Cordial Deconstruction

Observations from our shared single objective reality in a materialistic, naturalistic, & effectively macro-deterministic universe.

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Deconstruction Review of Fringe, Episode 1, Season 3, Olivia

Posted by Karl Withakay on September 23, 2010

(A Red Episode)

As usual, an episode synopsis can be found over at Scott’s Polite Dissent.

It seemed to me there was less to Deconstruct in this episode as it didn’t involve a Fringe incident and dealt mostly with the drama of Olivia in the alternate universe, but after finishing this post, maybe I was mistaken.

Ultra Low Security Establishment

OK, first they escort a potentially dangerous, combat trained prisoner using only one guard and no restraints.  Then they have no guard(s) posted outside the room during the treatment, and the guards on patrol in the hallways are best suited to be a mall cops rather than guards at a secure government installation.  (No offense intended to mall cops.)  Next they release her from her restraints when she starts having breathing problems so they can sit her up rather than say, bag her while she is still restrained.  (They’re conducting medical experiments on her, they have to have the  equipment and trained personnel to deal with medical emergencies, right?)  Finally the doors are locked only with a key code and no swipe card, they allow the prisoner to observe the code being entered, and all the doors internal and external have the same code.  If I ever get locked up in a super secret, government facility, this is the one I want to be locked up in.

Magic “Memory” White Blood Cells

I think the writers are confused about what is meant by the term “memory B Cells” and “memory T cells” in regards to B cell lymphocytes and T Cell lymphocytes (types of white blood cells) in the immune system.  The term does not refer to memory in regards to the ability to consciously recollect things; it is an anthropomorphic characterization of the T & B Cell’s ability to chemically “recognize” antigens from pathogens the immune system has “seen” before.  In no way do these cells have anything to do with memories stored in the brain.

Alternate Universe Presidential Trivia

In case you couldn’t make out what was being said on the radio:

In the alternate universe, not only is former president Kennedy still alive, but he is still actively involved in government service.  He is currently stepping down from his role as UN ambassador to head the agency in charge of slowing down ecological breakdown.

Cab Driver AND Women’s Clothes Buyer

How did the cab driver know what size clothes to buy Olivia?  She didn’t tell him her size.  Was she about the same size as his wife, or does he have a lot of experience in buying clothes for women of different sizes?

Alternate Universe Advertising Trivia

GlatterFlug (German for “smooth flight”) offers daily flights to the moon. “Don’t give her diamonds, give her the moon.”

Magic High Explosive Incendiary 5.7X28mm Ammo, Standard Issue

One shot from Olivia’s gun and the propane tanks explodes in a massive fireball.  It looks good on TV, but the Mythbusters can tell you it doesn’t happen like that.

Olivia was using a FN Five Seven pistol that could have been using SS190 copper jacketed rounds that do contain a steel penetrator, so a spark is not completely out of the question, but I’m still comfortable saying the explosion wouldn’t happen.

Adrenaline Carries Blood Cells Across the Blood Brain Barrier?

Scott will probably have more to say on this, but that’s the kind of thing the blood brain barrier prevents.  It’s generally not a good thing when things that normally don’t cross the BBB manage to do so.

Question To Be Answered:

Will we see the cabbie again?

Is Olivia truly converted into Bolivia II, or is she faking?

Identity Assumption Plausibility Problem

How can Bolivia I effectively pass herself off as Olivia in our universe without any of Olivia’s memories?  I would think her complete lack of knowledge of Olivia’s past has to catch up with her pretty soon.  “Geez Olivia, don’t you remember anything from before you returned from the alternate universe?  Wait a minute…travel between universes must give long haired, female FIB agents amnesia.  Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

UPDATE:  From My Notes

I had a couple of things in my notes, but forgot to mention them in my post.

