persecuted and stoned, and Jesus himself was crucified for contradicting the religious dogma of the day.

You will bow to the religious zealots, or you will pay the price.

Which brings us to l’affaire de Tyson. Neil Tyson, a prominent popularizer of science (he even has his own television show) was recently found to have repeatedly fabricated multiple quotes over several years. The fabrications were not a one-off thing. They were deliberate and calculated, crafted with one goal in mind: to elevate Tyson, and by extension his audience, at the expense of know-nothing, knuckle-dragging nutjobs who hate science. Tyson targeted journalists, members of Congress, even former President George W. Bush. And what was their crime? They were guilty of rejecting science, according to Tyson.

There’s only one problem. None of the straw man quotes that Tyson uses to tear them down are real. The quote about the numerically illiterate newspaper headline? Fabricated. The quote about a member of Congress who said he had changed his views 360 degrees? It doesn’t exist. That time a U.S. president said “Our God is the God who named the stars” as a way of dividing Judeo-Christian beliefs from Islamic beliefs? It never happened.

This is a common problem on the Left. No one challenges them so they start making stuff up. Celebrity scientists are a lot like celebrity chefs. They are better at being celebrities than being scientists. They start getting sloppy and before long they are making claims that are ridiculous. It’s why a lot of writers never read the comments of their own stories. They fear they will start writing to please their admirers.

Tyson does not seem like an evil person. He is a bright guy by conventional standards, but one always has to wonder about the elephant in the room. His scientific work is meager and ended more than 20 years ago. He made his name and career as a presenter, PR man and popularizer of science. Nothing wrong with any of it, but he probably should not be passing himself off as a scientist these days.

He is the John Stuart of science. Stuart does comedy, but he is not a comic. He is a preacher, telling the faithful the good news every night. He uses comedy as a tool and a shield. Tyson has the same act, except he uses science instead of comedy. Instead of mocking the benighted with comedy, Tyson tells the chosen that science proves their deepest beliefs. In another age, science would be replaced by the gods and Tyson would be dressed as a shaman.

Data Collection

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It is prudent to be skeptical about any claims from the government, especially those about their capabilities. Scooping up the databases from private companies, for example, is something government can do quite easily. Sorting it into anything useful is quite another. The volume is just too vast. Plus, a security apparatus so good that they can scoop and read everyone’s e-mail is not getting bested by a high school drop out like Snowden.

The reality is probably something a bit more crude. This story the other day in the Washington Post is what I mean.

The U.S. government threatened to fine Yahoo $250,000 a day in 2008 if it failed to comply with a broad demand to hand over user communications — a request the company believed was unconstitutional — according to court documents unsealed Thursday that illuminate how federal officials forced American tech companies to participate in the National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM program.

The documents, roughly 1,500 pages worth, outline a secret and ultimately unsuccessful legal battle by Yahoo to resist the government’s demands. The company’s loss required Yahoo to become one of the first to begin providing information to PRISM, a program that gave the NSA extensive access to records of online com­munications by users of Yahoo and other U.S.-based technology firms.

The ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review became a key moment in the development of PRISM, helping government officials to convince other Silicon Valley companies that unprecedented data demands had been tested in the courts and found constitutionally sound. Eventually, most major U.S. tech companies, including Google, Facebook, Apple and AOL, complied. Microsoft had joined earlier, before the ruling, NSA documents have shown.

Rather than covertly tapping into the root servers of the Internet or sniffing the world’s firewalls, the Feds are busting down doors and telling the big players to hand over their data. No doubt it is coming over in a digital format and in bulk, but that’s like having tractor trailers full of letters to Santa showing up ever day. Finding the one letter from Mohamed in Detroit is not going to be easy and maybe not even possible. Without a lot of other intelligence, having a big pile of e-mails is a waste of resources.

But, there’s value in letting the world know you can read their e-mail and listen to their calls. Even if it is not entirely true, it tilts the playing field. It forces everyone else to take precautions they otherwise might not take and maybe pushed them into forms of communication that are easier to track. The e-mail and telephone data also has use if you have other intel. If Abdul comes up on the radar and you have Abdul’s cell data, you can begin to put together his circle of friends, as it were.

Still it is important to remember that they have not caught anyone with this data. The Feds run to the nearest TV camera every time they catch some dope trying to join Jihad. If they had something to justify what is a very unpopular program, they would have made it public. It’s like gun registration. It is only useful when you have a lot of other information about the crime. In the case of gun crimes, the registration is useful after you have the gun and the perp. In the case of terrorism, having cell phone data is useful after you have the perp’s identity and location.

