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Source: The Economist

A Quora question asks:
From your own perspective, frame of reference, if you are not accelerating, are you not moving at all?

Perhaps the reason people find this difficult to grasp is because of the ambiguous and unnecessary words “at all” at the end – which lend support to the idea that the word “moving” without mention of a context has any meaning at all. It does not.

And it never has. The claim that something is “moving” has never had any meaning without identification of relative to what, and it is perhaps unfortunate that by convention we often take the word without modification as meaning relative to the Earth without explaining that convention to small children (who then grow up thinking that there must be some kind of absolute property of “moving”).

From my own perspective, while sitting still in a bus I am not moving relative to the bus, but I know damn well that I am moving relative to the world outside. And it’s not just from my own perspective. Everyone else agrees with both of those relative motion statements.

So although it is just a tautology that from every perspective I am never moving relative to myself, it is false (or rather meaningless) that there exists any perspective from which I am ever not moving at all.

Source: (1000) Alan Cooper’s answer to From your own perspective, frame of reference, if you are not accelerating, are you not moving at all? – Quora

I’ve got nothing against home schooling and in fact seriously considered it for our own children, but the Washington Post is presenting what may be good news in a very misleading manner.

Source: How many kids are homeschooled in the U.S.? Growth by school district. – Washington Post

OK, So perhaps no-one would read this as saying that 51% of US kids are now home-schooled and would see that we are talking about %change. But is that year over year or in total since 2017? The labels don’t say, and many readers are used to seeing %change presented in the former sense which might lead to the unthinking impression (once one has absorbed that we are looking at growth rather than absolute numbers) that there continued to be more parents starting to take their kids out of school after the end of the COVID closures than were going back to the public classrooms. But if it’s total change then the number of home schoolers decreased in the last two years (which is more like what one would expect, and is indeed what is described later in the article where it is admitted that “In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year”). Sure, anyone who stops to think (or reads on) may not end up permanently misled, but the false emotional impressions, first of dramatic increase and then of continued growth, may continue to be felt even after being corrected.

Also, when we see the graph shoot up in 2019-20 it looks dramatic because it starts at “0” in 2017-18 when that was the original 100% and having that at the bottom makes the peak height in 2020-21 look like much more than a mere 62% increase. So in fact, even at the height of COVID, the (actually quite small) absolute number of home schoolers never even doubled from what it was before COVID.

If we project the pre-COVID trend though, then it does look as if the number of home schoolers might have increased at a rate more like 5% per year or by about a third between 2017 and 2023. This is indeed respectable growth, but not at the dramatic scale suggested by that graph. And of course when a quantity is small then a large %growth rate is still a small absolute number and only becomes really impressive if sustained for an extended period. So I don’t really think it can fairly be said that growing (during an extended school-closing pandemic) from around 1% to a bit under 2% of the overall school population “demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system”.

Source: (1000) Alan Cooper’s answer to Those of you who are “pro-choice” when it comes to abortion: Are you also pro-choice when it comes to allowing pro-life people to vote their conscience at the ballot box? – Quora

Roger Pielke Jr. belies his blog title with his claim in this recent post that

the IPCC has concluded that connections of carbon dioxide emissions and most types of extreme weather are “in a state of high uncertainty, doubt, or incompleteness.”

The quoted section is not from IPCC’s own conclusions but from an expression of concern about how a certain way of expressing them might be misinterpreted, and the link provided to support that claim is not to IPCC directly but to Pielke’s own piece alleging that IPCC results do lead to that conclusion. It would have been more honest to rephrase the claim as “I have suggested that IPCC results do lead to the conclusion that most types of extreme weather are ‘in a state of high uncertainty, doubt, or incompleteness’”. And it would even not be actually dishonest to replace “suggested” with “shown” (though I am still withholding judgement on whether or not that claim is factually correct)

Source: Russell’s Teapot and the Climate Unicorn

I was going to upvote this, but then I read the actual statement from Marit Stiles (which was posted but cleverly NOT read out in the video) and it turns out that there is nothing in it that expresses any objection to the content of what Sara Jama said, and the part that was carefully NOT read out in this report suggests that the expulsion from caucus was just for violation of an agreement about the procedure for keeping the leadership informed before making such statements rather than for what was actually said.