Apparently in the alternate universe Manhattan is spelled with one t, and there is a vaccination for typhus, neither of which is true in this universe.  🙂

Posted in Fringe, Medicine / Health, Red Episode, Science, Television | Tagged: , , , , | 4 Comments »

On Book Burning…

Posted by Karl Withakay on September 9, 2010

I have to work tonight and was sick Sun-Tue, so I probably won’t get a real post out this week, but I’d like to take a moment and say the following:

Book burning is not a way to demonstrate that you are educated or enlightened, and it is certainly not a way to demonstrate your moral superiority.

Don’t just oppose it because it may put American military personal at risk.

Don’t oppose it because you feel all holy books should be respected.  I don’t have to respect anyone’s holy book if I don’t want to.  I only have to respect someone’s right to have a holy book.  I’m perfectly free to ridicule that book, and I’m also free to ridicule them for holding that book holy while I’m at it if I want to be dickish about it.

There are better and more complete reasons to oppose this planned act of bigotry and hate.

The following posts by PalMD are a small sample of the numerous excellent posts out there on the internet regarding the planned burning of a bunch of Qurans this Saturday by a Florida pastor.  Please take time to read them.

From the White coat Underground:

–     Book Burnings

–     Not an entirely benign form of expression

Posted in Criticism, Heads Up, Thoughtful/Random Observation | Leave a Comment »

Deconstruction of an Article on Automobile Hacking

Posted by Karl Withakay on September 1, 2010

I’d like to Cordially Deconstruct just a couple of items from and article I read today titled, “Cars: The next hacking frontier” by Elinor Mills.  The article is about the potential of hacking in today’s increasingly computerized and networked automobiles.  It’s generally a decently written article, but there’s a couple points I want to address.  The first is statement from a report by a team that managed to hack a wireless tire pressure monitoring system of a vehicle.  The article author included the following quote from the report:

“While spoofing low-tire-pressure readings does not appear to be critical at first, it will lead to a dashboard warning and will likely cause the driver to pull over and inspect the tire,” said the report. “This presents ample opportunities for mischief and criminal activities, if past experience is any indication.”

Listen, I don’t dispute that the lack of security in the TPMS displays a seriously concerning lack of attention to the concept of wireless communication security by automotive system designers, but I think the study is over blowing the seriousness of this particular vulnerability to make their point.  I seriously doubt that many drivers would pull over if this light displays on their dashboard.  Most drivers don’t even know what the light means.  I certainly dispute the notion that it “will likely cause the driver to pull over and inspect the tire”.  46% of people surveyed didn’t even know the icon was supposed to be  tire treads, and anyone who knows what the indicator is will likely know they don’t need to worry about it until they get to a service station.  Every time it gets cold, the pressure in my tires decreases in accordance with the ideal gas law, and the indicator lights up on my dashboard.  If my experience is remotely typical, many drivers with cars new enough to have the indicator are already accustomed to ignoring it until they have a convenient moment to deal with it, and certainly wouldn’t pull over right away to inspect their tires.

The article then goes on to mention another report where researchers

“tested how easy it would be to compromise a system by connecting a laptop to the onboard diagnostics port that they then wirelessly controlled via a second laptop in another car.”

Surprise, they were able to control all sorts of computer controlled functions like the anti-lock brakes, engine computer, speedometer display, etc.  The article author concedes,

“Granted, the researchers needed to have physical access to the inside of the car to accomplish the attack. Although that minimizes the likelihood of an attack, it’s not unthinkable to imagine someone getting access to a car dropped off at the mechanic or parking valet.”

OK, and it’s also possible they could plant a GPS tracker, wireless microphone, or bomb in your car, or cut the brake lines and cut a notch in your fan belt as well if they have physical access to the vehicle, all without touching the car’s computer or network system, what’s the point?  The real security concern is the wireless (hands off) vulnerability; just stick with that topic, please.

One area where I think the article author actually underplays a concern is when she writes,

“The threat is primarily theoretical at this point for a number of reasons. First, there isn’t the same financial incentive to hacking cars as there is to hacking online bank accounts.”

