Author: markinsanfran

Cross-posted at dailykos and mleftwing

Apparently the Bush administration’s war on science is now being assisted by the New York Times, who were so helpful in facilitating the war on Iraq. From the New York Times Book Review:

Modern man can choose from a veritable smorgasbord of Type 1 errors: string theory, neo-Darwinism, cosmology, economics, God. Astrology is as good as any…

Oh, now I get it. Science is just a bunch of nice stories, kind of like in the Bible.

But who is this writer, and why did the NYTwits let him get away with such an idiotic statement? More after this mouse-click…
Perhaps the editors at the NYTimes felt that the book under review, ‘The Fated Sky: Astrology in History’ by Benson Bobrick was so full of bullshit, given its subject, that there wasn’t much that the reviewer could do to make matters worse. But they weren’t prepared for reviewer Dick Teresi:

Shortly into my marriage (about six hours) my wife purchased a white-noise generator to counteract my night terrors. White noise is a mishmash of random sound waves that interfere with other waves, and thus flatten and nullify them. Within a few weeks, however, I heard the generator calling my name. “Dick . . . Dick . . . Dick . . . ,” it moaned. “What? What? What?” I moaned back. Recently, it has begun dispensing orders: “Kill, kill your publisher.”

Okay, is this guy just violating the terms of his poetic license, or it he really nuts? The review continues:

The mathematician Michael Sutherland diagnosed my condition. “It’s called apophenia,” he said. In statistics, apophenia is a “Type 1 error,” a false alarm, the experience of seeing patterns in meaningless data. I must have caught it from the theorists I interview.

Now this is a fairly amusing, if completely disingenuous, way of introducing the idea that humans are wired to see patterns where there aren’t any. All scientists are familiar with this tendency – when I was in grad school and I thought I saw a bump (a lot of experimental particle physics consists of hunting for bumps in data plots), the more experienced physicists would turn the plot upside-down and ask if I now saw a trough which, of course, I wasn’t predisposed to fixate on. Random data is almost never smooth, it clumps, and these random clumps can mimic all kinds of patterns. So far so good.

But here is where it gets just, well, stupid:

In the early 20th century, experimenters demonstrated that randomness rules: physicists found that particles are unpredictable; geneticists discovered that evolution is fueled by squillions of chance mutations. Yet today superstring theorists insist they will reconcile the lumpy, acausal quantum world with the smooth determinism of relativity; and neo-Darwinists emphasize natural selection, a god-like mechanism that sorts through mutations and chooses only the optimal ones. To them, every feather, fetlock and pubic hair bristles with meaning.

This is so far off base that it is, as Wolfgang Pauli once said, not even wrong. But, like the good little scientific reductionists that we are, let’s take it apart and see what is going on in there.

1. Small particles, roughly atom-size and below, obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which describes their motions with probability distributions of the kind used to predict coin-flipping, rather than the trajectories used by newtonian mechanics to describe the motions of billiard balls. Check.
2. Genetic replication includes errors that have a random character. Check.
3. Those kooky string theorists think they can reconcile “acausal” quantum mechanics with “smooth” relativity. Hey, wait a minute.
4. Neo-Darwinists believe that “god-like” natural selection always chooses the “optimal” genetic mutations. Whaaaaaa?

Having a physics background, I can easily dispose of item 3. Quantum mechanics is completely causal, it just isn’t deterministic for individual events. However the Schrodinger equation, which describes the time evolution of a wave function is, completely causal and even deterministic.

What’s more, relativity and quantum mechanics were unified long ago in the form of quantum field theories like quantum electrodynamics. String theory attempts to bring gravity into the quantum fold, but gravity isn’t any “smoother” than the other forces, such as the electric and magnetic fields, which were relativistically quantized in the 1940’s. Such bullshit.

Moving on to evolution, item 4 would have a neo-darwinist like Steven Jay Gould spinning in his (recent, alas) grave. The idea that evolution produces an inexorable progress toward “optimal” organisms is the kind of silly high-school mistake that might keep a student after school, writing “evolution is not deterministic” on the blackboard a hundred times.

