Well, it's Wednesday, which is the one day a week I said I'd get a post on the blog, hell or high water, rain or shine. Except today I have a cold and feel just ghastly. So have a couple extremely lame links, since they're quick and mean I can go meld with the couch again.
Odds of being a terrorism victim on a flight - a beautiful and also very hilarious infographic via Boing Boing. And while we're talking terrorism on flights, I would also like to point toward Bruce Schneier's op-ed on CNN about the topic. Which is more serious and less hilarious, but still interesting.
Doctor Who bingo cards for part two of "The End of Time" - Part one didn't really knock my socks off, but I'm still excited about part two because there appear to be Time Lords, funny hat/shoulder/whatever things included. And Timothy Dalton.
A quick hit about ocean acidification from National Geographic - because this post needed a buzzkill.
Have a lovely Wednesday. I'll go snot elsewhere now.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
An atheist Christmas
We slept late on Christmas; I think it's been years since I woke up early on Christmas morning. I'm one of those people who, given the chance, goes to bed around two in the morning and wakes up between nine and ten. Mike and I sat around a bit to wake up, then drove over to my parents' house for the actual Christmas festivities. It was wonderfully snowy and a little icy; a beautiful, classic sort of Christmas morning where it's just cold enough to keep the snow fluffy but not so cold that you have to bundle up too much.
My brother and his girlfriend were already there, having spent the night. My mom was already bustling around the kitchen, a cup of coffee (fortified with Bailey's) at hand. A random selection of Christmas music played over the speakers in the living room.
We were on something of a schedule, since April (my brother's girlfriend) had to be to work in the evening and we wanted to have dinner and dessert done by then. So we tried to get down to the business of opening the little pile of presents under the tree early, but were confounded first by my brother vanishing, then by my dad, then by Mike receiving a phone call from his parents. We settled down eventually, taking out time opening gifts and examining each item with a smile. I can't think of many pleasures greater than watching someone open a gift you've given them and smiling at it. We kept the gift giving fairly low-key this year; none of us are feeling that wealthy, after all, and at least Mike and I have a wedding to save up for. But there were still plenty of smiles to go around. The coolest of the gifts was definitely the one that April gave to my mother; a cork board she'd made from wine bottle corks.
Presents opened, we sat and talked, eating fudge and drinking coffee. Our family friends Diane and Glen arrived, and suddenly my mother realized that we'd gotten distracted, that we were behind schedule to get dinner ready. She ran off to the kitchen, with my dad and I following to help her get the food ready. My dad had somehow converted the grill on the back porch in to a second oven, where he roasted some root vegetables. I peeled hard-boiled eggs to top off the salad, while Mike prepared the asparagus to be baked, then opened up some bottles of wine. In the end, it all came together beautifully and we had a warm, wonderful meal that barely fit on the table. We ate and drank, laughed and talked, surrounded by good company and the warmth of good spirits. With dinner done, I was lazy and let other people help with the clean up while I finished up my glass of wine. We moved in to the living room and relaxed, talking about whatever came to mind, about going to Hawaii on vacation one day, about politics, about the wedding, since we can't seem to go five minutes without it coming up.
Around seven in the evening, Mike and I headed home, laden with leftovers and cookies and lots of hugs. And that was our Christmas.
I'm sure this all sounds very ordinary, and perhaps a little boring. I think that it is (ordinary, at least, not boring); what I did for my Christmas was probably not all that different from what most other families who celebrate this holiday do, year after year. Perhaps the one difference you can find, aside from quirky little family traditions, is that we didn't go to church, and we didn't say grace before the meal. My family is a bunch of atheists and agnostics, after all, and we celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.
I find this all worth mentioning because of things like this, where the Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, said:
It's been a week and a half since I read that, and it's still upsetting me.
Actually, having "thought it through," I think all that matters are the things that define Christmas with my family; smiles, laughter, being surrounded by the people I love most, and the hope that many other people share this happiness as well.
My brother and his girlfriend were already there, having spent the night. My mom was already bustling around the kitchen, a cup of coffee (fortified with Bailey's) at hand. A random selection of Christmas music played over the speakers in the living room.
We were on something of a schedule, since April (my brother's girlfriend) had to be to work in the evening and we wanted to have dinner and dessert done by then. So we tried to get down to the business of opening the little pile of presents under the tree early, but were confounded first by my brother vanishing, then by my dad, then by Mike receiving a phone call from his parents. We settled down eventually, taking out time opening gifts and examining each item with a smile. I can't think of many pleasures greater than watching someone open a gift you've given them and smiling at it. We kept the gift giving fairly low-key this year; none of us are feeling that wealthy, after all, and at least Mike and I have a wedding to save up for. But there were still plenty of smiles to go around. The coolest of the gifts was definitely the one that April gave to my mother; a cork board she'd made from wine bottle corks.
Presents opened, we sat and talked, eating fudge and drinking coffee. Our family friends Diane and Glen arrived, and suddenly my mother realized that we'd gotten distracted, that we were behind schedule to get dinner ready. She ran off to the kitchen, with my dad and I following to help her get the food ready. My dad had somehow converted the grill on the back porch in to a second oven, where he roasted some root vegetables. I peeled hard-boiled eggs to top off the salad, while Mike prepared the asparagus to be baked, then opened up some bottles of wine. In the end, it all came together beautifully and we had a warm, wonderful meal that barely fit on the table. We ate and drank, laughed and talked, surrounded by good company and the warmth of good spirits. With dinner done, I was lazy and let other people help with the clean up while I finished up my glass of wine. We moved in to the living room and relaxed, talking about whatever came to mind, about going to Hawaii on vacation one day, about politics, about the wedding, since we can't seem to go five minutes without it coming up.
Around seven in the evening, Mike and I headed home, laden with leftovers and cookies and lots of hugs. And that was our Christmas.
I'm sure this all sounds very ordinary, and perhaps a little boring. I think that it is (ordinary, at least, not boring); what I did for my Christmas was probably not all that different from what most other families who celebrate this holiday do, year after year. Perhaps the one difference you can find, aside from quirky little family traditions, is that we didn't go to church, and we didn't say grace before the meal. My family is a bunch of atheists and agnostics, after all, and we celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.
I find this all worth mentioning because of things like this, where the Governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, said:
People who reject the idea of a God -who think that we're just accidental protoplasm- have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications -which not all such folks have thought through- because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.
It's been a week and a half since I read that, and it's still upsetting me.
Actually, having "thought it through," I think all that matters are the things that define Christmas with my family; smiles, laughter, being surrounded by the people I love most, and the hope that many other people share this happiness as well.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Avatar
Hey, it's a post that's not about hydraulic fracturing! SAY IT AIN'T SO!
I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve with my handsome and talented fiance. I was actually supposed to see the movie on the Monday before that, but I was having stomach problems that day and elected to stay home so I could lay on the couch and feel sorry for myself. Mike (the handsome and talented fiance) saw the movie without me with our friends. With his assurances that it was excellent - and excellent enough to make him want to see it at least twice in theaters - we braved the ice and snow to catch the noon showing.
I just saw the normal version of the movie, by the way. I've had multiple people now tell me that 3-D is the only way to go, but honestly I thought it was just fine in boring old 2-D. And with the added benefit of me not having to wear uncomfortable fake glasses over my real glasses, which is the reason I don't bother with 3-D. I'm sure it's all very pretty, but I have a hard time getting in to movies when I've got two pairs of glasses sitting on my nose and tugging on my ears and feeling generally awkward and annoying.
The movie is beautiful. Very, very beautiful. Very, very, very beautiful. I think there was a moment or two where the CGI broke down, but they were few and far between. The technology sure has advanced, and it made for some spectacular looking aliens and a breathtaking world.
The story itself is fairly unremarkable. It's not a bad story, though I feel like the story was more there to prop up the HOLY CRAP LOOK AT ALL THIS COOL STUFF than anything else. The movie is very, very worth seeing, and you should go do that. In fact, go watch it now, because I'm going to do a little bit of complaining and discussing issues people have brought up about the film that is going to involve some spoiler-like stuff. But let's be clear... the complaining I'm about to do in no way means I didn't like the movie. I loved it. I want to see it at least once more in theaters, maybe twice more if I'm lucky and have the time. I'm going to buy the DVD. I'm going to obsessively watch all the special features. I just also have no problem admitting that it's not the most perfect piece of pretty film ever created.
SPOILERS BELOW
Race
A lot of people have likened the movie to Dances With Wolves. I tend to agree. In fact, rather than go into detail about how and why I agree, I'm going to send you to this post from Io9, because I think it sums everything up nicely: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar? I'll just say that I would like, just once, to see a big box office movie like this where the brown people (or the blue ones, as the case may be) get to save the day without the white hero saving them.
In Avatar, what basically summed up the whole issue for me is the scene where Jake comes flying up to the Tree of Souls on the scary giant read bird-thing. He goes up to the guy that's the best warrior of the tribe, the one that's supposed to take over as chief now that Neytiri's father has gotten turned in to a battered blue kabob. And he says, almost literally, "I can't do this without you... Translate for me." Now, I've had various people argue that I'm taking it the wrong way, that the pause between the two sentences significantly changes the meaning, and such. But frankly, it still came across to me that Jake was in one breath saying he needed Tsu'tey to follow him, and in the next asking the man to be his mouthpiece. It really rubbed me the wrong way. Imagine how different it would have been if Jake had walked up and Tsu'tey had said something like, "I'm going to lead everyone in to battle. Will you help me?" At which point Jake could have coughed up all sorts of useful information and been very involved in the defense, but still wouldn't quite have been the white dude leading everyone to victory. Because considering the technological gap, I think it's fair to argue that the Na'vi would have had a heck of a time scraping together the victory they did without some outside help.
As an aside on the race issue, my mother's apparently heard complaints that Avatar is in some way anti-American. It all sounds very defensive, and I have a feeling this connects to the race/white guilt issue, since it really is a movie about how it's shitty to abuse the native people and take their land just because they've got something you want. To me, this falls in the same category as the people who get defensive when you point out that it sucked to live in Hiroshima and have an atomic bomb dropped on you. People can make arguments to justify the action all they like, but it doesn't change the basic fact that it sucks to have an atomic bomb dropped on you, period. When there's this sort of bitter defensiveness, I'm forced to wonder just why it's so hard for some to realize - or at least admit - that we've done some things in the past (in the very recent past, in some cases) that haven't exactly been an ice cream social for all the involved parties.
The Military
I would like to get one thing straight. Avatar is NOT an anti-military movie. I'm sure that after watching Stephen Lang gnaw on the scenery for five minutes as Colonel Quaritch, it's easy enough to pick up that impression. That Colonel Quaritch is actually not actually in the military any longer is an extremely easy fact to miss. As a near throw-away line at the beginning of the movie, Jake Sully narrates that the forces on Pandora are actually mercenaries, soldiers hired directly by the company. I think that little understated and easily missed line is a very important one, to be honest.
If you look at James Cameron's other big movies, I think it's actually pretty fair to say he's mostly been pro-military, or at the very least not anti-military in them. The Colonial Marines in Aliens were certainly heroic. In The Abyss we had one Navy SEAL go bad due to HPNS, but in the end the other SEALs come through and help the civilians save the day. True Lies gives the Marine Corps a chance to show off their jets, which is always good for a "Woohoo, America!" moment. I would even argue that the Terminator movies are not actually anti-military, but rather anti-corporate and anti-taking-soldiers-out-of-the-loop-in-favor-of-autonomous-robots.
Honestly, keeping in mind from the start that the badguys of Avatar were basically corporate mercenaries immediately made me think of the scandals we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that have involved military contractors, which are basically mercenaries. (Blackwater and KBR, for example.) I don't know if that's what was on Cameron's mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was a factor in making the Avatar villains corporate hired guns.