Evolution and Bad Science

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Most of us with an interest in evolutionary biology understand that it is mostly a speculative science. Genetics takes some of the speculation out of it, but only a small part. The fossil record and materiel science helps, but there are huge gaps in the fossil record that leave huge gaps in our understanding of life in the long ago past. That does not mean it is not science or without loads of interesting data. It just means the the people in the field rely on inductive reasoning more than other fields.

That said, there’s informed speculation and then there’s crazy talk. This story crosses into crazy talk.

Mankind is undergoing a major evolutionary transition comparable to the shifts from prosimians to monkeys, monkeys to apes, and apes to humans, according to Cadell Last, a doctoral student in evolutionary anthropology and researcher at the Global Brain Institute.

Human life expectancy has already increased from about 45 at the start of the 20th century to 80 today. Because of advancements in technology, which will affect natural selection, Last suggests life expectancy could increase to 120 as early as 2050 — a concept known as radical life extension.

In addition to longer lives, humans will likely delay the timing of biological reproduction and reduce the number of offspring too, according to Last. Taken together, these changes could signify a new type of human, more focused on culture than biology.

Well, life expectancy has increased considerably, but that’s mostly due to a drop in human violence and a massive drop in childhood mortality. In 1900, getting killed by bandits was common in much of the world. Dying from the runs was also common. It does not mean we are living longer. People in the 18th century who were not murdered, killed in war or killed by the plague in youth lived into their sixties and seventies. Ben Franklin lived to 85. Augustus lived to 75. Tiberius lived to 79.

Fertility rates have been dropping in the west for a long time and no one has a good explanation. The cost of children is one argument, but children have always been a cost. Similarly, humans in the West have been having children later in life. That’s not new either. Taken together, it could be nothing more than a fad in the West that will go away in a generation or two. Jumping to the claims about new types of humans is nonsense.

Last makes his case in a paper from the most recent issue of Current Aging Science. Citing other futurists like Ray Kurzweil and Francis Heylighen, Last theorizes about human interaction with technology, relying on observations of past primate evolution and biology.

Ray Kurzweil is a good example of someone who can have a top-1% IQ and be crazy.

According to life history theory, natural selection shapes the length of an organism’s life and the timing of key events to produce the most surviving offspring. In the “fundamental life history trade-off,” organisms must choose between spending their time producing as many offspring as possible or rearing those offspring to make them as successful as possible, according to Last.

And as brain sizes increases, organisms require more energy and longer rearing time to reach their full potential.

Human brain size has gone down since human settlement. There’s no science to back the idea that bigger brains mean longer development cycles.

Based on these ideas, three major shifts in primate history have occurred toward longer lives and delayed reproduction: between prosimians and monkeys, monkeys and apes, and apes and humans.

Humans already dedicate the most time and energy toward nurturing offspring of any primate species, and this pattern is becoming only more extreme.

“Human life history throughout our species evolution can be thought of as one long trend towards delayed sexual maturation and biological reproduction (i.e., from ‘living fast and dying young’ to ‘living slow and dying old’),” Last writes.

While physical needs fueled previous evolutionary changes, cultural and technological innovations will drive the next shift, which has been accelerating since the Industrial Revolution.

Simply said, humans need more time to develop to take advantage of our complex world.

This is just Tofflerism wrapped in bad science. The pace of change may seem like it is accelerating, but we can’t know how the pace of change felt in 1930 or 1430. If you were alive in Bohemia in 1620, life was changing pretty damned fast.

Considering recent advancements like in-vitro fertilization, egg-freezing, and even adoption, the mechanics of biological reproduction have radically changed. “The biological clock isn’t going to be around forever,” Last says — or at least, people can turn it off or ignore it for a while.

Today, and even more so in the future, the success of individual and collective human life depends on knowledge and economic prosperity. Passing on new and important ideas to the next generation involves a process called cultural reproduction, which redirects time and energy toward cultural activities, as opposed to biological reproduction.

In the 19th century, what passed for futurists used to write about how the Industrial Revolution was radically altering humanity. H. G. Wells comes to mind. Marx was so convinced he founded one of the most destructive cults in human history. I would imagine that the spread of settlement probably included cranks claiming the advent of farming was the end times.

As far as a new type of human, that’s the lesson of the fossil record. No species sticks around for ever. Some have a nice long run and things change too fast for them to adapt. Then poof, they are nothing more than weird looking marks on a stone. Others come along have a relatively brief run and end up as nothing more than drawings on a cave wall. But, some species adapt and then adapt and then adapt again. When you’re in the drive through at KFC, you’re not thinking of T-Rex, but he is thinking of you, through the mists of time, leastways.

CSI Effect

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The term used to explain why 12 sensible people would acquit, despite witnesses and physical evidence, is the “CSI Effect.” That’s where juries expect conclusive scientific evidence like they see on TV. If they don’t get it, they assume the case is weak or the accused is innocent. It seems ridiculous, but we tend not to select the bets people for juries, as smart people duck their duties.

