Neil deGrasse Tyson: Very Probably Wrong?

Neil deGrasse Tyson is, according to Wikipedia, “an American astrophysicist and science communicator. He is currently the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.”

Mr. Tyson has been a frequent commentator on intelligent design vs evolution, as well as stellar formation, cosmology, galactic astronomy. He has on numerous occasions appeared on BBC News, the Colbert Report, and the Daily Show.

In one of his brief recorded presentations (I’m assuming this is an excerpt from a larger talk), available on YouTube, he speaks on the subject: Intelligent Design is Stupid.

A lot of what he says is amusing and thought-provoking. But it’s not all cogent.

Probably the most ridiculous of Mr. Tyler’s assertions here – and one that he says is his favorite – is that you “eat, breathe, eat (sic) and drink through the same hole in your body, guaranteeing that some percentage of us will choke to death every year. Imagine if you had a separate hole for breathing and eating… and talking? That would be just really cool, right? You could just drink, breathe and just talk, and you would never choke!”

It’s hard to fathom that Mr. Tyler doesn’t see – or at least doesn’t acknowledge – that if it’s evolution that has seen fit to have us physiologically configured in this way, a necessary corollary to his argument is that evolution too is stupid. If, as he argues, the outcome itself illustrates the stupidity of the “forces” that brought it about, then it’s simply not logical to include only one potential set of forces and to exclude others.

Sadly, what Mr. Tyler really seems to be saying is that he is a very intelligent man; humans aren’t designed the way he would have designed them; therefore we were not designed by an intelligent power or being.

I hate seeing a worthy cause argued badly. I’m not going to sit here and argue that we were created by intelligent design, even though I am as much a “religious” thinker as I am a “scientific” one. But if someone is going to make an argument and attempt to make it a convincing one, it ought not to violate the basic rules of logic.

When otherwise perhaps brilliant scientists such as Mr. Tyler, or Richard Dawkins, or Stephen Hawking are asked questions having to do with God or the possibility of a higher power, it seems to me that they might want to admit a priori their lack of credentials to address the subject in an expert way, and could only possibly offer an opinion.

In the wise words of Sir Arthur C. Clarke:

When a distinguished but elderly statesman states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

Who’ll save Syria from the Syrians?

Many articles are circulating in the press about the Syrian conflict, and China and Russia’s refusal to allow the UN to intervene. I’ve read some of them, and then I decided to look up some statistics on our own Civil War (1861-65). Here are the casualty results of some of the most costly battles fought, all of which were in the Spring of 1864:

The Wilderness, May 5-7: 17,666
Spotsylvania, May 10 and 12: 10,920
Drewry’s Bluff, May 12-16: 4,160
Cold Harbor, June 1-3: 12,000
Petersburg, June 15-30: 16,569

Big Note: These are the “Federal” side only. Statistics for the Confederate side are lost. It’s likely that there were more Confederates lost, as their all-war average was 150 wounded per thousand engaged, as opposed to 112 for the Federal soldiers. (Statistics were pulled from a “random” website, http://www.civilwarhome.com/casualties.htm. Other sources exist which roughly parallel these figures.)

The real point of this is not the statistics. It is this: war sucks. A lot of people die or are wounded in battle. Civil wars are particularly devastating because it is often family member against family member. And outsiders, well-intentioned citizens of other countries, cannot really jump in and make any sense out of it without having lived intimately with the situation. We can all have our theories about what should be done, about who’s right and who’s wrong.

While I personally feel that Russia and China did the wrong thing in blocking the UN’s intervention, should we really have sent our soldiers – our own precious young men and women – over there to fight their battles? Wrong though their government may be – and I do think that their government is extremely wrong – is that necessarily our role?

That’s a question without an easy answer.

What are your thoughts?

Be true to yourself, and watch for the encouragement

I’m sure it’s happened to, you as it’s happened to me. Way back when, you dated someone, or maybe were even married to them. Then, for reasons which seemed pertinent at the time, you decided (or they decided) to part company.

And yet, in the back of your mind, there was always that nagging doubt. What if it was my fault, my issues? What if he/she was the one? What if I never meet anyone again?

But then it happens. Out of the blue, when you least expect it, you run into them. You take one look, then another, and hope that they don’t notice that look in your eyes. That look of, “Oh My God. Thank God I made the right decision!! Why was there ever any doubt??!”

I think you know what I’m talking about. They’ve changed, and not in ways you would have envisioned. The person standing before you bears a striking resemblance to the person you thought you were interested in, and yet you would not dream of being involved with this person today.

It happens all the time. And it’s not always with someone you were actually involved with. Sometimes it’s just someone who you thought you knew, or thought you understood; thought you respected, or maybe even thought you envied. That’s how it was for me with Ian Shrager.