The Ladies
I've seen a couple comments about James Cameron liking his "woman trapped by destiny" characters. I suppose it's true... you could definitely draw some parallels between Rose from Titanic and Neytiri in Avatar. I do have to say, though, I actually really like how James Cameron does his female characters for the most part. Rose and Neytiri may be initially "trapped by destiny," but the major theme of their stories is that they escape from those destinies on to a path of their own choosing. (The fact that it involves falling in love with a different guy... okay, you've got me there.) But James Cameron also brought us Ripley, Private Vasquez, Sarah Connor, Helen Tasker, Lindsey Brigman, and Trudy Chacon. I think it's fair to say that the man likes to see the ladies kick some ass. It always thrills me to my toes to see situations in movies where the women get to defend the men - and effectively - since it doesn't happen nearly as often as I like. Neytiri taking out the evil scenery-chewing Colonel-that-would-not-die and thus saving Jake filled me with absolute glee.
The Environmentalism
You could probably accuse the environmentalist message of being heavy-handed, but in all honesty I felt that message was subordinate to the "treating the native people like they're sub-human and kicking them off their land because they have something you want is not cool" message. I suppose that there could possibly be people offended by the notion that strip-mining a pristine world and destroying its vegetation might be a bad thing. These are quite possibly the people who were yelling "Drill, baby, drill" at the RNC, which means I wouldn't want to sit next to them in a movie theater anyway.
In all honesty, I think the environmentalism of Avatar is an interesting thing to think about, depending on how deeply you want to get in to it. For example, could the corporation have found a way to get the resource that it wanted without causing environmental destruction? Was the open pit mine not really necessary, but mostly used because it was cheap and fast and the corporation had no reason to care? But I also think that if you start parsing the environmental theme like that, it becomes apparent that it's deeply tied to the movie's other themes, such as corporate greed and racial guilt. For all that the story is rather heavy-handed at times, the very fact that you can jump off from it in to these sorts of discussions means that it may very well be a deeper film than people (even myself) really give it credit for.
I saw Avatar on Christmas Eve with my handsome and talented fiance. I was actually supposed to see the movie on the Monday before that, but I was having stomach problems that day and elected to stay home so I could lay on the couch and feel sorry for myself. Mike (the handsome and talented fiance) saw the movie without me with our friends. With his assurances that it was excellent - and excellent enough to make him want to see it at least twice in theaters - we braved the ice and snow to catch the noon showing.
I just saw the normal version of the movie, by the way. I've had multiple people now tell me that 3-D is the only way to go, but honestly I thought it was just fine in boring old 2-D. And with the added benefit of me not having to wear uncomfortable fake glasses over my real glasses, which is the reason I don't bother with 3-D. I'm sure it's all very pretty, but I have a hard time getting in to movies when I've got two pairs of glasses sitting on my nose and tugging on my ears and feeling generally awkward and annoying.
The movie is beautiful. Very, very beautiful. Very, very, very beautiful. I think there was a moment or two where the CGI broke down, but they were few and far between. The technology sure has advanced, and it made for some spectacular looking aliens and a breathtaking world.
The story itself is fairly unremarkable. It's not a bad story, though I feel like the story was more there to prop up the HOLY CRAP LOOK AT ALL THIS COOL STUFF than anything else. The movie is very, very worth seeing, and you should go do that. In fact, go watch it now, because I'm going to do a little bit of complaining and discussing issues people have brought up about the film that is going to involve some spoiler-like stuff. But let's be clear... the complaining I'm about to do in no way means I didn't like the movie. I loved it. I want to see it at least once more in theaters, maybe twice more if I'm lucky and have the time. I'm going to buy the DVD. I'm going to obsessively watch all the special features. I just also have no problem admitting that it's not the most perfect piece of pretty film ever created.
SPOILERS BELOW
Race
A lot of people have likened the movie to Dances With Wolves. I tend to agree. In fact, rather than go into detail about how and why I agree, I'm going to send you to this post from Io9, because I think it sums everything up nicely: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar? I'll just say that I would like, just once, to see a big box office movie like this where the brown people (or the blue ones, as the case may be) get to save the day without the white hero saving them.
In Avatar, what basically summed up the whole issue for me is the scene where Jake comes flying up to the Tree of Souls on the scary giant read bird-thing. He goes up to the guy that's the best warrior of the tribe, the one that's supposed to take over as chief now that Neytiri's father has gotten turned in to a battered blue kabob. And he says, almost literally, "I can't do this without you... Translate for me." Now, I've had various people argue that I'm taking it the wrong way, that the pause between the two sentences significantly changes the meaning, and such. But frankly, it still came across to me that Jake was in one breath saying he needed Tsu'tey to follow him, and in the next asking the man to be his mouthpiece. It really rubbed me the wrong way. Imagine how different it would have been if Jake had walked up and Tsu'tey had said something like, "I'm going to lead everyone in to battle. Will you help me?" At which point Jake could have coughed up all sorts of useful information and been very involved in the defense, but still wouldn't quite have been the white dude leading everyone to victory. Because considering the technological gap, I think it's fair to argue that the Na'vi would have had a heck of a time scraping together the victory they did without some outside help.
As an aside on the race issue, my mother's apparently heard complaints that Avatar is in some way anti-American. It all sounds very defensive, and I have a feeling this connects to the race/white guilt issue, since it really is a movie about how it's shitty to abuse the native people and take their land just because they've got something you want. To me, this falls in the same category as the people who get defensive when you point out that it sucked to live in Hiroshima and have an atomic bomb dropped on you. People can make arguments to justify the action all they like, but it doesn't change the basic fact that it sucks to have an atomic bomb dropped on you, period. When there's this sort of bitter defensiveness, I'm forced to wonder just why it's so hard for some to realize - or at least admit - that we've done some things in the past (in the very recent past, in some cases) that haven't exactly been an ice cream social for all the involved parties.
The Military
I would like to get one thing straight. Avatar is NOT an anti-military movie. I'm sure that after watching Stephen Lang gnaw on the scenery for five minutes as Colonel Quaritch, it's easy enough to pick up that impression. That Colonel Quaritch is actually not actually in the military any longer is an extremely easy fact to miss. As a near throw-away line at the beginning of the movie, Jake Sully narrates that the forces on Pandora are actually mercenaries, soldiers hired directly by the company. I think that little understated and easily missed line is a very important one, to be honest.
If you look at James Cameron's other big movies, I think it's actually pretty fair to say he's mostly been pro-military, or at the very least not anti-military in them. The Colonial Marines in Aliens were certainly heroic. In The Abyss we had one Navy SEAL go bad due to HPNS, but in the end the other SEALs come through and help the civilians save the day. True Lies gives the Marine Corps a chance to show off their jets, which is always good for a "Woohoo, America!" moment. I would even argue that the Terminator movies are not actually anti-military, but rather anti-corporate and anti-taking-soldiers-out-of-the-loop-in-favor-of-autonomous-robots.
Honestly, keeping in mind from the start that the badguys of Avatar were basically corporate mercenaries immediately made me think of the scandals we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan that have involved military contractors, which are basically mercenaries. (Blackwater and KBR, for example.) I don't know if that's what was on Cameron's mind, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was a factor in making the Avatar villains corporate hired guns.
The Ladies
I've seen a couple comments about James Cameron liking his "woman trapped by destiny" characters. I suppose it's true... you could definitely draw some parallels between Rose from Titanic and Neytiri in Avatar. I do have to say, though, I actually really like how James Cameron does his female characters for the most part. Rose and Neytiri may be initially "trapped by destiny," but the major theme of their stories is that they escape from those destinies on to a path of their own choosing. (The fact that it involves falling in love with a different guy... okay, you've got me there.) But James Cameron also brought us Ripley, Private Vasquez, Sarah Connor, Helen Tasker, Lindsey Brigman, and Trudy Chacon. I think it's fair to say that the man likes to see the ladies kick some ass. It always thrills me to my toes to see situations in movies where the women get to defend the men - and effectively - since it doesn't happen nearly as often as I like. Neytiri taking out the evil scenery-chewing Colonel-that-would-not-die and thus saving Jake filled me with absolute glee.
The Environmentalism
You could probably accuse the environmentalist message of being heavy-handed, but in all honesty I felt that message was subordinate to the "treating the native people like they're sub-human and kicking them off their land because they have something you want is not cool" message. I suppose that there could possibly be people offended by the notion that strip-mining a pristine world and destroying its vegetation might be a bad thing. These are quite possibly the people who were yelling "Drill, baby, drill" at the RNC, which means I wouldn't want to sit next to them in a movie theater anyway.
In all honesty, I think the environmentalism of Avatar is an interesting thing to think about, depending on how deeply you want to get in to it. For example, could the corporation have found a way to get the resource that it wanted without causing environmental destruction? Was the open pit mine not really necessary, but mostly used because it was cheap and fast and the corporation had no reason to care? But I also think that if you start parsing the environmental theme like that, it becomes apparent that it's deeply tied to the movie's other themes, such as corporate greed and racial guilt. For all that the story is rather heavy-handed at times, the very fact that you can jump off from it in to these sorts of discussions means that it may very well be a deeper film than people (even myself) really give it credit for.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Fracturing Follow-up
After a small discussion in my previous post about hydraulic fracturing, I decided to look in to the subject a little more deeply, since the commenter focused strongly on concerns related to horizontally drilled wells. Horizontal wells weren't really mentioned in the articles I linked to, but horizontal drilling is becoming the common method for extracting gas from tight shales and will likely be used in the development of the Marcellus Shale. As such, it's more than fair to look at the practice and see if there are issues unique to it, or problems that occur more commonly in horizontal rather than vertical wells.
One thing I've noticed so far in researching is that papers that could answer that concern are few and far between. Looking at both GeoRef and GeoScience World, many reference hits are to expanded abstracts from meetings, and most of those are related to the effects of horizontal drilling on reservoir development rather than environmental impact. The EPA is also unhelpful on the topic; as the practice of hydraulic fracturing has been excluded from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA isn't in a position to look in to the safety from an environmental standpoint. The one study they have done relates to coal bed methane. In their coal bed methane study, the EPA concludes:
However, that said, the coal bed methane situation is arguably not quite the same, since most coal beds used in that study were fairly shallow, and many in direct "communication" with adjacent formations or aquifers. As a side geological note, coal layers can often act as barriers to fluid (such as hydrocarbons) flow from lower formations to upper formations, since they're only really permeable via fractures. Also, the conclusions have been called in to question in 2004 by an EPA employee named Weston Wilson:
An apparent conflict of interest is certainly something to look in to. I found one site that said Mr. Wilson's concerns were considered valid enough to prompt further investigation, though I have no idea if that investigation occurred or what the conclusion turned out to be. So I think for now, we'll skip the coal bed methane study.
The commenter made two points that I looked in to, which I've paraphrased here:
1) That the fractures made by hydraulic fracturing can extend further than intended, and in to different zones than are desired, possibly putting the aquifer at risk.
I tend to think that subsurface, technically anything is possible; geophysics is a difficult field (certainly not one I've mastered) since the conditions are uncontrolled and it's nigh impossible to know what the underground stress field is like precisely or what zones of weakness/minor faults may also exist. So is it possibly that a fracture created in a deep zone could "go rogue" (oh, I feel dirty just typing those words!) and go 4,000 feet up in to an aquifer? Possible, yes, but I would venture to say highly unlikely and would probably require an existing network of fractures/faults to do. The EPA coal bed methane study does actually say one thing of use about this matter, which holds true even if we're not talking coal bed methane:
Basically, the generic stress you'd expect in a deep formation would cause the fractures to tend to propagate upward. However, the general stress field will change as you approach the surface, and there are going to be other stress factors that may redirect fractures along the way. Intervening formations with different properties and different zones of weakness also have an important effect. A basin is in no way homogeneous vertically - and often formations will change their properties over horizontal distance as well. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation SGEIS report is a little more specific:
Depending on the depth of the aquifer, this conclusion makes the propagation of a vertical fracture in to it seem fairly unlikely.
