Microcosm

A few of us braved the torrential rain and went to Town Hall Seattle yesterday to hear Carl Zimmer speaking about his book Microcosm. PZ was there – I’m not stalking you, PZ, honest! – and I really enjoyed both the presentation and the conversations before and after. The book is wonderful: I can’t do better than quote Sean Carroll (author of Endless Forms Most Beautiful, another of my favourite science books):

Microcosm could well be entitled Fantastic Voyage. Carl Zimmer, one of our most talented and respected science writers, guides us on a memorable journey into the invisible but amazing world within and around a tiny bacterium. He reveals a life-or-death battle every bit as dramatic as that on the Serengeti and one that offers profound insights into how life is made and evolves. Microcosm expands our sense of wonder by illuminating a microscopic universe few could imagine and instills a sense of pride in the great achievements of the scientists who have discovered and mastered its workings.

Carl Zimmer with the Kindle edition of Microcosm.As for the problem of autographing a Kindle edition, I persuaded Carl to let me photograph him with my Kindle displaying the title page. I think my camera must have been affected by the rain, because the picture was lousy, but never mind. Many thanks, Carl.

United untied?

One legacy of my time with Sun Microsystems, during which I did a lot of travelling, is a healthy balance in MileagePlus, the United frequent flier program. Obviously such an asset is valuable only if there are opportunities to redeem the miles for tickets, which in turn requires that United actually keeps flying where I want to go. So today’s reports from PlaneBuzz caught my attention. Among the likely moves:

  1. Culling the B737 fleet (94 airplanes) by Fall 2009.
  2. Selling off 7 6 B747s by Fall 2008.
  3. 25 percent staff cuts by Fall 2008.
  4. Death to TED (quickly but painfully).

Obviously such changes will be accompanied by schedule and route cuts. Now one of the most frustrating things about the state of the US airline business is the grotesque inefficiency – in terms of fuel and airport slots – of flying so many segments with small planes. Twenty years ago, the SFO-BOS red-eye was a TWA L-1011, stopping in JFK. Today, there’s a swarm of 737s and A319s on the route. If the price of fuel isn’t sufficient, we need to find some regulatory or tariff-based mechanism to make it much more expensive to fly 300 people in three A319s than in one 777. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that if United is going to park the old 737s rather than its 757s and 767s, this might be good news. And hopefully there will still be enough 777s and 747s to let me use my miles in creative ways.

Philosophers and evolution

Yesterday evening, PZ Myers shared with us some of his email (2,000 messages a day, after excluding spam) to illustrate the variety of personae who feel compelled to rant against evolution (sorry, “Darwinism”). As he pointed out, some of them are clearly bright, thinking individuals who are spectacularly ill-informed, having been fed a diet of religious nonsense in their homes, churches, and (illegally but inevitably) schools. The other half are just plain whacko, some of them dangerously so.
But there is another group of antievolutionists that it’s worth noting. It may be numerically tiny, but they tend to punch above their weight. I’m referring to a small group of academic philosophers, of whom the most vocal is undoubtedly Jerry Fodor. 3 quarks daily just reported on an exchange in the latest issue of Mind & Language in which Fodor makes a fool of himself and Dan Dennett and others pile on to show him up. Dan’s piece is quite devastating: Fodor’s argument, according to Dan…

… has the startling conclusion:

Contrary to Darwinism, the theory of natural selection can’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations.

Now this really is absurd. Silly absurd. Preposterous. It is conclusions like this, built upon such comically slender stilts, that give philosophy a bad name among many scientists. Fodor’s argument really does follow from his premises, though, so far as I can see, so I am prepared to treat it as a classic reductio. A useful reductio, as we all learned in our first logic course, has just one bad premise that eventually sticks out like a sore thumb, but in this case we have an embarrassment of riches: four premises, all of them false. I will leave as an exercise for the reader the task of seeing if any presentable variation of Fodor’s argument can be constructed in which some or all of these are replaced by truths.

Dan concludes by pointing out the damage that Jerry’s kind of nonsense can do:

I cannot forebear noting, on a rather more serious note, that such ostentatiously unresearched ridicule as Fodor heaps on Darwinians here is both very rude and very risky to one’s reputation. (Remember Mary Midgley’s notoriously ignorant and arrogant review of The Selfish Gene? Fodor is vying to supplant her as World Champion in the Philosophers’ Self-inflicted Wound Competition.) Before other philosophers countenance it they might want to bear in mind that the reaction of most biologists to this sort of performance is apt to be—at best: ‘Well, we needn’t bother paying any attention to him. He’s just one of those philosophers playing games with words’. It may be fun, but it contributes to the disrespect that many non-philosophers have for our so-called discipline.