Actually, there is a financial incentive in hacking cars; if you could successfully hack a GM car’s On Star system, you could potentially not only disable the alarm, but also unlock and start the vehicle and disable the ability of GM to track and disable the vehicle via On Star, so there’s a minor fail in the other direction for the article.

It was a generally well written article, but a few points were a little sub par.  It may seem like nitpicking, but I usually feel that stretching points and using unnecessary hyperbole to enhance an  article degrades the overall quality of an article, and I needed something to blog about today.

Posted in Criticism, hacking, Media, Science | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Cryptosporidiosis Is Not A Bacterial Infection

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 25, 2010

While I drive to and from work each weekday, I listen to the local NPR affiliate, KWMU, a generally excellent source of broadcast news.  During my drive home from work today, I caught a story on an outbreak of a diarrheal illness, crypo in some St. Louis county day care centers.  The report mentioned that crypto is short for cryptosporidiosis and explained that cryptosporidiosis was a bacteriological illness spread through contact with infected feces, usually in swimming pools and day care centers.  The same story was reported on the Post dispatch web site with virtually identical information.  (The story broadcast on KWMU may have even credited the Post Dispatch for the story, but I didn’t catch it.)  The PD story stated:

“The bacterial illness, cryptosporidiosis, is spread through contact with infected feces, most commonly in swimming pools and day care centers.”

The problem with the story as reported by both KWMU and the PD is that cryptosporidiosis is not a bacterial illness, and Blythe Bernhard, the author of the Post Dispatch article, could have learned that with a few seconds of fact checking on the internet.  (See also the CDC’s site if you don’t trust Wikipedia.)  Cryptosporidiosis is instead a parasitic infection caused by a protozoan parasite, Cryptosporidium.

I know this because some years ago I saw an episode of (I believe) Forensics Files regarding an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis in Milwaukee after a rainstorm caused untreated sewage to overflow the sewage treatment system and spill into the same water source a water plant got its municipal water from; an outbreak of  cryptosporidiosis was the result.

As soon as I got home, I rushed to the computer to confirm my knowledge because no mater how sure I am of something, I like to be able to confirm and support my position; I try not to assume that I recall something correctly, even though in this case I was sure cryptosporidiosis was parasitic in nature and not bacteriological.

It’s not a major gaff per se, but neither was it in any way difficult to research either.  Cryptosporidiosis is not bacterial and cannot be treated like a bacterial infection.  In fact, there really is no treatment for cryptosporidiosis other than supportive care (you just have to let your immune system fight it off).  In immunocompromised individuals, it can become a lifelong, chronic condition that can also be fatal.   One would think the reporter would have looked up cryptosporidiosis to get more information on the disease.  Sure it was just a quick, breaking news blurb, but

A. wouldn’t it be good to be sure you have the facts straight BEFORE publishing,

and

B. wouldn’t it be good to have some background info on the disease in case the story gets bigger and you have to revisit it?

As of 7:30PM local time, the story on the PD website has not been updated, which tells me nobody has gone back to check the facts after getting the breaking news published to the web, although someone did post the diarrhea song in the comments section.  🙂

UPDATE 8-26-10

As of 9:00AM the next day, the story on the PD website is still unchanged, though the diarrhea song has been deleted from the comments, and someone else posted a comment regarding cryptosporidiosis not being bacterial in nature.  However, the story was repeated on the air on KWMU this morning, this time without any mention of a bacterial nature.  Maybe KWMU actually read my E-Mail.

EDIT II 8-26-10

Apparently the PD website put out a nearly identical replacement article omitting the bacterial infection part, but left the original article in place for some reason.   Maybe he app they use to deploy breaking news stories does not allow edits after publishing.

Posted in Criticism, Media, Medicine / Health, Public Radio | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Willkommen!