But in the NYTimes such crap is published without qualm, very much like the time the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a completely bogus pseudoscientific paper to the journal Social Text, which was published without anyone at Social Text understanding what he had written (they couldn’t have, it was gibberish mixed in with trendy lit-crit terms).

Now, the Social Text editors cried foul when Prof. Sokal revealed his hoax (on the eve of publication). They accepted his work because of his reputation as a physicist. Maybe the NYTimes book review editor simply thought that he couldn’t question the authoritative source of the review.

Who is this Dick Teresi? Well, his scientific credentials are flawless:

Dick Teresi is the author or coauthor of several books about science and technology, including The God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly, and is a frequent reviewer and essayist for The New York Times Book Review. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Ah, so the NYTimes published this drivel because they know him and have published his stuff before. Of course, they liked his previous work and, after all, he writes about science so he must know his stuff. Kinda like that other emminent NYTimes writer, uh, former writer, Judith Miller.

Well, at least they are consistent.

A hat-tip to Digby for bringing this up originally.

Cross-posted at dKos and MyLeftWing

It’s not that the AP article on the SOTU entitled Bush Skips Complex Realities in Address actually says Bush is toast. But try to imagine such a headline a year ago.

More SOTU and Bush evisceration, courtesy of the back-from-death fourth estate, below the fold…
The introduction is particularly tasty:

President Bush set energy self-sufficiency goals Tuesday night that would still leave the country vulnerable to unstable oil sources. He also declared he is helping more people get health care, despite a rising number of uninsured.

Whether promoting a plan to “save Social Security” or describing Iraqi security forces as “increasingly capable of defeating the enemy,” Bush skipped over some complex realities in his State of the Union speech.

Where is the “he said, she said” “balance” of the last five years, where the press was, at best, acting as a stenographer and, at worst, a PR agency?

The reporters (I can actually use this term here without gagging) then begin a point-by-point analysis/refutation of the bullshit:

ENERGY

…Bush has spoken of reducing reliance on foreign oil in every State of the Union speech, if not as explicitly as in this one, and presidents back to Richard Nixon outlined similar goals, to little or no effect.

Oooh, Richard Nixon – that had to hurt somewhere.

HEALTH CARE:

Noting that the government must help provide health care for the poor and elderly, Bush asserted, “We are meeting that responsibility.”

It is true that a new prescription drug benefit took effect this year, a new entitlement for up to 42 million disabled and older people. But implementation has been rocky: Mark McClellan, the administration’s top Medicare official, recently acknowledged that tens of thousands of recipients probably didn’t get medicine due to confusion and computer glitches, prompting some lawmakers to seek an extension of the May 15 signup deadline to work out the snafus.

An incomplete picture also emerges on health care for the poor.

The number of uninsured has increased nearly 5 million since Bush took office in 2001, to 45.5 million in 2004, two-thirds of the total from low-income families, according to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Since when has the press used the word “but” when refering to the words of a Republican?

SOCIAL SECURITY:

Bush said Congress did not act last year on his “proposal to save Social Security.” In fact, his plan does not take care of Social Security’s future solvency; instead, he wants to let younger workers divert some of their Social Security payroll taxes into private investment accounts to take advantage of the possibilities for a better return.

In fact? In Fact? They now seem actually to care about facts! Be still my beating heart.

IRAQ:

Bush’s upbeat account of progress in Iraq, coupled with an acknowledgment that “our enemy is brutal,” left unstated a variety of setbacks in turning control over to Iraqi forces, including Iraqi Army desertions in the volatile west.

There is so much more. You just have to go over there and read the whole thing. Lots of fact-checking-filled fun 🙂

After you do that you might click over to my internet TV show http://RealityBasedTV.com. Interviews with Juan Cole, Cindy Sheehan, and Crystal Patterson are “on the air”, with a piece on Craig Newmark (of Craigslist fame) to come in next week’s episode.

Crossposted at MyLeftWing and
at the orange empire

When I saw the picture of Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.com, on the cover, I just had to read the article. I really like craigslist.com; I even used it successfully to buy some furniture several months ago.