And he’s right. Science needs the philosophers of science, to remind them of the epistemological underpinnings of the discipline, and to police the boundaries between science and metaphysics. Of course there are some philosophers who misread the zeitgeist and try to maintain a philosophical stake in a scientific debate. ((For a good example of this, I recommend a brief dip into the recent collection “Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind”. But please keep it brief.)) But I think they are in a minority.
In addition to Dan’s piece, there are useful perspectives from Peter Godfrey-Smith and Elliott Sober. (The other article cited, by Kirk and Susan Schneider, addresses a completely different aspect of Fodor’s work.)
P.S. Iain commented that the links I provided don’t work for him. If you run into problems, I suggest that you click through to the 3quarks piece and link from there.

A good time with PZ

There was a pretty good turnout for PZ‘s talk last night at the Pacific Science Center, and a significant proportion of the attendees (including yours truly) continued the discussion over beer at McMenamins.
I hadn’t realized this until a UW grad student pointed it out to me, but PZ’s talk was sponsored in part by the Forum on Science Ethics and Policy, which hosted the session by Nisbet and Mooney last October. The similarity and difference was striking. Both PZ and Nisbet/Mooney argue that scientists need to change the way they behave in public in order to communicate more effectively. The difference was that Nisbet/Mooney want scientists to deliberately frame the issues to achieve a particular effect, while PZ simply wants them to drop the mask of cool, cautious, measured objectivity and be themselves: let the excited, passionate, human side of science come through. Drop the weasel words. Be advocates. Be positive. And focus on the beauty of science, of the sheer delight in solving elegant puzzles and discovering the extraordinary. Forget about importance. (I’m reading Carl Zimmer‘s “Microcosm” right now, and the highest accolade that he bestows on experimental work is “beautiful”.)
During Q&A, I asked PZ what he thought had changed over the last 15 years, from the days when discussions of atheism and creationism were largely confined to alt.atheism and talk.origins on the Usenet. He gave the “endogenous” answer – a bunch of atheists got uppity, and eventually broke through into the cultural mainstream. Obviously that’s a part of it, but I strongly believe that we were reacting to a bunch of “exogenous” changes: a significant rise in fundamental religionist activity which provoked our responses. Everything from creationists in schools, to ten commandments in courthouses, to pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions, to religious takeovers of military institutions, to Terry Schiavo. Yes, of course some of it had been going on for years – battles over prayers and “moments of silence” at school events, abortion rights, and so forth – and some of the increase might simply be explained by greater media attention (what happens in Kansas doesn’t stay there any more). But I’m convinced that there was a shift. Some of it was a consequence of the cynical exploitation of religious groups by the Gingrich and Rove Republicans. 9/11 undoubtedly had an effect.
The bottom line is, I think, that there was a great deal of stuff for atheists to get angry about. I’ve written about this before, in my review of Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great”. I wrote then:

But suppose that an old friend came to me and asked, “Why are you so fired up about atheism and religion these days? I remember you 15 years ago, and back then you were posting on alt.atheism, and having fun roasting creationists on talk.origins, and reading books on the philosophy of religion. But you didn’t talk – and write – about it all the time, and you certainly didn’t publically define yourself by your disbelief. So what happened?”
Instead of trying to explain all of my reasons, I think I’d simply give them Hitchens’ new book and say, “Read this. He puts it better than I ever could. I merely experience the occasional (but increasingly frequent) feelings of frustration, impatience, outrage, and even anger. Hitchens is an unequalled exponent of the art of the rant: he says what I feel, with passion, intensity and wit.”

Indeed.

A scientifically skeptical week ahead

This is going to be fun….
On Monday, PZ Myers (Pharyngula) is going to be speaking at the Pacific Science Center. Then on Tuesday, Carl Zimmer – author of “Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life” – is at Town Hall Seattle. And finally on Friday the Seattle Skeptics have organized “An Evening with PZ Myers” – skeptical socializing, followed by dinner. (RSVP required.)
I’m still wrestling with one little problem, however: how do I get Carl Zimmer to autograph my Kindle edition of “Microcosm”?