For those who don’t know, Ian Shrager is a real estate developer, focusing mostly on boutique hotels, though he famously co-founded the nightclub Studio 54, back in the day. His establishments have been the epitome of cool, going back a long way. It made me feel that he was so cool, and, well, I thought that it must be cool to be Ian Shrager.

But now I’ve just read a brief interview in a real estate trade publication, The Real Deal (February 12, 2012, p. 106). There’s a part of me that feels let down. Like, wow, this guy who I kind of admired is really not who I thought he was. His whole mission just seems to be built on his competitive obsession to get more. Getting a younger ballerina wife than his first ballerina wife. Getting the girl that his future business partner was dating. Ungraciously suing Crate and Barrel over the name of their “Ian sofa,” inspired by him. Deciding to move into the value-oriented hotel world, not to bring good design to people who might appreciate it but otherwise not afford it; instead, because “it’ll have a bigger impact on the industry than the boutiques had.”

In the end, Mr. Shrager feels that after spending time in prison for tax evasion, he lost everything. “We had nothing. [But] we were able to come back and pick ourselves up off the floor and dust ourselves off.”

I have no doubt that he was slowed down by what happened to him. But he had nothing? I would like to stand him next to my friend in provincial Philippines, who though he lives in the typhoon region, can’t afford windows for his house. Or my friend in California who, locked up for much of his adult life for youthful indiscretions and, frankly, borderline mental instability, is now recently released and living as a 40-something year old with his poverty-level mother, with essentially no skills to carry him.

After reading this interview, I am happy to shed the envy I had felt for Mr. Shrager’s life. I’m happy for him, if he’s happy. But I’m quite happy that I’m not him, and he’s not me. The world works in mysterious ways, and the rewards for just being yourself are always out there. You just have to recognize them when you see them.

Rushing phone and tablet products to market is not without its consequences

Ahhh, the days of tried-and-true Apple products that just worked because, well, because they were Apple. Sure, there were problems. Certainly combinations of factors caused crashes. But by and large, the approach taken by the company was an attempt to put a corral around the Macintosh way to develop and deploy software. It had to have a certain look and feel. It had to have specific menus, and the menus had to contain certain functions. Anyone sitting down to any new program on a Mac would know where to go to open a file, to set preferences, or to find help.

A recent article in The Register got me thinking. The subject of the article was a report by an investigative website called Crittercism. In their analysis, there were statistically more crashes (specifically, app crashes as a percentage of app launches) on the iOS platform than on Android. How could this be? Apple is so controlling as to what gets released to the public, compared to the relative ease with which an Android developer can get a product onto people’s phones.

But it might be true. The problem with iOS 5 is definitely there, but it’s not like it wasn’t there with 4 as well. I can’t say whether it’s there to the same or greater or lesser extent on Android, not being an Android user. I believe that it is there, to some extent, and it is on that basis that I make these observations.

I’ve been a die-hard Apple fan for many, many years, but I certainly noticed the difference between the “get it to market as fast as possible” mindset of the phone/pad world, and the more considered approach to product releases in the computer division. Particularly in consideration of Apple’s walled garden, where nothing gets released without first having been at least tried out and looked at, the number of issues that cause things to break is a little disappointing. In fact, unless there’s some very real truth behind the allegations that Crittercism is not quite looking at a level playing field (the company receives funding from Google Ventures, which some have cited as a possible conflict of interest, due to the fact that Android is also a Google product), it’s pretty inexplicable.

I’m sure it’ll get fixed in due course. But the fact that all the developers, the marketers, the manufacturers, the suppliers are constantly in such a mad rush to offer features over finesse will always mean that products are not as functional and reliable as they could and probably should be.

The extent to which we all just overlook glitches in product offerings because we were swayed by a nice shiny presentation is the extent to which we’ll have to deal with the failure of things to work when we need them to work. Is it a show stopper? Apparently not yet.

May your path easily lead you…

Imagining representative government…

Think about it. How many times have you heard that some particular government action – while right-thinking and in the best interest of the largest number of people – would nevertheless be “political suicide” for anyone sponsoring or promoting it.

Imagine if we had a true REPRESENTATIVE government, with people like you and me, taking a brief time out from our careers, to represent our brothers and sisters in the House and Senate and in local and state governments. Imagine if there were no career politicians, thereby eliminating the very possibility of political suicide.

Imagine if we truly had the type of government that our “founding fathers” envisioned. Imagine what could be accomplished!

Where is this coming from, today? First, let me quote some facts and figures from today’s Wall Street Journal article titled “Criminal Code Tough to Crack – Struggle to Revamp Illinois Laws Offers Glimpse of What Congress Faces in Its Effort.”