At this point, the best that can be done is computer modeling, which has become increasingly sophisticated - though it can always be argued of course that we lack perfect knowledge of sub surface conditions. However, the fact of the matter is that it's in the best interest of the people fracturing the formation to prevent such wild fracture propagation from happening. Going outside the intended zone tends to mean getting a lot of unintended fluid - normally salt water - which has to be separated and disposed of, not something that is cheap or convenient to do.
The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has a report that's an overview of the historical and current practice of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing here. I think the authors of the report make a valid point by stating:
The DEC SGEIS also quotes ICF again in noting:
These factors point to groundwater contamination without wild fractures going a thousand or more feet farther than intended being highly unlikely as well.
At this point, the question of the threat that the fracturing practice has on the ground water becomes a cost/benefit analysis. It's in the best economic interest of the company developing the well to model their fractures properly to ensure that they do not move out of the intended zone. But it's also fair to argue that modeling is imperfect and that the most bizarre accidents can happen. Is that amount of risk worth the economic benefit?
2) Horizontal wells carry a greater risk of inducing harmful seismic activity which can cause an array of problems.
I'm actually already familiar with the concept of just plain old vertical wells inducing seismic activity; I doubt horizontal wells would be at all different. It's certainly not a new concept. Most of the reading I've done on this subject relates to disposal wells; in particular there was a case in Colorado where a deep disposal well was lubricating nearby faults and causing them to reactivate. The seismic activity in these cases is generally pretty low level (0 to 3 on the Richter Scale) and mostly an argument for being careful where one puts one's disposal wells - and for not overpressurizing them.
Subsidence is another matter that goes with the extraction of any fluid from a reservoir. With the reservoir losing pressure and volume with the removal of fluid, it can compact, which destroys reservoir permeability and causes subsidence. Subsidence also occurs and is a significant threat when aquifers are overused for drinking water. Basically, any time fluid is taken out of the ground and not replaced, there will be subsidence. From the US Department of Energy:
The practice of reinjecting fluid isn't exactly perfect - if nothing else there are cases where the replacement fluid can't be returned to the right location and overpressurization can occur.
With the reading, I've done, I tend to agree with the DoE assessment:
So once again, this comes to a question of cost/benefit analysis. Are the possible seismic dangers present worth the economic benefit? Are the means by which the concern about subsidence good enough at mitigating the problem? Since we live in a less than perfect world, it becomes a personal choice if the mitigation of the risk makes the development of the resource worth it. Though I think it is worth noting that in the DEC review of the pertinent geology that comes from their SGEIS, they state that in at least New York, the Marcellus and Utica shales underlie the areas of lowest seismic risk.
The DoE also makes a point of separating the induced seismicity associated with fluid injection and extraction from hydraulic fracturing:
I think the crux of this issue becomes the phrase "to our knowledge." With what data and studies are available, it seems this is not something to be overly concerned about. However, I think a good argument can also be made in regards to needing more knowledge and more research. At this time, since the practice of hydraulic fracturing is in many ways proprietary and also exempt from government oversight, that makes the study of it in regards to environmental impacts difficult. I think that an NPR story on this topic sums it up nicely:
At this time, it's not something that could be directly proven or disproven. Off the top of my head, I think there are experiments that could be conducted that could tell us if:
a) Is there groundwater pollution associated with fracturing fluid?
b) Is this contamination associated with surface pollution or with the underground process?
For example, if you could add an inert "tracer" compound to fracturing fluid, you could then check if contaminated water had that tracer in it. As far as discerning between surface contamination and subsurface contamination, that might be more difficult. Though I imagine geologists who know far more about hydrology than I do may be able to determine the source just by looking at how quickly the contamination showed up. If you have contamination showing up in a reservoir two days after a nearby well has been fractured (and our mythical tracer compound shows it was from that well) then the next question is if a subsurface fracture could have possibly delivered fluid that quickly; if not, the more likely culprit is surface run off from an accident or inadequately observed safety practices.
Either way, this is all very pie in the sky. I'll be interested to see more on this subject as more data is collected.
As a final note, the Department of Energy Induced seismicity primer is honestly a fascinating read in and of itself and I'd highly recommend it. I also recommend the New York Department of Environmental Conservation report that I linked to above as well, since it's also a very good historical overview. The DEC also has a review of the pertinent geology that comes from their SGEIS that's definitely worth a read. There is also a good description of the drilling process and equipment used from the SGEIS, which also includes a look at slickwater fracturing as used in the development of the Marcellus Shale.
Edit: An anonymous comment was left rather incongruously my post about Heene being sentenced. The commenter left a link for another bit of good reading on this topic, however: Impact Assessment of Natural Gas Production in the New York City Water Supply Watershed. The report covers quite a bit about the underlying fractures/faulting that was not in the other reports I read.
One thing I've noticed so far in researching is that papers that could answer that concern are few and far between. Looking at both GeoRef and GeoScience World, many reference hits are to expanded abstracts from meetings, and most of those are related to the effects of horizontal drilling on reservoir development rather than environmental impact. The EPA is also unhelpful on the topic; as the practice of hydraulic fracturing has been excluded from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA isn't in a position to look in to the safety from an environmental standpoint. The one study they have done relates to coal bed methane. In their coal bed methane study, the EPA concludes:
Although potentially hazardous chemicals may be introduced into USDWs when fracturing fluids are injected into coal seams that lie within USDWs, the risk posed to USDWs by introduction of these chemicals is reduced significantly by groundwater production and injected fluid recovery, combined with the mitigating effects of dilution and dispersion, adsorption, and potentially biodegradation. Additionally, EPA has reached an agreement with the major service companies to voluntarily eliminate diesel fuel from hydraulic fracturing fluids that are injected directly into USDWs for coalbed methane production.
However, that said, the coal bed methane situation is arguably not quite the same, since most coal beds used in that study were fairly shallow, and many in direct "communication" with adjacent formations or aquifers. As a side geological note, coal layers can often act as barriers to fluid (such as hydrocarbons) flow from lower formations to upper formations, since they're only really permeable via fractures. Also, the conclusions have been called in to question in 2004 by an EPA employee named Weston Wilson:
While EPA's report concludes this practice poses little or no threat to underground sources of drinking water, based on the available science and literature, EPA's conclusions are unsupportable. EPA has conducted limited research reaching the unsupported conclusion that this industry practice needs no further study at this time. EPA decisions were supported by a Peer Review Panel; however five of the seven members of this panel appear to have conflicts-of-interest and may benefit from EPA's decision not to conduct further investigation or impose regulatory conditions.
An apparent conflict of interest is certainly something to look in to. I found one site that said Mr. Wilson's concerns were considered valid enough to prompt further investigation, though I have no idea if that investigation occurred or what the conclusion turned out to be. So I think for now, we'll skip the coal bed methane study.
The commenter made two points that I looked in to, which I've paraphrased here:
1) That the fractures made by hydraulic fracturing can extend further than intended, and in to different zones than are desired, possibly putting the aquifer at risk.
I tend to think that subsurface, technically anything is possible; geophysics is a difficult field (certainly not one I've mastered) since the conditions are uncontrolled and it's nigh impossible to know what the underground stress field is like precisely or what zones of weakness/minor faults may also exist. So is it possibly that a fracture created in a deep zone could "go rogue" (oh, I feel dirty just typing those words!) and go 4,000 feet up in to an aquifer? Possible, yes, but I would venture to say highly unlikely and would probably require an existing network of fractures/faults to do. The EPA coal bed methane study does actually say one thing of use about this matter, which holds true even if we're not talking coal bed methane:
A hydraulic fracture will propagate perpendicularly to the minimum principal stress. In some shallow formations, the least principal stress is the overburden stress; thus, the hydraulic fracture will be horizontal. In deeper reservoirs, the least principal stress will likely be horizontal; thus, the hydraulic fracture will be vertical.
Basically, the generic stress you'd expect in a deep formation would cause the fractures to tend to propagate upward. However, the general stress field will change as you approach the surface, and there are going to be other stress factors that may redirect fractures along the way. Intervening formations with different properties and different zones of weakness also have an important effect. A basin is in no way homogeneous vertically - and often formations will change their properties over horizontal distance as well. The New York Department of Environmental Conservation SGEIS report is a little more specific:
ICF – citing PTTC, 2006 – concludes that: “In the Appalachian Basin, the stress state would be expected to lead to predominantly vertical fractures below about 2500 feet, with a tendency towards horizontal fractures at shallower depths.”
Depending on the depth of the aquifer, this conclusion makes the propagation of a vertical fracture in to it seem fairly unlikely.
At this point, the best that can be done is computer modeling, which has become increasingly sophisticated - though it can always be argued of course that we lack perfect knowledge of sub surface conditions. However, the fact of the matter is that it's in the best interest of the people fracturing the formation to prevent such wild fracture propagation from happening. Going outside the intended zone tends to mean getting a lot of unintended fluid - normally salt water - which has to be separated and disposed of, not something that is cheap or convenient to do.
The New York Department of Environmental Conservation has a report that's an overview of the historical and current practice of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing here. I think the authors of the report make a valid point by stating:
Not only is fracture growth outside of the target formation discouraged relative to the potential of reduced production by production of fluids from non-productive zones, creating fracture size outside of the productive interval is more expensive and less cost beneficial to the well’s economics.
The DEC SGEIS also quotes ICF again in noting:
• The developable shale formations are vertically separated from potential freshwater aquifers by at least 1,000 feet of sandstones and shales of
moderate to low permeability.
• The amount of time that fluids are pumped under pressure into the target formation is orders of magnitude less than the time that would be required for fluids to travel through 1,000 feet of low-permeability rock.
• The volume of fluid used to fracture a well could only fill a small percentage of the void space between the shale and the aquifer.
• Any flow of fracturing fluid toward an aquifer through open fractures or an unplugged wellbore would be reversed during flowback, with any residual fluid further flushed by flow from the aquifer to the production zone as pressures decline in the reservoir during production.
These factors point to groundwater contamination without wild fractures going a thousand or more feet farther than intended being highly unlikely as well.
At this point, the question of the threat that the fracturing practice has on the ground water becomes a cost/benefit analysis. It's in the best economic interest of the company developing the well to model their fractures properly to ensure that they do not move out of the intended zone. But it's also fair to argue that modeling is imperfect and that the most bizarre accidents can happen. Is that amount of risk worth the economic benefit?
2) Horizontal wells carry a greater risk of inducing harmful seismic activity which can cause an array of problems.
I'm actually already familiar with the concept of just plain old vertical wells inducing seismic activity; I doubt horizontal wells would be at all different. It's certainly not a new concept. Most of the reading I've done on this subject relates to disposal wells; in particular there was a case in Colorado where a deep disposal well was lubricating nearby faults and causing them to reactivate. The seismic activity in these cases is generally pretty low level (0 to 3 on the Richter Scale) and mostly an argument for being careful where one puts one's disposal wells - and for not overpressurizing them.
Subsidence is another matter that goes with the extraction of any fluid from a reservoir. With the reservoir losing pressure and volume with the removal of fluid, it can compact, which destroys reservoir permeability and causes subsidence. Subsidence also occurs and is a significant threat when aquifers are overused for drinking water. Basically, any time fluid is taken out of the ground and not replaced, there will be subsidence. From the US Department of Energy:
The most famous early instance was in Wilmington, California, where the oil production triggered a series of damaging earthquakes. In this instance the cause of the seismicity was traced to subsidence due to rapid extraction of oil without replacement of fluids. Once this was realized the oil extraction was balanced with water injection to mitigate the seismicity. Ever since then the oil and gas industry has adopted these practices to mitigate seismicity , but also mitigate damage to the oil wells in the producing field (wells would be sheared off in the subsurface as subsidence occurred).
The practice of reinjecting fluid isn't exactly perfect - if nothing else there are cases where the replacement fluid can't be returned to the right location and overpressurization can occur.
