The Austringer

See here for a few more comments on the photo.

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We’ve been replacing incandescent lights with compact fluorescent lights as needed here. So I have a ceiling fan with a light fixture that now has two remaining incandescent lights and three compact fluorescent lights. Here is a picture of the light fixture:

I think it is just possible to pick out which are which. Give it a try…

Incandescent lights are not as efficient as compact fluorescent lights. So, where are those watts that incandescent lights soak up going to? Quite a lot goes into heat production. More, in fact, than is output as visible light. Below the fold, I’ve included a photo of the light fixture, this time using an infrared filter on the camera. It will be obvious there which two lamps are incandescent. See if you picked them right from the visible light photo above.

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I signed up for a couple of recycle / “freecycle” email lists, one for Pinellas County, and the other for Manatee County. If you haven’t seen these, people who want to pass along items that they aren’t using will put up an “OFFER: item” type email, and people interested in using the item can respond and arrange to pick it up. I haven’t put up any “OFFER” emails yet, but I expect to do so as we start going through our boxes here. But I have responded to three of the offered items so far. One was a largish coffee table with a baby-proof modification of a rubber bumper on the edge. The second was for a couple of DVDs and a couple of VHS tapes. The third was the most interesting of the lot, as it was a Sony receiver.

The receiver model was a Sony STR-6065. It is an old, heavy receiver. As far as I can tell, it seems to have been manufactured around 1972 and offers something in the range of 50 watts per channel. The modern trend to digital media players and small plug-in amplified speakers has just about killed the urge to locate and use a largish component amplifier or receiver. The one issue noted by the previous owner was that the tuning knob kept falling off. I fixed that with a screwdriver applied to the set-screw in the knob. I plugged it in for a test this evening. The VU meter lit up, but the tuning panel stayed dark, so if I get ambitious, I might replace the 12V lamps inside. The disappointing news was that despite hooking up an FM antenna, I was not able to tune any stations. The AM side of the receiver worked fine, which isn’t very helpful, as my tolerance for talk radio or salsa music is pretty low right now. Plugging my trusty Sansa E280 digital media player into the auxiliary input worked, too. Even driving a pair of Radio Shack Minimus-7 speakers, the unit sounded pretty good. It would probably sound even better if I went after it with a DeOxit cleaning kit. I’m looking forward to using this for reviewing our compiled audio data. A decent amp is pretty much an indispensable part of an audio research toolkit.

For everybody who is looking at clearing out unused but usable items and doesn’t care to go through the hassle of selling on eBay or via a yard sale, I recommend the recycle “freecycle” email lists. I hope to do my share of sharing soon.

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I caught a repeat of the “NCIS: Los Angeles” episode, “Found”, earlier this week. There are synopses and reviews various places, like here and here. Neither of those took any notice of the issue of vigilantism in the episode. I think that it is something that should be a bit higher on the radar.

In case you haven’t seen the episode or read the reviews, the plotline is that one of the NCIS LA team had been kidnapped previously, and now terrorists are demanding that a prisoner in the USA be exchanged for the agent, or he will be killed by a particular and short deadline. The rest of the team goes all out in tracing down leads and trying to find out where he is being held in order to mount a rescue mission. One of the terrorists seems to take pity on the agent, and provides him with a key to his handcuffs. Coincidentally, the rest of the team follows the terrorists’ supporter/organizer to the LA hideout where their colleague has made his way to the roof. A gun battle ensues, with casualties of several terrorists and the agent who had been held prisoner.

Along the way, there were various dodgy interrogation techniques. One suspect gets partially strangled, then later threatened with drowning. In one scene, the operations manager, “Hetty”, tells one of the agents that sometimes extreme measures must be taken to get results, and that often critical questions will fail to be asked if the outcome is right.

I have to admit that the “Hetty” speech really put this one over the line for me. The US market seems to enjoy watching tales of semi- to full-blown vigilantism, and we don’t seem to be particular as to whether our vigilantes are outside the legal structure or operate from within it to obtain whatever it is that they consider to be justice. In general, Hollywood follows a rigid formula that where vigilantism is depicted: the vigilante is otherwise of scrupulous moral character, acts in good causes, and the villain is shown to be especially despicable. For every “Taxi Driver” showing another side to vigilantism, there’s a lot of “Death Wish”-like presentations that stick to the proven formula.