What I thought would be an interesting article about how Craig (and the internet in general, including bloggers) is changing the media. What I found was a vile and juvenile screed attacking Craig for, get this, taking money away from newspapers and causing job losses in the newsroom.

Follow me on an exploration of one newspaper’s descent into irrelevance…

The beginning of the article is inauspicious:

Craig Newmark’s stubby fingers tap at the keyboard in an irregular, accelerating rhythm, akin to kernels in a microwave popcorn bag approaching peak heat.

Nice visual there, eh? It gets more pointed rather quickly:

Newmark peers into one of three computer monitors on his home office desk. The screen displays, in plain black-and-white text, the focus of Newmark’s daily life — much of it, anyway. It’s in an e-mail program called Pine, favored by geeks of all ages, partly because it renders the mouse nearly useless. Pine users are, like Newmark, the type who derive an almost perverse pleasure from deleting a message by simply pressing the “D” key, rather than undertaking the laborious task of clicking on a trash can icon. Newmark pores over his inbox, which receives about 300 messages daily.

Not only are Craig’s fingers “stubby”, but he actually uses them efficiently. As anyone who has written software for mission-critical real-time UI’s knows, the mouse is an incredibly slow and inefficient tool for anything that is not intrinsically graphical (like email, duh). Of course, the mouse is absolutely essential for clueless fucktards like our intrepid reporter, who have to be led by the hand through an application, with little tail-wagging puppies making the awful journey bearable.

We have only read the first two paragraphs and already there are indications that the reporter may actually not like Craig very much. These suspicions are verified a bit farther down the page:

The offices of Craigslist, the mostly free classifieds site Newmark co-founded a decade ago, are less than a mile to the west, but he spends most of his workweek here, at the Inner Sunset house his girlfriend teasingly calls his “swank new bachelor pad.” Newmark moved in in October, and his progress does much to reveal his priorities: The wall that will separate the bedroom from the bathroom has yet to be built, but two brand-new, widescreen televisions (one in the living room, one at the foot of the bed) are fully functional.

OMFG, Craig watches TV! I’ll bet he can’t even read!

So why all the disrespect? Especially from a lefty alternative paper like the SF Weekly (I will now begin calling it the SF Weakly, of course :-).

Craig’s great sin is revealed on page 2:

Almost by accident, Newmark built one of the Internet’s most successful sites, creating a free marketplace for millions that continues to grow around the country and the world. Among the unintended consequences of Craigslist’s growth, though, is that it’s sucking away significant dollars in classified advertisements from already-struggling newspapers. Bay Area papers alone forfeit at least $50 million annually to Craigslist, losses that contribute to layoffs of dozens of reporters. As fearful publishers cut newsroom jobs, inferior news coverage is the likely outcome. Craigslist’s devoted fans are unknowingly exchanging one public service for another — trading away the quality of their news for a cheaper way to find an apartment. At the same time, Craigslist’s executives won’t disclose the amount of money they’re pulling in.

Damn, Craig is indeed the heart and soul of pure evil. He (and thousands of other sites on the internet) are providing a better way for people to buy and sell, and is thereby destroying the dead-tree media, who were too clueless to keep up with reality. Another way of putting it might be:

Gee, I’ve waited for this my whole life. I finally got a paying (sort of) job at a real (sort of) newspaper and now, because my paper and I are too clueless to compete in the 21st century, I might lose my job and have to write for free.

I mean, it’s not as if I really know anything. I’m a reporter, I don’t have to (until I stop getting paid for this, that is).

Waaaahhhhh!!!

Of course it’s not only Craig who is ruining this guy’s rush. It’s all citizen journalists, which means, if you post here or anywhere else, you!

You are the enemy. Destroying journalism. Wrecking newspapers.

Cry me a fucking river.