• In the year 2000, an effort was begun to revamp the laws of Illinois’ criminal code. Throw out the obsolete or contradictory ones, clean up and modernize those remaining, adjust the penalty to match the crime.
• In one specific area, the body of law covering fraud in Illinois State law was represented in 70,000 words. After two years of effort, a commission produced a 600-page report. It contained a proposal to reduce the statement of law governing fraud to 2,729 words.
• The report went nowhere. It ran into opposition. It didn’t accurately reflect the views of some who provided input. It died.

This is one example of one set of laws of one state out of 50. In 2004, a second commission was formed, nicknamed “CLEAR” – the Criminal Law Edit, Alignment and Reform Initiative. I find it necessary to paste here an entire paragraph from the referenced WSJ article (but you should really read the entire article!) to underscore my point in writing this article.

In another case, some commissioners wanted to give judges greater discretion in sentencing for residential burglary, which under Illinois law carries a four-year minimum sentence. That meant a hungry person coming through an open door to steal a loaf of bread faced the same minimum prison time as someone who planned and pulled off a major jewel theft from someone’s home, said Mr. Baroni.

Lawmakers on the commission argued that softening such penalties would be “political suicide,” said Mr. Baroni. The idea was dropped.

[Paul Baroni is Clear's director and a Chicago attorney.]

It has taken Illinois a decade to reduce its 1200-page criminal code by one third. Given the same operating conditions and chances for success, how long would it take to do the same with a federal criminal code that is more than 20 times larger? And how long would it take, given that the operating conditions are clearly not the same, when dealing with the added issue of the limits federal authority vs state’s rights to decide?

I feel it is simply undoable as a standalone project. The aptly-named “lawmakers” cannot think outside of the box they’ve created for themselves, and so there is no possibility that they will deliver a unified, practicable, fair, meaningful and relevant federal criminal code, ever. This is one of those cases where you don’t know what’s most important in your life until you have a fire or a flood. What do you grab first? That’s when you know what’s important.

We need flood-think in Washington. We need people who want to get back to what they were about. Back to their lives, their families, their towns. We need non-career-oriented politicians to go in and disembowel what their predecessors created, and make something that, flaws and all, represents the way most of us really think about the matters at hand.

In short, we need a representative government to lead the way forward. It’s a very old idea; it came from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, published in its most widely-known form on my birthdate (February 14) in 1776. Perhaps that’s why I feel so attached to it. I’ll close with an excerpt from that document:

…that the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors, prudence will point out the propriety of having elections often; because as the elected might by that means return and mix again with the general body of the electors in a few months, their fidelity to the public will be secured by the prudent reflection of not making a rod for themselves. And as this frequent interchange will establish a common interest with every part of the community, they will mutually and naturally support each other, and on this (not on the unmeaning name of king) depends the strength of government, and the happiness of the governed.

[public domain text available, among numerous other sources, at usconstitution.net.]

Imagine a different future, as envisioned so long ago. We’ve certainly gone astray. Let’s get back on track.

When is a journalist not a journalist?

A recent article in The Register (UK) disclosed that the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge (actually his surname, not an affectation; you can’t make this stuff up!) has allowed the use of Twitter in courtrooms by journalists without the need for permission, and by non-journalists as permitted by the judge.

The obvious question becomes, “What is a journalist?”

Consider the case of Crystal Cox, a blogger from Montana (US), sued for defamation in her reporting of an attorney’s handling of a particular bankruptcy case. Her defense – that she was a journalist and thereby protected – was thrown out when the judge in her own case decided that a blogger is ~not necessarily~ a journalist.

According to a Boston Globe article (12/8/2011), “Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials, or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product, or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story.”

Nevertheless Ms. Cox was and is a prominent, well-known and well-followed blogger in her own right (www.crystalcox.com). And of course we must also consider the case of Julian Assange, about whom the media are split into so many camps it’s hard to know which way the wind blows. Salon says he IS a journalist, US News & World Report (and let’s not forget the US Departments of State and Justice) say he’s NOT a journalist, and numerous reporters (among them former NY Times reporter Judy Miller) says he’s a BAD journalist.

Journalism, like many fields, is both blessed and cursed by having no fixed, official and universally accepted standard of inclusion. It is therefore always open to interpretation. When a judge rules, as did Mr. Hernandez, in a particularly narrow way, it temporarily tilts the balance in that direction. But the preponderance of evidence in support of an alternative view will usually cause it to win out in the end, after much wrangling in the courts and in the press itself.

The current battle is anything but won. At least the Lord Chief Justice, if he errs at all, errs on the side of openness. While tweeting can hardly be considered a substitute for reporting, it at least opens the door for persons who are actually observing with their own eyes and ears what is going on in a courtroom to let others know what they are witnessing. Taken with a grain of salt, that seems like a good thing.