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 23, 2010

It seems I have some German traffic from the German Scienceblogs site Frischer Wind where that blogger has linked to my post Flash Forward Gets Schrödinger’s Cat a Little bit Wrong in his post Robert J. Sawyer: Flash Forward.

It’s been more than 20 years ago since I took German in high school, so I won’t insult the German language by trying to use what little remains of my wortschatzie * to say hello to any German speaking visitors.

* For the English only speakers:  Wortschatzie is a German play on words.

Wortschatz is German for vocabulary; it translates literally to “word treasure”.  Schatzie is a German term of affection like honey in english; it translates to “little treasure”.  Wortschatzie would basically be “little vocabulary”/ “little word treasure”.  I tried it out on my native German speaking father, and he got it right away and thought it was witty.

Posted in Flash Forward, Science, ScienceBlogs, This Blog | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Reply to a Comment on Interstellar Travel

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 22, 2010

Someone going by the handle of Speising made a comment on my post Follow-Up: Energy Requirements of Interstellar Travel, and the reply I composed grew so large that I decided to make it into a full post.

The comment was:

“So what about ram-jet like ships? probably quite useless (to vulnerable) as carriers for an invasion force, but they do not have the problem of carrying all that fuel with them.
also, of course, If we assume ET doesn’t want to spend 200 or more years making a round trip to Earth… doesn’t necessarily apply for ET’s with, eg., longer life spans than ours.”

Thanks, for the comment, speising.  Basically, you’re talking about a Bussard Ram Jet.  There’s a few problems associated with that.

You’d be scooping up hydrogen to use as a fusion fuel, but hydrogen’s not a particularly good fuel for fusion, believe it or not.  The proton-proton chain, which is the primary source of energy production in stars less than 1.3 solar masses, is a very slow process (like an average of one billion years per reaction in the first step), which is a good thing otherwise the sun would have burned out after just a few million years.

You could theoretically use the CNO cycle for hydrogen fusion, but the confinement and cooling requirements would likely be insurmountable.  We’re talking about temperatures and densities greater than that of the core of the sun.

Also, the interstellar medium isn’t as dense with hydrogen as Bussard thought it was, and you probably wouldn’t be able to scoop up enough fuel.

All this completely ignores the shielding requirements, which I never even went into in my earlier posts, mostly because I concluded interstellar travel was already impractical before even getting to the shielding requirements.  Traveling at speeds even at one tenth the speed of light, every particle of dust floating in space is going to impact your space craft with a lot of kinetic energy.

Let’s assume a particle of cosmic dust floating in interstellar space with zero velocity relative to the Earth.  Let’s also assume this particle is medium sized cosmic dust, say 300 micrometers in diameter, and let’s further assume it’s density is average for cosmic dust, 2.0 g/cm^3.  This particle has a mass of only 2.82X10-8 kg or .028mg.   If our vessel is traveling at 1/10th the speed of light relative to Earth, that particle of cosmic dust is going to impact our spacecraft with a kinetic energy of 12 Megajoules.  To put that into perspective, lets assume a typical automobile mass of 1500kg (3300lb); that particle of dust is going to impact our spacecraft with the same kinetic energy as a car traveling at 454km/h (284mph).  How are you going to protect against that kind of collision, and what do you do if you run into a particle that was 10 or 100 time larger?  300 micrometers is pretty small; a strand of human hair is 100 micrometers wide.

In regards to the other part of your comment,

“If we assume ET doesn’t want to spend 200 or more years making a round trip to Earth… doesn’t necessarily apply for ET’s with, eg., longer life spans than ours.”

