Utahpia Travelblog: Machu Picchu

Posted on April 5, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia
In front of Huayna Picchu. Photo from: Ken Kilgore

In front of Huayna Picchu.
Photo from: Ken Kilgore

“If you love your child, send him out into the world.”

─ Japanese Proverb

I inherited my love for travel from my father, who had joined the Navy when he was eighteen to see the world (and to avoid going to college).  While I was in college, I made a vow to myself that, at a minimum, I would someday visit the following world heritage sites:

  • The pyramids of Giza in Egypt
  • Angkor Wat in Cambodia
  • Machu Picchu in Peru

In my 20s, when I was still single, I checked the pyramids off my list.  In my 30s, I married Ptarmi, who is as adventurous as I am.  Early in the spring of 2000, we decided to check another site off my list:  Machu Picchu, the so-called “Lost City of the Incas”.

After a couple months of preparation, we arrived in Lima, the Peruvian capital.  Following two days of sight-seeing, we packed up our bags and flew to Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Incas.  Our arrival coincided with a political rally that brought dozens of flag-waving, banner-carrying Peruvians onto the streets, shouting slogans against then-President Fujimori.  Fortunately, the demonstrations were peaceful and the staff of our 5-star hotel discretely and professionally ensured our security.

There are several options for traveling to Machu Picchu.  Ptarmi & I felt the hybrid train – short Inca trail route suited us best since we didn’t have the time or the camping equipment for the four day trek on the Inca trail.  We boarded a train departing from Cuzco and got off 6 miles from Machu Picchu.  At the time, hikers could strike out on the trail themselves as we did, but must be accompanied by tour guides now.

We arrived at Intipunku—the Sun Gate—by late afternoon.  This gate marks the end of the Inca trail and is the doorway to Machu Picchu, which lies below.  After hiking on the narrow, moderately strenuous trail for hours, the first view of the city through the gate is breathtaking.  Exploring the ruins had to wait till the next day since the site was ready to close when we arrived.  We stayed at a 3-star hotel in Aguas Calientes, the town in the valley below Machu Picchu.

Early morning the next day, a bus took us from Aguas Calientes up the steep, winding road to Machu Picchu.  The city was shrouded by a blanket of clouds that drifted slowly by, allowing glimpses of the ruins bit by bit.  It reminded me of a scene from Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film Castle in the Sky, when obscuring clouds part to reveal the fabled floating fortress for the first time.

Machu Picchu is full of marvels:  astronomical, technological, agricultural, archaeological, cultural, natural.  But I expected these.  What I didn’t expect was the city’s stunning beauty—not just the beauty of the site, but the city itself.  The ancient inhabitants had devoted considerable time and effort to civic beautification projects.

For example, outdoor public squares are connected to other areas by long stretches of broad stone steps.  In one such span of stairs, I noticed a narrow channel through which water trickled, cut into the stone flanking the steps.  I followed the flow of water down the steps and noticed that the channel split sharply into two separate arms, then converged a short way down, forming the shape of a four-sided diamond.  The rejoined channel ended abruptly at the end of the stairs, causing the water to fall in an artistically pleasing arc into a shallow stone basin below.  A fountain!

Lacking iron tools, Inca artisans used sand as grit and relatively soft bronze and copper tools to grind the channels into the stone.  This painstaking work took years, probably decades, just to produce a water fountain with no other purpose than for the public to enjoy.  Incredibly, the fountain still works, and it continues to delight.

I came across another example in one of the residential ruins.  The lodging looked typical, rectangular and not very big.  The stacked-stone walls were pierced by several characteristic trapezoid-shaped windows.  Standing inside the room and peering out through a window, I was struck by the magnificent view outside.  I realized then that the builder must have consciously placed the window there to frame the view perfectly, to create a wall mural of such jaw-dropping beauty that it reaches across centuries, cultures and languages to connect me aesthetically to the Inca builder.  At that moment and place, I shared a human appreciation for the world’s splendors with someone who had lived and died six hundred years ago.  That is travel–time travel–of the best kind!