With the reading, I've done, I tend to agree with the DoE assessment:
Overall the impact of induced seismicity on the implementation of various different energy recovery and or disposal activities will depend on the risk associated with the activity and the cost-benefit ratio. All experience to date has shown that the risk, while not zero, has been either minimal or can be handled in a cost effective manner.
So once again, this comes to a question of cost/benefit analysis. Are the possible seismic dangers present worth the economic benefit? Are the means by which the concern about subsidence good enough at mitigating the problem? Since we live in a less than perfect world, it becomes a personal choice if the mitigation of the risk makes the development of the resource worth it. Though I think it is worth noting that in the DEC review of the pertinent geology that comes from their SGEIS, they state that in at least New York, the Marcellus and Utica shales underlie the areas of lowest seismic risk.
The DoE also makes a point of separating the induced seismicity associated with fluid injection and extraction from hydraulic fracturing:
Hydrofracturing is distinct from many types of induced seismicity because hydrofracturing is by definition only created when the forces applied create a type of fracture called a “tensile” fracture, creating a “driven” fracture... To our knowledge hydrofracturing to intentionally create permeability rarely creates unwanted induced seismicity large enough to be detected on the surface with very sensitive sensors, let alone be a hazard or annoyance.
I think the crux of this issue becomes the phrase "to our knowledge." With what data and studies are available, it seems this is not something to be overly concerned about. However, I think a good argument can also be made in regards to needing more knowledge and more research. At this time, since the practice of hydraulic fracturing is in many ways proprietary and also exempt from government oversight, that makes the study of it in regards to environmental impacts difficult. I think that an NPR story on this topic sums it up nicely:
Critics of hydraulic fracturing suspect that the chemicals used in the process have somehow leaked into the groundwater supply. It has been difficult, however, to demonstrate a direct connection between these apparent instances of water pollution and the hydraulic fracturing procedures that have taken place nearby...It is also true, however, that state regulators have not been able to disprove a connection between hydraulic fracturing and water contamination.
At this time, it's not something that could be directly proven or disproven. Off the top of my head, I think there are experiments that could be conducted that could tell us if:
a) Is there groundwater pollution associated with fracturing fluid?
b) Is this contamination associated with surface pollution or with the underground process?
For example, if you could add an inert "tracer" compound to fracturing fluid, you could then check if contaminated water had that tracer in it. As far as discerning between surface contamination and subsurface contamination, that might be more difficult. Though I imagine geologists who know far more about hydrology than I do may be able to determine the source just by looking at how quickly the contamination showed up. If you have contamination showing up in a reservoir two days after a nearby well has been fractured (and our mythical tracer compound shows it was from that well) then the next question is if a subsurface fracture could have possibly delivered fluid that quickly; if not, the more likely culprit is surface run off from an accident or inadequately observed safety practices.
Either way, this is all very pie in the sky. I'll be interested to see more on this subject as more data is collected.
As a final note, the Department of Energy Induced seismicity primer is honestly a fascinating read in and of itself and I'd highly recommend it. I also recommend the New York Department of Environmental Conservation report that I linked to above as well, since it's also a very good historical overview. The DEC also has a review of the pertinent geology that comes from their SGEIS that's definitely worth a read. There is also a good description of the drilling process and equipment used from the SGEIS, which also includes a look at slickwater fracturing as used in the development of the Marcellus Shale.
Edit: An anonymous comment was left rather incongruously my post about Heene being sentenced. The commenter left a link for another bit of good reading on this topic, however: Impact Assessment of Natural Gas Production in the New York City Water Supply Watershed. The report covers quite a bit about the underlying fractures/faulting that was not in the other reports I read.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Hydraulic fracturing
I hadn't actually heard about the proposed regulation to subject hydraulic fracturing to the Safe Drinking Water Act. I suppose I've been too inundated with the entire horrific healthcare mess to hear much of anything else. I don't have any problems with Congresswoman DeGette's proposal - and I'm not just saying that because I voted for her.
Hydraulic fracturing is something that's actually been in use for quite some time in the United States - at this point, a little bit over fifty years. Obviously, length of use doesn't necessarily say anything about a practice's safety; there are plenty of industrial practices that have been in use for far longer that do not-nice things to the environment and to people. I mostly point this out because by now, the practice is ubiquitous in the industry. When I started working for my company* as a temp four years ago, some of the first reports I ever read detailed how formations were being fractured.
The basic one sentence explanation in the article is fair enough, but I'd like to go in to just a little more detail about the what and why. Most fluids that we're interested in getting out of rocks (water, oil, natural gas) are locked in sedimentary rocks**. We're used to thinking of rocks as very solid things; the fact of it is, many of them are surprisingly un-solid. There are two very significant properties to these sedimentary rocks that determines how hard it's going to be to extract the fluid.
The first is porosity - just how much "air space" there is in a rock. (Picture here) These spaces in the rock are basically the gaps between the grains that have been cemented together to form the rock. The higher the porosity of the rock, the more of your fluid of interest it can contain.
The second important quality is permeability - just how interconnected are the spaces in the rock? For example, a rock could potentially be quite porous, but if each of the spaces in it are completely isolated, it would be impossible for fluid to flow through the rock.
Permeability is a nice quality for a reservoir rock to have. If you want to get fluid out of that rock and it's nice and permeable, often all you really have to do is drill down into the rock and then let the pressure differential do the work for you. The fluid in the rock will be under a lot more pressure than what's in the well, so the liquid will just move on its own. But if a rock's not very permeable, that fluid flow doesn't happen easily because there just aren't many paths for the fluid to travel. Rocks like that are referred to as "tight."
Enter hydraulic fracturing. At its most basic, you just pump a lot of water and sand down in to a formation, under high pressure. The water finds zones of weakness in the formation and fractures them further; the sand keeps the fractures open. The end result is the creation of a lot more paths through which fluid can move through the formation and in to your well. However, there's also the addition of a lot of chemicals to the fracturing process, many of which are included to help keep the sand from clumping up and clogging the fractures that you've just made.
For the most part, I don't see a lot of problems with the basic practice of hydraulic fracturing. (Not on the table for discussion at the moment: the basic practice of using fossil fuels.) It aides in production - sometimes making it possible to produce from formations that would otherwise not produce at all - and ups the amount of fluid recovery. Most of the time, oil and gas producing formations are far deeper than the water table and properly done fracturing shouldn't intrude anywhere near it. That said, a lot of the time you're drilling through an aquifer to get where you need to go, or more importantly, fluid spills can occur at the surface or nasty things may find a way to escape waste pits. Even if you've got the most environmentally conscious and careful drilling company in the world, accidents can happen and should not be ignored. It doesn't take too many mistakes to harm an aquifer and potentially hurt all of the people who rely on it for their water.
In my rather inexpert opinion (and from the news articles I've read thus far) the main problem with fracturing doesn't seem to be the process in the ground, but rather spills and waste collection at the surface. Thus, I don't think banning hydraulic fracturing would necessarily solve the basic problem, which at this point appears to be surface safety, and would quite possibly have an adverse effect on the natural gas market***. If there's real, substantiated concern (which there seems to be) over contamination of ground water, then the Safe Drinking Water Act no doubt has something to say about it. Though I am also forced to wonder if adding another layer of regulation will do much good if current safe practice requirements are not being properly enforced.
Side note: There's quite the collection of links for groundwater contamination news stories at the site NoFracking.com. I used the site as a link mine to see what contamination complaints/news was out there rather than as an informational source.
* I am an intern at an oil company. My opinions are not in any way the opinions of my company.
** Some times you'll get water out of an igneous/metamorphic rock because it's seeped in to fractures from the surface, or from an underlaying sedimentary reservoir. We won't worry about that here.
*** Your mileage on this may vary, depending on how worried you are about the price of natural gas versus the possibility of finding some extremely scary chemicals in your drinking water.
Hydraulic fracturing is something that's actually been in use for quite some time in the United States - at this point, a little bit over fifty years. Obviously, length of use doesn't necessarily say anything about a practice's safety; there are plenty of industrial practices that have been in use for far longer that do not-nice things to the environment and to people. I mostly point this out because by now, the practice is ubiquitous in the industry. When I started working for my company* as a temp four years ago, some of the first reports I ever read detailed how formations were being fractured.
The basic one sentence explanation in the article is fair enough, but I'd like to go in to just a little more detail about the what and why. Most fluids that we're interested in getting out of rocks (water, oil, natural gas) are locked in sedimentary rocks**. We're used to thinking of rocks as very solid things; the fact of it is, many of them are surprisingly un-solid. There are two very significant properties to these sedimentary rocks that determines how hard it's going to be to extract the fluid.
The first is porosity - just how much "air space" there is in a rock. (Picture here) These spaces in the rock are basically the gaps between the grains that have been cemented together to form the rock. The higher the porosity of the rock, the more of your fluid of interest it can contain.
The second important quality is permeability - just how interconnected are the spaces in the rock? For example, a rock could potentially be quite porous, but if each of the spaces in it are completely isolated, it would be impossible for fluid to flow through the rock.
Permeability is a nice quality for a reservoir rock to have. If you want to get fluid out of that rock and it's nice and permeable, often all you really have to do is drill down into the rock and then let the pressure differential do the work for you. The fluid in the rock will be under a lot more pressure than what's in the well, so the liquid will just move on its own. But if a rock's not very permeable, that fluid flow doesn't happen easily because there just aren't many paths for the fluid to travel. Rocks like that are referred to as "tight."
Enter hydraulic fracturing. At its most basic, you just pump a lot of water and sand down in to a formation, under high pressure. The water finds zones of weakness in the formation and fractures them further; the sand keeps the fractures open. The end result is the creation of a lot more paths through which fluid can move through the formation and in to your well. However, there's also the addition of a lot of chemicals to the fracturing process, many of which are included to help keep the sand from clumping up and clogging the fractures that you've just made.
For the most part, I don't see a lot of problems with the basic practice of hydraulic fracturing. (Not on the table for discussion at the moment: the basic practice of using fossil fuels.) It aides in production - sometimes making it possible to produce from formations that would otherwise not produce at all - and ups the amount of fluid recovery. Most of the time, oil and gas producing formations are far deeper than the water table and properly done fracturing shouldn't intrude anywhere near it. That said, a lot of the time you're drilling through an aquifer to get where you need to go, or more importantly, fluid spills can occur at the surface or nasty things may find a way to escape waste pits. Even if you've got the most environmentally conscious and careful drilling company in the world, accidents can happen and should not be ignored. It doesn't take too many mistakes to harm an aquifer and potentially hurt all of the people who rely on it for their water.
In my rather inexpert opinion (and from the news articles I've read thus far) the main problem with fracturing doesn't seem to be the process in the ground, but rather spills and waste collection at the surface. Thus, I don't think banning hydraulic fracturing would necessarily solve the basic problem, which at this point appears to be surface safety, and would quite possibly have an adverse effect on the natural gas market***. If there's real, substantiated concern (which there seems to be) over contamination of ground water, then the Safe Drinking Water Act no doubt has something to say about it. Though I am also forced to wonder if adding another layer of regulation will do much good if current safe practice requirements are not being properly enforced.
Side note: There's quite the collection of links for groundwater contamination news stories at the site NoFracking.com. I used the site as a link mine to see what contamination complaints/news was out there rather than as an informational source.
* I am an intern at an oil company. My opinions are not in any way the opinions of my company.
** Some times you'll get water out of an igneous/metamorphic rock because it's seeped in to fractures from the surface, or from an underlaying sedimentary reservoir. We won't worry about that here.
*** Your mileage on this may vary, depending on how worried you are about the price of natural gas versus the possibility of finding some extremely scary chemicals in your drinking water.
Local: Heene gets the book thrown at him
Richard and Mayumi Heene got sentences this morning for wasting everyone's time with their balloon hoax. (See here for a reminder if you've somehow forgotten that glorious week in October for which the highlight was video of a six-year-old boy vomiting on national TV.) The jail sentences are fairly light (Richard Heene is going to spend 30 days in jail full time only) but the couple is also being hit with mountain bills from the various local, state, and federal agencies that had their time wasted by this stupid bid for public attention. Per the article, the bill is currently sitting at $47,000, and could go up.
