Sick

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University has been up to some pretty sick shit. Concerned parents bring their little girls to the good doctor and express their worries. Their worries, namely, that their developing child's clitoris is too large. The WTF factor only snowballs from here. Dix Poppas performs a "nerve-sparing" surgery on the little girls (most are around six years old) in which he removes the offending tissue from the shaft of the clitoris, then reattaches the glans to what little remains. 

Imagine growing up with the knowledge that your parents found the most private, sensitive part of your body so aesthetically disturbing, so very ugly that they arranged to have it chopped up by a creep who would later masturbate you as they watched. Ugh. 

I have few words to describe exactly how wildly unethical this is. Here's a Pharyngula post on the topic, and the original post from Psychology Today. The comment threads are worth reading and rather cathartic. Dan Savage has also caught wind of this, and has a long, passionately written post at the Stranger.

From Dan Savage's post:

There's lots to be outraged about here: there's nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there's no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl's clitoris because it's "too big" has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm. But what's most outrageous is how Poppas is "proving" that his surgery "spares nerves." Dreger and Feder:


But we are not writing today to again bring attention to the surgeries themselves. Rather, we are writing to express our shock and concern over the follow-up examination techniques described in the 2007 article by Yang, Felsen, and Poppas. Indeed, when a colleague first alerted us to these follow-up exams—which involve Poppas stimulating the girls’ clitorises with vibrators while the girls, aged six and older, are conscious—we were so stunned that we did not believe it until we looked up his publications ourselves.


Here more specifically is, apparently, what is happening: At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch.... Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls....

I encourage you to vent your disapproval/outrage here (Weill Cornell Medical College contact form).


Now for something completely different: in the runup to next week's IWC meeting in Morocco,   celebrities are joining the "fight against whaling". If you're a Doctor Who fan, the wonderful Christopher Eccleston has gotten behind the cause. The BBC article also outlines the agenda for the meeting, which will probably result in the 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling being overturned. Environmental groups are, of course, up in arms against this. More information is here, at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society website. If you'd like to subscribe to their blog, the RSS feed is here.

Moratorium harpooned

The Independent has an article today on the upcoming International Whaling Commission meeting, and what's likely to come out of it. At the same time that Australia is challenging Japan in court over its illegal whaling practices - one small step forward - it looks like the 24-year moratorium on commercial whaling is, in a giant leap backwards, about to be scrapped.

From the article:

The moratorium on commercial whaling, one of the world's major environmental achievements, is in danger of being abandoned after 24 years at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) which begins this week in Morocco.


A proposed new deal, which stands a realistic chance of being passed at the conference in Agadir, would allow the three countries which have continued killing the great whales in defiance of the ban – Japan, Norway and Iceland – to recommence whaling legally in return for bringing down their catches.


However, many conservationists do not believe that catches will actually fall under the proposed new agreement, and one of the world's leading whaling scientists recently described it in testimony to the US Congress as "a scam ... likely to fool many people".


...


Should the moratorium be dismantled, it would represent one of the most damaging setbacks ever for wildlife conservation. The ban, which was agreed in 1982 and became operational in 1986, was introduced after a long and intense campaign by environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace.


They were protesting against the intense cruelty of whaling, where the killing is done by firing explosive harpoons into the large, intelligent animals, and also against the fact that many of the stocks of the great whales had been drastically reduced by over-hunting, with blue whales driven to the brink of extinction.


Although large-scale whaling came to an end with the ban, and populations began to recover, three countries carried on killing: Japan, by labelling its hunting "scientific research", and the Norwegians and Icelanders by lodging formal objections. Since 1986 the three nations have between them killed more than 30,000 whales, the Japanese leading with more than 1,000 whales a year – mainly minke whales, but also Bryde's, fin, sei and sperm whales.


But the global total of kills has nevertheless fallen to a tiny fraction of what it was, and the moratorium has been an unqualified success from a whale conservation point of view.