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Error and Uncertainty Lead to Confidence

Posted on March 30, 2013 by The Science-Minded Citizen

Article by Davis Jacobson

“Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

–Brown and Williamson, 1969 (internal memorandum, found here)

It is often lamented that there are misunderstandings of scientific findings in the general public. There’s no blame there; science is what scientists do, not what non-scientists do. I think people can be forgiven for lacking expertise on whatever subject happens to be under discussion at the moment.

More concerningly, some special interests have played upon these misunderstandings to their own advantage or that of their constituents. This is unfortunate, but it is to be expected in an unregulated marketplace of ideas.

Nevertheless, if a concerned citizen or policy-maker needs to take actual action on science-related issues, it is quite important to place our bets on the best information available, and that information can often fairly be said to come from science.

Science itself can be a source of confusion — if only because scientists and non-scientists don’t always use language in the same ways (or because certain background assumptions differ between scientific and casual speech). Today I’d like to touch on a few words that are often sources of confusion in and of themselves.

“[P]ropositions to which no competent man today demurs.”

—Charles Sanders Peirce

Uncertainty:

Precision vs Accuracy

(a) Neither precise nor accurate (b) precise and accurate (c ) precise but inaccurate. Procedural methods can correct for systematic biases like in (a) and (c )
Image: Public Domain

“Uncertainty” is a measurement of the accuracy of measurements, and scientists evaluate it in well-defined ways. They can

    • Understand the uncertainty empirically, for example by making numerous measurements with a particular tool and observing how accurate it is in practice (Type A evaluation of uncertainty), or
    • They can predict uncertainty based on what is known of the measurement system or experimental method (or common sense): “Because our machine way built this way, it can’t be more accurate than that.” This is Type B evaluation of uncertainty.

Uncertainties are known, quantifiable sources of measurement variation that can be sensibly accounted for (large PDF) in scientific procedure and reporting. There are even scientific studies of uncertainty itself!

Uncertainty is a mathematical entity describing the experimental range of measurement. Uncertainty does not mean doubt.

Error:

In scientific usage, “error” is used in several unique ways, not all of which mean “mistake.” More-commonly mentioned errors include:

  • Type I errors, errors in which a “null hypothesis” is rejected while true (for technical reasons, this confusingly results in a “false positive” error), and
  • Type II errors, or false negative error.
  • Other statistical errors, such as “sampling error.” (Sampling error quantifies the likelihood that a subgroup of a population, for reasons of accident, does not represent the whole population accurately).
  • Systematic errors, such as the change in length of a measuring rod with temperature (may be addressed by Type A or B evaluation of uncertainty).
  • Random errors (ibid).

Note that the first four usages can all be defined mathematically to mean specific things in statistical studies and can be quantified and accounted for in scientific practice and reporting.

In casual speech, people usually aren’t talking about the results of solving mathematical equations when they say things like, “I made an error,” but in scientific speech, it cannot be assumed that scientists have made a mistake when they report an error.

Confidence:

When all of the known uncertainties and errors in a scientific experiment are accounted for, we can state how confident we are in the result with another mathematical entity called a “confidence interval,” usually represented as a percentage probability. At the 95% confidence interval, there is a 95% chance that the mean of measurements interpreted to confirm a hypothesis falls within the range of values that would confirm that interpretation if the experiment were repeated. Here is a short video describing how to calculate a confidence interval.

Establishing high degrees of confidence with careful procedure and interpretation reduces the incidence of Type I and Type II errors. (The p-value measure of confidence is also becoming popular, but is beyond the scope of this article.)

Scientific studies are usually not published unless their findings are meaningful at the 95% confidence interval.  In any event, there are strong conventions to report the confidence interval of a scientific report, whatever it may be. Here is a paper that explains why the confidence interval should be reported in medical papers, and assumes reporting at the 95% level.

The careful ways in which scientists account for error and uncertainty, and the honesty they demonstrate in disclosing their uncertainties and confidence, persuade me that their reports are trustworthy.  In and of itself, this distinguishes science from other ways of knowing: knowability itself is a knowable quantity.

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My Book of Lists

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia
Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Photo by: Ken Kilgore

“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

─ African proverb

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe….  All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.  Time to die.”

─ Roy Batty, Blade Runner

In 2008, a number of significant life events converged that spurred me seriously to ask myself what it means to be alive.  I had turned 45 that year, thereby entering my “mid-life” phase.  A relapse of acute leukemia meant I had to endure stronger doses of chemotherapy, total body irradiation, and a bone marrow transplant.  My 6 year old daughter had just started kindergarten and my 3 year old son started his 1st year of pre-school (we were living in Japan at the time).