The NCIS: LA episode in question is certainly one of the more formulaic presentations, differing only in that the vigilantes eventually come up short, failing to save their colleague’s life. Getting back to the “Hetty” speech, though, what struck me was that the scriptwriter seemed to have to stretch quite a ways to come up with a pretentious, serious-sounding paraphrase of the blunt saying, “The ends justify the means.” For that was the sole content, when one boils it down to its base elements.

While the vigilante formula is widespread in Hollywood and beyond, it is a serial theme in many of the series produced by Donald Bellisario, including the NCIS franchise. Elsewhere, comments about the “Found” episode killing off a credited protagonist showed surprise or disappointment with the outcome. However, for anyone paying attention to previous series, having a fairly major supporting character die or suffer serious injury in a way that may result in some degree of feelings of guilt for the protagonist or protagonists remaining is also a continuing theme in Bellisario series. We saw it in Magnum PI, JAG, and the original NCIS before, so having that come into NCIS: LA is no big shocker.

Cognitive research shows that the vigilante theme plays on some common neural wiring in humans: we really do hate to see wrongdoing go unpunished, and will often do ourselves some harm to prevent that. However, the vigilante impulse in real life tends to be fulfilled not by clear-thinking puritans, but rather by flawed people acting out on their prejudices and fears. We may not know exactly why Michael Enright chose to stab a Muslim cab driver, but we do know he had been drinking heavily before the assault.

As frustrating as “letting” villains have their way with victims is, the alternative of rampant vigilantism doesn’t provide a good way forward. All too often, the vigilante makes mistakes in assigning guilt, and delivers punishment — or death — to the wrong party. Our legal system, with all its quirks and warts and exploitable flaws, is an evolving system aiming to find a balance between holding the guilty accountable for their actions and preserving the rights of the innocent, including those of the innocent wrongly accused. That’s a concern that vigilantes don’t seem to often bear in mind.

For the “Found” episode, the dodgy interrogation stuff wasn’t even essential to the main plotline. They got information on the supporter/organizer villain by casual conversation with an informant, which would have been enough to have them tail the fellow where he went. And where he went eventually was the location of their colleague and the climactic shootout. So essentially the episode’s main message to me wasn’t that this was a team who’d put it all on the line for a colleague, but rather that here are a bunch of people supposedly working on our behalf who are willing to dispense with their principles at the first hint of difficulty. I don’t think that’s what the producers were aiming for.

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Tea Party candidate Allen West made clear his disdain for the “Coexist” bumper sticker. West was quoted as saying,

“[A]s I was driving up here today, I saw that bumper sticker that absolutely incenses me. It’s not the Obama bumper sticker. But it’s the bumper sticker that says, ‘Co-exist.’ And it has all the little religious symbols on it. And the reason why I get upset, and every time I see one of those bumper stickers, I look at the person inside that is driving. Because that person represents something that would give away our country. Would give away who we are, our rights and freedoms and liberties because they are afraid to stand up and confront that which is the antithesis, anathema of who we are. The liberties that we want to enjoy.”

West makes clear that what he objects to is the symbol of Islam on the bumper sticker, saying that people choosing that bumper sticker would give away America because they won’t stand up against radical Islamists. It seems to me that he reaches a conclusion without any chain of logic connecting the premises he starts from to the conclusion he wishes to reach. We can reject the extremism of some without trampling on the rights of other citizens; West doesn’t appear to get that.

The Bill of Rights to the Constitution does provide for freedom of religion, and Islam, last I checked, is a religion. There are practitioners of Islam who don’t agree with radical Islam, just as there are Protestants who aren’t in favor of hanging or burning witches and Catholics who aren’t into pederasty or burning heretics at the stake. We aren’t ‘giving up America’ when we tolerate our Protestant and Catholic neighbors, and we aren’t ‘giving up America’ when we tolerate our Islamic neighbors. It is, though, ‘giving up America’ when we let foreign extremists of any sort encourage us to turn our back on freedom of religion here in the USA. It is curious that Allen West can’t seem to see that his attitude is the problem, not the fellow with the “Coexist” bumper sticker.