In the Oct 20 issue of The Economist, global business correspondent Tom Lee-Devlin wonders at ‘The eye-watering pay of American bosses‘, but it’s not the disproportionately high compensation of some workers (whether they be CEOs, actors, or athletes) that bothers me so much as the disproportionately low share of inherited capital at the other end of the spectrum. The high earners all have to convince someone with wealth of their worth and, whether or not I agree with their decisions, those ultimately agreeing to the payments have sufficient resources to look after their own interests.

The inequity that really matters is not that of nominally earned income but that of unearned wealth, and what we need to deal with that is to ensure that every child gets a Universal Fair Inheritance to be paid for by taxing all large gifts and inheritances as income in the year received at a rate at least as high as that applied to earned income.

It’s good to find that Andrew Coyne has been paying attention to my rants at the screen (and whoever else is in the room) whenever this issue comes up in the news. The stupid claims underlying Bill C-18 are indeed “as if sending millions of readers our way every day, for free, was somehow a form of theft”.

My own frustration with such claims extends back to the earliest days of the web when some academic institutions seriously considered requiring those of us trying to collect and evaluate resources to comply with prohibitions against linking without permission.

(Embedding ripped content, especially without attribution, is of course quite a different matter, but that needs to be dealt with separately – perhaps even with some restrictions on what constitutes a “fair use” excerpt.)

Source: Opinion: The government dug a deep hole for itself with Bills C-11 and C-18. And it’s only digging deeper – The Globe and Mail

…but it’s not ‘Cap&Trade’ or any other kind of payment for ‘Carbon Offsets’.

Source: Carbon offsets don’t work, and that’s not news | Climate & Capitalism

The only real way to stop CO2 emissions (or any other environmental damage) is to charge polluters the full cost of remediation of all such “externalities” by way of a recovery fee or tax based on whatever it would cost, using currently available technology, to reverse whatever environmental effects they have created.

One thing that bothers me about the nuclear industry is their constant whining about how the the onerous cost of regulations is what makes their product uneconomic, with the implication that such regulations should be relaxed for them rather than just being made similarly strict for all human enterprises.

Much (though by no means all) of what is wrong with “capitalism” as currently implemented is due to the gifting to industrialists of the right to benefit from having the externalities of their activities leading to a reduction of common wealth; and if the value so extracted were restored to all of us by way of a universal compensation payment, it would go a long way towards reducing the extremes of inequity at the low end of the income scale.

I applaud and encourage anyone who is interested in entering the field of mathematical biology, and in particular the mathematically rigorous formulation and elaboration of Darwin’s ideas about evolving populations. But I am more sanguine about the prospects for using the Coq proof assistant in that endeavour.

I don’t share the common reaction of many that the term ‘Darwinism’ is just a misleading label invented by creationists. To me it’s a fair label for the adoption and study of Darwin’s main thesis – namely that the present distribution and variety of biological species can be explained as the result of a process of natural selection from the results of reproduction with random variation.

And it is certainly possible to formulate various mathematical models of the evolutionary process and prove theorems about them. Such models, like most classes of mathematical objects, can often be defined either in terms of axioms of their own or as structures within some broader axiomatic system. (For example, the important class of von Neumann algebras can be identified either concretely as subalgebras of the set of bounded operators on a Hilbert space or more abstractly by the axioms of a W*-algebra.)

However, no such model claims to capture all of the complexity of real-world biologies, so there is no single officially recognized set of such axioms for Darwinism.

The basic first step towards entering this field is probably getting a firm background in basic probability theory (not just the discrete case but also including probability measures on continuous spaces) and stochastic processes of various kinds. And a parallel step should probably be learning as much as possible of what is currently known about the actual processes of inheritance – including both the genetic coding of protein sequences and the inheritable epigenetic systems that govern the reading and expression of those genes.