Each round of chemo required that I spend six weeks in a hospital ward, allowing me a lot of time alone to ponder the “big” questions.  Because religion has never played a large role in my life and I’ve called myself an atheist since high school, my thoughts mostly centered on the mundane and practical:  are my health and life insurance plans in order?; are our finances effectively structured to support my surviving family?; is my living will up-to-date?; am I satisfied with where I’ve been, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve done?; will my kids remember me?

The last question was the hardest to answer and I realized that my only regret about dying then is that my kids would grow up not knowing much about their dad.  As a student, I was quite active in civic and public affairs, but grew increasingly private as I got older, so few people knew me outside my circle of family, friends and co-workers.  I had neither the talent nor the creativity to write “the great American novel”, so I knew that I was leaving little of my unique individuality to posterity.  Was there anything I could say or do in a short time—while confined to my hospital bed—that would make any difference?

My family visited me every afternoon during my extended hospital stays.  During such visits, my daughter often played her “What’s Your Favorite?” game, where she asks the rest of us questions like, “what’s your favorite color?”, “what’s your favorite movie?”, “what’s your favorite animal?”, etc., until we’re all sick of answering.  It occurred to me that one way for my kids to know who I am (or who I was) is to write a list of all my favorite things in the world.

The project started simply, as merely a list of things I like.  But as the list grew longer, it became more complicated.  It was hard to pick just ONE favorite for each topic, so I started creating categories of things.  My focus on this project grew in intensity, and it evolved into a record of more than just my favorite things–practically a memoir of my experiences, only in a list format.  I even started doing on-line research to “fact check” names, addresses, dates, and other references.  The research became quite involved, but the best thing about the project is that it was still fairly easy to write.

The project is now called “My Life Lists”.  At 40+ pages, it’s still a work in progress—I continue to add to it and edit it occasionally.  Here are a couple of examples:

  • My favorite movie scenes
    • “A Year of Living Dangerously”:  Guy and Jill in an outdoor café get caught in a sudden downpour
    • “Star Wars—A New Hope”:  Luke gazes at a binary sunset on Tatooine
    • “Fifth Element”:  an alien opera diva sings an excerpt of the “mad scene” aria from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor
    • “Gallipoli”:  Archie and Frank climb the pyramids of Giza
    • Etc.
  • My favorite culinary experiences
    • Ryouhei Sushi (Tokyo):  salt sherbet; frozen basashi (raw horse); grilled whale
    • Honeymoon trip dinner at L’Auberge Provençale in White Post, Virginia (1997)
    • “Canadian” Christmas dinner at Carmen Fournier’s house (Augsburg, 1989)
    • Dinner with Ptarmi at an Amazon jungle lodge, by lantern light and with monkeys running around us (Peru, 2000)
    • Etc.

Additional sample topics include:

  • Continents  and countries I visited (and cities)
  • U.S. states (and cities) I visited
  • Favorite music/soundtracks by genre
  • Best Friends (sorted by location)
  • Favorite sports/physical activities I do
  • Cars owned/borrowed (from parents)
  • Favorite language expressions/bon mots

I also included wish lists, like:

  • Things I want to see happen in the world by 2050
  • Life Lessons I want my kids to learn

I recommend compiling your own lists if you’re looking for a way to record a bit of your life experiences and personality traits.  It requires less time and resources than scrapbooking or cataloguing a videography, and less commitment and effort than starting a full-fledged book or a diary (though I’ve kept a daily journal for the last 15 years).

What ideas have you had for preserving that library that is uniquely you?

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Why Atheists Stop Believing

Posted on March 26, 2013 by A Rational Woman

puzzleGood writing and clear thinking don’t always go hand in hand. It’s a pleasure, then, to find both in a book about going it alone–using rationality rather than supernatural entities to face reality–titled 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists.

In one volume, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk, idiosyncratic essays by a range of atheists are featured, from science fiction authors and philosophers to scientists and activists. Only a few names were previously familiar to me (Michael Shermer, James Randi, Peter Singer, Dale McGowan). It’s a geographically diverse group, too, with writers from India, Scotland, England, Australia, Germany, Nigeria, and the U.S.