The deal which may do away with it, which has been on the table for three years, was first thought to be merely a diplomatic compromise to end the perpetual confrontation at IWC meetings between the whaling nations and the anti-whaling countries. But recently it has become clear that it had a different purpose, and was cooked up in the US – by leading figures in the Bush administration, among them being Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who, until his conviction for taking unreported gifts in 2008, was the longest-serving Republican senator in American history.


One of the most powerful figures in US politics, Senator Stevens sought a deal with Japan after the Japanese caused problems for the US by objecting (as a bargaining counter in IWC negotiations) to the whale-hunting quota for Alaskan Inuit peoples, who have a traditional hunt for about 50 bowhead whales.


Senator Stevens is believed to have put pressure on the then-US Whaling Commissioner and IWC chairman, William Hogarth – whose budget, in the US National Marine Fisheries Service, Mr Stevens controlled as a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee – to open talks with Japan, which Mr Hogarth duly did at the 2007 IWC meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

...


Justin Cooke, who is the representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature on the IWC Scientific Committee, took the deal apart in the US Congress, in evidence to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Dr Cooke said: "The proposal is disingenuous and I suspect that it will fool many people." It was a scam, he said, in which the calculation of how many whales could be killed was being left to politicians rather than scientists.

I have always considered Ted Stevens a slimy bastard, but this latest revelation upgrades him to a walking, talking, waste of oxygen.

Click here to download Dr. Cooke's testimony in Congress. Short, sweet, and worth reading.

If your attention span is longer and your tolerance for bullshit higher than mine, you can download the full 43-page proposal here.

Good news, very bad news

First, the good news: Australia is set to pursue legal action against Japan for its illegal whaling program. From the Beeb:

The Australian government says it will lodge formal proceedings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague next week.


The move comes ahead of a meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in Morocco next month, where agreement is being sought on a new approach to whaling, which would allow commercial hunting but with strict quotas.


Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett and Attorney General Robert McClelland said in a joint statement that the move underlines their "commitment to bring to an end Japan's program of so-called scientific whaling".

And now the bad news. The first picture I've seen of a dolphin killed by the BP oil spill has hit the internet. A warning: this picture is graphic and may at the very least ruin your day. Click here.

Finally, Ann Weaver in Tampa wrote an article a few days ago about the effects of the spill on local dolphin populations. She reviews what little we know about the devastating damage the spill has done to the food chain, and speculates that dolphins will not be able (or willing) to leave the area.

From the article:

Couldn’t our adult dolphins just move, just head north or south where there was less oil or more food? Possibly. But even if the waters were unequally disturbed by the oil, and there were healthy waters to go to, dolphin psychology could keep the dolphins from fleeing the meltdown.


One, dolphins are pretty free-form but they do have habits. Changes during construction on the John's Pass Bridge further suggest that their habits die hard. They may stick to their habits despite diminishing food and water quality.


Two, dolphins live in home ranges, which are where they’re found most often. They may stick to their home ranges despite diminishing food and water quality. About sixty of the dolphins we’ve seen are residents who would stick around John’s Pass.


Finally, there’s the glaring psychological difference between humans and other animals: Humans move. Animals don’t. Granted, some animals migrate to another troop at maturity. But animals become endangered or extinct because, when humans destroy their habitat, the animals either have no place to go or don’t know to go.


Randy Wells of Mote Marine described our coastline as a mosaic of overlapping dolphin home ranges.


Let’s say, for the sake of argument, our local dolphins found John’s Pass untenable and decided to move. They would encounter dolphins already living in every area they went. There are no free waters where “our” dolphins could go.


Another major concern of mine is the expansion and potential connection of dead zones. A dead zone is an area of water that is so depleted of oxygen that no sea creatures can live in it.


The Gulf of Mexico already has a dead zone the size of the state of Massachusetts, created by the fertilizers that get into the mighty Mississippi from America’s breadbasket and end up in the Gulf. Lesser dead zones (if there is such a thing) pock the Western Florida shoreline. God forbid these all get together.

A bleak forecast.

Gulf spill

Lazy though I may be, I think the unfolding environmental disaster in the Gulf deserves a mention.

