Richard Dawkins romps through Toronto

Everyone’s favourite atheist has a new book out this fall: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

From an excerpt on Wikipedia:

This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the ‘theory’ of evolution is actually a fact - as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.
—Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, p. vii

Heavy.

As part of the literary-industrial complex’s promotion efforts, he made a whirlwind voyage through Toronto’s media scene last week. Hamutal Dotan and I decided to join in the fun and cover the Indigo-organized book reading for Torontoist.

Full house at Isabel Bader. Apparently lots of people like this guy. So for everyone who had to fork over $10 (or $100 in the case of this desperate soul) to see Dawkins, was it worth it?

Only if you enjoy listening to celebrities read. Don’t get me wrong — Richard Dawkins has a beautiful voice and an even more beautiful writing style.

But about the only thing that I learned that I couldn’t have got from his book is the fact that his wife knows how to paint neckties. He was wearing one that featured various icons of evolution and apparently it’s one of his most cherished possessions.

Other than that, it was the usual Creationist-bashing that anyone who follows the evolution “debate” is familiar with.

The Canadian twist, of course, was the abundance of self-congratulatory clapping to indicate how much saner we are than those crazy Americans. From Hamutal’s piece:

In a textbook case of preaching to the choir, Dawkins gleefully skewered the 44% of Americans who believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” and his listeners laughed right along with him.

If Dawkins really wants to reach this group, is such a sarcastic, aggressive tone the most effective?

Again, from Hamutal’s piece

The very last question of the evening dealt with a recent attempt to repackage atheists under the more positive-sounding name “Brights.” Dawkins, a supporter of this movement, told the audience that the term never took off because it implied that non-believers were smarter than believers. “So?” he asked rhetorically, with an arched eyebrow and a knowing smile.

But at least he wasn’t as offensive as another angry atheist I’ve covered before.

After the highly-regulated Q&A, it was off to the assembly-line style book signing. Streams of people were hustled past the sales table and given a brief moment with Dawkins to get their books signed — “No greetings! Just signatures” — and perhaps squeeze in a few moments of chit chat. Like most celebrities, Dawkins is a master at extricating himself from demanding questions (the swarms of Indigo staffers also helped on this front).

All in all, not the most memorable event. But hey, at least I wasn’t the victim of a theft like I was the last time I covered something with Hamutal.

If you want to see pictures of someone who managed to score closer seats, Michael Willems has also has some shots on his blog.

Doing it in the open: Michael Nielsen at Science 2.0

How is the Internet changing the way scientists do science? The Science 2.0 conference attempted to give some answers to that question yesterday.

Greg Wilson (that’s him at the front) has been running a Software Carpentry course for the last few weeks and yesterday’s conference pulled in a bunch of guest lecturers to give some closing thoughts.

Doing it in the open

For most people in the audience, the fact that Michael Nielsen experienced projector troubles and had to be rescheduled to the end of the afternoon was a minor nuisance. For me, it meant that even though I showed up near the end of the conference, I still got to hear him. Fortuitous — it was one of the most interesting talks I’ve heard in a while. In fact, it was so interesting that I even forgot to take photos.

Here’s the title:

Doing Science in the Open: How Online Tools are Changing Scientific Discovery

Michael Nielsen is writer who’s been spending a lot of time thinking about open science and mass online collaboration. He began by highlighting a post on mathematician Terence Tao’s blog that outlined the Navier-Stokes problem and sketched a few techniques that might be used to solve it. “This is not your typical BoingBoing post,” said Michael. It’s a heavy, sprawling post but most interestingly, it sparked a conversation that at the latest count has 129 comments including contributions from some of the heaviest heavyweights in the math world. And the debate is still raging two years later, both in the comments and the other blog posts that have linked to it. The kicker: “This guy is pumping these posts out, over and over again.”

But it’s not just Tao. About 10% of living Fields medallists have blogs. Many others are pushing the boundaries of blog and wiki software with great success.

(Ironically, the LaTeX encoding that has allowed mathematicians to use math formulas in blog posts on wordpress.com was added almost as an afterthought. A developer announced that he was installing the plugin but joked that it’s a “niche feature that maybe 17 people would use regularly”. Little did he know…)

So what’s actually going on? Nielsen argues that we’re seeing a restructuring of where experts focus their attention — and attention is the ultimate scare resource in science.
These online tools facilitate small insights that couldn’t be published in a conventional way but contain the seeds to later progress. In this sense, it’s a way of scaling up scientific conversation, both across space (geographically over the Internet), and time (remember the comments on the Terrence Tao post have been going strong for two years).

As someone in the audience asked, with this massively collaborative way of doing science, who gets the credit for achievements? Michael asked a related question: “Who sequenced the human genome?” It definitely wasn’t the result of a few people. In the future, the concept of authorship might be trumped by a culture of recommendations. Besides, if science is done in the open, you could lie about your contribution but all claims would be trivial to verify.

He ended his talk with a great anecdote — probably not quite historically accurate — about how Michael Faraday was asked by Queen Victoria “what the point of electricity is” after he explained the concept. His reply: “of what use is a newborn baby?” None of us know quite how the Internet will change science but Science 2.0 values the process of sense-making rather than simply pumping out theorems. Online tools enable these conversations to happen.

Needless to say, I’m excited to read his upcoming book which will be an expansion of what he’s been talking about now.

So, what else?

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear all the talks but some other people did. Steve Easterbrook was liveblogging it and has good notes from everything. Milan Davidovic also has some notes. And of course, there’s the twitter stream. Here are all the blurbs

And a few more photos:

Jon Udell gave the closing talk on “Collaborative Curation of Public Events,” another great talk that I might write about at some point…

One of my favourite examples from his talk. A high school that said “We posted weekly.pdf to our website. Isn’t that good enough?”