There’s even an enlightening essay by Sean Williams, an Australian speculative fiction author, titled, “Doctor Who and the Legacy of Rationalism.” Williams, noting that the popular television show features “frequent references to the Judeo-Christian faith,” goes on:

So whence arose my burgeoning sense of a-religiosity? The answer is not difficult to find. It resides in the series’ steady commitment to rationalism and the scientific method. ‘Everything that happens must have a scientific explanation,’ the Doctor says, ‘if you only know where to look for it.’ This message is consistently emphasized when church and faith rear their heads, as they do on numerous occasions, along with the show’s other enduring villains.

Other personal turning points in this volume include such incidents as the following:

1. When she read the World Book Encyclopedia from A to Z, Margaret Downey (founder of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia) “discovered the difference between mythology and reality. The many gods that had been created by man became evident.”

2. When Michael Shermer, who had become a “born again” as a high school senior, attended a college class in which it was “okay to challenge any and all beliefs without fear of psychological loss or social reprisal,” he realized how insular his worldview had been. He is now Executive Director of the Skeptics Society and editor of Skeptic magazine.

Available in ebook, too. Read an excerpt and the table of contents from Voices of Disbelief.

Copyright (c) 2013 by Susan K. Perry (Follow me on Twitter @bunnyape)

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Thinking Critically for Life

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia
Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Article by Ken Kilgore

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

─ Derek Bok

I majored in Biology in college, but it wasn’t till I read Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996) years later that I consciously developed a consistent and rigorous critical thinking process that applies to life in general.  In his book, Sagan devotes a chapter to equip readers with a “baloney detection kit” that contains tools for evaluating new ideas and discriminating between accurate reflections of reality and false deceptions.

Some of the tools included in the kit are (as quoted directly from the book):

  • Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
  • Arguments from authority carry little weight—“authorities” have made mistakes in the past.  They will do so again in the future.
  • If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise)—not just most of them.
  • Quantify.  What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.

Nearly every day, I use one or two baloney detection tools when critical thinking is needed to make a decision.  But I had the opportunity to use several tools at once a couple years ago when a neighbor enjoying his walk saw me working in my front yard and came over to chat.  My family had recently moved back to our old neighborhood in Utah after having lived in Japan for five years, and the neighbor and I hadn’t had the chance to catch up on each other’s lives since our return.

My neighbor noticed that I had lost weight, so I told him that I was treated for acute leukemia in Japan and while I am doing fine now, it will be another two years before I’m considered cured.  In the meantime, I exercise, watch my diet, and take about a dozen meds daily to maintain a delicate balance of my immune system.  At this point, my neighbor’s eyes lit up as he excitedly said he had just the thing for me.  He ran home and then returned to my yard with several pamphlets and a two-page stapled paper print out.

“Now, you’re half Japanese, right?  Have you heard of Kangen water?” my neighbor asked.  When I confessed that I hadn’t, he explained that the Kangen water process was invented by a respected Japanese scientist and that drinking this water will surely provide me with amazing health benefits, as stated in the colorful marketing pamphlets.  Hoping to appeal to my scientific bias, the print out was a copy of a medical paper describing how the permeability of a certain tissue in a human subject increased when water with a basic pH was transfused, or something like that.

In short, the Kangen water process claims to rearrange water molecules into hexagonal structures that more easily permeate hard-to-reach thirsty tissues, and the water’s alkaline pH reverses all the supposed damage caused by the acidity of our body.  These benefits come from just drinking a reasonable quantity of Kangen water every day.

When I expressed fear that such powerful stuff might affect the meds I take and upset my immune system, my neighbor assured me that “it’s still only water” and there will be no side effects or interactions with drugs.  “It’s just clean, healthy water.”

As a neighborly gesture, I agreed to review the literature and check into the product over the next couple of days, but using critical thinking tools and skills, it took less than ten minutes to realize that the Kangen water process is a fraud.

The pamphlets contained only anecdotal declarations of the benefits gained from drinking the water, without any control subjects or independent, 3rd party confirmation of the claims.  The factual errors and misunderstanding of basic water chemistry in the literature would be obvious to even a high school science student.  The print out’s medical article seemed legitimate, but it described a situation of infusing alkaline water into a specific body tissue via an IV or hypodermic injection and says nothing about whether such water taken orally will survive the acidic environment of the stomach and reach specific tissues.