I think the judge for the case put it best:
Obviously the legal system in Colorado isn't taking this one lightly. It'd be nice if Judge Schapanski could say similar stern things to, say, Peckman (he of the UFO commission ballot initiative) but I suppose wasting a lot of public time and money isn't illegal if you're just a deluded (yet arguably honest) crank.
I think the judge for the case put it best:
"In summary," Schapanski said in imposing Richard Heene's sentence, "what this case is about is deception, exploitation — exploitation of the children of the Heenes, exploitation of the media and exploitation of people's emotions — and money."
Obviously the legal system in Colorado isn't taking this one lightly. It'd be nice if Judge Schapanski could say similar stern things to, say, Peckman (he of the UFO commission ballot initiative) but I suppose wasting a lot of public time and money isn't illegal if you're just a deluded (yet arguably honest) crank.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Skeptics and Science
Daniel Loxton has written an interesting post over at Skepticblog about the role of skeptics in science. There's quite the lively discussion going on in the comments of the post, as you can imagine.
For the most part, I agree with him. I'm in an interesting position as a skeptic with just enough science education (woohoo, undergrad degree!) to make me dangerous, so to speak. I find it fascinating that the skeptic movement has come up swinging when it comes to evolution denial, whether in the form of Intelligent Design or good old Creationism, but seems to be chasing its own tail when it comes to the science surrounding climate change. Now, I think part of the problem here is that the climate science is relatively new - at least in our understanding of it - compared to evolution, or geology, or medicine. Part of it may even be the subconscious realization that the climate science is saying something very scary about the way we live and the future that may be in store for us. I've honestly found it rather infuriating.
This actually makes me think of the little speech that Dr. Farmer gave at the department graduation last week. He told us that part of the importance of having our degrees is that it means we don't have to take anyone's word for it. We have the tools necessary to think for ourselves. Now, I'm sure this sentiment could be interpreted as something that supports the climate change deniers, for example. They're just refusing to take the scientists' word for it. Fight the power!
I couldn't disagree with that more.
Having critical thinking skills and an understanding of basic science doesn't mean that within us all is the power to take raw data and interpret is perfectly, or come to a reliable expert opinion after staring at tide gauge graphs for a couple of hours. What it does mean is that we don't have to take, say, Al Gore's word that climate change is a real thing and is happening. Rather, because we know how science works, we know where to go looking for the papers and the research. We can find a reliable body of experts in their field, such as the IPCC, because we know what sort of methodology and review are indicative of robust research.
This leads to how I often respond to just about any scientific issue that doesn't involve geology (and many that do, since I'm certainly no expert); well, I don't know enough to have my own opinion, but these other guys (e.g. the IPCC) have some good credentials and evidence, so I've got to go with them. The real pitfall here is that it's very easy to get caught in the same trap as Randi did with the "Petition Project." Some denialists are quite well camouflaged, and when they're saying what you'd like to hear anyway, it becomes something of a siren song. Determining just who you ought to be listening to because you lack the necessary scientific background on your own is a gargantuan skeptical task in and of itself.
Skepticism works best when we're going after pseudoscience because pseudoscience is at its heart bullshit lovingly dressed up in a lab coat. It takes twenty minutes on Google to become an expert (so to speak) on why homeopathy is crap because the base claim is so ridiculous in the face of reality. Psuedoscience and the paranormal often have only a lack of critical thinking or a dearth of common knowledge to support them; we bring in the "big guns" of basic scientific thought, and we win. The only expertise you need for these fights is in the field of critical and scientific thinking.
Once you get in to something like climate science, however, it's time to admit that just one's expertise at being a skeptic is no longer sufficient. When you're wading in to a scientific field hip deep, you actually need expertise in that field to understand its subtleties and its messy parts, its strange interpretations and incredibly counter intuitive bits. At that point, whether you like it or not, you start relying on consensus and experts in the field. Or, I suppose, you can start sounding like an arrogant jerk who thinks that he understands tidal fluctuations when coupled with changes in the Earth's geoid better than some schmoe who just (psh, whatever) did his PhD in it.
Critical thinking skills don't give you the expertise to interpret data in a field that you haven't been trained in. But it does give you the ability to detect that whiff of bullshit on the wind when an anti-vaccinationist waves around a study with a pathetically small sample size and some very dubious methodology in it. To rephrase what Dr. Farmer had to say, having a good science education means discerning just whose word is worth taking.
For the most part, I agree with him. I'm in an interesting position as a skeptic with just enough science education (woohoo, undergrad degree!) to make me dangerous, so to speak. I find it fascinating that the skeptic movement has come up swinging when it comes to evolution denial, whether in the form of Intelligent Design or good old Creationism, but seems to be chasing its own tail when it comes to the science surrounding climate change. Now, I think part of the problem here is that the climate science is relatively new - at least in our understanding of it - compared to evolution, or geology, or medicine. Part of it may even be the subconscious realization that the climate science is saying something very scary about the way we live and the future that may be in store for us. I've honestly found it rather infuriating.
This actually makes me think of the little speech that Dr. Farmer gave at the department graduation last week. He told us that part of the importance of having our degrees is that it means we don't have to take anyone's word for it. We have the tools necessary to think for ourselves. Now, I'm sure this sentiment could be interpreted as something that supports the climate change deniers, for example. They're just refusing to take the scientists' word for it. Fight the power!
I couldn't disagree with that more.
Having critical thinking skills and an understanding of basic science doesn't mean that within us all is the power to take raw data and interpret is perfectly, or come to a reliable expert opinion after staring at tide gauge graphs for a couple of hours. What it does mean is that we don't have to take, say, Al Gore's word that climate change is a real thing and is happening. Rather, because we know how science works, we know where to go looking for the papers and the research. We can find a reliable body of experts in their field, such as the IPCC, because we know what sort of methodology and review are indicative of robust research.
This leads to how I often respond to just about any scientific issue that doesn't involve geology (and many that do, since I'm certainly no expert); well, I don't know enough to have my own opinion, but these other guys (e.g. the IPCC) have some good credentials and evidence, so I've got to go with them. The real pitfall here is that it's very easy to get caught in the same trap as Randi did with the "Petition Project." Some denialists are quite well camouflaged, and when they're saying what you'd like to hear anyway, it becomes something of a siren song. Determining just who you ought to be listening to because you lack the necessary scientific background on your own is a gargantuan skeptical task in and of itself.
Skepticism works best when we're going after pseudoscience because pseudoscience is at its heart bullshit lovingly dressed up in a lab coat. It takes twenty minutes on Google to become an expert (so to speak) on why homeopathy is crap because the base claim is so ridiculous in the face of reality. Psuedoscience and the paranormal often have only a lack of critical thinking or a dearth of common knowledge to support them; we bring in the "big guns" of basic scientific thought, and we win. The only expertise you need for these fights is in the field of critical and scientific thinking.
Once you get in to something like climate science, however, it's time to admit that just one's expertise at being a skeptic is no longer sufficient. When you're wading in to a scientific field hip deep, you actually need expertise in that field to understand its subtleties and its messy parts, its strange interpretations and incredibly counter intuitive bits. At that point, whether you like it or not, you start relying on consensus and experts in the field. Or, I suppose, you can start sounding like an arrogant jerk who thinks that he understands tidal fluctuations when coupled with changes in the Earth's geoid better than some schmoe who just (psh, whatever) did his PhD in it.
Critical thinking skills don't give you the expertise to interpret data in a field that you haven't been trained in. But it does give you the ability to detect that whiff of bullshit on the wind when an anti-vaccinationist waves around a study with a pathetically small sample size and some very dubious methodology in it. To rephrase what Dr. Farmer had to say, having a good science education means discerning just whose word is worth taking.
Monday, December 21, 2009
US earth science education survey
Done by AGI, looking at Earth Science education from state to state.
I'm guessing that the colors of the various states on the map don't have a specific meaning, since there's no key. However, you can click on a state on the map (or in the list) to see what states require earth sciences education in public schools, what percentage of students in selected grades are taking earth sciences courses, and other information. I haven't looked through all of the states, but I'm finding the numbers depressingly low. Then again, I suppose when you've only got the kids in high school for four years at the most, and are only on average requiring two years of science education, earth sciences gets trumped by chemistry and biology. That's certainly what it was like in my high school - everyone took some form of chemistry and biology, and then you went on to physics if you were the sort of alpha geek that didn't mind being in to school at seven in the morning so you could listen to the world's most boring teacher drone on about algebra-based physics**. Maybe one reason is that chemistry and biology are more "general," particularly chemistry since just about any other science you could go on to in college will require basic chemistry. Or it could just be that given limited time, chemistry and biology are more "important."
Still, I think geology is rather important, since it's about the world around us and how it came to be. And what kid doesn't love watching videos of volcanoes exploding? Though I also wonder if the reason that geology as a field hasn't suffered too many major attacks by the religious fringe is because it's not exactly a major component of the high school curriculum like biology is.
** - As one of those snobs that did my two semesters of physics on the calculus-based side, I really don't get the point of algebra-based physics. I suppose the math is technically easier, but considering that calculus was effectively developed in order to describe physics, it also makes a lot less sense. At least in my thinking, Difficult Concepts in Physics + Math That Makes No Sense =/= The Easy Way Out.
I'm guessing that the colors of the various states on the map don't have a specific meaning, since there's no key. However, you can click on a state on the map (or in the list) to see what states require earth sciences education in public schools, what percentage of students in selected grades are taking earth sciences courses, and other information. I haven't looked through all of the states, but I'm finding the numbers depressingly low. Then again, I suppose when you've only got the kids in high school for four years at the most, and are only on average requiring two years of science education, earth sciences gets trumped by chemistry and biology. That's certainly what it was like in my high school - everyone took some form of chemistry and biology, and then you went on to physics if you were the sort of alpha geek that didn't mind being in to school at seven in the morning so you could listen to the world's most boring teacher drone on about algebra-based physics**. Maybe one reason is that chemistry and biology are more "general," particularly chemistry since just about any other science you could go on to in college will require basic chemistry. Or it could just be that given limited time, chemistry and biology are more "important."
Still, I think geology is rather important, since it's about the world around us and how it came to be. And what kid doesn't love watching videos of volcanoes exploding? Though I also wonder if the reason that geology as a field hasn't suffered too many major attacks by the religious fringe is because it's not exactly a major component of the high school curriculum like biology is.
** - As one of those snobs that did my two semesters of physics on the calculus-based side, I really don't get the point of algebra-based physics. I suppose the math is technically easier, but considering that calculus was effectively developed in order to describe physics, it also makes a lot less sense. At least in my thinking, Difficult Concepts in Physics + Math That Makes No Sense =/= The Easy Way Out.
A volcano for Monday
Excellent video of an undersea volcano eruption.
After eating two tacos from Jack in the Box last night at our Paranoia game, this is about how my stomach still feels. At the tender age of not quite thirty, I am apparently now officially too old to (a) handle greasy food even if I have six hours before bedtime to digest it, and (b) weasel my way out of a hangover, as I discovered yesterday morning. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids.
Also, I cannot recommend the Onion's look back on the last 4.5 billion years enough.
After eating two tacos from Jack in the Box last night at our Paranoia game, this is about how my stomach still feels. At the tender age of not quite thirty, I am apparently now officially too old to (a) handle greasy food even if I have six hours before bedtime to digest it, and (b) weasel my way out of a hangover, as I discovered yesterday morning. Enjoy it while it lasts, kids.
Also, I cannot recommend the Onion's look back on the last 4.5 billion years enough.
Friday, December 18, 2009
And by the way (...bitch?)