As some of you know, I have been extending my blogging activities into the realm of video, beginning with my interview of Prof. Juan Cole. I have now created a new website:

http://www.RealityBasedTV.com

to provide a focus for this work. Please visit the site and take a look at the interviews of:

Crystal Patterson – 37 minutes (about 10-20 minutes download on DSL)

Cindy Sheehan – 1 minute (very quick download)

Prof. Juan Cole – 7 parts of about 12 minutes each (a few minutes download each)

More info after the flip…
We in the blogosphere are, generally, inveterate readers and, often, writers. But many people don’t relate to the written word and get most of their news from TV, with the unfortunate political consequences that we see all around us.

RealityBasedTV.com is my attempt to extend the reach of the blogs to a larger audience. I will be doing interviews and other videos but, more importantly, I will be upgrading the website in the next few weeks to include a full blog with comments and diaries. I want to encourage people to join me in these efforts by creating their own video works and posting them as diaries on RealityBasedTV.com.

Tutorials will be provided and budding producers can post questions and get answers on production methods and such. My goal is to have a videoblogger in each of 435 congressional districts to shine a bright light on the political process.

As Frameshop might say:

Please recommend so RealityBasedTV can stay on the air 🙂

Crossposted at you-know-where and Myleftwing

Juan Cole reports that the fraud is too obvious to ignore:

Al-Hayat reports that 643,000 votes were cast in Ninevah Province (capital: Mosul). At the time it filed, 419,000 had been preliminarily counted, and the vote was running 75 percent in favor. Ninevah Province was the most likely place that Sunni Arabs opposing the constitution might be able to get a 2/3s “no” vote.

Several of my knowledgeable readers are convinced that the Ninevah voting results as reported so far look like fraud. One suspected that the Iraqi government so feared a defeat there that they over-did the ballot stuffing and ended up with an implausible result.

More below…
So they overdid it, did they?

One of my Iraqi-American correspondents compared the turnout statistics from Ninevah and Diyala provinces last Jan. 30 to those coming out now, and found the current numbers completely unbelievable. He pointed out that the Iraqi Islamic Party had not garnered many votes in Ninevah last January, and its support of the constitution could not hope to explain the hundreds of thousands of “yes” votes the constitution appeared to receive on Saturday.

I guess that you need Diebold-style technology to commit election fraud with the requisite amount of finesse.

Go read the whole thing at juancole.com.

I just finished watching Kos’s interview on Evolve TV. Kos really does a great job interviewing Cole, and Cole really explains what has gone on, and what is now going on, in Iraq and the middle east in a spin-free and informative manner.

Go watch the interview here. If you don’t have Quicktime7, get it here (if you are on Windoze like I am). You will need Quicktime 7 to see this video quality at such a (comparatively) low data rate, for this video as well as more that will be available on the internet in the months to come. The new Quicktime version will not mess up your PC, as some previous versions are said to have the propensity to do.

A brief outline of the interview follows after the click…
The interview is organized into six chapters (kind of an odd coincidence, since my interview of Cole that aired last Friday is in six parts, with an added trailer intro). Why do they call it a “trailer”, since it comes first?

The chapters are as follows:

I. Introduction

Kos does a great job painting a picture of Juan Cole’s background and experience in the middle east. Cole talks about his years in Egypt, Pakistan, and Beirut (where he was a journalist in his younger years). They talk about how the blog got started, and how easy it is to provide the great detail Cole does in his blog (http://juancole.com) given that the arabic web newspapers come out the night before (our time) and given that Cole reads eight or nine languages.

II. Media bias

The drumbeat of the US press for the war, who basically obeyed the dictates of the administration. The blogosphere’s right-wing pundits are also covered. Cole analyzes the reality of the Arabic press very well, describing the differences between various middle east media sources and explains their biases. The attacks against Cole by the right wing are lauded by Cole as giving him free advertising.

III. Shiite role

The Moqtada al Sadr are described by Cole as similar a ghetto urban gang, but with a puritan slant. The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq is explained as a Shiite terrorist organization that started in Iranian the early 80’s, and is now a party in Iraq – so Bush has achieved their goals for them since they did extremely well in the elections (half the provinces are now ruled by SCIRI). The Dawa party is described as largely Stalinist and the primary political enemy in the 80’s inside Iraq (as opposed to SCIRI, which were expatriates).