First, NPR has a story on a group of scientist and engineers who have calculated the daily output of the broken pipe and come up with an estimate that is dramatically higher than the official numbers. 

Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.


A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.


The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.

Wereley's calculations were backed up by scientists and engineers at other institutions. Needless to say, BP disputes these figures. But even at BP's absurdly low estimate - 5,000 barrels a day - this is shaping up to be even worse than the Exxon Valdez spill.

Deborah Blum over at ScienceBlogs has a post on the relative toxicity of the oil in the Gulf and the chemical dispersant being used to break it down. The standard toxicity test for chemical compounds is called the LD50. LD stands for Lethal Dose and 50 indicates 50 percent. So, LD50 means the lowest dose at which a material kills half of the test subjects. Blum did some digging on the LD50s for crude oil and the dispersant being used (Corexit 9500) and came up with some distressing results: turns out that pouring Corexit 9500 on crude oil actually makes the resulting mixture even more toxic.

The results differ by species and by time as well as by amount of poison, The EPA numbers for Corexit 9500 (the formula used most heavily by BP) show that at 2.62 ppm, the dispersant kills half the silver fish in 96 hours/ four days. At a slightly higher concentration - 3.4 ppm - the compound kills half the little shrimp in two days.


As for crude oils, a very decent analysis by the American Petroleum Institute shows that all are toxic, but their effects vary with thickness and with the different chemistry seen in say, oil from the Gulf of Mexico and oil from Kuwait. The best estimate I've seen for South Louisiana Crude - after hours of exasperated research - comes from thesis work done at Louisiana State University several years ago. For instance, the study found that Louisiana crude had an LC50 of 4250 ppm for the warm-water loving killifish.


This suggests that crude oil is less acutely poisonous than chemical dispersants. But here's the really interesting finding in that terrific little study. Adding a dispersant - specifically Corexit 9500 - made the oil more poisonous. A lot more poisonous.


The "dispersed" oil had an LC50 of 317.7 ppm, making it more than 11 times more lethal in its effects. The study found a similar worsening for white shrimp, although not quite as dramatic. "Dispersed oils were more toxic than crude oils," noted the report.

Finally, The Big Picture has a feature on the spill. I highly recommend it. Beautiful pictures of awful stuff.

Bottlenose dolphins swim through oily water

The end is nigh

I'm counting hours until the end of undergraduate classes forever and ever and ever. This is beyond strange. It hasn't been four years. They're lying to me. My cap and gown are stashed away in my sock drawer, still in their plastic because I'm scared to open them up. I walk in a month and two days.

Locked myself in and stayed up for a few days this week staring at this screen and contemplating my thesis with a growing sense of existential horror. Sort of like this, but silently and in a library. I am cautiously optimistic, however. If I keep going long enough, it is statistically probable that I will produce a work of profound insight and great intellectual beauty:

Meat

Meat from Japan's "scientific research" whaling program is turning up in US and Korean stores. The Beeb reports:

Scientists say they have found clear proof that meat from whales captured under Japan's whaling programme is being sold in US and Korean eateries.


The researchers say they used genetic fingerprinting to identify meat taken from a Los Angeles restaurant as coming from a sei whale sold in Japan.


They say the discovery proves that an illegal trade in protected species still exists.


Whale meat was also allegedly found at an unnamed Seoul sushi restaurant.


Commercial whaling has been frozen by an international moratorium since 1986.


But a controversial exemption allows Japan to kill several hundred whales each year for what is termed scientific research.


The meat from these whales is then sold to the public in shops and restaurants in that country.

From the article, it seems the meat was advertised straight up as whale meat. While it boggles the mind that eateries selling endangered species escaped notice for so long, I suppose it's better than the alternative: dolphin and whale meat with toxic levels of mercury deliberately mislabeled and sold to unwitting customers as more expensive stuff.

Wonder how toxic this stuff was?