Graduation was lovely. Dr. Lang Farmer is the department head now, so he gave a fairly brief little speech. He really emphasized how important our degrees are, not because of the knowledge that we've learned to earn them, but because we've presumably also learned to think about things critically and to not accept facts at face value. He made an incredibly good point about the importance of critical thinking, and how training in the earth sciences field gives us a foundation for that sort of thinking.
So I got to stand at the front of the auditorium with my nine other undergrads and get a little applause, as well as a pretty diploma cover and a nice coffee mug. I've been in at least one class with each of the guys I graduated with; it was an odd thing to notice, since I'll be surprised if I see any of them again any time soon.
Celebration dinner is tomorrow, and after that all I can really do is wait for my grades to finish posting, then see what the two schools I applied at for graduate study have to say.
As for the last bit of my post title, I just heard about Senator Schumer mouthing off to a flight attendant, then calling her a "bitch" under his breath. That was a jerky thing for him to do, and I hope he makes a proper apology. That would be a jerky thing for any man to do, regardless of his politics. I could go in to more detail about the language issue, but Dan has made the point much better than I could. I tend to believe that words only have the power that you choose to give them**; on the other hand, you simply cannot ignore the historical baggage that goes with a word, or the way the rest of the culture understands it. The "porch monkey" scene from Clerks 2 springs instantly to mind.
** Though this admittedly operates as an excuse for the fact that I curse like a sailor at the slightest provocation.
So I got to stand at the front of the auditorium with my nine other undergrads and get a little applause, as well as a pretty diploma cover and a nice coffee mug. I've been in at least one class with each of the guys I graduated with; it was an odd thing to notice, since I'll be surprised if I see any of them again any time soon.
Celebration dinner is tomorrow, and after that all I can really do is wait for my grades to finish posting, then see what the two schools I applied at for graduate study have to say.
As for the last bit of my post title, I just heard about Senator Schumer mouthing off to a flight attendant, then calling her a "bitch" under his breath. That was a jerky thing for him to do, and I hope he makes a proper apology. That would be a jerky thing for any man to do, regardless of his politics. I could go in to more detail about the language issue, but Dan has made the point much better than I could. I tend to believe that words only have the power that you choose to give them**; on the other hand, you simply cannot ignore the historical baggage that goes with a word, or the way the rest of the culture understands it. The "porch monkey" scene from Clerks 2 springs instantly to mind.
** Though this admittedly operates as an excuse for the fact that I curse like a sailor at the slightest provocation.
Trilobites
I love the little critters. Not enough that I'd ever be willing to be a paleontologist, but enough that I thoroughly enjoyed Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution when Mike's dad recommended it to me. Particularly when viewed from the top, they look like such friendly little critters, and it's a shame that we can only be acquainted with them in fossil form now.
The first fossil I ever owned was a tiny but perfect trilobite in a piece of gray shale. I bought it during a family vacation when I was in grade school, I want to say, and I still have it now. I just don't have anywhere I can display it that won't allow the Bad Kitty to throw it on the floor whenever he's feeling grumpy.
Anyway, this site is quite cool, and all about trilobites. There's even a page dealing with fossil abnormalities that indicate disease or recovery from injury, which is pretty neat.
The first fossil I ever owned was a tiny but perfect trilobite in a piece of gray shale. I bought it during a family vacation when I was in grade school, I want to say, and I still have it now. I just don't have anywhere I can display it that won't allow the Bad Kitty to throw it on the floor whenever he's feeling grumpy.
Anyway, this site is quite cool, and all about trilobites. There's even a page dealing with fossil abnormalities that indicate disease or recovery from injury, which is pretty neat.
Graduation Eve
I only just realized that I missed my regular Wednesday posting date; I apologize. This was finals week, and things have been a bit strange and hectic. I did my last final on Tuesday, but on Wednesday there were holiday packages to mail, and many a thing to check and double check to make sure I'd be ready for Friday. For tomorrow, at this point. Well, today, actually, since it's a few minutes after midnight as I write this.
I'm graduating with my BA in Geology (second major in Japanese Language and Culture) tomorrow at around 11. I'm excited, to be sure. I'm off the hook for school, at least for one semester. No homework! No early classes! I can read what I want! I may even have some extra cash on hand since I can work more, though most of it needs to go toward the wedding.
A bit of it, I'm not sure how I feel about, though. I haven't graduated from anything since I was in High School. I've elected this time around to not wear the funny robe and hat, since I just can't get myself excited about being one face among hundreds in a stadium. I'll be going to my department graduation, of course. And after? Well, I've put in my grad school applications; I imagine I'll find out if I'm going to be going back to school in a month or two. What if I don't? What if I do?
It's funny, but you'd think someone less than a year away from being thirty would know what she's going to do with the rest of her life. The more grown-up I become, though, the more I'm beginning to realize the dirty little secret of being grown-up. Older may mean a little more experienced, maybe even a little wiser, but as you slowly count the days by, the change is so small, so incremental that you never notice the difference until it's been ten years and you're wondering what the hell you were thinking when you were 19. I'm a different person than I was when I graduated high school, yet also still the same.
The end of an eleven year journey didn't fill me with a sudden strong sense of my life calling. It's really just left me with an incredibly expensive bit of paper and the same questions I've always faced. What do I want to be when I grow up? What am I good at? (Too many things, if I'm being honest with myself, to be willing to just pick one and stick with it.) Where will I be in another ten years? I don't have any better idea now than I did when I was 18 or 19. And this expensive paper, this degree, what does it actually mean? To be honest, I don't feel smarter than when I started out. Maybe now I know what various sedimentary structures look like, or the significance of the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, or what Gender Queer Theory is, but knowledge has never been the same as wisdom. I may know more things, but I still approach many problems and wonders with a profound since of puzzlement, and deep down I'm still just as worried that this time, I may not figure out the solution.
Some small part of me wants to be afraid at this thought, because so many people my age and older make it look easy. They have plans. Some wanted to get married, some wanted careers, some wanted a family. Some knew what careers they wanted and got themselves there. Some knew what careers they wanted and didn't. But I also know that I'm not alone, because we all have doubts, and I think that beneath the surface of any confident person that hasn't crept across that terrible dividing line into the realm of the fanatic, there's still that uncertainty, that question.
What do I want to be when I grow up? I still don't know. Maybe in another ten years, I will. Or the ten years after that... or the ten years after that...
I'm graduating with my BA in Geology (second major in Japanese Language and Culture) tomorrow at around 11. I'm excited, to be sure. I'm off the hook for school, at least for one semester. No homework! No early classes! I can read what I want! I may even have some extra cash on hand since I can work more, though most of it needs to go toward the wedding.
A bit of it, I'm not sure how I feel about, though. I haven't graduated from anything since I was in High School. I've elected this time around to not wear the funny robe and hat, since I just can't get myself excited about being one face among hundreds in a stadium. I'll be going to my department graduation, of course. And after? Well, I've put in my grad school applications; I imagine I'll find out if I'm going to be going back to school in a month or two. What if I don't? What if I do?
It's funny, but you'd think someone less than a year away from being thirty would know what she's going to do with the rest of her life. The more grown-up I become, though, the more I'm beginning to realize the dirty little secret of being grown-up. Older may mean a little more experienced, maybe even a little wiser, but as you slowly count the days by, the change is so small, so incremental that you never notice the difference until it's been ten years and you're wondering what the hell you were thinking when you were 19. I'm a different person than I was when I graduated high school, yet also still the same.
The end of an eleven year journey didn't fill me with a sudden strong sense of my life calling. It's really just left me with an incredibly expensive bit of paper and the same questions I've always faced. What do I want to be when I grow up? What am I good at? (Too many things, if I'm being honest with myself, to be willing to just pick one and stick with it.) Where will I be in another ten years? I don't have any better idea now than I did when I was 18 or 19. And this expensive paper, this degree, what does it actually mean? To be honest, I don't feel smarter than when I started out. Maybe now I know what various sedimentary structures look like, or the significance of the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, or what Gender Queer Theory is, but knowledge has never been the same as wisdom. I may know more things, but I still approach many problems and wonders with a profound since of puzzlement, and deep down I'm still just as worried that this time, I may not figure out the solution.
Some small part of me wants to be afraid at this thought, because so many people my age and older make it look easy. They have plans. Some wanted to get married, some wanted careers, some wanted a family. Some knew what careers they wanted and got themselves there. Some knew what careers they wanted and didn't. But I also know that I'm not alone, because we all have doubts, and I think that beneath the surface of any confident person that hasn't crept across that terrible dividing line into the realm of the fanatic, there's still that uncertainty, that question.
What do I want to be when I grow up? I still don't know. Maybe in another ten years, I will. Or the ten years after that... or the ten years after that...
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Monday, December 14, 2009
Race and the border patrol
I think this post makes an interesting point.
Actually, when I originally posted about the Peter Watts incident, the two examples that sprang instantly to mind about people being hassled by the border patrol or immigration were the problems that Fouad and Aki's friends had. Later, Chelsea reminded me that she'd had a nasty run-in with the US-Canada border patrol, which makes for an awful story all on its own.
Fouad is British (if I'm remembering correctly), though he's of Pakistani descent. So you can imagine the sort of hassle he would be subject to any time he's trying to go anywhere near the United States. Aki's friends are Japanese, and a rough-looking bunch if you don't know them, so also very obviously not American and not white. I suppose the thing to consider here is if you find it all that surprising that they were hassled, as opposed to Chelsea (though if you're young and college-aged, that opens up the whole "must be doing drugs" can of worms, I'm sure) or Dr. Watts. When I heard these various stories, I was shocked and outraged each time - but hearing it from Aki's friends or from Fouad didn't surprise me. Because I think I've gotten to the point that, even if it's still appalling and it still pisses me off, people who made the awful mistake of being brown and wanting to visit a foreign country getting hassled in airports or at border crossings is par for the course.
And that is really, really not okay, from any angle you approach it.
Actually, when I originally posted about the Peter Watts incident, the two examples that sprang instantly to mind about people being hassled by the border patrol or immigration were the problems that Fouad and Aki's friends had. Later, Chelsea reminded me that she'd had a nasty run-in with the US-Canada border patrol, which makes for an awful story all on its own.
Fouad is British (if I'm remembering correctly), though he's of Pakistani descent. So you can imagine the sort of hassle he would be subject to any time he's trying to go anywhere near the United States. Aki's friends are Japanese, and a rough-looking bunch if you don't know them, so also very obviously not American and not white. I suppose the thing to consider here is if you find it all that surprising that they were hassled, as opposed to Chelsea (though if you're young and college-aged, that opens up the whole "must be doing drugs" can of worms, I'm sure) or Dr. Watts. When I heard these various stories, I was shocked and outraged each time - but hearing it from Aki's friends or from Fouad didn't surprise me. Because I think I've gotten to the point that, even if it's still appalling and it still pisses me off, people who made the awful mistake of being brown and wanting to visit a foreign country getting hassled in airports or at border crossings is par for the course.
And that is really, really not okay, from any angle you approach it.
Dr. Watts update
Just home from my Japanese History Final, which I think went quite well. I feel like a 4.0 semester is within my grasp.
Update on Dr. Watts' site. And there's an article in at least the online version of the Toronto Star. There have actually been a few other articles now, including one I saw from the AP. It sounds like things are going as well as they can at this point - he's gotten back most of his stuff, other than his laptop and thumb drive, which Homeland security is no doubt crawling through in the hopes of finding something, anything damning.
Here's hoping things continue to improve.
ETA: Canadian sci-fi authors rush to Peter Watts' defense.
Update on Dr. Watts' site. And there's an article in at least the online version of the Toronto Star. There have actually been a few other articles now, including one I saw from the AP. It sounds like things are going as well as they can at this point - he's gotten back most of his stuff, other than his laptop and thumb drive, which Homeland security is no doubt crawling through in the hopes of finding something, anything damning.
Here's hoping things continue to improve.
ETA: Canadian sci-fi authors rush to Peter Watts' defense.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Another bit on climate-gate.