I’ll just add that even if an alien species were to have a significantly longer life span that humans, it wouldn’t necessarily follow that their perception of the passage time or their value of time were different than ours.  If science found a way to extend you lifespan to 1000 years, would you be interested in spending 200 years in a submarine without port if there was an alien planet at the end of the trip?  I think 200+  years is still a long time, no matter how many years you have ahead of you in life.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Followup, Science, Skepticism, Space, This Blog | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Deconstruction of the Drake Equation

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 18, 2010

I’ve been scooped by PZ Meyers, but I’m still writing this post anyway.  It fits in well with my recent posts on space;

Cordial Deconstruction of Stephen Hawking? (Am I So Bold?)

Follow-Up: Energy Requirements of Interstellar Travel

Final Follow-Up on the Probability of an Alien Invasion

Where Does Stephen Hawking Think We Can Go?

On Monday  I read this article: Proof of Aliens Could Come Within 25 Years, Scientist Says on Space.com.  The scientist, Seth Shostak, cites the Drake equation when attempting to support his prediction.

The Drake equation, in case you’re not aware, is an equation that is supposed to be used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, and it’s utter garbage.

Form Wikipedia, the equation is:

N = R^{\ast} \times f_p \times n_e \times f_{\ell} \times f_i \times f_c \times L \!

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy

fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets

ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the equation itself is basically sound, tough that’s debatable.  In that case, the accuracy of the number we can get from this equation depends on how accurate the values we plug into the individual terms are, so let’s look at  the terms and see how well we can estimate those numbers.

The first term, R*, we have an OK, better than order of magnitude estimate for, so we’re off to not too bad a start, understanding that we’re not looking for a terribly precise value here.

For the second term, fp, we really don’t have a good number for right now.  PZ says we have “growing evidence of values” for this number, and that’s not an inaccurate statement, as long as you understand that the evidence is not quite ripe for picking yet.  While we have been making a lot of progress in detecting extra solar planets,  we’re still only good at detecting larger giant type planets like Jupiter orbiting stars similar to the sun (the Kepler mission may change that).  Because the best way we have to detect planets right now is to detect the wobble the planets induce in their parent star while they orbit, it’s easier to detect planets with a large mass relative to its parent star.  Because of this, we haven’t yet been able to detected any planets of less than several Earth masses, which means what we currently have for this number is really a lower limit for this value, but we really don’t have a good estimate for an upper limit because we don’t know how many stars have only relatively low mass planets and no planets large enough to induce a noticeable wobble.  We’re only on the second term, and we already have a little problem, but as long as we use the lower estimate for this values, we should be OK.

For the third term, ne, we really have nothing but projections using our solar system as a model.  We don’t know how many rocky planets or moons are out there, we don’t know how many of them lie in the habitable zone of their parent stars, we don’t know how many of them have the right elemental composition, we don’t know how many have relatively circular orbits (to avoid extreme temperature variances), etc, etc.  Even if we get better at detecting terrestrial planets, there are so many factors that contribute to the suitability of a planet for supporting life, many of which will be very difficult to detect, that it will be problematic to ever come up with a good value for this number.

As little as we have to go on for the third value, we have basically jack nothing to go on for the all the remaining terms.  We have absolutely no clue about any of those numbers and any attempt to make an estimate for any of them is just wishful thinking or anthropically derived values by people wanting to find an answer.

What fraction of the unknown number of habitable worlds actually develop life?  How does one even make up a number for this and keep a straight face?  Without knowing how life arose here on Earth, how can we begin to  say how probable it is anywhere else?

What fraction of the planets from the previous term develop intelligent life?  Again, who knows?  Our sample of 1 doesn’t give us much to go on.  If the dinosaurs hadn’t died out, would we have intelligent dinosaurs now?  Who knows?  We assume we are the natural, logical conclusion of the evolutionary process because we’re here, but we could be an aberration, an exception to the norm.

What fraction of civilizations develop technology that releases detectable signals?  It might seem reasonable to suggest that if they survive, that this is an inevitable outcome, but we shouldn’t be overly anthropic and assume we are the norm.  We really don’t know.  We do know that when Europeans ventured forth and explored the word, they ran into a lot of pre-industrial and stone age civilizations several millennia behind them technologically.  We can’t even say if the native Americans would have ever developed technology in America under very similar conditions to what the Europeans had let alone say what would be likely on a planets of different conditions and abundances of resources.