David Rich talking about “Using ‘Desktop’ Languages for Big Problems.”

And the attendees at the end of long day.

PZ Myers preaches to the choir

PZ Myers, a “godless liberal” and one of the Internet’s most popular bloggers was in Toronto on Halloween to talk about “Science Education: caught in the middle of the war between science and religion.”

Speaking to a friendly crowd

For the most part, the talk consisted of PZ rehashing his blog material to a crowd that seemed to be on the same page. Granted, this took place in Toronto — not exactly a hotbed of religious fundamentalism.

I got to cover the event for the Varsity:

For a personality that evokes such strong reactions on the Internet, Myers’ talk was a rather staid affair. A solitary moment of discord arose when a cry of “we’re here to hear PZ” rang out from an audience member frustrated by the stream of enthusiastic questions that had brought Myers’s talk to a near standstill.

A few angry picketers or at least a tough question or two would have made the evening feel less like a sermon to the congregation.

That isn’t to say it was boring — far from it. Lots of profanity was dropped:

“Religion ought to be like masturbation. It feels good, lots of people do it, yet we all agree public exhibitions are inappropriate.”

The next night, I had a chance to talk to PZ after a dinner with him and some people affiliated with the group that hosted the event, the Centre for Inquiry (thanks Justin). Unfortunately the recording got nuked but it was still an interesting chat.

Fundamentalist Bating

PZ Myers has made a name for himself for not mincing words about his feelings about religion and what he sees as its negative impact on science, politics, and culture.

He’s been on the internet for ages. At first it was TalkOrigins, an early platform for the evolution-vs-creation wars. He moved on to blogging and apparently gets more than 75,000 visitors a day on Pharyngula. Though often billed as a science blog, the content these days is typically about politics, religion or the latest crazy Creationist exploits.

Two big controversies have put him on the Internet map.

Earlier this year, he was expelled from Expelled (simultaneously the best and worst PR move of the year), Ben Stein’s documentary that claims Intelligent Design is being persecuted by mainstream science. Myers was interviewed for it under false pretenses. Later, he signed up to see an early screening but was kicked out. Ironically, fellow atheist Richard Dawkins was allowed to stay in. It was all chronicled in real time.

Here he is showing us a clip from the documentary (his interview is on the screen):

And then there was the communion incident.

Someone smuggled him a consecrated wafer. He pierced “the body of Christ” with a rusty nail, unceremoniously dumped it in the garbage, and posted a picture to his blog. The response was incredible (including the adding of armed guards at local Catholic services).

Again from the article:

He received 18,000 outraged emails—before he stopped counting. So strong was the reaction that his university had a dedicated staff member to deal with outraged Catholics calling for his dismissal.

But when some went as far as to call his act worse than the Holocaust, it underscored to him that “religious beliefs are not only silly but deplorable.”

Unfortunately, I had 600 words so I didn’t have the space to talk about some of the other stuff he brought up in the talk.

For instance, he spent a lot of time on the characters on the Creationist side, particularly those who’ve used brief stints in academia to claim the status of being real scientists. One respondent in the Q&A session went as far as proposing that graduates in the science take a loyalty oath to evolution. Thankfully, PZ rejected this idea.

Does his style achieve anything?

It’s not controversial to say that people PZ Myers infuriate fundamentalists and religious conservatives. In turn, this reinforces their idea that they’re a persecuted minority which is itself a galvanizing idea.

But PZ knows this. They’re not the real target.

From my conclusion:

As Myers sees it, “[fundamentalists] don’t listen to you anyways.” The important thing is to dislodge the complacency of non-believers and force society to “recognize that atheists are willing to fight back.”

And this is what I’m not sure about.

Don’t the majority of non-fundamentalists just see his kind of behaviour as obnoxious, divisive, and marginal? This is certainly what I hear from people I’ve talked to about him. Thoughts?

What photography tells us about electricity

A two minute science lesson

While wandering around downtown a few years ago, I snapped a shot of a car in motion by panning my camera to match the car’s speed. I thought it was a pretty boring shot until I noticed a pulsing pattern on all the lights in the background.

My friend John and I put on our science caps and figured out what was going on.

Hypothesis:

Our power grid operates at 60Hz (cycles per second).

Method:

1. Open the full size image and count the number of pulses on the lights. For the lazy, each has 9.
2. Note the shutter speed. Again, for the lazy, the shutter was open for 1/13 of a second.
3. Multiply the 9 by 13 to get the number of pulses there would be in a second given that we know that 9 occurred in 1/13th of a second.

We arrive at ~120.

Discussion

Didn’t we just say that our grid runs at 60? Did we mess something up?

Our power grid runs on an alternating current (much to the disappointment of Tesla edit: Edison). This means that current in our wires has two peaks as it switches between positive and negative voltages once every cycle (-110V and +110V).

Since bulbs shine brightest at voltage peaks, there are two bright spots per cycle. This is why we have double the number of pulses that we might have assumed.

120  / 2 pulses/cycle = 60 cycles per second or 60 Hz.

Which matches what we know about our grid.

Bonus: speed of the car

Eyeballing the image, I’d guess that the streak just to the right of the car is almost 1/3 the width of the Civic’s length which happens to be 176 inches.

We know that the exposure ran for 1/13 of a second so the car is travelling 686 inches =~ 17m/s which is ~60km/h.

Another bonus: car lights

As pointed out by scienceduck, the car’s lights aren’t pulsing. This is because instead of being hooked up to to the grid, they’re running off the car’s direct current battery which does not cycle the same way as AC.

Taking it up another level

Maybe there’s some lessons about the red shift waiting to be teased out… ;)