Mike Littwin did a lovely opinion piece in the Denver Post about it today. I don't often read the local paper (unless they inexplicably have cattle mutilations as the front page story, as if the health care debate and even Tiger Woods had ceased to exist), and I hear a lot from my mother about how the opinion pieces in the paper practically slosh with crazy these days. But it looks like at least some of the time, they're getting it very right.
Indeed.
There is nothing particularly new in doubting what you don't understand. There are flat-earthers even today. But some things have changed. The Internet has made more information available to more people than ever before. But it also has led to what you might call a democratization of the facts, in which everyone's "facts" turn out to be equal.
Indeed.
Friday, December 11, 2009
"The crime of having been punched in the face"
As a generally nerdy person, I read a lot of science fiction - and write a bit non-professionally. I would find this incredibly upsetting to begin with, but maybe it has hit me even harder because of that connection. Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.
Yes, we don't know the whole story. But frankly, unless the man came out of his car swinging or wielding a weapon, this is not okay. Considering the pattern of problems that people who I personally know have had entering or leaving the US (Fouad being detained, Aki's friends getting a world of insane crap because someone accused them of stealing a pen, for example) it doesn't surprise me. It just makes me feel more ashamed and angry. Things haven't been peachy-keen at the US borders for quite some time (if ever) but the constant fearmongering about terrorists and the extra power that gives some people over others in regards to security just makes it uglier and uglier.
Dr. Watts' account of the incident. Even more upsetting.
What Scalzi has to say about it.
I've donated $30 to help with his legal defense. I wish I could donate more.
Edit: Local news story about the incident. And another from today.
Follow-up by Dr. Watts; says there are a couple errors in the story.
Yes, we don't know the whole story. But frankly, unless the man came out of his car swinging or wielding a weapon, this is not okay. Considering the pattern of problems that people who I personally know have had entering or leaving the US (Fouad being detained, Aki's friends getting a world of insane crap because someone accused them of stealing a pen, for example) it doesn't surprise me. It just makes me feel more ashamed and angry. Things haven't been peachy-keen at the US borders for quite some time (if ever) but the constant fearmongering about terrorists and the extra power that gives some people over others in regards to security just makes it uglier and uglier.
Dr. Watts' account of the incident. Even more upsetting.
What Scalzi has to say about it.
I've donated $30 to help with his legal defense. I wish I could donate more.
Edit: Local news story about the incident. And another from today.
Follow-up by Dr. Watts; says there are a couple errors in the story.
Scientology at CU. Again.
It was the last day of school! Yay! Well, except for finals. Boo.
As I was walking to the bus, there was a nice older gentleman handing out pretty pink fliers that said, "Free Career Analysis." I took one, because I always feel sorry for people standing out in the cold trying to hand out pieces of paper. I guess on the last day of school, that's a reasonable thing for people to be trying to hand out. No doubt it was the gateway to some sort of quasi-scammish recruitment thing...
And then I noticed the address on the corner of the flier. Church of Scientology Mission of Boulder. Well then. Scammish and not so quasi about it.
It's the ol' Scientology personality test, tarted up as a career analysis. There's even a fancy graph to illustrate how you can find your "career barriers" and "get rid of them!" Career barriers is code for Thetans, I suppose. "Discover how well you communicate!" and find out "Are you aggressive enough? Competent?" The flier is the 200 question personality test, which you're supposed to fill out and mail back to the Scientology Mission of Boulder. It includes such gems as:
It sort of runs the gamut from stupidly general to bizarre to just plain creepy, then back again. I think #162 is my favorite question, personally. You're apparently supposed to complete this test and mail it to them so that they can work up a "confidential test analysis" for you.
There is of course nothing against the Scientologists handing out their fliers at CU. To me, it certainly seems creepy and dishonest to frame their infamous personality test as "free career analysis," particularly when they're handing it out on the last day of school to many students who are heading toward graduation with not a little bit of dread about the job market. However, that's par for the course for Scientology. And I am also sad to say, it's not the most creepy and dishonest I've seen out of religious recruiters on campus. I'd hope since they at least put their name and address on the form, most of the kids at CU would be wise to the tricks, or be able to find out about them very easily. Operation Clambake is the third site on the list when you google "scientology," so a source of good information is definitely at the fingertips of people who want to look.
One thing I will say for the nice older gentleman handing out these fliers: at least he wasn't wielding a huge sign and screaming that we all deserve Hell.
As I was walking to the bus, there was a nice older gentleman handing out pretty pink fliers that said, "Free Career Analysis." I took one, because I always feel sorry for people standing out in the cold trying to hand out pieces of paper. I guess on the last day of school, that's a reasonable thing for people to be trying to hand out. No doubt it was the gateway to some sort of quasi-scammish recruitment thing...
And then I noticed the address on the corner of the flier. Church of Scientology Mission of Boulder. Well then. Scammish and not so quasi about it.
It's the ol' Scientology personality test, tarted up as a career analysis. There's even a fancy graph to illustrate how you can find your "career barriers" and "get rid of them!" Career barriers is code for Thetans, I suppose. "Discover how well you communicate!" and find out "Are you aggressive enough? Competent?" The flier is the 200 question personality test, which you're supposed to fill out and mail back to the Scientology Mission of Boulder. It includes such gems as:
5. Do you intend two or less children in your family even though your health and income will permit more?
6. Do you get occasional twitches of your muscles, when there is no logical reason for it?
55. When hearing a lecturer, do you sometimes experience the idea that the speaker is referring entirely to you?
61. Do you ever get a "dreamlike" feeling toward life when it all seems unreal?
79. Are you sometimes considered forceful in your actions or opinions?
132. Do some noises "set your teeth on edge"?
143. Do you usually criticize a film or show that you see or a book that you read?
162. Would you like to "start a new activity" in the area in which you live?
171. Do you spend too much time on needless worries?
191. Does life seem rather vague and unreal to you?
It sort of runs the gamut from stupidly general to bizarre to just plain creepy, then back again. I think #162 is my favorite question, personally. You're apparently supposed to complete this test and mail it to them so that they can work up a "confidential test analysis" for you.
There is of course nothing against the Scientologists handing out their fliers at CU. To me, it certainly seems creepy and dishonest to frame their infamous personality test as "free career analysis," particularly when they're handing it out on the last day of school to many students who are heading toward graduation with not a little bit of dread about the job market. However, that's par for the course for Scientology. And I am also sad to say, it's not the most creepy and dishonest I've seen out of religious recruiters on campus. I'd hope since they at least put their name and address on the form, most of the kids at CU would be wise to the tricks, or be able to find out about them very easily. Operation Clambake is the third site on the list when you google "scientology," so a source of good information is definitely at the fingertips of people who want to look.
One thing I will say for the nice older gentleman handing out these fliers: at least he wasn't wielding a huge sign and screaming that we all deserve Hell.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Oh no, Climate-gate!
Fiore puts it well.
I don't really have much more to say about the ridiculous situation. The SGU did a great job in episode 228 and 227 talking about it. I can't personally speak authoritatively and I don't have anything really unique to say other than this: attacking scientists for being grumpy, bitchy humans doesn't change the preponderance of the data; it just makes the grumpiness and bitchiness feel much more justified. Panting hysteria over the use of the word "trick" may help you shore up your own worldview, but to someone not scrabbling for evidence of a world-wide global warming conspiracy, it starts sounding like sad desperation.
I don't really have much more to say about the ridiculous situation. The SGU did a great job in episode 228 and 227 talking about it. I can't personally speak authoritatively and I don't have anything really unique to say other than this: attacking scientists for being grumpy, bitchy humans doesn't change the preponderance of the data; it just makes the grumpiness and bitchiness feel much more justified. Panting hysteria over the use of the word "trick" may help you shore up your own worldview, but to someone not scrabbling for evidence of a world-wide global warming conspiracy, it starts sounding like sad desperation.
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Moo? Moo.
You know who else is always baffled, along with doctors? Apparently: Ranchers, cops, and a UFO believer. Cattle mutilations in Colorado! Woohoo! And on the front page of today's Denver Post.
I hadn't realized it, but apparently we have our own tradition of whacky cattle mutilation tall tales in Colorado. "Phantom Surgeons of the Plains" certainly has a nice ring to it. Though what I find quite interesting here is that the "UFO Investigator" that has been looking at these seems fairly convinced himself that it's not UFOs, but humans.
Well, you certainly have to give him credit for that. I actually feel very charmed that he's looking for a mundane explanation instead of immediately concluding that it was aliens because no one knows exactly what was happening. I've gotten the impression that it's a fairly unusual attitude to have.
The one picture that's on the article (which is fairly gross) isn't really good enough to even begin to make guesses. I'd be curious to know what's giving this impression, though:
Were there apparent burns, or is he just sticking with the meme that only human intervention can cause cuts to appear straight or precise? If nothing else, the icky picture looks like the carcass has started to decompose, and depending on the weather out here, that'll either mean that it's going to bloat or dehydrate, or do a weird combination of the two. That alone would probably alter the appearance of wounds on an animal.
Also, much is made about the udders, the eyes, and the missing entrails; that's all pretty standard, and the best explanation for that is often that insects like eating the wobbly bits instead of chewing through leather. Which is fair enough. I don't like chewing on leather, myself. From the article (though it's hard to tell) it doesn't sound like the calf that was found right away was missing the squishy bits. In the end, it may not be possible to say exactly what killed these cows. But like most mutilation cases, leaping to the alien conclusion is a big, big leap. Dead things look weird when you've let them sit out for a bit, so that even natural causes start looking decidedly unnatural to anyone that's not a forensic scientist. There are predators around of the four-legged variety, and possibly of the two-legged variety that widen the prospects of just how weird things might look.
I find it sadly ironic that the UFO investigator says that he doesn't think it was UFOs, but one of the ranchers apparently does:
Something that really, really hates cows, apparently.
I hadn't realized it, but apparently we have our own tradition of whacky cattle mutilation tall tales in Colorado. "Phantom Surgeons of the Plains" certainly has a nice ring to it. Though what I find quite interesting here is that the "UFO Investigator" that has been looking at these seems fairly convinced himself that it's not UFOs, but humans.
"I'm looking for obvious things," Zukowski says. "I don't like to say aliens did it. There are just too many unknowns. I like to lean on human intervention until I actually see a UFO come down and take a cow."
Well, you certainly have to give him credit for that. I actually feel very charmed that he's looking for a mundane explanation instead of immediately concluding that it was aliens because no one knows exactly what was happening. I've gotten the impression that it's a fairly unusual attitude to have.
The one picture that's on the article (which is fairly gross) isn't really good enough to even begin to make guesses. I'd be curious to know what's giving this impression, though:
"It's weird and unexplainable," says Duran, who lost a healthy 27-year-old Red Angus cow on March 8, her udder and rear end removed with what he describes as "laser cuts, like when somebody cuts metal with a torch."
Were there apparent burns, or is he just sticking with the meme that only human intervention can cause cuts to appear straight or precise? If nothing else, the icky picture looks like the carcass has started to decompose, and depending on the weather out here, that'll either mean that it's going to bloat or dehydrate, or do a weird combination of the two. That alone would probably alter the appearance of wounds on an animal.
Also, much is made about the udders, the eyes, and the missing entrails; that's all pretty standard, and the best explanation for that is often that insects like eating the wobbly bits instead of chewing through leather. Which is fair enough. I don't like chewing on leather, myself. From the article (though it's hard to tell) it doesn't sound like the calf that was found right away was missing the squishy bits. In the end, it may not be possible to say exactly what killed these cows. But like most mutilation cases, leaping to the alien conclusion is a big, big leap. Dead things look weird when you've let them sit out for a bit, so that even natural causes start looking decidedly unnatural to anyone that's not a forensic scientist. There are predators around of the four-legged variety, and possibly of the two-legged variety that widen the prospects of just how weird things might look.