This story is another example of how television is warping the public’s ability to understand the world.

We’ve frequently talked about law enforcement and the intelligence community accessing and making use of cell site location data, which looks to figure out where people are based on what cell towers they’re connected to. Law enforcement likes to claim that it doesn’t need a warrant for such data, while the NSA has tested a pilot program recording all such data, and says it has the legal authority to collect it, even if it’s not currently doing so.

However, as anyone with even a basic geometry education recognizes, which cell tower you’re connected to does not give you a particularly exact location. It can be useful in putting someone in a specific (wide) area — or, much more useful in detailing where someone is traveling over long distances as they repeatedly switch towers in a particular direction. But a single reading does not give you particularly exact location details. I had naturally assumed that most people understood this — including law enforcement, lawyers, prosecutors and judges — but it turns out they do not. A rather depressing story in The Economist notes that, thanks to this kind of ignorance (combined with bogus cop shows on TV that pretend cell site data is good for pinpointing locations), cell site location data is frequently used to convict innocent people.

We should not expect the average person to understand how their gadgets work. Probably 90% of people have no understanding of their car’s engine and that technology has been with us for a long time. It is also much easier than cell phone technology or network technology. Cops are no brighter than the general public so they can’t be expected to know this stuff either. Prosecutors and judges have the power to take a man’s freedom away so that’s a problem.

SOMEONE strangled a prostitute in Portland, Oregon in 2002. The police arrested Lisa Roberts, the victim’s ex-lover, who spent more than two years in custody awaiting trial. Shortly before the trial the prosecutor told Ms Roberts, via her lawyer, that tower data collected by Verizon, her mobile-telephone network, showed precisely where she was at the time of the murder. As her lawyer recalled, the prosecutor said Ms Roberts could be “pinpointed” in a park shortly before the victim’s naked and sexually assaulted corpse was found there. She was told she faced 25 years to life in prison. She accepted a deal to plead guilty and serve 15 years.

But the high-tech evidence against her was bunk. Routinely collected tower data can place a mobile phone in a broad area, but it cannot “pinpoint” it. That would require a special three-tower “triangulation”, which cannot reveal past locations. It took a decade for Ms Roberts’s guilty plea to be thrown out. On May 28th she left prison, her criminal record clean, after nearly 12 years in custody.

The problem here is that even if the accused knew the DA was lying, she could not be sure the jury would understand that the DA was lying. The defense attorney probably lacked the knowledge and resources to fight it. That opens the door for the many crooked prosecutors to make claims about technology, like in this case, that are batshit crazy, but may fly with a jury or a gullible defendant.

This really points to a larger issue: people have this tendency to believe that technology can answer all questions. The NSA’s fetishism of surveillance via technology is an example of this. There’s data there, so it becomes all too tempting to assume that the data must answer any possible question (thus, the desire to collect so much of it). But the data and the interpretations it can lead to are often misleading or simply wrong. And that’s especially true when dealing with newer technologies or forms of data collection. That the criminal justice system could go decades without everyone recognizing the basic geometric limits of cell site location data based on a single cell is… both astounding and depressing. But it’s also a reminder that we shouldn’t assume that just because some evidence comes from some new-fangled data source it’s automatically legitimate and accurate.

This is why the NSA spying stuff is mostly bullshit. The government buys all of its technology from the private sector. There are things done for the government by private contractors that are not for anyone else, but the government does not have special magic. Further, the government is not getting the best and brightest. There’s way too much money to be made in the private sector for the government to get the best and brightest.

More important, the volume of data involved is so large there’s simply no way to sort through it in a meaningful way. There are 150 billion e-mails sent every day. That’s 55 trillion e-mails a year. Searching that volume of records for useful data is simply impractical. Throw in the 100 trillion or so phone calls and probably the same number of texts and the volume of data is well beyond what could be useful. That’s why they don’t try, but they’re fine letting people think it. The Feds are relying on the CSI effect to convince the world they can read your mind.

That Guy Again

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The interesting thing about the creationists and Intelligent Design advocates is they are not very Christian. They use Christian rhetoric from time time and make explicit religious appeals to people, but they are not in line with Scripture. In fact, they are almost pagan in their beliefs. This story that has been kicking around the neo-Christian sites is a pretty good example. The first sentence is a good starting point.

LANDMARK Adelaide research showing that sperm and eggs appear to carry genetic memories of events well before conception, may force a rethink of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin, scientists say.