IV. Kurd/Sunni Role

The politics and successes of Kurdistan are described in detail, with the parties as being outgrowths of the clans united against the rest of Iraq. Cole calls Kurdistan the nicest part of Iraq, with a lot of economic activity – would be better if petroleum production were not being interrupted by the Sunni resistance.

The Sunni groups are covered next. There are neo-baathist secular nationalist groups, religious groups (Salafi), and tribal groups. These latter are powerful especially due to the desire for revenge against the US for clan members having been killed.

V. Iran’s involvement

Since SCIRI is dominant in the new Parliament and was headquartered in Tehran, and Dawa had a branch there, Cole describes that Iran has basically won in Iraq. He says that Iran is covertly is providing funding to these groups and overtly is offering aid and development money to Iraq. There is a Shiite-Iranian military alliance as well.

The bloody eight-year Iran-Iraq war is described, and the enmity of Iran and Saddam is causing Iran to be very happy with Bush – both for destroying the Baath rulers of Iraq as well as the Taliban in Afghanistan (who were also enemies of Saddam). So all of Ayatollah Khomeini’s goals in the middle east have been achieved by Bush, and the elections in Iraq were a huge victory for Iran, which now wants to form an alliance with Iraq and Syria.

VI. The Blame Game

Who’s to blame? Cole says George W. Bush, who the administration has put on a pedestal even though he himself has called a lot of the shots. Cole even says that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 🙂

Cole says that Bush is a very ad hoc leader, shooting from the hip. This worked for a while due to the size and wealth of the US, but has now failed miserably.

The topics covered in the interview are largely different than Cole and I covered in our interview that aired last week. We covered the political situation in the run-up to the war in much more detail and also talked in detail about how the US should proceed in getting out of Iraq.

The similarities of the two interviews are kind of weird. Both interview Juan Cole, of course. But both appeared at almost exactly the same time, both use quicktime, and both are divided into six chapters. But they covered complementary topics. Either there was covert collusion between Kos and me, or it’s just an example of “great minds think alike”. 🙂

I think the coincidence is mainly due to unique aspects of this time in history. Technology (video compression and internet bandwidth) are allowing small groups (me and JessicaDrewSW in one case and Steve Garfield and his merry band in the other) to herald the overthrow of what I like to call the one-way media. It started with the blogs beginning to make the print press irrelevant. But now the addition of video threatens to reach the vast audience that gets most of it’s news and views from television (this is the motivation behind my statement at the beginning of the introduction to my Cole interview “Iraq is a mess, and TV sucks.”

You can watch my interview here. There are obvious problems with the video – you can see me better than you can see Prof. Cole (this is a somewhat the case in Kos’s interview as well – they needed to focus the camera that showed Cole better). The main problem with my interview is the audio. These were due to equipment problems on-site that I cleaned up to some extent in post-production.

I will be re-airing my interview with Cole in a few days (probably Wednesday) with a version that has much-improved audio and an mp3 podcast version as well. I will also try to produce a Flash version that will play on virtually any computer, made possible by the ubiquity of Flash which, in turn, was driven by the profit motive (advertising :-). But please try to check out my interview, it shows well on many computers and there is much more detail (the whole thing is over an hour, with the average segment being about 13 minutes long).

A Conversation with Juan Cole — Video Interview on Iraq

[From the diaries by susanhu. Citizen journalism! Great job, Mark.]

As some of you may have read, I was planning to travel to the University of Michigan and do an interview with Prof. Juan Cole, the noted expert on the Middle East and proprietor of the blog Informed Comment. This was an outgrowth of an email exchange that I had with him as well as some diaries I posted on dKos and on BMT.

Well, I decided to go all out and do a video interview. I was accompanied by fellow dKosser JessicaDrewSW, who contributed her video expertise and was the cameraperson. I have just posted the complete interview video (split into seven parts) at the following locations:

Please click…
Introduction

Attempts to stop Cole’s internet activities and allegations of antisemitism

The runup to the war

Motivations for the war and consequences of a partition of Iraq

How do we get out of Iraq?