Update: I’ve already been told in the comments that West “is not anti-religion”. Here’s another reported quote from West continuing his anti-bumper sticker comments:

– “We already have a 5th column that is already infiltrating into our colleges, into our universities, into our high schools, into our religious aspect, our cultural aspect, our financial, our political systems in this country. And that enemy represents something called Islam and Islam is a totalitarian theocratic political ideology, it is not a religion. It has not been a religion since 622 AD, and we need to have individuals that stand up and say that.”

– “George Bush got snookered into going into some mosque, taking his shoes off, and then saying that Islam was a religion of peace.”

The above demonstrates the very generically anti-Islam sentiment that West advocates. West is not targeting Islamic radicalism or radicalism in general; he is setting himself up as an arbiter of who gets First Amendment freedom of religion rights. That’s about as scary as politics gets in my book.

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“The Underground Site” passes on some arguments from Answers in Genesis responding to comments made by an ethnologist, Bernadette Barton, who took a few trips to the “Creation Museum” facility. From the looks of the responses, AiG probably should have just kept mum; they seem to be of the “Bridgewater Treatise” sort of reply that leaves one thinking that the original critique is still looking pretty good.

But what comes through is either pure laziness or lack of journalistic drive on the part of the anonymous “staff” writing the piece. Given a “he-said, she-said” situation (literally!), the “staff” goes for “reporting” he-said only. Not only did only AiG’s arguments get space in the article, the author couldn’t even be bothered to link to the original critique that AiG was responding to. That seems curiously uninformative for a site with pretensions of delivering news. Oh, and there is the inability to run a spell-checker. Even AiG managed that. Hey, anonymous staff writer at “The Underground Site”, if you are wondering why Christians often get a bad rap in intellectual circles, you aren’t helping.

I felt moved to leave a comment. I’ll quote it here.

“Enthologist”? When Answers in Genesis can correctly spell “ethnology” and you can’t, I think you lose 50 points in the t.o. home game.

[Quote]

-50 if a C’ist corrects a factual error of yours (This may seem
like a big penalty, but lets face it — if a C’ist has a better
grasp of bio than you do, maybe you shouldn’t be posting.)

[End quote - Chris Colby, http://www.antievolution.org/features/evohumor/tohome.html ]

But going beyond the title’s spelling glitch, I don’t see much that looks like journalism here. AiG responds to just about anything that might resemble a comment about their facility in Kentucky. Did anybody even consider checking to see whether AiG’s response here made sense in its various supposed points?

Take response (1), for example. AiG doesn’t like the “fundamentalist” adjective. They note that their objection is solidly based on … market perception. Then they equivocate on “mainstream” versus “extremist”, using the demographic connotation of the former to try to deny the philosophical import of the latter. Sorry, inerrantist literalism is still a plank of the fundamentals, and it is still extreme, no matter what percentage of the population happens to be on board with it. All they manage there is to show that extremism is popular. I feel safe saying that Islamic fervor for sharia law in Iran is popular there, but that does nothing to make it any less extreme.

If you want to do some commentary from a Christian perspective on AiG’s curious commitment to plain error, then you can cite St. Augustine’s advice on these topics:

[Quote]

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.

[End Quote - St. Augustine, “De Genesi ad litteram libri duodecim” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis)]

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About 5 AM, I heard an owl outside the house. I went out to check, since owls and hawks don’t mix well. I wanted to make sure the owl wasn’t near Rusty. The owl turned out to be perched high in an oak tree in the front yard.

The owl proved to be a pretty cooperative subject, continuing to sit in the tree while I got together the camera, flash, and big 12V flashlight. Unfortunately, the owl was still about 75 feet away from the camera, so this is a pretty severe crop of the original image.

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David Klinghoffer recently challenged Lauri Lebo to explain how the Discovery Institute’s promotion of “intelligent design” related to creationism.

And Lauri wrote a nice article explaining how. It is a good read. And if Klinghoffer can manage to read it for comprehension, he might even achieve enlightenment.

As Lauri notes, we are fast coming up to the fifth anniversary of the start of the Kitzmiller trial.

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This New Scientist article discusses some really cool results coming out of the Devolab at Michigan State University. In for particular attention was my colleague, Laura Grabowski, who defended her dissertation on memory evolving in Avidians shortly before I left MSU. She is now a professor at the University of Texas – Pan American in Edinburg, Texas, continuing her work on artificial life.

Rob Pennock and Jeff Clune also got attention in the article, and a paper of mine (with Laura and Rob) published last year got a link in the article.

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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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