Time travel

Two brief items about time and my recently completed circumnavigation.
For years, my timepiece of choice has been the Citizen Skyhawk. It’s a solar-powered marvel, with only one flaw: its multiple city feature doesn’t accomodate the Indian time zone (IST=UTC+5:30). When I was at Hyderabad Airport last week, I stopped by a watch store and asked if, by any chance, Citizen now had a watch that could handle Indian time. They showed me a Navihawk: an earlier design, no longer sold in the USA ((Or at least not available through the Citizen store at Amazon.com.)), without solar power, but with full support for IST. ((Curiously, it still doesn’t support other half-hour zones, like Newfoundland, Tehran, or Adelaide.)) I bought one in a heartbeat: highly recommended for those who visit India regularly.
The Navihawk was a success; the iPhone less so. I disabled data roaming on my travels, for all the well-documented reasons; I also found that very few of the roaming carriers would send out the signal needed to automatically set the time. This shouldn’t have mattered: the iPhone allows you to set the date, time, and time zone by hand, so everything should just work. Unfortunately it doesn’t. Despite my best efforts, the “World Clock” and “Alarm” features of the Clock application were totally confused. I had planned to rely on the iPhone’s alarm function, and so I hadn’t bothered to pack a separate alarm clock. Eventually I worked out that the most reliable (but awkward) technique was to use the count-down “Timer”.
I’m really surprised at how buggy this part of the iPhone software is. I can only assume that Steve Jobs has never travelled abroad with his iPhone. Please fix it, Apple.

Photos are up

The photos from the trip (334 of them) are now up here. Among my favourites:
The “broken rainbow” bridge in Beijing.
The sheer scale of the Forbidden City.
A view inside….
Announcing a bake sale in my hotel for the earthquake victims.
Tianenman Square.
Hutong pics: #1, #2, #3.
Beijing subway.
Beijing Airport, Terminal 3.
An A380 at SIN.
Sign on a balcony at the Bangalore office.
Signs at the Java conference: #1, #2.
The A321 that took me from FRA to LHR.
The controversial Heathrow T5 in the rain.
UPDATE: If you’d just like to browse the pictures of the Forbidden City in Beijing, start here.