The separation of church and state in the new Iraq

The worst black mark on American foreign policy

All you have to do is go there and, after the page loads, click on the “This media file’s URL: Link” just below the picture on the web page. Left click if you want to view the video within the browser, or right click and select “Save target as…” (or similar, bepending on your browser) to save the video as a file on your computer. It is a Quicktime file.

The intro is about 8 minutes long and amazingly only took about 12MB, due to the fantastic compression afforded by Quicktime. The succeeding 6 parts vary from 8 to 23 minutes. If you don’t have Quicktime then the file may play in another viewer, but if not then it is easy (and free) to download Quicktime7 from apple here:

Quicktime

I assume that you already have it if you are a Mac person.

If you think what I have is promising then maybe you could recommend this diary so that the interview can get a wider audience.

Feel free to respone with comments, auggestions, questions, or whatever. Please realize that I haven’t done anything even remotely like this before, so I am climbing the learning curve. That said, let me have it 🙂

As some of you may have read, I was planning to travel to the University of Michigan and do an interview with Prof. Juan Cole, the noted expert on the Middle East and proprietor of the blog Informed Comment (juancole.com). This was an outgrowth of an email exchange that I had with him as well as some diaries I posted on dKos and on BMT.

Well, I decided to go all out and do a video nterview. I was accompanied by fellow dKosser JessicaDrewSW, who contributed her video expertise and was the cameraperson. I have just posted, for your preview, an introductory video to the full (over 1 hour) interview at the following location:

http://www.ourmedia.org/node/61748

all you have to do is go there and, after the page loads, click on the “This media file’s URL: Link” just below my picture on the web page. Left click if you want to view the video within the browser, or right click and select “Save target as…” (or similar, bepending on your browser) to save the video as a file on your computer. It is a Quicktime file.

More after the click…
The intro is about 8 minutes long and amazingly only took about 12MB, due to the fantastic compression afforded by Quicktime. If you don’t have Quicktime then the file may play in another viewer, but if not then it is easy (and free) to download Quicktime7 from apple here:

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html

I assume that you already have it if you are a mac person.

If you think what I have is promising then maybe you could recommend this diary so that the interview can get a wider audience.

Unless people tell me that the video completely sucks, I will  post the full interview in a diary on the same blogs on Friday, probably around noon as well.

Feel free to respone with comments, auggestions, questions, or whatever. Please realize that I haven’t done anything even remotely like this before, so I am climbing the learning curve. That said, let me have it 🙂

Cheers!

Markinsanfran (soon to go by the callsign “Dio”)

Crossposted at dailyKos.com

As some of you may recall, University of Michigan Professor and Middle East expert Juan Cole (whose work I have been pimping shamelessly here for the past few months) has agreed to be interviewed by me. Well, now is the time!

I am presently in Ann Arbor and will be interviewing Prof. Cole on campus Thursday. I will not necessarily be able to ask all suggested questions but I encourage you to let me know your thoughts.

I will be posting the interview as a diary sometime this weekend, so please keep a lookout for it!

Cross-posted at dailyKos.com

I loved the negative press on Rove so much that I headed right down to the corner store to get an actual hardcopy of the SF Comicle, the one with Rove’s face taking up a goodly portion of the front page above the fold, his head held high (by the way, it’s held high so as to attempt to hide the double chin – don’t ask how I know). But as I was walking I had this sinking feeling…

Please click “Read more…” for the feelings…

The public loves narrative. A narrative allows people to be able to understand information, its context, and its likely outcome. Emphasis on “likely outcome.”

We started the narrative.

“Rove, evil genius, steals 2000 election”
“Rove, evil genius, steals 2002 election”
“Rove, evil genius, steals 2004 election”

Now Rove is at the center of the press coverage of the Plame outing. As well he should be. But, how will the narrative conclude?

There is only one relatively good outcome that the Bush-masters can look forward to:

It was Rove
It was only Rove
It was nothing but Rove
So help us God.

Rove goes, BushCorp stays, and nothing changes. Let’s not let this happen.

Please, repeat after me:

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up
It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up
It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up

Now I feel better. I think.