Normally, it’s enough I figure out for myself that such a product is mere baloney.  But when I learned that this particular Kangen device (basically a filter, an electrolyser and a mixer for adding alkaline chemicals to ordinary water) costs $6,000, I felt sorry for my neighbor who had invested his limited time and resources in his sincere but false hope of making money and improving the wellness of his friends and neighbors.  Had he employed basic critical thinking skills and the baloney detection kit, he might have been spared from being so rudely conned financially, intellectually, and morally.

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Are We Less Violent Than in the Past?

Posted on March 14, 2013 by A Rational Woman

Fingers_crossedSteven Pinker is a major modern thinker and atheist, so when I got a paperback copy of his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, I read it seriously. All 700 pages of it (add another 100 for notes, references, and index).

Could it really be true that human societies are less, rather than more, violent than at previous times in recorded history? Even considering how modern media pummel us with outrageous incidents of brutality, war, and crime?

The key to the truth of Pinker’s claims may lie in that simple single word: outrageous. That fact that extremely violent events outrage us, that they’re not ordinary, may show that we’ve indeed come a long way toward conquering violence.

Pinker offers graphs and charts and an extraordinarly amount of historical evidence and psychological insight in an attempt to prove his thesis. There was no way I could absorb all of it from a single reading, but I did learn a  few things.  Allow me to share the following:

6 Snippets about Violence & Human Nature:

1. Lives began to be more valued than souls somewhere in the second half of the 17th century, thus lessening the likelihood that one would be killed “for the wrong supernatural beliefs.” This positive development came along with the rise of skepticism and reason.

2. A crime surge in the 1960s reversed a long trend of decline. Pinker suggests this was most likely related to baby boomers having a new sense of solidarity due to TV and those newfangled transistor radios, as well as the civil rights movement and a general mistrust of every social institution.

3. Novels may increase empathy. “The explosion of reading may have contributed to the Humanitarian Revolution,” wrote Pinker, “by getting people into the habit of straying from their parochial vantage points.”

4. World War I has been called the first “literary war.”  Indeed, in my own experience, some of the war stories and poems from that era are incredibly moving. One wonders how anyone can still feel the same about the viability of war after reading them.

5. Potential for peace in the Middle East? Possibly, if diplomacy treated the disputants as what Pinker calls moralistic actors and framed a peace agreement in a different way, one that could more readily be accepted by those with a “mindset of sacredness and taboo.” (Good luck with that.)

6. Optimism is called for, according to Pinker. To boil down the point of his book, it’s to offer hope to the doomsayers, regarding violence, nuclear devastation, even climate change. If optimism is necessary for action, then he may have a viable point.

P.S. The image above, of crossed fingers, relates to early Christian superstitious belief. I use it here with tongue-in-cheek irony.

Copyright (2013 by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D.

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Parking Perplexity

Posted on March 4, 2013 by The Science-Minded Citizen

Article by Davis Jacobson

Who wants to waste time walking if you could just drive? If only there were a perfect way to find a parking space in a big lot….

Spoiler alert: There isn’t! But there are glimmers of ways that are reliably not as bad as the worst you could do! It turns out that this problem fits within a category called sequential search problems, and there has been a bit of study. I’ll touch on that at the end.

First, should you even care?

It’s not like it costs anything. Right?

One-Car Garage, a large parking structure with only one vehicle in it.

One-Car Garage, by O Paulson
(License Asserted CC BY 2.0 as of 2-20-2013)

Suppose I’m a typical working suburban family who drops off kids at school, does a little grocery shopping, goes to two jobs, what have you, and parks a car on average three times per workday for about 220 workdays per year.

Average fuel consumption of idling passenger vehicles is about .6 liter of fuel per hour per liter of engine displacement. (Idling is not much different from cruising around a parking lot.) Let’s just guess a 2-liter engine is fairly typical for passenger vehicles. (Being American, I’ll convert to US dollars and “customary units.”) At today’s price of $4.19 per gallon, that’s $0.22 to park a car if finding a space takes 10 minutes.

