June 2012 – Page 2 – Auxiliary Memory

Does Science Fiction Hurt Science?

Science is under attack in America today. There are more anti-science people than scientists. And by scientists I mean anyone who accepts science as the best method for understanding reality, not just working Ph.D. scientists. I just finished a book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway and they carefully chronicle how fraud science is being used in politics to attack real science.

Most people have no idea how real science is conducted and communicated, thus it’s very easy to corrupt the general public about scientific knowledge. Real science is done in peer reviewed journals and is rather plodding. Popular science writing takes real science and tries to explain it. This is the first level where unscientific noise enters the equation. Most people do not read peer reviewed science journals so they must depend on textbook and popular science writers to explain science to them.

The third level down are writers (like me) who take what they’ve read in popular science writing and further spread the ideas or use the ideas in some applied political or practical fashion. This is were a lot of imprecise and unscientific noise gets spread to readers in general.

I’m a life-long science fiction reader. I spend a lot of time writing about science fiction and its history. I grew up thinking science fiction promoted the study of science. Now I’m not so sure.

Anyone can introduce a meme into the social network. And they can claim the meme is scientific. 99% of Ph.D. climate scientists say global warming is happening, and it’s caused by humans, but if one non-science person who is good at communicating can convince a large group of people that global warming is a fraud, it will be believed, even more so than by the Ph.D. scientists. The scientists have billions of dollars of the latest technology systematically researching the problem on a worldwide scale, and one person, with no expertise and equipment, but with good communications skills can destroy all their effort. Ideas are more powerful than science.

We live in a world of seven billion gullible people who’d rather believe what they want than the truth. People are self-delusional.

Science fiction is a powerful art form that generates non-scientific memes. Is that good or bad? Should we worry.

Thousands of years ago some human came up with the idea of angels and the meme has existed ever since. In more recent times science fiction promoted the idea of faster-the-light traveling spaceships. Is a warp drive any more real than an angel? Battlestar Galactica had warp drives and angels. I thought the show was a lot of fun, but I don’t believe in either, but many people do. Create an idea and the believers will come.

The innocence of science fiction corrupting minds with junk science depends on fans knowing that science fiction is just for fun. I’ve argued this point before and some of my friends exclaim that it’s obvious that people know that science fiction books and movies are just for fun. I don’t agree. I think some people want to believe that their favorite science fiction can come true. That the future of mankind includes galactic civilizations, time travel, downloading minds into clones and computers, and so on.

I think great science fiction takes real science and dramatizes it in ways that make readers speculate about the future. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells is a good example. Wells used the idea of evolution to speculate about descendants of Homo Sapiens and the extinction of our race and the Earth. The time machine was merely a gimmick to let the reader visit these speculations, but it’s that gimmick that’s stuck with the popular mind.

Other science fiction throws out far out ideas just to see what people will say. There’s nothing wrong with fun speculation, unless people consider it science. Take for instance the current film Prometheus which I’ve already written about. What’s dangerous is if some people actual start believing that aliens visited the Earth and helped humans develop civilization. Prometheus is only a continuation of 2001: A Space Odyssey back in 1968 and that led to Chariots of the Gods type thinking.

Now this kind of fun pretending is fine as long as you don’t think it’s science. Science has a huge problem in America. Few want to study it, fewer still want to accept it, and many want to corrupt it. I have to ask if my favorite art form is contributing to undermining scientific thinking?

According to this recent Gallop Poll, 46% of Americans believe God created man in the last 10,000 years, according to Bible history. Science is competing with that kind of thinking. Does it help science to have science fiction generating all kinds of nonsense ideas too? If you understand science, science fiction is fun, but if you don’t, how can you tell if the ideas are real or crazy?

Follow the link to the Gallop Poll and read the statistics about Americans and their beliefs. They’re closer to fantasy and science fiction than science. In fact, people who pursue scientific thinking makes up only a tiny fraction of the population. We all depend on science for medicine, cars, airplanes, computers, weather prediction, etc., but few of us study how it works. Scientists are the magicians of our times, and few understand how their magic works.