Simon Singh vindicated

Science writer Simon Singh wrote an article two years ago in which he called out chiropractors on their fantastical claims and dangerous practices. Soon afterward, the British Chiropractic Association, in a fit of idiocy, brought a libel suit against him. Singh has lost two years of his career to the suit, but yesterday he won.

[EDIT: Oops, my bad. He won his appeal to classify his comments as "free comment" instead of statements of truth, which makes this easier, but he's not in the clear yet. There are still many legal hurdles he has to clear before this business is over.]

Writing that this coalition of quacks "happily promotes bogus treatments" (in one of Singh's books) to describe a "treatment" that has proven both ineffective and potentially lethal strikes me as perfectly reasonable. The BCA thought it was criminal. As soon as the internet heard about the suit, it exploded with indignation and scorn. From Wiki:

"A "furious backlash"^[2] to the ongoing lawsuit has resulted in the filing of formal complaints of false advertising against more than 500 individual chiropractors within one 24 hour period, one national chiropractic organization ordering its members to take down their websites,^[3] and Nature Medicine noting that the case has gathered wide support for Singh, as well as prompting calls for the reform of English libel laws.^[4]"

Sometimes, if you ignore 4chan, the internet gives me hope for humanity. 

The bullshit of chiropractors runs deep. From Singh's original article:

"This is Chiropractic Awareness Week. So let’s be aware. How about some awareness that may prevent harm and help you make truly informed choices? First, you might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that, “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae”. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body."

It's not just that it's wacky. People have died.

"...manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

[Some reports here.]

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: “Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck."

Happily, the Court of Appeal ruled in Singh's favor, trashing the BCA's suit in scathing terms. From yesterday's ruling :

"The opinion may be mistaken, but to allow the party which has been denounced on the basis of it to compel its author to prove in court what he has asserted by way of argument is to invite the court to become an Orwellian ministry of truth. Milton, recalling in the Areopagitica his visit to Italy in 1638-9, wrote:

"I have sat among their learned men, for that honour I had, and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom, as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; …. that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought."

That is a pass to which we ought not to come again."

Love the Milton. Love that we're winning again.

Google vs. China

Google just cold turkey stopped censoring in China. Who knows what happens next. I'm behind Google all the way, but sooner or later they're going to get kicked out. If the Party really decides to get its crackdown on, massive government cyberattacks are going to be the least of their problems.


From Wiki:

The apparatus of the PRC's Internet repression is considered more extensive and more advanced than in any other country in the world. The regime not only blocks website content but also monitors the internet access of individuals. Amnesty International notes that China “has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world.” The offences of which they are accused include communicating with groups abroad, opposing the persecution of the Falun Gong, signing online petitions, and calling for reform and an end to corruption.^[4]

Some pretty egregious offenses there. It certainly would be unacceptable to have anyone suggesting reform, pointing out corruption, communicating with "groups" (what groups?) abroad, or opposing persecution. That would be shameful. Or something.

I'm just waiting for the international fiasco when a Google employee gets thrown in jail on some similarly ridiculous charge.

From the article:

Thousands of police officers are employed to monitor web activity and many automated systems watch blogs, chat rooms and other sites to ensure that banned subjects, such as Tiananmen Square, are not discussed.

What must it be like to work as a censor? To possess illicit knowledge when your job is to obliterate it? Are there really thousands of people across China who know what their country's been up to and choose to smother the horror stories anyway? That's real patriotism. Or true denial.

Maybe they told them it was all a pack of Western lies, evidence be damned. Maybe it's a cultural thing and I'm being insensitive. Then again, maybe the toxic waste in the air and water has affected their heads.

China scares me on several levels. Intensely corrupt, wildly irresponsible, and childishly vindictive, it looms like an enormous dumptruck on the horizon. They'll be more powerful than the States one day. We're far from perfect, but at the very least, we've got a mostly democratic government and a fetishistic attachment to free speech. What does China have?

Back to it

I'm back from spring break, sunburned, certified for scuba adventures and thoroughly satisfied. I slept for about two days after I stumbled off the bus, and now I think I'm ready for the next few weeks. And it is only weeks now. One week until grad school apps are due, a few more weeks until the thesis (currently in embryonic form) is due, and only a few weeks after that until graduation.