That’s 660 parking spaces per year, or 110 hours and $145 in fuel cost per year of parking convenience.

Or Is It? 

Turns out, I might be spending over 28 of those daily minutes and 139 of those yearly dollars for no advantage at all — or quite likely even a penalty. Am I wasting the very time I hope to save by looking for good parking spaces?

I just Google-Earthed the parking lot at the local grocery store: it’s almost exactly 400 feet from the store entrances to the worst parking spaces on the lot. At a typical adult walking speed of 4 feet per second, that’s about 3 minutes and 20 seconds walking both ways from the worst space to the door. I’m no mathematician, but I don’t see how it makes sense to spend more than half that time looking for a better space — assuming I get the average space over time. (Half is where I’ve spent the same amount of time driving that I can hope to save walking between the best and worst parking spaces.)

But Wait! There’s Less!

But I don’t get the average space. I get better than the average space.

According to the article I cited, parking lots typically fill to about 35% capacity, but I’ve observed that parked cars tend to be a bit scattered out, leaving good spaces between. I’m going to guess that on a typical trip, I might be able to save myself something like half the time it would take to walk from the space that’s only half as bad as the worst space on the lot if I find a pretty good space some of the time.

Therefore, I don’t think it makes sense to spend more than 25 seconds looking for a better space than the first one I see — about 4% of the time drivers routinely spend looking for parking spaces. I’ve often waited longer than that to turn around at the end of the aisle. So what’s the point?

On the stated assumptions, I’m simply wasting more than 105 hours per year parking my car.

But Still.

You might get lucky. You wouldn’t want to not look, right? I look. So what’s the best way?

I did happen across a paper in which 7 strategies were studied using computer models: Car Parking as a Game Between Simple Heuristics (Hutchinson, Faneslow, and Todd, 2012).

Real mathematicians with serious computing power. What do they conclude? Nobody knows the best way to park a car. Too many variables. But

 Nevertheless, our idealized model system proved illuminating when assessing other plausible sorts of simple parking heuristics. All could give rise to [states in which no variant strategy could do better] yielding a similar mean performance and distribution of parked cars; but when we allowed different heuristics to compete, a mixture of the fixed-distance and linear-operator heuristics consistently prevailed.

In English.

The parking strategies that do best amount to going down one side of a parking aisle, taking a good space if one presents itself (with some bias for early selection depending on how many spaces are already full), and else turning around at the end and taking the first space that presents itself.

Like I said, it’s not the worst you could do — and think how less stressed you’ll be if you just take what you can get and get on with your life. And the sooner you’re out of the lane, the sooner the person behind you can park. Just imagine if the guy in front of you were doing it that way.

Would you like to spend less money and be less exasperated for the “cost” of better physical fitness? I would.

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“Not For the Body or Belly”

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Umwelt Utahpia
Photo by: Ken Kilgore

Photo by: Ken Kilgore

“And again, hot drinks are not for the body or belly.”

─ Doctrine & Covenants 89:9

My wife Ptarmi comes from a close-knit family, the Stones.  Unlike the Kilgores, the Stones family is large in number and deeply religious, with membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS) going back several generations.  The Stones visit each other often and get together for annual summer reunions.

As a Bright and stout atheist, I am the only non-Mormon in Ptarmi’s immediate family, but I’ve been accepted without bias.  In fact, Ptarmi’s mother is German and she held on to her Lutheran affiliation for years before converting to the LDS church, so Ptarmi’s parents and siblings really understand that people believe in different things and that’s okay.  I assumed this understanding continues down to the nieces and nephews as well.

Several years ago at a Stones Family Reunion, I was strolling through the woods with my 7 year-old nephew Tanner.  Ptarmi had given me an iced coffee drink as a special treat, and I sipped it through a straw as we walked.  At one point, Tanner looked up at me and said,

“Uncle Ken, you know our bodies are our temples.”

Between sips, I muttered, “Yeah, that’s a good way to put it.”

“Then you know you shouldn’t be drinking coffee.”

Coming suddenly from baby-faced Tanner, the admonishment stunned me for a moment.  My head whirled with many ideas for a proper response, and I was surprised that some of them weren’t very nice.  Where did such negative reactions come from?  He’s just a child, parroting what he’s been taught since birth, right?  I’m adult, rational and secure—so why am I feeling defensive?