How long do such technological civilizations release detectable signals into space?  We haven’t stopped yet, so we don’t even have an anthropic reference number to go on here.

Frankly the best evidence we have for estimating a number for N is the lack of evidence so far.  This is basically the Fermi Paradox.  The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.  I would say that this is not so much a paradox as an indicator that the estimates for N are probably unreasonably exaggerated.  N must be low enough that we’re not currently detecting signals from alien civilizations.  If they’re out there, we can at least say they’re probably not close by or we’d have detected them by now, which means alien civilizations probably aren’t as widely dispersed as the optimists project.

Honestly I’m amazed that anyone tries to invoke the Drake equation, given that we can only reasonably speculate the value for N is between 0 (if you don’t count us) and millions or even billions.  I automatically loose a little respect for any scientist who seriously invokes the Drake equation; the equation is junk science and probably always will be.

Posted in Criticism, Science, Space | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Where Does Stephen Hawking Think We Can Go?

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 11, 2010

Stephen Hawking thinks we need to start looking for another home– not necessarily a replacement, but a summer home, perhaps.  He says our existence is fragile enough that we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket and that we need to hedge our bets by spreading humanity to other worlds, just in case something happens here.

I admit that we face all sorts of threats, both from ourselves flirting with disaster and from the universe potentially trying to kill us as well.  Hawking cites climate change, and nuclear or biologic war as man made threats to humanity.  We also face threats we have little power to influence, such as an asteroid impact or a gamma ray burst aimed right at us.

Hawking says “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million”.  So what are our options, really?  I’ve already covered the relative implausibility and impracticality of interstellar space travel in a previous series of posts (here, here, and here), and we’re not talking about a little exploration scout ship here, we’re talking about an big, massive ark.  It’s arguably questionable whether we would ever have the resources to reseed ourselves on a planet orbiting a distant star if we somehow managed to find one suitable enough to relocate to.  Certainly in the 200 year time frame, we have to think more locally.  We’re talking Mars or one the large moons of the solar system.  Saturn and its moons are a long way out, and the amount of sunlight that reaches Saturn is about 1% of what reaches Earth; that’s not exactly a good setup for a self sustained civilization with no support from the potentially destroyed Earth.  Jupiter is a little closer, but the Jovian system still gets only 4% the solar energy Earth does and 3 of the 4 large moons are bathed in high levels of radiation due to Jupiter’s magnetic field to boot.  As Mercury is too close to the sun, and Venus is pretty much worse than we could hope to make Earth by ourselves, this leaves the Moon or Mars as the most likely candidates.  Mars gets about 44% the solar energy Earth does, and that’s likely enough to use to provide energy and grow crops, plus it has water and a (very) thin atmosphere.  It has no magnetic field to protect against cosmic rays , but we’ve got to work with what we have.

But, how practical is creating a reservoir of humanity on mars or the moon?  We’re not talking about a base or an outpost, we’re talking about a fully self sustained, independent colony here that has to be able to survive on its own.  It has to support a large enough population to provide sufficient genetic diversity to allow our species to survive, at least 1000 people, and it probably needs to be able to grow.  Sure Mars has water and solar energy, and with those two things, you can also have oxygen, but how independently habitable can you make it within 200 years?  How bad would the devastation to the Earth have to be before Mars was more survivable than Earth?  You either have to terraform Mars to make it earthlike enough to support an agrarian civilization , or build an entire self contained infrastructure capable of supporting itself without any support or resources from Earth.  Frankly, if an extinction level asteroid hits the Earth in the next 200 years, my money is on the people who stay behind on Earth; they’ve got a lot more to work with.  A devastated Earth is probably a safer bet than Mars.  If we had the resources and technology to terraform Mars enough to make it habitable independent of technology (technology requires infrastructure over the long term to keep it going), we’d probably be able to neutralize global warming and clean up all the pollution to boot here at home.

Any refuge inside the solar system only works for Earth specific disasters anyway.  Everything in Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies after chapter one would be just as bad for any other location in the Solar System as it would be for the earth, and I’ve previously covered that I don’t consider interstellar travel particularly likely or practical.

If we want humanity to survive really long term, we better hope we do find a way to get humanity to the stars.  Even if we get lucky and dodge all the bullets we and the universe have aimed at us, the sun’s out to get us.  In a billion years, the Earth will definitely be uninhabitable, and nine or so billion years after that, the sun will be a burned out white dwarf providing very little energy to whatever is left orbiting it at that time.  However, even if we manage practical interstellar travel, we’d only be delaying our inevitable doom.  One way or another, there will be an end to the universe as we know it.  Whether it’s a heat death where all stars are burned out and everything in the universe is in thermal equilibrium making work or energy transfer impossible, a big rip, a big crunch, or the decay of ever proton in the universe, eventually there won’t be any place in the universe for humanity to survive.  Sure, we should do what we can to stay alive, but maybe what’s really important is how we live while we are around.  After all, that’s all we really can control.  In the words of Phil Plait at TAM8, “Don’t be a dick.”

EDIT 8-12-10:  Stephen Hawking also has expressed the thought that the possibility that we might be invaded and killed by extraterrestrials is another reason why our existence here on Earth is tenuous, but I’ve already addressed why we shouldn’t worry about being invaded by ET in the posts I cited above. (here, here, and here)

EDIT II 8-12-10:  Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks colonizing other world is prohibitively impracticable.  PZ Meyers has an interesting post this morning where he discusses a post by Charlie Stross that discuses the same idea of how it is  just so absurdly impracticable that it is essentially impossible.

Posted in Criticism, Science, Space, Stephen Hawking | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Origins of My Pseudonym and My Blog’s Name

Posted by Karl Withakay on July 29, 2010

Tonight I decided to do a light and easy post on my pseudonym and blog name rather than the topic I originally planned to blog about, partly because I spent too much time playing Lego Harry Potter to have enough time to do a good job on the topic I was going to blog about.

Origins of a Pseudonym

Tonight I changed the display name for my blog ID to match the name I use pretty much everywhere else on the internet.  It’s the name I use in forums, when making comments on other people’s blogs, and elsewhere.  The name is Karl Withakay.

Until recently I never realized how many people don’t catch the play on words underlying that online name.  In fact, it seems that most people that I meet in person after “meeting” online haven’t caught it.  Perhaps that’s because they first see the name written (typed) online rather than hearing it pronounced out loud.  Once I explain it to them, they tend to say something to the effect of, “Oh, duh, I get it now.”

Apparently I’m not the first person to think up the pseudonym Karl Withakay:  This guy is not me, but apparently he came by the name through a similar process.  After years giving my first name as “Karl, with a K” to avoid any misspelling of my name, I eventually began to joke to my friends that I should change my middle name to “Withakay”.  When I first started registering to post on forums and blogs, I thus had the perfect pseudonym to use for my online persona, Karl Withakay.

Origins of a Blog’s Name

The name of this blog, Cordial Deconstruction was chosen after much deliberation and consideration of various names.  I’d been thinking of setting up a blog for a while and had always intended it to be related to critical thinking and deconstruction of  things like fallacious logic or bad science & plot lines in television shows and movies.

Before getting around to setting up my own blog, I had been commenting on various blogs like Science Based Medicine, Respectful Insolence, and Neurologica for several years, cutting my teeth on logical argument and online discourse.   I always strove to hold myself to the standard of conduct of the bloggers on those sites, keeping the discourse polite and cordial, even when completely deconstructing another commenter’s arguments.

The name I finally settled on for this blog was both a reflection of what the blog was going to be as well as a tribute to the blogs of two other people.  One is probably my favorite blog, Orac’s Respectful Insolence.  The other is the blog of my real world friend, Polite Scott of Polite Dissent.  Thus the current subtitle “(Not Polite or Respectful, just Cordial.)”

Posted in Me, This Blog | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Blog Maintenance & PepsiGate

Posted by Karl Withakay on July 22, 2010

I had intended to write an actual blog post for this week tonight, but my sister and brother-in-law were in the neighborhood and invited me to dinner, wiping out most of the evening for me.

That, the fact that I’m kind of burned out from work this week, and the need to do some blog maintenance means I don’t have time to do a “full” post tonight.

The blog maintenance I need to do is mostly updating numerous links, due to the partial collapse/implosion of ScienceBlogs .   I’ve had to edit numerous links to bloggs of bloggers who have left ScienceBlogs for greener pastures.  If you don’t already know there story, I’ll give you the outsider’s Reader’sDigest version.

ScienceBlogs is a sort of super blog collective that hosts a plethora of science themed blogs.  It has (or had) a fairly impressive stable of high quality science bloggers, including P.Z. Meyers and his Pharyngula blog, one of the biggest blogs on the internet.

Recently, ScienceBlogs shot themselves in the foot by deciding to host a blog sponsored, produced, and written by Pepsico called Food Frontiers.  The focus of Food Frontiers was to be “innovations in science, nutrition and health policy”.  The key issue was not so much hosting a corporate sponsored blog, but hosting what was essentially paid advertising on an equal footing with actual, independant blog content without clear indication that it was paid advertising.  This is analogous to the New York Times publishing an article on environmental responsibility written by BP on the front page without providing clear indication that the content was a paid promotion produced and written by a corporate entity.

This blurring erasing of the line between advertising and independent blogging would have been bad enough, had ScienceBlogs not already been on thinner ice with its bloggers than most people realized.  There had been issues with poor tech support, late payments, a quashing of column by Seed Media Group (parent company of ScienceBlogs) because it was unfriendly to a potential advertiser , etc.  You can look at the Pepsi fiasco as either the straw that broke the camel’s back, or Seed Media/ScienceBlogs crossing of the Rubicon, but either way they have lost nearly 20% of their bloggers since they debuted the now removed Pepsi blog.

There’s no doubt about it, they are hemorrhaging bloggers and are feeling some real pain.  P.Z. Meyers went on strike and issued demands for changes, and apparently those demands have been met, and ScienceBlogs is still alive, for now.  It remains to be seen whether it stay that way; they’ve lost a lot of heavy hitter bloggers, and I don’t think many of them will come back.  It seems likely they’re going to have to fill in the gaps with what are currently 2nd or 3rd tier bloggers.  P.Z. sure seems encouraged by the discussions he’s had with the Seed overlords, but I’m curious of just how confident he is that things are headed in the right direction.  Would he be willing to put his clout on the line and reassure new or returning bloggers that ScienceBlogs is the place to be, or is he, like Orac, really taking a hopeful wait and see approach?

That’s kind of the $64,000 question right now, isn’t it?  Yes, you’re staying, but right now, would you recommend blogging at ScienceBlogs to your best friend?  It’s not necessarily the perception that the party’s winding down because people are leaving.  It might be that the party’s run out of beer, someone promised a fresh keg is on the way, and although you’re sticking around, you’re talking to your best friend on the phone, trying to decide if it’s worth it for him to drop by because you’re not so sure whether that keg is really coming or not.

OK, so I just spent about 90 minutes explaining why I don’t have time to do a full post tonight and essentially wrote the same post I would have written if I had time anyway.  Now I don’t feel like going back and editing this to pull out that parts about not having time to do a full post.  🙂

Posted in PepsiGate, ScienceBlogs, This Blog | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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