by cameron | Sep 23, 2006 | climate change, science, Uncategorized
Feeling confused about whether or not climate change is really a threat? Good. That’s exactly what they want you to feel. Confused.
I was having a conversation about this with a friend over lunch during the week and he explained to me how the big oil companies fund hundreds of small lobby groups who purport to be scientists and who put out misleading and contradictory evidence deliberately to confuse the general public.
Here’s an interesting statement I read tonight:
According to Ward’s own analysis of Exxon’s Corporate Giving Report, the company last year funded 64 groups conducting climate change research, of which 25 were in line with mainstream climate science and 39 were "misleading." The latter category included the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, to which Exxon gave $25,000 in 2005, the Exxon website shows. The Centre’s website says: "There is no compelling reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2."
This is from an article in Al Jazeera stating that The Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, is criticizing Exxon’s attempts to mislead the general public by confusing them with contradictory reports.
So, here’s how it seems to work. You give money to both the dodgy groups who make up their science off of the back of a breakfast cereal box but you *also* give funding to the real scientists so you can’t be accused of just funding the bad guys. You can say
"These organisations do not speak on our behalf, nor do we control their views and messages. They may or may not hold similar views to ours."
But what you *really* want to do is create confusion. It’s Alexander of Macedon’s old "divide and conquer" strategy updated for the 21st century corporation. Plausible deniability.
Now, when you read about the confusion in the newspaper, all you read is that Politician X said "Climate change is important and we need to do something about it now" but then you read that Politican B said "Such-and-such a group of scientists says it isn’t as big a problem as everyone is making out, go back to your Reality TV". Of course, what you *don’t* read is that the group Politican B quoted from was funded by Exxon.
Who has the responsibility to tell you this last fact? The newspaper? You would think so.
by cameron | Sep 8, 2006 | science, Uncategorized
Okay – this is really bothering me. You’re all a lot smarter than I, so of course I turn to you first (well… second, after Wikipedia) for answers.
I’ve been reading Denis Brian’s biography on Einstein and the book contains lots of references to something called "energy". It says stuff like
"everything in the universe is a repository of enormous, latent energy"
"the formula implied that mass is frozen energy"
"every gram of matter contains this tremendous energy"
Over the years I’ve also talked to lots of spiritual types who like to tell me about ‘energy envelopes’ and chakras which are apparently an energy. The body has an ‘energy aura’. My friend Sailor Bob the guru likes to say that the universe is "intelligence energy".
 So I went looking for a definition of what this thing called ‘energy’ really is.
Wikipedia was, of course, my first port of call. It says:
In general, the concept of energy refers to the potential for causing changes. The word is used in several different contexts. The scientific use has a precise, well-defined meaning, whilst the many non-scientific uses often do not. In physics, energy is the ability to do work and has many different forms (potential, kinetic, electromagnetic, etc.) No matter what its form, physical energy has the same units as work; a force applied through a distance. The SI unit of energy, the joule, equals one newton applied through one meter, for example.
Okay, so what is the precise scientific meaning of ‘energy’? Until 1807, scientists used the term ‘vis viva’ (latin for ‘living force’) instead of energy, which sounds similar to the way it’s often used by my spiritualistic friends. So what does Wikipedia say the term means now?
The concept of energy change from one form to another, as a "driver" for natural processes, is useful in explaining many phenomena.
… in the context of physics energy is said to be the ability to do work
Okay but.. what is it? What is it made of? Can I touch it or smell it is visualize it in any way? The chemical and biological definitions for energy are similarly vague. The term gets used like there is an a priori understanding on behalf of the reader that energy does, in fact, exist. And yes I still don’t know what they are talking about. It reminds me of talking to spiritual friends about "soul". What is it? They cannot tell me, just that they believe it exists. It seems about as good as I can get for "energy" as well.
Wikipedia also has this to say:
During a 1961 lecture for undergraduate students at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman, a celebrated physics teacher and a Nobel Laureate, had said "There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law — it is exact so far we know. The law is called conservation of energy [it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes]. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same…"
So Feynman says it isn’t a thing as such. It’s a principle. An abstract idea. A useful imaginary premise. I found this quote somewhere else:Â
"It is important to realize that in physics today," says Richard P. Feynman, "we have no knowledge of what energy is." Feynman was one of the three recipients for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics and was one of the most influential physicists of the 20th century.
We don’t know. No idea. This bothers the HELL out of me. Scientists use this term every day but nobody knows what it is??? It’s one thing for spiritual fairy people to use vague terms, I kind of expect that. But I hold science to a different standard. It’s okay for fairy lovers to accept "belief" over evidence and rational thinking, but I expect scientists to be my source of deep thinking about the true nature of things. I expect the scientific method, a process for evaluating empirical knowledge under the working assumption of methodological materialism, which explains observable events in nature as a result of natural causes, rejecting supernatural notions. As yet the definitions of "energy" I can find seem about as supernatural as they come. It’s almost enough to make me buy some prayer beads.
With respect to uses of the term "energy" in spirituality, Wikipedia says this:Â
… refers to a widespread belief in an interpersonal, non-physical force or essence. Vitalism is a general term for a force that animates living things. Believers consider spiritual energy to be of a different type than those known to science. Various ideas pertaining to spiritual energy have been postulated in various cultures, prominent amongst them are:Â
Okay… no help here? These definitions seem to try to define one word with an equally vague word. Energy is Soul. Riiight. So Sayeth The Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So if anyone out there can help me understand what energy really is, ping me. Come on G’Day World and enlighten us all.
by cameron | Jul 26, 2006 | Podcast, science
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by cameron | Jul 14, 2006 | science, Uncategorized
In August 2005 I interviewed Dr Aubrey de Grey, biogerontologist from the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, UK, about his work to develop a cure for human aging. He calls it SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) and is confident that, given enough funding (a measly $100 million a year for ten years), we can make significant in-roads towards curing human aging. He and his partners have established The Methuselah Mouse Prize, a scientific competition designed to draw attention to the ability of new technologies to slow and even reverse the damage of the aging process. Back in August, Technology Review magazine issued another challenge – a prize of $20,000 for any molecular biologist working in the field of aging who could submit an intellectually serious argument that SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate. Well this week an independent panel of judges decided that none of the three submissions received were worthy of the prize.
Who were the judges? Just a bunch of nobodies.
- Rodney Brooks, PhD, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory;
- Anita Goel, MD and PhD, founder and chief executive of Nanobiosym;
- Vikram Kumar, MD, cofounder and chief executive of Dimagi, and a pathologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston;
- Nathan Myhrvold, PhD, cofounder and chief executive of Intellectual Ventures, and former chief technologist at Microsoft; and
- J. Craig Venter, PhD, founder of the Venter Institute and developer of whole-genome shotgun sequencing, which sped up the human genome project, deliberated over the three serious submissions and has now delivered its verdict.
What does it all mean? I guess it means that, despite the derision aimed at Dr de Grey’s theories from certain members of the scientific community, no-one has been able to provide a scientific rationale sufficient to convince the panel of judges that SENS is inherently flawed. Now, I’m no biogerontologist (hell, I can hardly spell it), but I’m all for backing any serious big brain (and, in Dr de Grey’s case, a big beard as well) who thinks they might be able to delay, let alone cure, aging. Shouldn’t this be the #1 field of scientific research?
Of course, all de Grey needs to do is reverse engineer Keith Richard’s DNA. The guy IS Methuselah.
Listen to my original interview here. Read the three submissions here.
[audio:http://www.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/gday_world/Gday_World_onthepod_20050801_42_aubrey_de_grey.mp3]
by cameron | Jun 14, 2006 | Podcast, science
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