This is an exciting area of study ripe for the application of new mathematical techniques (such as renormalization group theory which originated in theoretical physics). But I am almost certain that automated proof systems will not be of any use in formulating plausible conjectures, and doubt that the mathematical structures involved are particularly well suited to their capabilities for constructing proofs once such conjectures have been identified.

So if your real interest is in learning about and applying automated proof systems, then I would suggest that doing so in a different context might be more fruitful.

Source: (1000) How does one develop mathematical theorems on Darwinism? For example, what are the axioms officially recognized by academia? I want to know what the basic first steps in the process are. I intend to write a paper and use the Coq proof assistant. – Q

In this article Roger Pielke Jr. notes that it may take a long series of trials to detect shifts in the mean of a variable if those shifts are small  compared to its random fluctuations. The example he uses is based on numbers of severe hurricanes observed in the years 1995 to 2022 (which fluctuate wildly between 0 and 7 with an average of about 2.6 and a standard deviation of about 3) whose frequency distribution he then uses to assign random values to the years 2023 to 2050. First unmodified, then with increases (ie shifts of the frequency distribution to the right) of one and two. The ostensible point of this exercise is to show the reader why there are many possible consequences of climate change from which the IPCC does not expect to see convincing evidence in the next few decades. But it is presented with a subtle(?) subtext that appeals to those who deny the need to limit our CO2 emissions by claiming that the media are citing extreme events as evidence for climate change when they might just be the result of random fluctuations(*). Furthermore, by looking just at the overall shape of the resulting time series plots, he overlooks the fact that it is often just those extremes that are truly relevant.

The historic data never goes above 7, and so neither does the randomly generated “no change” projection (even in the longer projection shown later in the article). But the one step up projection reaches 8 (though by chance only once in the run that Pielke chose to show us) and the two step up reaches 8 or more twice.

This might not be so much of an issue with the number of hurricanes per year but might be more so if one considers instead the greatest magnitude occurring in any given year. So let’s look at those randomly generated pseudo-projections as if the number for each year was the highest storm surge that year at some specific location. From the historical data it seems safe to have dykes capable of protecting us from anything up to a 7ft surge, but after the “climate change” that will not suffice and almost every run of the pseudo-projection now yields a disaster within the next 25 years. So, according to that toy model, despite not being able to “see” the effect in a first look at the trend lines of those graphs, if we don’t invest now in higher dykes we are almost certainly screwed and if we don’t stop driving the change we’ll have to repeat that investment again and again.

(*) The article opens with a complaint that “ABC News wrote an accurate story about how climate was not a major or even significant factor in the Lahaina, Maui fire and disaster” but “After being mobbed by the enforcers, the story was changed to emphasize the role of climate.” But although there were certainly other factors (such as a change of local vegetation as a result of reduced market for sugar cane), it would be just as wrong to assert with confidence that climate was not a significant factor as to claim for sure that it was. And actually what the substance of the article discusses would be more in support of a claim that the fire was not significant evidence for climate change than that climate change was not a significant factor in causing the fire – which is a completely different question (hint: both the words and their order are different).

Source: Signal and Noise – by Roger Pielke Jr. – The Honest Broker

Source: (1000) Are the denialists seriously claiming that today’s global heating is just coincidence and has nothing whatever to do with the CO2 we are pumping into the air? – New Real Climate Science – Quora

The foolishness of citing a local cold spell as evidence against a global average warming trend is just the most obvious of many misunderstandings (or deliberate obfuscations?) in the above answer.

Another is the following:

“CO2 is indeed a ‘greenhouse’ gas, and so is H2O. Care to guess which has a higher effect on the earth’s temperature? (Hint, it’s not CO2)”

H2O is indeed the biggest contributor to the overall global greenhouse effect, but since there is masses of exposed water surface in contact with the atmosphere the amount of H2O in the atmosphere depends on the temperature, and once equilibrium is reached it is not a source of further changes. What it does do though at least to first order is amplify the effect of any other source of temperature change, so the net effect of increased CO2 is actually much greater than that due directly to the IR absorption by just the CO2 itself.

The question of whether higher order effects (such as changes in albedo due to changes in cloud cover) act to damp or to amplify the simple first order effects is much more complex. So we don’t yet know for sure how bad it might get. But until we have a better understanding of that it is foolish to keep our foot on the accelerator in the hope that the brakes might just come on automatically to save us before we crash.

Source: (1000) Are the denialists seriously claiming that today’s global heating is just coincidence and has nothing whatever to do with the CO2 we are pumping into the air? – New Real Climate Science – Quora

There’s a fuzzy line between Stockholm Syndrome, fanatic devotion to a corrupted regime, and admirable forbearance of “mistakes” made in pursuit of laudable goals. Source: Isabel Crook devoted her long life to making a new China

It’s not just the headline writer that got it wrong in the Economist’s article: Propane-powered heat pumps are greener.  The expression “propane-powered” is actually used in the body of the article too, but it is clear that what is being advocated is use of propane as the working refrigerant fluid and not to replace electricity as the power source.

So now we are complaining that they don’t want to pay for the privilege of transmitting our public service announcements?

Source: Facebook News Ban Is Risking Lives in Wildfires, Say Eby and Trudeau | The Tyee

Source: Right-Wing Writer Richard Hanania’s Racist Past Exposed | HuffPost Latest News

There is a pattern that often happens when people feel the need to change the behaviour of others, where for some reason those who want the change seem to see it as in some sense punitive and so actually make it less attractive and so less likely to happen.

There are many examples in the environmental movement, but another is in the area of aboriginal place names.

Frequently while driving around BC, I would be happy to learn and use an aboriginal name for the place where I find myself. But I am obstructed by the unnecessary use of unfamiliar symbols to display those names. Of course I am aware of the fact that the Latin alphabet only imperfectly and inconsistently specifies the pronunciation of a word, even just in the English language (and if you don’t believe me then I’ll desert you in a desert). But the use of an imperfect transliteration into the Latin alphabet would at least allow me to get started.

The following comment by Bob Jones on a recent Tyee article says it maybe better than I could.

Getting rid of Powell River? – I understand, and no objection there.

Renaming it with local indigenous moniker? – Great idea.

But representing the name using an IPA linguistic orthography that’s no less a colonial construct than the Latin alphabet – I’m out.

I’m not saying that obscure IPA orthographies don’t have a place in academia or in assisting with the pronunciation of a distinct language that historically was communicated only orally. But the pronunciation aid should not eclipse the accepted alphabet (for better or for worse) of the country and province, and the rest of the western world for that matter.

Maybe the main impediment is not the fear that the new name will be “hard to pronounce.” It’s more likely the fear that the new name, in written form, will be completely indecipherable to almost everybody.

So instead of: θaθχaysəm (thath-hay-sum)

How about: Thath-hay-sum (θaθχaysəm)

Source: The Case for Changing Powell River’s Name | The Tyee

The subheading of this article claims that “Despite advances in molecular genetics, too many biologists think that natural selection is driven by random mutations”.

Several examples in the article show how the random changes which natural selection acts upon do not always have to be small. This is something that Darwin himself eventually acknowledged and for which modern theorists have identified a number of plausible mechanisms which are widely understood and accepted. So no modern biologists think that natural selection is driven by random small mutations. The article’s discussion of some of those mechanisms is well informed and interesting, but the false claim that they are not “random” and confound a “physicalist” interpretation makes it something that I could not in good conscience recommend to anyone – and even raises doubts in my mind as to the intentions and integrity of the author.

Source: Why did Darwin’s 20th-century followers get evolution so wrong? | Aeon Essays

This  story reminded me of the fact that I have often been puzzled by premature references to the anthropocene as an epoch rather than an event. Source: Opinion | The ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ movie craze tells a dark story – The Washington Post

See also https://anthroecology.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/gibbard_2022.pdf