Perhaps, for an instant, I sympathized with his point of view that coffee might be unhealthy and I felt the need to justify drinking it.  Or was I annoyed about being put in a position to defend my beliefs again, like I had to in junior high school?  Caught up in analyzing my initial private reaction, I nearly missed the opportunity to expose Tanner to my worldview and hints of broader diversity and self-determination.

“Well, Tanner, just like there are many different kinds of temples in the world, there are different foods and drinks that fit people’s bodies.  For me, coffee works just right if I don’t drink too much—or too little—of it.”

Tanner’s view comes from health laws called the Word of Wisdom, given in the LDS Doctrine & Covenants.  Among other things, Mormons refrain from “hot drinks”, meaning coffee and tea.  But interpretation varies widely, so some LDS members include iced coffee drinks in the prohibition while others don’t, some will eat coffee ice cream while others won’t, and herbal tea is okay for most but few think green tea is.

Like some Jews who assert without any scriptual basis that their dietary laws against pork were meant to prevent trichinosis, many Mormons assume that the proscription against coffee and tea are actually directed at caffeine, although there is no doctrinal support for the assumption.  Such attempts to rationalize religious health laws are usually pointless, since scriptural and doctrinal references are silent on the reasons for the laws.

Rather, members and non-members should simply accept the bans as rules of membership for that religion—obeying the rules is one definition of membership.  The practical reasons for the bans don’t matter and quibbling about why coffee, or pork, or beef, or some other substance isn’t allowed does little to advance discussion and understanding between religious members and non-members.

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Are You Secular, or Secularish?

Posted on February 24, 2013 by A Rational Woman

tug of warYou don’t have to be an atheist to be secular. In fact, according to a new book, How to Be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom, confusion between the two terms may well harm progressives.

How to Be Secular was written by Jacques Berlinerblau, a professor at Georgetown University and director of its Program for Jewish Civilization. In his book, he covers what he believes to be secularism and what isn’t, the rise and fall of American secularism (he puts “rise” in quotes), and why being “secularish” (i.e., not too hardline) could be a positive development.

One argument that is often used to try to prove that secularism is bad is to equate it with Hitler’s and Stalin’s nasty regimes. As Berlinerblau writes,

The secularism = murderous atheist regime meme has become a staple of political, religious, and academic discourse. Believing and nonbelieving secularists had better learn how to neutralize this talking point; they’ll be hearing a lot of it from both the Left and the Right.

That meme is nonsense, of course, but hard to respond to intelligently if you don’t know the facts of history. Read this chapter before the next time someone asserts that Hitler and Stalin were atheist and secular and that’s why they were so monstrous.

Berlinerblau offers readers a thorough description of his tolerant view of what secularism should ideally be: one in which we take it easy and learn to live with one another. He’s not a fan of the so-called New Atheists. Thus, in his own words:

5 Lessons About How Not to Be Secular:

1. Do not fetishize separation of church and state. Separation might be a necessary condition for a healthy society, but it is absolutely not a sufficient condition. A commitment to separation must be soldered to an equally robust commitment to religious liberty. The case of the Soviet Union confirms this observation: it was totally committed to separation, but from a human rights perspective (and many other perspectives) it was a total disaster.

2. A secular state cannot espouse a religion. It seems safe to say that the Communist Party advocated and promulgated the quasi religion of scientific atheism.

3. Hatred of religion, like hatred of atheism, is an impulse that should be tempered. If atheists cannot make peace with the idea of the existence of religion, they will never to be able to function in democratic polities or a true secular movement.

4. Nonbelief cannot be spread by force. The human soul [Berlinerblau’s word] is such a complex mechanism; its carapace resists coercion and tyranny. Soviet atheists tried everything to separate worshipers from their gods. Nothing worked.

5. Nonbelief can rarely be spread by persuasion. Few empirical studies address the subject, but attempts to “rationally” distance a person from faith do not often work.

Listen to the author discuss secularism here.

Copyright (2013) by Susan K. Perry

Posted in A Rational Woman | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Fish Fights

Posted on February 18, 2013 by The Science-Minded Citizen

Article by Davis Jacobson

I saw a bit in the Telegraph regarding the problems surrounding all the mackerel in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Yes, the mid-latitude Atlantic fish, and yes, the smallish island countries between Scandinavia and Greenland. Plus Russia.