I’ve read popular books and magazines about science all my life. I think of myself as an advocate for scientific thinking, but I’m far from a disciplined scientific thinker. Science is a very misused word. Our society is full of junk science, fraud science, pseudo science, fake science, and an emerging category I’m calling zombie science.

Some computer viruses take over personal computers and turn them into zombie computers to attack other computers and create massive denial of service attacks. Conservatives waging a war on science and environmentalism have developed fake and fraud science to inject into people’s minds to spread zombie science. They are taking over people’s minds to create a denial of science attack with their anti-science science. This is very diabolical, but impressive. Read Merchants of Doubt for the details.

What I’m asking is in this war on science, is science fiction helping or hurting?

Don’t just toss this idea off. Think about it for awhile. Everybody has a map of reality in their heads. How functional or accurate that map is depends on how well it corresponds to actual reality. That’s what science is about, validating the input of our senses. It’s extremely easy to program humans to believe anything. Not only can we be brainwashed but we all actively promote self-delusion. Scientific thinking is an extremely hard discipline to pursue, much harder than Zen.

Remember Cypher in the film The Matrix, when he sells out to Agent Smith? Cypher is willing to accept a delusional world because it gives him what he wants. Most humans do that. I wonder if our love of science fiction is like steak to Cypher?

People will dismiss this idea. They will say only an idiot will believe the stuff in science fiction, that science fiction is only books you read for fun. Well, how many people believe in the Bible? It’s only a book too. Don’t get infected by zombie science.

JWH – 6/23/12

Clear Explanation of Fast and Furious Scandal

I highly recommend watching this video – it’s enlightening on so many levels.

By the way, I’m all for gun ownership. Maybe if all us liberals joined the NRA they’d feel less paranoid. Obama has done nothing about control and that’s caused immense fear in the NRA community. Fear drives people to desperate thinking and this video explains how. Maybe Obama should join the NRA.

I’ve been hearing about the Fast and Furious scandal in the national news and wondered what the hell was going on. This video makes everything clear.

Thanks to Bill at That’s interesting… for the link.

JWH – 6/23/12

Are You Naïve, Delusional, A Rube, A Chump?–The War On Science

Do you believe everything you read?

Can you verify everything you know?

How much of what you know is wrong?

People believe what they want to believe, and they always think they’ve right. Would you even know when you’re wrong? Does it matter, or would you really like to know the truth?

The reason I ask these question is because we’re in the middle of a war on science. Like the rulers in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there are people who want you to believe what they want to believe and they know what they believe isn’t scientific, so their battle plan is to confuse people by attacking science and making it very hard to know what’s true and what’s not true. Like those rulers in that famous dystopian novel, they’re willing to rewrite history and invent newspeak to fool people into believing their version of the truth.

Why trust what I have to say is the truth? Well, you shouldn’t. Never trust anyone. The important thing is to learn how to verify facts for yourself. It’s also important to learn how information is presented to you. It’s very easy to be persuaded. People are quick to believe anything. It’s surprisingly easy to convince people to believe false information. It’s devilishly hard to be logical. People aren’t rational, even though we believe we are. We’re geniuses at self-delusion. Don’t trust yourself either.

Absolute truth is elusive in this reality. We don’t live in a black and white world, but one with infinite shades of gray. One of the biggest misconceptions about science is its knowledge is one hundred percent certain. We know with absolute certainty that the Earth orbits the Sun. Our knowledge of celestial mechanics is good enough that we can launch a satellite to Saturn and years later and billions of miles traveled, we’ll hit our target perfectly. This is while the Earth, the satellite and Saturn all move independently tens of thousands of miles an hour in different directions, and the gravity of all the bodies in the solar system come into play. This is fantastic knowledge that correlates to many decimal places.

Science is far less sure about the causes of breast cancer or global warming, but scientists know far more about those topics than you think. The trick is, if you are worried about getting cancer or impending global warming, is to understand just how much they do know. Evolution is closer to the fact of the Earth orbiting the Sun than the causes of global warming, and what we know about global warming is massive, but millions of people are fooled otherwise.

Now I can’t prove that in this essay. It would take more words than I have time to write. What you need to learn is how to examine news about science, and to do that I highly recommend reading Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Oreskes and Conway examine several public scientific debates that have occurred since the 1940s and they show how science works and doesn’t work, as well as how anti-science forces are corrupting science in the United States.

After World War II scientists began to tell people that smoking cigarettes was not safe. Now the tobacco industry didn’t want people believing that, even though their own scientists told them it was true. When the tobacco industry realized they couldn’t refute the actual science, they discovered they could confuse the public by attacking science in general and sowing doubt. Oreskes and Convey show a history of how big businesses have refined these techniques to fight one scientific discovery after another that threatened livelihood. And they use the public as their dupes.

Oreskes and Conway examine these battles like a court case carefully weighing all evidence presented by science and the anti-scientists. One thing big business learned quickly was to hire scientists to attack other scientists, and Merchants of Doubt presents several men and women who have made careers of being anti-scientists. Oreskes and Conway try hard not to vilify these individuals, but I can’t help seeing them as evil.

But who is to say I’m right? The point of Merchants of Doubt is to learn how scientific issues are studied and decide for yourself.

We all get email with a political agenda. These emails have carefully crafted stories designed to convince us to believe something specific about reality. It might be that global warming is a myth, or Obama isn’t a natural born American. Why believe what you read? Why be skeptical? Because there’s a war going on and each side is recruiting. One side wants you to be their chump. It’s like computer viruses that convert your computer into zombies used for organized crime – someone wants to use your mind, and they want you to act for them.

Don’t get brainwashed. Learn how to think for yourself. Learn how to think scientifically. Be skeptical. Seek good evidence.

Real science works through peer reviewed journals. A scientist will develop a hypothesis to test. They will set up an experiment. They will report their results in a paper and send it to a peer reviewed journal. Fellow scientists in the same discipline will review the article and judge it for proper methodology. If the article is accepted and published it doesn’t mean the results are facts. Other scientists will read the article and devise new tests and go through the process again. Topics under examination will be thoroughly researched over and over again until a statistical consensus emerges. It takes a long time. All too often one test result will be reported in the national news and causes a big brouhaha. This is one reason why many people find science confusing. They think one test result is suppose to tell the absolute truth and it doesn’t.

To further complicate scientific inquiry, people with a vested interest in a particular topic will make that topic newsworthy. They will do everything they can to try their case in the court of popular journalism. In peer reviewed journals only people who are specialists in the topic deal with the subject, but in regular journalism anybody can say anything. You might get a food processing chemist proclaiming facts about climatology. Or you might get high school dropout that just wants to get their opinion heard.

Don’t believe what you read about scientific concepts unless you thoroughly research them. Few people are going to read peer reviewed science journals. So what can you do? Learn to read popular science books. At least research Wikipedia. Wikipedia can be untrustworthy, but many of its articles are a battleground between many points of view and a consensus often gets hammered out.

Another good realty check is Snopes.com. Snopes often reviews silly topics, but all too often people believe silly crap. When you hear about something new check Snopes. A large percentage of internet gossip is fabricated.

Like I said, I highly recommend reading Merchants of Doubt. Instead of saying anything more about the book please read Global Warming Deniers and Their Proven Strategy of Doubt to get a bit of the flavor of the book.

This isn’t the only book on this subject. Journalists, writers and historians are beginning to see a pattern.

Doubt is their Project: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health by David Michaels
Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution by Gerald Markowitz
The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney
The Battle Over Climate Science – Popular Science

JWH – 6/21/12

Lose It! versus MyFitnessPal

I want to lose weight and my Google research tells me keeping a food diary is essential to this goal. My wife said they taught her at Weight Watchers:

If you bite it, write it.
If you nibble it, scribble it.
If you drink it, ink it.
If you snack it, track it.
If you steal it, reveal it.
If you sneak it, leak it.
If you chose it, disclose it.
If you hog it, log it.
If you grab it, blab it.
If you indulge it, divulge it.
If you ingest it, you guessed it!
If you imbibe it, inscribe it!
If it goes in your smacker, it goes in your tracker!
If you lick it, bic it!
Grab your pencil before your utensil!

I’m not a joiner, so Weight Watchers isn’t for me. I’m a do-it-yourselfer, so I found a couple of apps to help me out.