My semester thus far has been an easy ride: work hard all day, then home for painting and beer all night. The next while is going to involve a lot less painting and a lot more typing. Thinking, even. And probably less beer. Alas.

On the bright side, it is currently 60 degrees and sunny out.

Evil

Dick Cheney, it appears, is even more of a sadistic, evil douchebag than we thought. I won't call him an arrogant bastard, because Arrogant Bastard Ale is delicious, but he is beyond arrogant, and most definitely a bastard. 

He has confessed to war crimes, without any of the shame or reticence that word usually conveys. In an interview with ABC News the other week, he made it clear that he had supported "enhanced interrogation techniques" from the beginning, and still does.

He's not making it easy to not hate him. He's even making life difficult for the people in the Obama administration who don't want him or his cronies prosecuted. From the article:

Those statements, both on Sunday and in his December 2008 interview with Karl, destroys a key line in the Bush administration's defense against war crimes charges. For years, Cheney and other Bush administration officials pinned their defense on the fact that they had received legal advice from Justice Department lawyers that the brutal interrogations of “war on terror” detainees did not constitute torture or violate other laws of war.

Cheney's statements, however, would suggest that the lawyers were colluding with administration officials in setting policy, rather than providing objective legal analysis.

Obama's not doing too great on this front. Even with Cheney spewing toxicity and lies to the media (if you'd like to consider Fox News "media"), the Obama administration has consistently resisted calls for government investigations. It has gone to court to block lawsuits that demand release of torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture (and yes, waterboarding was, and has always been, torture). A final word on this, from Rahm Emanuel:

"Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community..." [...] "Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, 'Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?'"

I understand the impulse to put ugliness behind you. But there are boils that need lancing, and the longer they fester, the uglier they get. I expected better.

What a mess.

Big Brother Down Under

This is old news, but the South Australian government recently passed a law, in force as of about a month ago, outlawing anonymous political speech on the internet. In the run-up to regional elections on March 20, the law requires anyone commenting on the election to publish their real name and postcode. In addition, according to this article:

The law, which was pushed through last year as part of a raft of amendments to the Electoral Act and supported by the Liberal Party, also requires media organisations to keep a person's real name and full address on file for six months, and they face fines of $5000 if they do not hand over this information to the Electoral Commissioner.

Seriously? Australia?

Read on for paranoia, political slime, and ultimate Internet victory!

Creation

I saw Creation last night, and really loved it. There is love and madness and science and phosphorescent sea life and an orangutan. Also, Paul Bettany. It's no action thriller, but it is very thoughtful, beautifully shot, and almost satisfying. Almost, because some moments of it makes me despair of humanity: Hooker, Darwin's close friend, pleads with him to write the Origin. It's a battle, he says, in a war we can win within our lifetimes.

Ouch. One hundred and fifty one years later, and where are we?

• We've got a burgeoning Young Earth Creationist movement on our hands. 
• The last post has details, but the numbers on scientific literacy in the United States (specifically with regard to evolution) are pretty ugly.
• The Creation Museum offers your impressionable children a chance to ride a dinosaur, just like Adam and Eve did a few thousand years ago. You can also explore a beautiful model of Noah's Ark! 
• According to Wiki, the otherwise respectable (I think?) Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave $1 million in 2000 and pledged $9.35 million over 10 years in 2003 to the goons at the Discovery Institute.  
• School boards all over the country are caving to the creationist wedge strategy: first introduce intelligent design into the curriculum, then worm in a little more, then a little more, then a little more, until students who report that the Earth was created in six days six thousand years ago are allowed to graduate. 

But there are those who are fighting back. Hope and vindication after the jump.

Viva la Evolución!

Creation, a Darwin biopic starring the wonderful Paul Bettany, came out recently. In a disgusting development, the majority of US distributors have refused to pick it up. This is a film which would tear the nation apart, apparently. It would prove so hugely controversial in this, our country of Big Macs, guns and superstition, that they could only lose money on it.

That's my charitable interpretation, and the most likely scenario.

The uncharitable one, and the idea that fills me with fear, is that they are simply willfully ignorant, backwards people themselves. The elites, the presumably well-educated potentates who mandate what we see and hear and experience - because media is far more powerful than politics - could themselves be prey to the same regressive pettiness that the rest of us proles face. As a shameless elitist myself, I suppose I had more faith in the sinister media oligarchy.

Numbers after the jump.

Non-human persons

There's an AAAS conference coming up in San Diego, focusing on the ethical implications of dolphin intelligence. Several very interesting people will be speaking. A few of them are quoted in this article, which outlines the ongoing controversy about intelligence and animals and what it means, or should mean, to us. The abstract for the conference:

The dolphin brain has a large cerebral cortex and a substantial amount of associational neocortex. Most anatomical ratios that assess cognitive capacity place it second only to the human brain. More important, recent research in marine science has revealed that dolphins have a remarkable degree of cognitive and affective sophistication. For example, dolphins can recognize their image in a mirror as a reflection of themselves -- a finding that indicates self-awareness similar to that seen in higher primates and elephants. These and other studies, which have found that dolphins are also capable of advanced cognitive abilities such as problem-solving, artificial language comprehension, and complex social behavior, indicate that dolphins are far more intellectually and emotionally sophisticated than previously thought. Considerable research indicates that they are significantly different from fish and other marine species, and this research has significance for commercial policy and practice. This symposium will present the scientific findings and explore their ethical and policy implications.

Fitna فِتْنَةٌ‎

Geert Wilders goes on trial today, accused of incitement and discrimination against Muslims. His film, Fitna, presents suras from the Qur'an... and scenes of atrocities committed by people inspired by them. He could be fined or jailed if convicted.

Really?

Hideous pandering and audiovisual aids after the jump.

Blueshift

So, it looks like I've got a job next year. And a PhD program lined up after that. That's six years. 2016. That's the future... they'll have flying cars by then. I'll be 28.

This is ridiculous and scary and perhaps the best, most meaningful opportunity I've ever had. I've got so much work to do on myself before I can even contemplate becoming the sort of person who is knowledgeable/educated/going places/self-sufficient/in charge/responsible for things and yet it seems that I already am?

The future is here. It's rushing up at me in an alarming, delicious way. Everything is suddenly blue-shifted. And blue is my favorite color.

The Sokal Affair

Long ago, the Sokal affair put Alan Sokal on my list of people I want to be when I grow up. Someone reminded me of him today, and I thought I'd share the wonderful. The Wiki page (linked above) is really worth reading, as is Steven Weinberg's analysis of the paper and the situation.

Sokal, a physicist and mathematician, wrote an essay in the postmodern style, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", arguing - tongue firmly planted in cheek - that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. The paper was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by a respected humanities journal. On the day it was published, Sokal announced that it had been a hoax: in his words, "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics. It was a bad day for bullshitters everywhere.

Steven Weinberg, another physicist, summarized it:

The targets of Sokal's satire occupy a broad intellectual range. There are those "postmoderns" in the humanities who like to surf through avant garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experience. There are those sociologists, historians, and philosophers who see the laws of nature as social constructions. There are cultural critics who find the taint of sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, or capitalism not only in the practice of scientific research but even in its conclusions. Sokal did not satirize creationists or other religious enthusiasts who in many parts of the world are the most dangerous adversaries of science, but his targets were spread widely enough, and he was attacked or praised from all sides.

I've posted about this before (see "The White Stuff"), but the anti-science squawking of the academic far left is almost as irritating, if not as dangerous, as convergent nonsense excreted by the Know-Nothing far right. Education, it seems, don't cure stupid. It merely gives you the means to elaborate on stupid for pages and pages and pages.

On that note, for the linguistically inclined, the Chomskybot is also worth playing with.

One last tidbit of wisdom from Sokal:

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)

Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text
46/47, 217-252 (1996).