Why hasn’t anyone shown me this clip of Mos Def on Bill Maher’s show last year? Mighty Mos clearly has some strange ideas (Bin Laden wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks? No one walked on the moon? OJ was innocent? Hard to tell if he’s joking anymore), but his take is interesting, and it’s definitely fun to watch him blowing Maher’s mind. Meanwhile, when did Bill Maher become one of those “Oh noes, the Islamofascists are coming for us” dudes?

The clip also includes a performance from Dr. Cornel West which constitutes a watershed moment in the history of YouTube*.

Two bits of awesome from the internet, either of which you may already have seen. The first is really old; in fact, I’m upset that no one told me earlier that there’s a music video featuring the entire male cast of The Karate Kid. (Except, of course, for Pat “Mr. Miagi” Morita; his role is filled in admirably by Mr. Belding.) The song is pretty mediocre, but the conceit is perfect.

Second, I absolutely demand that you go and watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It is (so far) thirty minutes of pure awesome. Awesome put together by Joss Whedon during the writers’ strike, and staring Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion. In Whedon’s words:

Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.

Go there, and don’t come back until you’ve gotten to the end of Act II and you know what the hammer is. It’s only available until Sunday, so go quickly.

Yesterday, PZ Myers linked to a Vanity Fair article for which Christopher Hitchens had himself waterboarded. Hitch wanted to decide for himself whether or not it’s torture. In short:

I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

That’s pretty interesting, and I considered posting it at the time. But, lacking anything to add, I passed. Then today Scott Kaufman brought back the reaction from the wingnut frontier, and it included bits like this:

The enemy believes that we are weak, & Hitchens & his ilk are to blame. It will come to a point, & soon me thinks, when real force will be required. And then it shall come to pass that the unpleasant realities of preemption need to be replaced with the even more unpleasant realities of vengeance […] & the Hitchens of the world will cease to be relevant.

They think we’re weak, and Hitchens is to blame? You mean, this Hitchens: “I shall go on keeping score about this until the last phony pacifist has been strangled with the entrails of the last suicide-murderer”? How hard-assed do they want our rhetoric to be? Perhaps from now on, whenever you write about terrorists, you should pretend to be that the masked dude from the Saw franchise or Arnold’s character from Predator. Then you’ll have the right levels of machismo and sadism to sound like a patriot.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll addresses the Wired article on the “end of theory.” He makes a similar argument to mine, only he does it much better. For instance, I didn’t have this excellent one-line demolition of the whole argument: “Theory is understanding, and understanding our world is what science is all about.”

Highly recommended for examples involving Brahe, Kepler, Newton and the Large Hadron Collider.

My post from May about PZ Myers’ over-reaction to a car dealership’s radio ad has found a long comment, and since it’s my blog I decided to reply with a new post. Commenter Lilia has clearly never seen me get tipsy and start offending not only religious people, but less-strident nonbelievers as well:

And I assume you know what it’s like to be an atheist in the United States, which is why you can make this claim? For your information, it’s not at all like being a Yankees fan.

Read the rest of this entry »

This past week I’ve been picking through A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. It’s a big, thick book detailing the history of the Venetian Republic, from its beginning as a refuge in “these marshy, malarial wastes” until their surrender to Napoleon. Some guy on Goodreads didn’t like the book, saying, “[V]ery little thought was given to try and make the history pop. […] Maybe I expect more from my histories, but this was written so dryly it could have come from the Gobi.” Which is exactly the opposite of what I would say. Reading the book is like sitting down for a story with your historian friend the Viscount Norwich, maybe with some good Scotch.

A dry history might just tell you that in 565 the Byzantine general Narses was relieved of his duty, and that as a way of taking revenge on the Emperor he encouraged the Lombard king to invade Italy. But your friend the Viscount takes a sip of his Scotch and tells you why the general should never have been dismissed: “Eunuchs, as everybody knows, are dangerous people to cross.”

Further, a dry history would probably not call the 864 Patriarch of Aquileia a “rascally primate,” or describe the tenure of Pope John XII as “the nadir of the papal pornocracy.”

Probably the most famous tourist attraction in Venice is St. Mark’s Basilica. Wikipedia provides a dry history of this building’s importance: “In 828, the new city’s prestige was raised by the liberation of the relics of St. Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria, which were placed in the new basilica.” After the jump I’ll transcribe Norwich’s livelier version of the “liberation.”

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of talk on the statistics/machine learning/computer science blogs this week about an article in Wired called The End of Theory. Basically, everyone thinks the author, one Chris Anderson, has lost his damn mind. The piece argues that the enormous amounts of data available to modern computers, combined with advances in statistical modeling and analysis techniques, will lead to a time when the old scientific method is no longer used. The argument is that we will give up the practice of building and testing hypotheses in favor of querying huge databases for correlations. I’ll use the same passage as Ed Felten to sum up the article:

[…] The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the “beautiful story” phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Among the interesting reactions, we’ve got Andrew Gelman, Drew Conway, Fernando Pereira, Cosma Shalizi, and Ed Felten. They have a range of more and less technical reasons for disagreeing, all of which are interesting and seem on-point to me. Dr. Felten’s explanation of his disagreement is the easiest to understand:

To take a simple example, suppose we discover a correlation between eating spinach and having strong muscles. Does this mean that eating spinach will make you stronger? Not necessarily; this will only be true if spinach causes strength. But maybe people in poor health, who tend to have weaker muscles, have an aversion to spinach. Maybe this aversion is a good thing because spinach is actually harmful to people in poor health. If that is true, then telling everybody to eat more spinach would be harmful. Maybe some common syndrome causes both weak muscles and aversion to spinach. In that case, the next step would be to study that syndrome. I could go on, but the point should be clear. Correlations are interesting, but if we want a guide to action — even if all we want to know is what question to ask next — we need models and experimentation. We need the scientific method.

It’s true that correlations are enough if all you want to do is make money selling ads. In that case, as Anderson says, “Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” But scientists interested in human behavior would see this argument as completely backwards. To a scientist, the behavior is not “the point,” but a place to begin. Science is a process of forming an understanding of the world we live in, and the one thing data mining doesn’t produce is understanding. It may produce actionable predictions, but it won’t explain them to you.

For instance, here’s another claim from the article:

The best practical example of this is the shotgun gene sequencing by J. Craig Venter. Enabled by high-speed sequencers and supercomputers that statistically analyze the data they produce, Venter went from sequencing individual organisms to sequencing entire ecosystems. In 2003, he started sequencing much of the ocean, retracing the voyage of Captain Cook. And in 2005 he started sequencing the air. In the process, he discovered thousands of previously unknown species of bacteria and other life-forms.

It’s great that Craig Venter is able to sequence a bunch of genomes. Everyone agrees this is a cool project. But, more than anything else, it’s a starting point. A bunch of DNA sequences on disk may produce interesting correlations, but they don’t advance our biological understanding of global ecosystems until they’ve been used to build testable hypotheses.

A couple of months ago I was hanging around in the lobby before an invited lecture on machine learning, and wandered into a conversation between the speaker and a couple of the CS faculty here at UCI. Since I’m not entirely comfortable quoting professors from memory months after the fact and without asking permission, I won’t say exactly who, but it was one of the people high up on this list. Anyway, the person in question is an expert in the fields of machine learning and data mining. So I came into the conversation late, and just caught someone repeating a clam from elsewhere that soon machine learning would make the scientific method obsolete; it was a claim very much like Anderson’s. And this professor, whose research involves thinking up clever new ways to mine data, said, “I think that’s exactly the wrong way to think about it.” I don’t remember the rest of the quote verbatim, but the gist was: In a perfect world, machine learning and data mining would become unnecessary, because we would have a sufficiently complete understanding not to have to resort to them. They are effectively stop-gap measures, which we rely on to make predictions (and, in a lot of cases, money) when we’re willing to act without having (or understanding) interpretable reasons. But we shouldn’t look forward to a world when we can stop searching for that understanding.

I’ve been meaning to write about this since May 3rd, but I’m completely lame. Way back then, some awesome UCI grad student whose name is now lost to me hosted a combination Kentucky Derby party and bourbon tasting. I forgot to take notes, so two months later we’re going on some pretty vague memories. That said, I did write down the names of my favorite three. Those were, in order of both increasing deliciousness and more awesome name:

• Woodford Reserve — I recall this being a really drinkable sort of whiskey. Sort of a more flavorful Knob Creek (which was kind of boring, compared to everything that followed).
• Booker’s — Can’t remember much about this, except that I liked it a lot.
• Pappy Van Winkle — I think we tried the fifteen year, which is old for a bourbon, but young for this brand. Anyway, this was my favorite, by kind of a wide margin. If you think my stepfather isn’t getting a bottle of this for Christmas, or that we aren’t opening it before we’re done handing out gifts, you’ve got another think coming.

Other things I recall trying include Buffalo Trace and the reserve or high-end versions of Early Times and Wild Turkey. My impression was that all of those were fine, but not as smooth as the Woodford or as good as the Booker’s. There must be a few I’m forgetting, but we’ll assume that only means they were forgettable. The last thing we tried was Bulleit, which (if I recall correctly) I found tasty but a little too challenging, making it the Oaked Arrogant Bastard of bourbons.

Meanwhile, this post has a title, which references the fact that I’ve never found whiskey from elsewhere to be all that great. Possibly this is because all I can recall ever drinking is the Jameson’s that Tony was putting into everything during sophomore year. Based on this evidence, I declare that Americans make the best whiskey. If you disagree, I invite you to buy me some Scotch, to show me how retarded I am.* That’ll teach me.

**Will I ever get tired of remembering the time the wingnuts banded together to support the just cause of Christopher Hitchens’s drinking problem? Probably not, but I suppose it’s conceivable.

One of the more entertaining (and surprising) facts I’ve learned about American politics in some time: apparently both Obama and McCain are left-handed, a trait they share with 4 other presidents in the last 35 years. If you read the article, while this is pretty clearly not a chance occurrence (it’s a less than 1 in 1,000 probability), it may fit with the fact that left-handedness is more common among mathematicians, scientists, and artists than the population as a whole. Even more amusing, however, is the quote from an Alito dissent at the end of the article, where the Justice compares this tendency to pick left-handed presidents to selection of an all-white jury in a case trying a black defendant for murder. (Maybe “amusing” isn’t the word I’m looking for there.) Never mind the fact that in two of the past 7 elections, the major candidates have all been left-handed (H.W. Bush, Clinton, Dole, and even Perot, in case you’re wondering).

EDIT: Whoops, I had earlier said 5 of the presidents in 35 years had been left-handed - it’s 5 counting whoever wins.

Not that these are mutually exclusive, necessarily, but via my Google News AP feed I found this article about the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum. It provides some interesting food for thought, although it’s hard to know what to make of it.

One highlight is the finding that Americans of various faiths seem more accepting of other viewpoints than their religious doctrine of choice would suggest. For example, according to the Survey, “57 percent of evangelical church attenders said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.” As the AP article points out, this “can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don’t know fundamental teachings of their own faiths.” I would argue that the one needn’t exclude the other. More specifically, even if the reason for this tolerance partly ignorance of religious doctrines to the contrary, this may still be a sign that people are disinclined to accept tenets that require them to write the rest of the country off as sinners condemned to eternal damnation.

It would be interesting to see further studies where people were asked a follow-up question about whether they would continue to hold this belief if their religion told them otherwise. I would also think that respondents first given a statement by a religious figure saying that people of other faiths would not enjoy eternal life would then be less likely to express this tolerance, but that may be too obvious to be of interest.

While I’m relieved (and even slightly amused) by the findings among the religious, this figure is somewhat more troubling: “21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit, with 8 percent “absolutely certain” of it.” It’s that these people have misunderstood the dogma of atheism (there isn’t one, so far as I know), but that they seem to simply misunderstand the word “atheism”. If you go look at the Pew Forum results, the atheists are a subgroup of the “unaffiliated,” which also includes the agnostics and those of no particular faith, but the above statistics are just for the atheists.

If people were given an open prompt to identify their religion, I would guess that this was mostly people applying “atheism” (and perhaps “agnosticism”) indiscriminately to any rejection of an Abrahamic god, but the phrasing of the question tends to suggest otherwise:

What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else, or nothing in particular?

There’s clearly still some confusion about the use of these words (and not just atheism; how could 18% of the people who claim agnosticism also claim to be “absolutely certain” of a belief in god?), since these people selected that identification out of a list of equally plausible alternatives (e.g., why was “nothing in particular” an unappealing choice?). It’s also disappointing that the unaffiliated come a poor fourth for believing that evolution is the best explanation for life on earth, although understandable given the other statistics (plus I couldn’t find a detailed breakdown of this belief between atheists and agnostics in the full report). Any guesses what religions were higher? (Two were tied for first place, if it helps.)

UPDATE: At Pharyngula, PZ notes that the LA Times oddly chose to include their own poll in an article on the Survey (which also finds it more newsworthy that 92% of respondents expressed a belief in god). So feel free to go crash the poll, if that’s your thing.