Loset It! and MyFitnessPal are both great programs that help you lose weight by tracking what you eat. They both work from a web site and/or mobile device. Both have barcode readers to quickly look up calorie and nutritional content. Both help you track calorie intake and calories burned through exercise. Both programs are essential for fighting weight loss. Both programs have social networking features. Both are easy to use. Both work with iOS and Android. Both are free.

So how to pick one? Since they are free you could just start with both and see which one you liked.

However, my basic characterization is Lose It! is best for non-techies and MyFitnessPal is best for power users. Lose It! has an elegantly simple user interface that goes deep with features with the minimum of thinking. MyFitnessPal is a tiny bit harder to learn, but you can do more customization. MyFitnessPal gives more nutrient information and it’s barcode scanner seems to recognize slightly more foods, but it’s program menu structure is a touch more cumbersome than Lose It!’s menus. I like proportion control in Lose It!, but MyFitnessPal can be more accurate if you like math.

You sign up for each program and answer some questions about your height, weight, age and your weight loss goal. The program then tells you your daily calorie goal and what date you’re reach your weight loss goal if you follow their routine.

My goal is to get down to 180 pounds by July 25, 2013 by losing 1 pound a week. I get 2,271 calories to work with each day. I can eat more if I exercise more. For years I’ve felt like I was dieting all the time because I wasn’t eating all the food I wanted and had given up all my favorite junk food. But tracking calories closely clearly shows I was still eating too much. Well, duh! I’m still fat.

The Math of Weight Loss

I want to lose 1 pound per week. 1 pound is about 3,500 calories, so that’s 3500 / 7 days = 500 less a day. Lose It! asked my age, height and weight and told me 2,271 calories is what it takes for me to lose 1 pound per week, which means eating 2,771 calories maintains my weight, and eating more means my bodily universe expands.

It’s extremely important to honestly record everything you eat and use accurate proportions, otherwise you are fooling yourself. Don’t cheat, or you won’t loose weight.

Both programs work in almost an identical way. You track calories by adding food or exercise to a diary that’s broken down by:

Breakfast
Lunch
Dinner
Snacks
Exercise

You add calories to your diary by selecting food items by:

Scanning the barcode
Searching a database
Selecting from items you’ve already added
Selecting from complete meals you’ve already recorded

You decrease your calorie count by adding an exercise from:

Menu of exercises
Exercises you’ve already listed

You can use both of these programs from the web if you don’t have a mobile device. I don’t have a smart phone but I do have an iPod Touch that I carry with me everywhere. It’s the current generation with a camera, so I can scan barcodes. It’s extremely easy to keep a food diary with these programs and a mobile device. It’s pretty easy to just use the web version, but it will be a bit more work because you have to run find a computer after you eat each meal, or jot down what you eat during the day and enter it at night.

Here’s what the daily diary looks like for the two programs:

Lose It! (the program I use)

MyFitnessPal (the program I’m testing)

Neither program had physical therapy exercises on their list, so I used yoga as a substitute.

Once you’ve looked up most of the common foods you eat, recording a meal or snack in the diary takes seconds. I make up menus of my favorite meals and just add the whole menu with one click. I tend to eat a lot of the same meals. In Lose It!, breakfast is one item that’s a stored recipe, but lunch is from a restaurant.

Eating out is a big problem. No barcode to scan, or label info to read. Both programs lists items off of chain restaurants, but if you go somewhere else you have to make the best guess you can, or build an approximate recipe. This restaurant guide at CalorieKing is very helpful, but I wished they had photos of the food, with dimensions. At CalorieLab you can search 70,000 foods and 500 restaurants for similar meals and hope you get close. The FDA is rolling out a law that will require all restaurants with more than 20 locations to list nutritional information. It would be great if the menus had little barcodes to scan.

More than Counting Calories!

These programs are about more than counting calories, they provide overall nutritional information, like this my current information from Lose It! (I haven’t had dinner yet):

I eat too many carbs, and too much salt, and I need to eat more protein in relationship to the carbs and fats. I’ve seen all kinds of recommendations for the proper ratio for Carbs/Protein/Fat. Moderate is 50/25/25, but the Zone diet recommends, 40/30/30. I’m a vegetarian, and not a particularly healthy eating vegetarian so my protein is low and my carbs high. As I work on my diet I want to get close to the Zone diet ration of 40/30/30.

Not only do these programs help me watch calories, they help me watch the kind of foods I eat. When it comes to nutrition data, MyFitnessPal is superior to Lose It! Here’s what MyFitnessPal shows for Quaker Oat Squares cereal:

Here’s what Lose It! shows (but for 1 and 1/2 cups – Lose It! is easier to adjust proportions):

I find Lose It! a breeze to use and adapted to it quickly. I’m tempted by MyFitnessPal because of the extra nutritional information, but for now I’m going to stick with Lose It! When I want to know more I just add the foods to MyFitnessPal.

My wife and two friends use Lose It! This helps us stay on track and gives us stuff to discuss and argue. My friend Peggy nags me about my carbs. I nag her about her cholesterol and protein.

I’ve just started using these programs. I wished I had discovered them years ago, or I wished they had existed decades ago. Back then I tried keeping a food diary. It involved a pen, a notebook, and a nutrition fact book. It was tedious and I gave it up after a couple of days. I’ve adapted very easily to Lose It! But it’s too soon to see if I’ll stick with it for a whole year. However, I feel closer to dieting success than ever before.

JWH – 6/16/12 (Happy Birthday Susie)

UPDATE: 8/21/12

I ended up picking MyFitnessPal for my standard app. I preferred the look of Lose It!, but MyFitnessPal had way better barcode scanner and nutritional database. And being able to scan the barcode for information is just too handy.

After losing 10 pounds I started getting lazy with recording my food intake. I thought I could remember my good habits, but I was wrong. If I don’t record everything I don’t lose weight. I’m now back to using MyFitnessPal, but it’s hard. I try to tell myself I can’t eat anything unless I record it first. Or it’s not worth eating if I’m not willing to record it.

I hate having to control what I eat, but the act of maintaining a food diary helps that control.

MyFitnessPal makes it about as easy as possible to record what I eat, but it’s still a pain in the ass. I’ve even thought of eating the same meals every day so I won’t have to record.

JWH

Inventions Wanted: Pinterest and Street View Mashup

What if there was a way to organize everyone’s photographs into a database we could all share and use in ways we never imagined?

Google Maps Street View is a 3D database of photos organized by location. What if we used the street locations to pin copies of our photographs? What if we made Street View 4D, so not only could we walk up and down virtual streets, we could walk up and down them in the past?

Here’s a March 2011 Street View photo of a house my family moved into in 1958, and left just after JFK was killed in November, 1963.

And here’s a picture of me, Patty, my sister Becky, and Jodie taken Christmas 1958.

As you can see, they have remodeled the house so that it doesn’t look the same (note the faucet in both photos).

Here’s another picture with my sister and Patty older, along with my neighbor Michael Kevin Ralph who lived in the house with the awnings.

How many people have lived in that house in the last 50 years? What if we all pinned our photographs to that house in Street View? I have no photographs of the inside of that house, but I’d love to look inside it. Maybe Michael Kevin Ralph’s mother took some photos when were there. I have a photo of a birthday party at Patty’s house down the street.

I could use Street View to walk up and down S.W. 37th Street, Hollywood, Florida and see old friends. I often think of that old Lake Forest neighborhood. I could follow the way we walked to school and see photographs that were taken in long forgotten classrooms, or to the 7-Eleven or Kwik-Chek were we bicycled to get Cokes and RC Colas.

Not only would this let us return to past locations, but if we find photos pinned to old locations we might find old friends to reconnect with. I wonder if Patty or Michael Kevin ever visits this street on Street View?

What if I wanted to go to New York City in the 1930s. There must have been millions of photographs taken along its streets. What if I wanted to visit where my father grew up in downtown Miami in the 1920s and 1930s. How many photographs were taken in those years that could be pinned in this database?

If enough photographs were tagged to Street View eventually we’d have Street View maps of the past. We could even walk into homes if we had the photos. If we had enough photographs we could stitch them together in virtual reality simulations.

Not only could we leave photographs, but we could notes and annotate locations with our memories.

Can you imagine what we could all do with such an invention?

Hey, Google, are you listening?

JWH – 6/14/12