A lot of science comes together here: climate science, biology, political science, economics…. (Today I’m using “science” in a broad sense like the German Wissenschaft, but not debating ‘soft’ vs. ‘hard’ sciences.) Let me explain.

What’s Going On?

The details are complicated, but Iceland, Russia, and the Faroe Islands have the opportunity to catch a lot of mackerel that they didn’t formerly have accessible. The mackerel are migrating farther north in the summer than they used to, because of warmer waters in the the North Atlantic.

That’s great for Iceland, but between them Norway and the European Union, in a legally binding way, had claimed 90% of the mackerel catch deemed safe by fish experts.

Neither Iceland nor the Faroe Islands nor Russia is subject to those agreements. They’ve collectively and unilaterally awarded themselves 355,000 tons of mackerel catch beyond the amount that was deemed safe by the fish experts and agreed to by all the other state parties to the Northeastern Atlantic mackerel catch.

So, it’s a problem.

Here’s the Science Part:

US Fish and Wildlife worker on boat checking gill net full of fish.

Not Grandpa’s fishing net: Commercial fishing nets can be many miles in length.
Image: Public Domain.

I’m not making an anthropogenic claim about the ocean warming today. (Not that I couldn’t.) Scientists are figuring out what fraction of the North Atlantic warming is due to humans and how all that might end up. So, I would say smart people are working on that, but certainly the waters are warmer than in recent history, and there are more mackerel in the north Atlantic these days for reasons that relate.

Which brings us to the fish: Their biology influences their migration in a number of relevant ways which are still subject to scientific debate. So that’s another thing that should be understood in more detail. But no matter: the fact of the change in their migratory patterns is not apparently open to much debate: Icelanders didn’t formerly catch mackerel, and now they do. The bottom line is that when the temperatures change, so do the migratory habits of the fish.

What Does it Mean?

The economics of supply and demand are also very much in play here.

In the immediate term, the new availability of mackerel for fishing in the northeastern Atlantic means that more fish can be caught in total. The presence of mackerel now corresponds with the fishing ranges of several major fleets previously excluded from that game by the paucity of mackerel in their regions. In the short term, the price of mackerel crashes because more suppliers are now able to dump mackerel on the markets. This bankrupts small mackerel fishers immediately.

In the long term, though, overfishing of the mackerel could diminish their ability to replenish their numbers, depleting the mackerel stock on a long-term basis — or even exposing the mackerel to a risk of extinction (Hall, Millner-Gulland, and Courchamp, 2008). On that timescale, the depletion of mackerel could put major economic sectors of the Atlantic, European, and Russian nations in the tank — especially if they’ve committed significant capital to the mackerel catch.

What to Do?

Finally, the politics are not at all clear, here. We have a situation where technological development has empowered people to take fish at rates scarcely distinguishable from annual, regional natural disasters. (More background on that.) Clearly this is an issue whose consequences transgress national boundaries. Whence policy that protects everyone’s food supply, then, if there’s no transnational law that binds the players?

Since some players in the fish catch seem exempt from regulation and willing to fish beyond reasonable limits, the immediate-term incentive for all the fishers is to take fish as rapidly as possible before they’re extinct or the laws get changed. Which may cause the extinction of the fish. Everybody loses forever in this regime, but short of war, complicated international agreements, or self-sacrificing restrictions voluntarily adopted by a controlling fraction of the players, there’s no obvious logic that stops it.

Except, of course, scientifically responsible and sustainable fishing practices endorsed by all.

Why Do I Care?

Seafood accounts for up to 16.5% of the protein consumed by humans, with strong regional variations favoring those most able to adapt should fisheries collapse. Maybe you ate some fish today.

In sum, while there’s some material that’s open for discussion, what’s clear is that this is a problem set that needs resolution quickly, and science informs both the problem and the solution from all sides. So, think about that during the next school board meeting.

But back to my original source, I couldn’t have said it better than the Scottish Fisheries Secretary:

“If some countries act unsustainably then we are all losers.“

There are no isolated players in a global environment.

Posted in The Science-Minded Citizen | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments