The Austringer

I heard a segment on NPR this evening about the Toyota sudden uncontrolled acceleration problem (I’ll just call it SUAP). They were following the lead of the Wall Street Journal, who said:

The U.S. Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of data recorders from Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration and found that at the time of the crashes, throttles were wide open and the brakes were not engaged, people familiar with the findings said.

The results suggest that some drivers who said their Toyota and Lexus vehicles surged out of control were mistakenly flooring the accelerator when they intended to jam on the brakes. But the findings don’t exonerate Toyota from two known issues blamed for sudden acceleration in its vehicles: sticky accelerator pedals and floor mats that can trap accelerator pedals to the floor.

What the WSJ reported, though, doesn’t exonerate Toyota of anything.

NPR had a commentator on who said something to the effect that 100% of the cases examined showed the same thing, and that one would be hard pressed to argue that the computers got it wrong every time. Not at all, Mr. Non-programmer dude on the radio; all it shows is that the fault is upstream of the black-box recorder and not downstream of it. And it isn’t just the driver who is upstream; there is a lot of Toyota software and hardware there, too. If the Toyotas have an intermittent fault that causes the brake to be recognized as if it were the accelerator, it would explain the data far better than the “all those drivers forgot which pedal is the brake pedal, some of them for minutes at a time” conjecture. That’s just one way in which the problem might occur. In any case, it appears that the data recorders do tell us what the computer controlling the car operated upon, which is full-throttle acceleration and no attention to brakes whatsoever, which corresponds neatly with the survivors’ reports of what happened to them.

I’m thinking when all is said and done, this is going to be discovered to be a software fault in Toyota’s control program. I’m hoping the commentator on NPR gets 30 seconds of airtime to make an abject apology to the survivors when that happens.

Update: I found the NPR All Things Considered transcript, and the fellow whose name I didn’t recall is Mike Ramsey of the Wall Street Journal.

NORRIS: How many data recorders were analyzed? And of those, how many of these accidents were found to have been caused by driver error?

Mr. RAMSEY: Well, we have been saying several dozen, all of them that were -fit the criteria, were found to have the brake not depressed and the accelerator wide open. So 100 percent of the incidents where it fit that criteria, that’s what was found.

NORRIS: One hundred percent?

Mr. RAMSEY: Yes.

NORRIS: It sounds like, upon hearing that, that the government might be on its way toward exonerating Toyota.

Mr. RAMSEY: Well, when it comes to incidents where people are claiming electronic throttle control, the government has already said they have no evidence of it. This set of data, what it does is it completes the other side of it, which is if it’s not that, then what is it, right? It’s probably driver error. So the government has been hesitant to say that so far.

[...]

I totally understand the position of these people. And if you hear many of these anecdotes, it’s incredibly compelling to hear them and all of their evidence. That said, when you have dozens of incidents that are similar where people say they were stepping on the brake and the car accelerated anyway and hit and that all of these incidents show virtually the same findings, that’s difficult to believe that the computer was wrong and, you know, they had a special instance.

(Emphasis added.)

Mike, the data recorder can say what it says and the survivors still be right. Try doing some embedded programming sometime. You haven’t come up with anything that in the least puts their accounts in a bad light, at least not to those who know something about computer control systems.

And be scripting your apology.

Update 2: I’ve marked in bold a particularly interesting piece of information from Ramsey. We have dozens of incidents that show exactly the same thing: no depression of brakes ever, and full depression of the accelerator throughout. This pattern is not what one would expect of humans behaving either in panic, where accidental touching of the brake would be likely, or in Mr. Ramsey’s alternative of confusion of pedals. Pumping the brake is common, so if people were confusing the accelerator with the brake, we’d expect to see some fraction of those incidents showing variation in the accelerator control, and according to Mr. Ramsey, we never see that. That’s pretty damning for Toyota, I think. Having absolutely the same data pattern across dozens of drivers when some of those incidents went on for a significant amount of time doesn’t speak to mass confusion of drivers; it says “computer screw-up” to me.

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For a while after moving in here and getting our new ISP, we were able to send our email through our server in Texas using port 25. That stopped working, so it was time to deal with the joys of managing with an ISP blocking port 25.

The first step was getting Postfix on our email server in Texas to use the submission port, port 587. There’s about six lines in Postfix’s “master.cf” configuration that have to be uncommented and restarting Postfix, plus making sure /etc/services has port 587 uncommented.

I tested things out using my Thunderbird email client, and things went fine, with just a dialog about accepting the SSL certificate from the email server. That made me feel good.

Then I tried to get Diane’s antique installation of Eudora to connect up. My mood went down. Trying to add “:587″ to the SMTP server name resulted in Eudora not figuring out where the server was, despite various places online where Qualcomm says appending “:587″ would fix things up. Another round of searching turned up an odd procedure: copy “esoteric.epi” up to the main Eudora directory, restart Eudora, then set the port for SMTP in the new “Ports” section of the Options part of the menu. That brought me to the next stop: SSL negotiation failed because the certificate had expired. Last year, Jeff handled getting the certificate set up, so now I got to work on the SSL certificate. But things did eventually fall into place, and our email now flows in its accustomed channels once again.

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The TBT carried a notice of the sentencing for Lindsey Lohan in her probation violation case. Yeah, ho-hum, but what caught my attention was this paragraph:

Defense attorney Shawn Chapman Holley argued that Lohan was “absolutely on track to finish the program” and had complied with most of the court’s orders. She also said no one had made clear to LiLo what she had to do to satisfy the requirements of her class. Telling her to be in one place at a certain time just isn’t specific enough for her, we’re guessing.

(Emphasis added.)

I’m not sure what transpired in court when Shawn Chapman Holley spoke whatever it was that came to be reported above, but if that is accurate, I wonder whether Holley was confessing to being incompetent counsel for Lohan. I would have expected that the next thing said by the judge would have been an offer to send to pair off to jail, the one for flagrant probation violation, and the other for contempt of court. What the heck is Lohan paying Holley for other than to be advised about what all that legal mumbo-jumbo actually means, and what she needs to do to minimize further legal trouble? It isn’t like this outcome wasn’t foreshadowed in any number of previous events concerning lack of compliance with the terms of Lohan’s probation with respect to her class attendance record.

In an ideal world, the transcript would read something like the following:

Attorney Holley: Your honor, please take into consideration the fact that no one has made clear to my client what she had to do to satisfy the requirements of her class.

Judge Revel: Why do I need to take into consideration the fact that you are not doing your job? Ms. Lohan, I would look favorably on a motion for change of counsel.

Unfortunately, this world doesn’t approach the ideal, and the above remains fiction. It is a commonplace tragedy that a young person favored by fortune would self-destruct as Lohan is doing now. It is more remarkable that an attorney would announce in public that her regard for her client is so small that she would begrudge the minute it would take to say, “The classes meet weekly at fixed times, and you must attend every single time in order to satisfy the terms of your probation,” at some time when it could have made a difference.

Somebody please tell me that the reporter got it wrong instead.

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Creation Ministries International has launched a “Question Evolution” campaign. Mostly, they seem to be looking to get parents to use their kids as shills in a publicity campaign featuring “Question Evolution” t-shirts.

I wouldn’t push for parents on the pro-science side to simply suit up their kids with a response, but if the students would like to show their pro-science colors, I’ve put up a Evolution Questions: Answered! T-Shirt design on CafePress. It features the “Evolution Questions: Answered!” logo with handy links to the TalkOrigins Archive and Panda’s Thumb weblog for all to see… and many to avoid or deny.

You can see all the TalkOrigins Archive designs here.

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There’s an article in the Austin American Statesman about the ongoing Gulf oil spill. It talks about the effects of the spill throughout the water column. The massive use of dispersants at depth is noted as being experimental: nobody knows exactly what outcomes you get by doing that. Well, other than that less of the oil washes ashore where it is convenient for photographers to document the pathetic demise of many a bird and marine mammal because of the oil. It is a lot harder to get cameras on the pathetic demise of benthic, nektonic, and pelagic animals, but those deaths count no less because they pass unseen. Nor is most of the problem going to be at the level of charismatic megafauna, as the authors point out. This spill is disrupting the food web from the lowest levels right up to the top predators. Further, they note that the bacteria that are relied upon to consume the oil over time do so in the presence of oxygen. As they metabolize the oil, they deplete the oxygen. High levels of methane gas are not helping, either. It doesn’t take much to make the inference that “dead zones” with low to no oxygen in the water will expand. What’s worse is that given the toxicity of what we’re dumping into the Gulf, they may well persist over time scales we have not experienced before.

It seems to me to be only common sense that off-shore oil drilling at any depth, if done at all, should be conditional on the principals demonstrating that they have the capacity on-hand to deal with even worst-case problems within a short time window. Turning loose the machinery and hoping for the best is no way to safeguard the public welfare.

As usual, this is only personal opinion.

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I’m working on setting up a citizen scientist project to document where snapping shrimp (family Alpheidae) are active pre- and post-contamination by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In this post, I just want to introduce the basic concepts and provide an example sound file.

Snapping shrimp comprise a number of species, mostly distributed in tropical to temperate waters. They live in near-shore structured environments, including seagrasses, rocks, and coral reefs. They are predators on small, live prey, and they kill or stun their prey using a snap from a disproportionately large claw. The snap of the claw generates a cavitation event and, by the way, a high-amplitude, broadband transient sound that is also called a snap. The combined noise from the local population of snapping shrimp is a familiar feature not only to bioacoustics researchers, but to anyone who snorkels or SCUBA dives in areas with snapping shrimp.

Because of this noise and the role snapping shrimp play in the marine food web, they are an excellent candidate as an “indicator species”, a species that can be easily monitored and which provides a measure of the health of that part of the marine food web. Better yet, the monitoring and assessment can be done acoustically, by sound recording, to get a measure for a local population.

If I had a chunk of money to throw at this, a sophisticated way to do this would be to make a baseline of calibrated sound recordings and be able to characterize tidal and daily cycle effects on snapping shrimp sound activity, and thus be able to statistically determine a reduction in activity post-contamination. I estimate somewhere around $10K would be needed to set up a portable data collection system from scratch with that kind of capability. Not having that in spare change in my pocket, I’m looking at a somewhat different approach that a lot more people can get into with minimal outlay of funds and just a bit of do-it-yourself drive.

Because snapping shrimp noise is broadband, you can hear it even in plain audio recordings, though the peak frequencies are actually ultrasonic. This means any sort of audio recorder can be used to find out if snapping shrimp are present in a location: cassette tape recorder, digital recorders, and even video cameras. The thing that any of those will need is a microphone input. What to plug in for that recording? A hydrophone would be great, but most people don’t have those lying around. But one can also make a normal microphone water-resistant and use it. It is best to think of such a microphone as disposable, since better sensitivity also corresponds to the water-resistance being more fragile, and saltwater is great at destroying electronics. In another post, I’ll describe making your own hydrophone or water-resistant microphone. If you already have a recorder, the additional cost is under $50 to be able to record underwater sound. I’m not looking for this sort of recording to do as much, simply to say whether a snapping shrimp population is active or not.

Below is an example of a simple recording I made last night that demonstrates the presence of an active population of snapping shrimp at one location and time. I’m still working on what additional information should be noted along with the recording, but I think what I provide here may be sufficient.

File: s_sunshine_skyway_201006241851_WS_30006.wma
Recorder: Olympus WS-320M, ST HQ mode, CONF mic sensitivity
Transducer: Salvaged hydrophone from a sonobuoy
Transducer depth: Approximately 2 feet
Recording made by: Wesley R. Elsberry
Date: 2010-06-24
Time: 18:51 EDT
Latitude: 27.586371°
Longitude: -82.620388°
Location description: South Sunshine Skyway Bridge on road to south fishing pier, at overpass over water, north side, toward east end.

I’ll be posting more on this topic later.

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I got an email request from a college student. He asked if I knew of a high-school level textbook that covered the concept of natural selection without using the word, “evolution”. He has relatives who are Mennonite and who home-school, and would reject any textbook that explicitly said “evolution”, but whose kids deserve to have an understanding of some of the basic concepts in evolutionary science.

This is the text of my reply to my correspondent:

I personally do not know of such a textbook, and I’ve tried to get feedback from people who should know the textbook market better than I do without success.

I think that it would be outside expectations that such a textbook would be written, though. Writing a textbook is a major undertaking, and those who are inclined to cover evolutionary science have little incentive to try to target a market segment that will, if they figure out what is going on, not buy their book.

I have myself considered writing a book (not a textbook) with a working title of, “What Every Creationist Should Know About Evolution”. It would cover the basic information and try to be non-confrontational about most aspects of religious antievolutionism. (I haven’t gotten sanguine about the outright lying part of antievolution yet.) The prospects for a market for it are similarly dismal, I expect.

Personally, I think that you might be better off to point out that overturning something like evolutionary science is only going to happen when people motivated to do so can approach the topic with an excellent understanding of the current state of that science. It is that sort of person who would be cognizant of the flaws and have the drive to do the research that would demonstrate it to be so to the scientific community. If they believe that evolution is false and have the courage of their convictions, they should utilize a standard textbook to show their children what the scientists *actually* say about it, rather than accept second-hand slurs about it from people who never bothered to learn the topic. This does, of course, run the risk of convincing the children that the scientists have a point, but the children will eventually have the opportunity to learn these concepts without their parents’ guidance anyway. They might find it better to meet that problem head-on while their children are still in their care than to have them discover evolutionary science concepts and evidence on their own.

I think this latter course of action is better than the stealth textbook on the openness front.

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Diane and I finished up a course in boating safety this week. Flotilla 72 of the US Coast Guard Auxiliary in St. Petersburg has a continuously-running series of lectures for the introductory boating safety course that happen every Tuesday evening from 7:30 to 9:30 PM. As their flier puts it, “Start Any Tuesday Evening”. The place is the Flotilla 72 building on the Coast Guard base, 1300 Beach Drive SE, St. Petersburg, FL 33701.

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In an article discussing Google and the news, the Discovery Institute complains that they are victims of a uniform journalistic culture:

We know from our uniform and repeated experience that once something like intelligent design is misdefined as, and equated t,o[sic] creationism, the label sticks. It sticks for exactly the reason that this story subtly highlights in explaining how hidebound traditional reporting is when compared to the internet age. A newspaper reporter defines the idea, and all future reporters at that publication (and many others when you consider somewhere as influential as the AP) simply copy the definition as the defecto[sic] standard – no matter that it may be wrong or completely out of touch with reality. So, eventually you get thousands of reporters with one consensus reading, not five.”

There’s a problem with the bleat, of course: “intelligent design” is a label for a subset of the arguments of creationism, so the people who report “intelligent design” as such are simply “following where the evidence leads”. There is nothing that is argued by “intelligent design” advocates that wasn’t argued previously by “creation scientists” and “scientific creationists” before, either as attempted argument related to agency or in the strategy of general criticism of evolutionary science. This was amusingly well-documented during the 2005 Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District trial, where such things as “cdesign proponentsists” were a topic of discussion, and where the Discovery Institute’s own experts testifying under oath show that we had seen those arguments in religious antievolution before:

[Eric Rothschild] Q. We’ll return to that. In any event, in Pandas, there are arguments for intelligent design of higher level biological life?

[Michael Behe] A. Yes, there are.

Q. And we’re clear, that’s not based on your work?

A. It’s not based on any concept of irreducible complexity. It is based on a concept that I discuss in Darwin’s Black Box, the purposeful arrangements of parts.

Q. That purposeful arrangement of parts, that’s not — you didn’t originate that?

A. No, I didn’t.

Q. At least, it goes back to Reverend Paley?

A. Yes, it does. Further back than that.

And DI Fellow Scott Minnich a bit later:

[Stephen Harvey] Q. Dr. Minnich, I’d like to know whether you know that a man named Dr. Dick Bliss, who was affiliated with the Institute for Creation Research, was using the bacterial flagellum as part of his argument for creationism years before the intelligent design movement picked up on it?

THE COURT: All right. The objection is overruled for the record. You can answer the question.

[Scott Minnich] THE WITNESS: No, I wasn’t aware of it, but I’m not surprised. Again, like I asserted yesterday that, the bacterial flagellum is one of the organelles that we know the most about of any. And so it’s natural to look at this structure as a model for either evolution or irreducible complexity. So I’m not surprised. I didn’t know it, but I’m not surprised.

It’s possible for tropes to become established convention and passed on. Certainly, the religious antievolution movement practices this assiduously. But there’s another reason why things may get repeated once stated, and that is because they happen to be true and well-supported by the available evidence. “Intelligent design” is just a label for a subset of religious antievolution argumentation, and represents nothing but a sham to evade legal rulings against religious antievolution being injected into the public schools. Of course the DI has to say it isn’t so, since admitting forthrightly what the evidence has shown over and over again would be “game over” for any future outings in court. The new news should be just as resistant to accepting propaganda from the self-interested as the old-school journalism was supposed to be.

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Word was that the “House” finale that aired this past Monday was shot on a DSLR with 1080p HD video.

When the shots had deep-focus, all looked well. However, whenever there were large regions of darker bokeh, it was obvious that there was some pretty serious quantization going on. I’m not sure what needs adjustment for the video capture, but it looks like there’s still something for digicams to catch up with on regular video gear.

Now all I need is someone to tell me that, no, those scenes weren’t done on the DSLR…

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Following up on a comment from Dick Hoppe, I expanded upon the data compilation I wrote about earlier concerning the Manatee County 2010 Tax Certificate Auction. Now I’m pulling in data from three additional pages and have it all tidily summarized in the resulting comma-delimited CSV file. I made a short demo CSV file with three of the entries so people could pull it into a spreadsheet and see how it works. I made a page to explain what I had and why an investor ought to want to have it here, and that includes PayPal links for people to pick either the MS-DOS/Windows or the Unix/Mac OS X version.

My biggest problem is there is a small market for this, and I don’t really have a good way to make them aware that there is an alternative to them doing all their information look-ups manually themselves. I tried making a posting to Craigslist, but all the responses I’ve gotten so far are spam.

Anybody else have experience with time-limited, targeted market information compilation marketing?

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Manatee County offers tax certificates to bidders. When property owners fail to pay their taxes, and that is happening a lot right now, the county gets other people to pay the taxes and gives them a tax certificate, which is a lien against the property. Each year, an auction happens where people can bid to get these. The bid amounts are in percent interest, and range from 18% at the high end down to 0%. The person bidding the lowest percent interest gets the tax certificate, after, of course, they pay the county the outstanding taxes.

Today, there was a practice auction. This is all handled online now. The page included the option to download data on the 9,000+ properties in CSV, XLS, or XML formats.

Diane is interested in the process and specifically in the land just to the south of our property. It currently has unpaid taxes, and if the executors of the former owner’s estate don’t pay up by June 1st, it will be included in the tax certificate auction. But she is also interested in what else is available out there.

That brings up an interesting problem. The downloaded data is minimal, giving just a parcel ID, outstanding tax balance, and some auction-related attributes. On the other hand, Diane would like information that is available online from another county office, that of the Property Appraiser.

I worked on a Python script to handle the job of getting additional information on acreage, zoning, the address, and bits like that. I hadn’t done anything with Python regular expressions to date, and started looking at that and getting less enthused by the minute. The issue is getting data out of an HTML page downloaded from the Property Appraiser. I could have it done in Perl right offhand, but wanted to develop my Python skills a bit.

On the other hand, getting the job done is the top priority, so while looking stuff up, I ran across the BeautifulSoup module for Python. The web site sounded promising, and a number of other people seemed to have found it useful. Very useful.

BeautifulSoup is an HTML/XML parser. It aims to not only handle clean XHTML, but also to do reasonable things with the sort of HTML people were writing when the Web was young, in other words, bad HTML.

I downloaded the module distribution, and got it uncompressed. Setup is simply

python setup.py -install

My usage so far is to pluck values out of adjacent cells in a table. I can load a BeautifulSoup object with the HTML in question, then ask it to find the label I’m looking for in text. Then I just ask it to retrieve the next text in the document, and that is the stuff I’m looking for.

Anytime one gets started with a library to do a job, it can take a while to get going with it. BeautifulSoup let me get my job done without a lot of effort on the initial learning curve. Right now, my script is about halfway through getting the additional data wanted for those 9,000+ properties. We’ll be able to look it over in the morning. The whole script I’m using is less than a hundred lines of code, and that reads in a CSV file, traverses that, gets the associated profile page from the Property Appraiser for each property, parses that with BeautifulSoup, adds the additional fields of info to the original, and writes out a new CSV file with the more complete data set.

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I left a comment to the opinion letter of a Greg Swank, M.D.. Dr. Swank gave a Gish Gallop and finished up with argument from authority.

My background is in the medical field and I find it interesting that from a science background I am defending Intelligent Design as a scientific probability, while Rev. Ward defends evolution.

So here’s my bit, just fitting into the character limit on comments there:

Dr. Greg Swank has overlooked some information. The objections that he notes in his letter, plus the hundreds more he didn’t have space for, are listed — and rebutted — in Mark Isaak’s “Index to Creationist Claims”. This resource is available online at http://talkorigins.org/indexcc .

Evolutionary science is rather more productive than Swank admits, being an indispensable part of even medical research. It shapes our best knowledge on why indiscriminate use of antibiotics is bad, leading to today’s “superbugs” like MRSA, and why developing a vaccine for HIV is hard work, since HIV evolves so quickly. It also contributes to agriculture. The Soviet Union rejected evolutionary science and adopted Lysenkoism, leading to decades of crop failures and famine. When China adopted Lysenkoist antievolution in 1958, they went from grain surpluses to a famine that killed tens of millions of people.

Evolutionary science is worth learning about and teaching.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.
Palmetto, FL

Update: I added another comment attached to Swank’s letter:

Dr. Swank advances “intelligent design” (ID) as a “scientific probability”. But the transcript of the 2005 “Kitzmiller v. DASD” trial in Pennsylvania plainly showed even the ID advocates admitting in sworn testimony that for ID to be considered as science, one must use a definition of science broad enough that astrology would fit the bill, too.

The transcripts are at http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dover/kitzmiller_v_dover.html

When it comes to ID-speak about probability, I can go Dr. Swank one better: I have published articles in the technical literature on exactly this topic. Versions of those are available online at http://www.talkdesign.org/faqs/theftovertoil/theftovertoil.html and http://www.antievolution.org/people/wre/papers/eandsdembski.pdf

ID is simply a form of religious antievolution, not science. Its content is entirely a subset of the arguments advanced before under the “creation science” label. ID is a sham to evade contrary legal decisions.

Wesley R. Elsberry, Ph.D.

Update: Other commenters say that Swank is not an M.D. I posted one apologizing for having given Swank more credit than someone merely “in the medical field” deserves.

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My parents send me interesting articles from my hometown paper, the Lakeland Ledger. One of the latest of these I got was an article by Eric Pera titled, A Special Kind of Air Patrol. It is about Polk county farmers employing American Bird Abatement Service (ABAS) to keep crops like blueberries safe from depredation by flocks of cedar waxwings and other birds. Their method? Fly falcons over the fields during the daytime. Check out the article; it has some nice pictures of the Aplomado falcons used by ABAS.

While reading the article I realized that I had a personal connection in the story: Jim Nelson, co-owner of ABAS, was quoted in there. Jim is a friend of Diane and I from back when we were living in eastern Washington state. Jim is an avid longwinger who nonetheless took time to help us train our then-new Harris’ hawk, Rusty. Rusty surprised Jim by showing enthusiasm for hunting upland birds and ducks. (Rusty also surprised him in having an absolute unwillingness to be or remain hooded.) We wish Jim and his colleagues all the best with the ABAS venture.

In the article, it says that ABAS’s “services aren’t cheap, costing as much as $600 a day for one falconer and up to four birds”. Well, I don’t know how one defines cheap here. It is likely that the falconer gets half or less of the day’s charge, so they are specialists with federal/state permits probably working for less than $40/hour. The other half would have to cover the costs of breeding, training, and maintaining the falcons. That is a not-inconsiderable expense in terms of materials and labor itself. There are travel costs and the costs of radio-telemetry for each falcon. Figure in also that ABAS likely does not have a full year-round schedule, so the days that do get paid have to cover the parts of the year that don’t. If the farmer gets about $2/pint of blueberries, and needs about a week’s protection to get the crop harvested, he comes out ahead if the falcons save him over 2,100 pints of blueberries.

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I was looking for a particular post of mine, and ran across this one from back in 1999. “The Patterson Challenge” refers to a lecture given by Colin Patterson in which he asked his audience a question. This incident has become a favorite quote of antievolutionists.

I’ve been putting a simple question to various people and groups of people. Question is: Can you tell me anything you know about evolution, any one thing that is true? I tried that question on the geology staff at the Field Museum of Natural History and the only answer I got was silence. I tried it on the members of the Evolutionary Morphology Seminar in the University of Chicago, a very prestigious body of evolutionists, and all I got there was silence for a long time and eventually one person said, “I do know one thing — it ought not to be taught in high school”.

So when it popped up again in a forum I was participating in, I took the opportunity to answer the original question.

True things about evolutionary theory
Wesley R. Elsberry (welsberr@inia.cls.org)
Tue, 9 Nov 1999 11:26:29 -0600 (CST)

Art Chadwick writes:

AC>Those are fancy (and oft repeated) words. Let me issue you
AC>the Patterson challenge: tell us one thing you know for
AC>sure about the theory of evolution…other than that “it
AC>shouldn’t be taught to high school students”

Patterson’s challenge was broader, asking whether anyone knew any one thing about “evolution” to be true.

Let’s see… true things about evolution. That would make an overlong list. I’ll just give some of my favorites.

- Inheritance is particulate, not blending.

- Inheritance is not perfect. Changes can and do happen in heritable information.

- More organisms are produced than can be sustained under prevailing ecological conditions.

- Those heritable variations which correlate with differential survival of organisms tend to have higher proportional representation in the population.

- The distribution of traits in a population can be influenced by chance effects, such as population bottlenecks and sampling from a limited pool of variant.

- Fossils are the traces of organisms that were once alive.

- Fossil forms show that extinction of species happens. Certain fossils represent organisms common enough, large enough, and distributed in areas where if they were present through the present day could not have been overlooked.

- Fossils are distributed in a stratigraphic pattern indicating change in fossil assemblages over time.

- Fossil assemblages show that mass extinctions have happened at widely different times in the earth’s history.

- The canonical genetic code is consistent with the theory of common descent.

- Patterns of differences in sequences of proteins and heritable information support the idea that these differences have accrued since the time of a last common ancestor.

- Evolutionary interrelationships have been used to advantage in medical research.

- The principles of natural selection have been used to advantage in computational optimization and search.

- Species have been observed to form, both in the laboratory and in the wild.

- A novel symbiotic association has been observed in the laboratory.

Well, that should get us started, anyway.

Wesley

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The Consortium for Ocean Leadership’s National Ocean Science Bowl is holding its national competition this weekend in St. Petersburg, Florida at the USF/St. Pete campus and FWRI. There is round robin competition on Saturday, then the finals will use a double-elimination tournament schedule that finishes up on Sunday.

I’m signed up as a moderator in one of the rooms on Saturday. I really enjoyed volunteering for the regional tournament, and I am looking forward to tomorrow’s competition.

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Last year, the CoverFlorida Health Care program got started. This is essentially group insurance for the Florida uninsured pool, organized by (but not paid for by) the state of Florida. Governor Charlie Crist says the following on the CoverFlorida website:

During the 2008 legislative session, my administration worked with legislators of both parties to secure unanimous approval of the Cover Florida Health Care Access Program. This legislation makes affordable health coverage available to 3.8 million uninsured Floridians through a comprehensive market-based strategy.

3.8 million uninsured Floridians. That’s a lot.

It has been a little over a year now, so maybe we can start to see a shift in the demographic. How many eligible people actually have signed up for coverage under CoverFlorida’s plans? According to a PDF summarizing enrollment through January, 2010, that would be 5,426 people. That works out to about 0.14% of the eligible pool who have taken the plunge. At that rate, 3.8 million people may have signed up for this health care somewhere around the year 2709. That does appear to be viewing the problem as solving itself in Lord Keynes’ long run.

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We got our new ISP activated on Saturday, and we had selected Verizon FIOS. On a dollars per bandwidth unit basis, it was by far the most effective way to spend the money. The choices where we are were Verizon DSL, Bright House cable, and Verizon FIOS.

I had priced the DSL a couple of months ago, and Verizon was offering 1 Mbps for $19.99/month and 1.5 Mbps for $29.99/month. We were considering the 1 Mbps DSL service simply on the cheapskate basis. However, when I checked again last week, the prices had been sharply changed upward. The 1 Mbps was $29.99/month, and the 1.5 Mbps was $39.99/month. I happened to have a chat session going with a Verizon representative, and part of it went something like this:

Me: So what additional value has been added to the DSL options to make them worth $10 more a month now than back in January?

[2 minute pause]

Verizon Rep: I’m sorry, I don’t have any information available about that.

Me: Good answer.

While we didn’t really want to reward Verizon for the predatory pricing structure they’ve created on DSL, the bandwidth available with Verizon FIOS was just too tempting. The FIOS Internet service starts at 15 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream at $54.95/month. It’s more than we wanted to be budgeting for our internet, but we really do use it.

A Verizon service person called last Thursday to discuss access to our driveway. It’s a mere 663′ long. His job was to get the fiber optic cable laid down to the house. We found out that they had to put in a splice; they’ve marked that patch of ground with flags and recommended that we don’t plan to extend our driveway over that spot. I had informed them about the long driveway in the chat session, and they get their fiber optic cable in 1000′ lengths, so they should have had plenty to manage to get there without a splice.

The actual install went fairly smoothly. Verizon says installation may take between four and eight hours, but our install was done in about three.

I did a Speakeasy bandwidth test, and the gear delivered a bit more than advertised, so that’s to the good. We’ve been using Bright House cable to access the internet since last August, and we’ve had a variety of annoying lapses in what we’ve been able to do. For instance, we use email on a server located in Texas. We have not been able to send email through that server for several months. That has now been remedied.

The next step is to get our home internal network set up again. Right now, FIOS does look like it will help us get done the things we need done on the internet.

Update: OK, I found a slightly annoying thing here: poor DNS resolution. Apparently, the FIOS router defaults to a set of not-so-hot nameservers. Fortunately, I can specify better ones on my individual computers. See this page for an explication of the problem and the fix.

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Richard Thompson’s latest lawsuit by the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) is a foray to obtain a permanent injunction against the health care law recently passed.

Readers here probably recall TMLC for suborning the Dover Area School District (DASD) into passing an “intelligent design” policy late in 2004, claiming that they could blow off advice of their legal counsel; TMLC would be there to defend them in court. The TMLC and DASD ended up losing spectacularly in 2005, with DASD getting a negotiated fine of $1,000,011. (The eleven dollars were $1 each for the plaintiffs in the case; as far as I know, none of those checks were ever cashed, and most if not all are framed and on display.)

Thompson is also known for a long series of unsuccessful cases attempting to prosecute Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the doctor who advocated assisted suicide for terminal patients. Kevorkian eventually went on national television with a video showing Kevorkian actually administering a lethal injection to a patient who was incapable of doing that himself, and given that suspect-supplied evidence, the state of Michigan was finally able to successfully prosecute Kevorkian.

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Back in 2004, Diane was looking at getting a reciprocating saw. Despite the indications that one simply should get the Milwaukee Sawzall and be done with it, we instead got a kit of Ryobi power tools that included a reciprocating saw. Ryobi is the Home Depot’s own brand of power tools, and occasionally Home Depot marks down kits deeply. In 2004, they had a pretty deep discount on the Ryobi 18V kit that included a reciprocating saw, 10″ chainsaw, circular saw, jigsaw, drill-driver, flashlight, and handheld vacuum. We found the purchase relatively disappointing, though, for one specific reason: the batteries and charger that came with the kit made the tools practically useless.

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