Heathrow works, Chicago sucks, Edam isn't

I’ve just arrived back in Seattle after my circumnavigation. The day started out uneventfully: I drove from Oxford to Heathrow, dropped off the car, took the shuttle to Terminal 3, checked in, and flew through security. What’s wrong with this picture? I thought Heathrow was the airport we all hated…
The flight to Chicago aboard an aging United 767 was long, a bit tedious, but mostly harmless. I could tell that I was back in the mediocre arms of the US airline industry, because the food was crap and you had to pay $5 or 3 Euros for a miniature alcoholic beverage. This particular 767 configuration did have seat-back video screens in coach, but (a) the screens were incredibly small, (b) the screen was fixed in place, and thus unviewable if the person in front reclined their seat, and (c) the IFE wasn’t working properly in my seat row anyway.
After watching postage-stamp sized snippets of various movies over the shoulders of those in front of me, I sat back and read “Into The Darkness”, Peter Zimonjic’s graphic but confused assemblage of survivors’ stories from the 7/7 bombings in London. (It would be greatly improved by the addition of three diagrams showing the positions of the trains and where each of the characters was.) My other book was Stephen Fry’s elegant tutorial on versification, “The Ode Less Travelled”. Unfortunately I had not brought along a notebook and pencils, and so I was unable to carry out the exercises that he directed his readers to perform before reading any further. Furthermore he also encouraged us to read the examples out loud, repeatedly, in order to appreciate the “stress-timed” nature of spoken English. Richard Feyman may have lived by the precept “What do you care what other people think?”, but I am rather more inhibited.
So I slept. This was a good preparation for the chaos that was Chicago O’Hare. It started well, with a landing in strong, gusty cross-winds that had many passengers squeaking in fear and prompted me to have a delightful chat with the captain about how nicely he’d handled things, which led on to discussions about trends in oceanic flow management (there’s been a widespread slowdown of Mach 0.02-0.03 to save fuel; we were cruising at M0.77 rather than the earlier standard of M0.8). Then immigration, and getting our bags, and clearing customs: all fairly mundane.
And then things started to go downhill. The baggage handling system for rechecking luggage through to domestic connections was broken, so everybody was forced to lug their bags to their domestic departure terminals. International travellers tend to have more baggage than most, and this completely swamped the inter-terminal rail service. I had to wait for three trains before I was able to board one. When we got to United’s Terminal One, none of the staff there were ready for the influx of bags, even though the system had been down for hours.
Next, security… We’re all used to the arrangement where a serpentine queue feeds into separate queues for each x-ray/metal detector. Only in Chicago would they think of having several TSA staff “tapping into” the serpentine queue at different points, so that nobody knew whether to wait for particular official or go further down the queue. The mood of the mob was not improved by the fact that only half of the x-ray units were open, despite the fact that the lines were all overflowing. Most of the TSA staff were as confused as we were, and kept asking each other who was in charge.
During my trip I visited ten airports: Seattle, San Francisco, Beijing, Singapore, Hyderabad, Bangalore (two different ones!), Frankfurt, London, and Chicago. Obviously the worst was the old Bangalore airport, which none of us will miss. That aside, Chicago clearly gets the wooden spoon. And it wasn’t just a problem of volume: Beijing, Singapore, Frankfurt and London all handle plenty of traffic. The sad truth is that US commercial aviation – the airports, the airlines, the planes they fly, the ATC that guides them – is in a pretty shabby state: a suicidal business model leading to underinvestment and decrepitude.
Here’s an interesting nugget. In India, I flew from Hyderabad to Bangalore on Kingfisher, one of the recent arrivals on the Indian scene. Even though the flight was only 90 minutes, on an ATR turboprop, the staff served everyone a three-course meal. How come? (Particularly when United cabin staff can barely manage a beverage service in that length of time.) I think what’s happening is that the Indian airlines haven’t got any elaborate fuel price hedging plans, and so in this era of volatile oil prices, fares are pretty much determined by a “fuel cost plus” calculation. But there are several carriers competing on every route, and since price competition is impractical, they have to compete on service. What a concept!
Anyway, I eventually boarded the 757 to take me from Chicago to Seattle. It was late, it was oversold, the in-flight entertainment system was broken, and one of the toilets needed last-minute repairs. There was no Indian-style three-course meal ((With vegetarian and non-vegetarian options.)) for us; we were given the opportunity to buy $5 boxes containing various ill-assorted snack products. Mine contained, inter alia, a can of tuna, a jar of hummus, various kinds of crackers, a bar of chocolate, some raisins, and a yellowish slab in a plastic wrapper, labelled “Edam style cheese food product“. The ingredients were listed as “Cheddar cheese”, followed by various chemicals intended to create the illusion of Edam. The attempt was a failure. If I were a resident of Edam or Cheddar, I would consider a lawsuit.
Never mind. I’m home.

"Tragic life stories"

I was in the Oxford W.H.Smith’s just now, and among the books upstairs they had two full shelves ((I.e. two bays of five shelves, each about 4 ft. wide.)) devoted to “Tragic life stories”. Accounts of abused childhood, “white slavery”, honour crimes, prostitution, life with medical or psychiatric conditions (including anorexia and self-mutilation), drugs, and kidnapping. And that’s just a sample: I found it too depressing to look any further. There was more space devoted to this subject than religion (good, I guess), science (bad, but not surprising) or football (truly bizarre).

In Oxford

I’m blogging from a Starbucks in Oxford, grimacing at the expense of the T-Mobile WiFi. Never mind. Herewith a random collection of observations about the last couple of days.

  • Bangalore was cool. The staff in the Amazon Bangalore office were very welcoming, and presentations and meetings went very well. I have a bunch of action items!
  • The IT conferences (on Java and Startups) and the ACM meeting I attended were full of energetic, ambitious people.
  • The new airport at Bangalore isn’t as pretty as the one at Hyderabad. It was functional, but barely. Most shops were empty of stock, the WiFi didn’t work, and everything seemed to happen 15-30 minutes behind schedule. The road from the city to the airport was… well, it was a typical Indian highway. Leave plenty of time….
  • I’d forgotten how much I hate Lufthansa’s long-haul service – especially the 747-400 fleet. Uncomfortable economy seats, minimal pitch, no real in-flight entertainment, and indifferent and poorly-timed service. The house magazine claims that they are replacing the economy seats with new ones, with seat-back video. Maybe. I’d settle for the nice leather seats from the A-321 that flew me from Frankfurt to Heathrow.
  • I’m flying back to Seattle on Tuesday, and I’ll be in the office on Wednesday. Phew!