Creationists and ID’ers look at evolution as a cult. They assume Darwin holds the same place in the hearts of “evolutionists” as Jesus or the Bible holds for them. If Darwin is proven to be wrong in some way, then everything he said is false and the whole religion of evolution comes crashing down. After all, if the prophet is proved false his religion is proved false. The result of this thinking is an obsession on the part of ID’ers with Darwin and trying to discredit him.

The trouble is science does not work like religion. Darwin was wrong about a lot of things and he guessed about a lot of other things. He was also not the only guy working on these ideas. Genetics and the cracking open of the human genome have added more to evolutionary biology than Darwin. Newton was wrong about plenty of things, but that does not mean math is a false god. Science is the process of trial and error, with error leading to new discoveries.

But, the ID’ers can’t think that way. Their interest in the subject is not to gain a better understanding of the natural world. it is to defend their faith. That’s where the paganism creeps into the story. Traditional Christianity contains two key elements. One is that God is rational and the other is God is unknowable. God created the laws of nature and enforces them. They don’t change. God could change those laws, but he doesn’t because he keeps his word, literally and figuratively.

The latter, the unknowable part is where the new breed of Christian wanders off the reservation. They think they are having a personal relationship with Jesus. Traditional Christianity does not view Jesus as divine in the same way Greeks viewed Zeus as divine. Jesus was the word, God’s word, made flesh. If God were so inclined, he could have used a stick or a rock as his covenant with man. Jesus is the symbol through which God communicated his new covenant with mankind.

The neo-Christians into the Intelligent Design cause hold a different view. They see Jesus as their personal God in the same way a Roman would have a personal relationship with Apollo. Like the pagan gods, Jesus can and does intercede on man’s behalf when asked. This is why the wide receiver looks up and thanks Jesus after he scores a touchdown. The result is an occasionalist view of nature. If Jesus were so inclined, he could make the sky green and the grass purple.

In this regard, creationists are more honest that ID’ers. The creationist simply says the world is as described in their version of Genesis. They are not interested in knowing anything about their version of Genesis or the science of evolution. ID’ers on the other hand are only interested in evolution in order to come up with the right ritual to persuade their god to smite the evolutionist. They dream of a time when Jesus will defeat Darwin at the end times. That’s not science and it it barely qualifies as Christianity.

Statistics is not Science

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One of the worst things about the fake nerd movement is the belief that statistics are the same as science. Science certainly uses statistics for all sorts of things. Correlations can narrow the search for causal relationships. But, you have to use other tools to reveal those links. That’s no more obvious than in how the sabermetrics crowd completely missed the steroid era. Bill James, the godfather of baseball stat-nerds, was silent on the steroid era. You would think his spreadsheets would have revealed to him what everyone noticed from the stands.

This story on Grantland is another fin example of missing the forest for the trees.

One of the things that makes it such a joy to watch the Chicago Cubs’ rebuilding plan unfold is that the team’s approach is completely transparent. There’s no trickery here, no deceit, no super-secret process that’s inscrutable to everyone outside of the front office.

I don’t simply mean that the Cubs are rebuilding with complete conviction; under the terms of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, that’s really the only way to go.1 Nor do I mean that the Cubs are nearly the extremists that the Houston Astros are. I’m referring instead to the core principle with which the Cubs have been trying to build a championship roster since team president Theo Epstein and general manager Jed Hoyer were hired after the 2011 season, a principle that distinguishes this rebuilding project from almost every other one in baseball history: They’re building an offense from within and a pitching staff from spare parts.

This flies in the face of more than a century of conventional baseball wisdom, which states that (1) pitching wins championships, and (2) a team can never have too much pitching. The Cubs’ approach is completely counterintuitive. It’s also completely right.

Again, no mention of steroids. From World War II through the eighties, you followed a well known template to build your team. Power at the corners, defense up the middle, speed in the outfield. Mark Belanger could start at short on a title team with a .228 batting average. Elrod Hendricks could make a career as a catcher, despite a .220 career average. Pitching was a given. It was starts and innings you wanted from the rotation. That 1971 Oriole team had four starters account for 1080 innings.

Then the steroid era happened. Suddenly everyone in the lineup was a fearsome slugger. Pitchers were getting killed. That changed how teams looked at pitching. Getting hitters was easy. Getting pitchers that could give you 30 starts was rare. Every team shifted resources into getting and developing pitchers. Teams would draft nothing but pitchers some years. Technology was brought to bear to help pitchers compete with hitters who were jacked up on steroids.

Now, the steroids have gone away. The stat guys have not noticed, but front offices have noticed. The Red Sox traded four pitchers for hitters at the deadline. They just signed a Cuban slugger. The Cubs are doing the same thing. They traded their two best pitchers for hitters. Those teams that acquired the pitchers, by the way, are now struggling. Oakland has slumped and Detroit is fading. There’s plenty of pitching to be had these days. It is hitting that is rare.