I find it sadly ironic that the UFO investigator says that he doesn't think it was UFOs, but one of the ranchers apparently does:
"I do believe it was UFOs. This universe is so big, a lot of people think we are the only ones here," he says, declining to guess why aliens harbor such bloody disdain for bovines.
"I bet there is something out there."
Something that really, really hates cows, apparently.
Monday, December 07, 2009
Ego > IQ?
Well, obviously. For guys, at least.
I find this very unsurprising, to be honest. Sorry, but we still very much live in a society where women feel a definite pressure to dumb themselves down. This sort of study also lines up pretty nicely with the "girls are bad at science/math" attitude as well. Men think they're smarter than us; we do too. And I imagine if a woman thinks that she's not as smart as her fellow men, she's not going to fight as hard for her share of education or her right to be there.
I'm sure of course that there are egotistical women (like me?) that think they're far smarter than they actually are. It's just that the general trend is for men to have the ego and women to agree that ladyparts suck the oxygen out of your brain.
While this may be funny in some ways (I'm obviously poking fun at it myself), let's also not forget that there are real and horrible consequences to this sort of sexism. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, when a man who hated feminists and believed they didn't belong in the field entered an engineering seminar, separated the men from the women, and began shooting the women.
Pretending we're different when we're not may bring the funny, but it also can fuel much, much darker things.
I find this very unsurprising, to be honest. Sorry, but we still very much live in a society where women feel a definite pressure to dumb themselves down. This sort of study also lines up pretty nicely with the "girls are bad at science/math" attitude as well. Men think they're smarter than us; we do too. And I imagine if a woman thinks that she's not as smart as her fellow men, she's not going to fight as hard for her share of education or her right to be there.
I'm sure of course that there are egotistical women (like me?) that think they're far smarter than they actually are. It's just that the general trend is for men to have the ego and women to agree that ladyparts suck the oxygen out of your brain.
While this may be funny in some ways (I'm obviously poking fun at it myself), let's also not forget that there are real and horrible consequences to this sort of sexism. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre, when a man who hated feminists and believed they didn't belong in the field entered an engineering seminar, separated the men from the women, and began shooting the women.
Pretending we're different when we're not may bring the funny, but it also can fuel much, much darker things.
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Quick links for today
The periodic table of elements has never looked so tasty.
The same sex marriage debate, greatly simplified. - Thank you, PZ. I laughed a lot.
Reading Rogue - a series of blog entries by a man heroically taking the bullet and reading Going Rogue and blogging about it. Entertaining, yet I fear for his sanity.
The same sex marriage debate, greatly simplified. - Thank you, PZ. I laughed a lot.
Reading Rogue - a series of blog entries by a man heroically taking the bullet and reading Going Rogue and blogging about it. Entertaining, yet I fear for his sanity.
"Get a new hobby" doesn't even begin to cover it.
Denver voters will be asked to create UFO commission
Oh yes, Peckman is back. In 2003 it was a plan to instate city-wide stress relief programs. Last year it was his utterly asinine "alien" video, which the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society*** utterly demolished. And now, because not enough people think he's crazy, or think that Denver's full of insane people, he's setting up a voting initiative for Denver to create a UFO commission. No, really.
This would still be a colossal waste of time and money, even if we were in the greatest world economy of all time. Considering the current economic issues we've got going on, this is just beyond irresponsible. Now, I don't think it will pass. I really, really hope it won't. (Don't disappoint me, Denver. Please.) I can't vote against it myself, since I live in a different city. Hopefully since it'll be on the 2010 ballot, there will be a decent voter turnout and it'll go down in spectacular, Hindenburg-like style.
Also, apparently Peckman has been living under a rock and doesn't realize that there already is an organization looking for aliens. It's called SETI. Or maybe he doesn't think that SETI is doing a good enough job because they're, you know, too concerned with doing actual science. Instead of making hoax videos. I suppose it's too much to hope that Seth Shostak, incensed at the slight to his honor, will dispatch SETI's ninja death squad to Denver. But a girl can dream.
I suppose one good thing that may come of this is that it's getting the city of Denver to focus on how stupidly easy it is to get an initiative on the ballot. May Denver have more luck with fixing that problem than the state of Colorado did last year.
***made of 100% pure awesome
Oh yes, Peckman is back. In 2003 it was a plan to instate city-wide stress relief programs. Last year it was his utterly asinine "alien" video, which the Rocky Mountain Paranormal Society*** utterly demolished. And now, because not enough people think he's crazy, or think that Denver's full of insane people, he's setting up a voting initiative for Denver to create a UFO commission. No, really.
This would still be a colossal waste of time and money, even if we were in the greatest world economy of all time. Considering the current economic issues we've got going on, this is just beyond irresponsible. Now, I don't think it will pass. I really, really hope it won't. (Don't disappoint me, Denver. Please.) I can't vote against it myself, since I live in a different city. Hopefully since it'll be on the 2010 ballot, there will be a decent voter turnout and it'll go down in spectacular, Hindenburg-like style.
Also, apparently Peckman has been living under a rock and doesn't realize that there already is an organization looking for aliens. It's called SETI. Or maybe he doesn't think that SETI is doing a good enough job because they're, you know, too concerned with doing actual science. Instead of making hoax videos. I suppose it's too much to hope that Seth Shostak, incensed at the slight to his honor, will dispatch SETI's ninja death squad to Denver. But a girl can dream.
I suppose one good thing that may come of this is that it's getting the city of Denver to focus on how stupidly easy it is to get an initiative on the ballot. May Denver have more luck with fixing that problem than the state of Colorado did last year.
***made of 100% pure awesome
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Quite possibly the greatest thing you will ever watch
I apologize for the terribly late post. Today was utterly atrocious; I set my alarm to the wrong time, and just in case I somehow could have teleported myself to the bus stop in the necessary ten minutes it would have taken before my normal bus showed up, it was snowing. A light snow. A snow that left the highways covered with significant amounts of no-this-isn't-ice-it's-just-a-bit-damp. So as you can imagine, traffic was at a standstill as everyone in Colorado realized that they hadn't actually seen snow before, and that the best place to stare at it in rapt fascination was on the US-36 stretch between Westminster and Boulder.
Then I had a class project to work on this afternoon, because in this great state, we believe in adding insult to injury.
Whining done, I would draw your attention to this. It is quite possibly the greatest thing you will ever watch. And involves the most classic taste combination since someone got chocolate in their peanut butter: hand puppets and theoretical physics.
Then I had a class project to work on this afternoon, because in this great state, we believe in adding insult to injury.
Whining done, I would draw your attention to this. It is quite possibly the greatest thing you will ever watch. And involves the most classic taste combination since someone got chocolate in their peanut butter: hand puppets and theoretical physics.
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
And three nifty links
Before I go scooting out the door for school.
Koreans make plastics without fossil fuel chemicals - I'm waiting for the E. coli strain that will vacuum my floor for me. Oh bacteria, is there anything you can't do once properly tinkered with?
Trailblazing: Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing - From the Royal Society (the UK's equivalent of the NAS) there's an array of historic and important papers from its 350 years of publishing online for our perusal. Very, very cool stuff.
Balloon Boy's Dad -- Not Smart, Not Funny - Well, we already knew that Heene was a total crank after his balloon hoax where he tried to prostitute his young son to the media in a bid to get his own reality show. Apparently he's a racist, too. Just when we thought we couldn't get less classy than a six-year-old barfing on national TV...
Koreans make plastics without fossil fuel chemicals - I'm waiting for the E. coli strain that will vacuum my floor for me. Oh bacteria, is there anything you can't do once properly tinkered with?
Trailblazing: Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing - From the Royal Society (the UK's equivalent of the NAS) there's an array of historic and important papers from its 350 years of publishing online for our perusal. Very, very cool stuff.
Balloon Boy's Dad -- Not Smart, Not Funny - Well, we already knew that Heene was a total crank after his balloon hoax where he tried to prostitute his young son to the media in a bid to get his own reality show. Apparently he's a racist, too. Just when we thought we couldn't get less classy than a six-year-old barfing on national TV...
Women and geoscience degrees.
There are some new statistics from the AGI regarding women earning science degrees - and more specifically geoscience degrees. The general upward trend makes me quite happy, as far as geoscience degrees being conferred. There looks like there's been a teeny dip in the percentage of undergraduate degrees over the past couple of years, but there could be quite a few reasons for that. We're above 40% now, which I find heartening. Geology isn't the old boys club that it used to be, even if you can't necessarily tell that quite yet if you work in oil and gas.
What I thought was interesting is actually in the bar graphs. The greatest percentage change in degrees conferred for women was non-science and engineering degrees first, then geoscience. So we're making bigger gains than the other science/engineering fields. But if you look at the two percentage graphs below it, the comparing 1993 to 2006, it's also interesting. Some fields have taken a pretty big bump, but the only two where women are getting more than 50% of the degrees are social sciences and non-science and engineering fields. Considering that more women attend college than men (in 2006 the New York Times reported that men were down to 42% of college attendees), we're still not getting an even distribution across the fields. But who knows if we ever will. I think for now, just seeing that more women are going in to these fields is encouraging.
Looking at the graphs a second time, there is one other thing that struck me. For the most part, women are doing pretty darn good at getting bachelor's and master's degrees. Except in geoscience and engineering, there's still a major (at least 10 point) gap between master's degrees and PhDs, even though we are getting more PhDs than we used to, by a lot. It's not like we haven't noticed this before. A brief cruise through the feminist stylings of the amazing Dr. Isis provide some lovely anecdotes regarding why being cursed with ladyparts make life rough if you want a PhD.
But, I'm hoping that if we're seeing increases in other degrees, some day we'll see the institutional adjustments that will let women pursue their doctorates, rather than being forced to choose between advanced education and producing the next generation of li'l scientists.
Personally, I'm just going for a Master's right now. Not because of any sort of external difficulty, but mostly because I have no idea what research I'd even want to do for a PhD. Some day, it'd be nice to get to wear the big-girl "doctor" pants, but I definitely need some focus first.
And since I'm mentioning graduate school, here's a random aside: Why is it that of the three colleges that I attended, the only one that's charging me for official transcripts (to the tune of $10.25 each) is the one I attended for only one semester? Grr, I say. Grr.
What I thought was interesting is actually in the bar graphs. The greatest percentage change in degrees conferred for women was non-science and engineering degrees first, then geoscience. So we're making bigger gains than the other science/engineering fields. But if you look at the two percentage graphs below it, the comparing 1993 to 2006, it's also interesting. Some fields have taken a pretty big bump, but the only two where women are getting more than 50% of the degrees are social sciences and non-science and engineering fields. Considering that more women attend college than men (in 2006 the New York Times reported that men were down to 42% of college attendees), we're still not getting an even distribution across the fields. But who knows if we ever will. I think for now, just seeing that more women are going in to these fields is encouraging.
Looking at the graphs a second time, there is one other thing that struck me. For the most part, women are doing pretty darn good at getting bachelor's and master's degrees. Except in geoscience and engineering, there's still a major (at least 10 point) gap between master's degrees and PhDs, even though we are getting more PhDs than we used to, by a lot. It's not like we haven't noticed this before. A brief cruise through the feminist stylings of the amazing Dr. Isis provide some lovely anecdotes regarding why being cursed with ladyparts make life rough if you want a PhD.
But, I'm hoping that if we're seeing increases in other degrees, some day we'll see the institutional adjustments that will let women pursue their doctorates, rather than being forced to choose between advanced education and producing the next generation of li'l scientists.
Personally, I'm just going for a Master's right now. Not because of any sort of external difficulty, but mostly because I have no idea what research I'd even want to do for a PhD. Some day, it'd be nice to get to wear the big-girl "doctor" pants, but I definitely need some focus first.
And since I'm mentioning graduate school, here's a random aside: Why is it that of the three colleges that I attended, the only one that's charging me for official transcripts (to the tune of $10.25 each) is the one I attended for only one semester? Grr, I say. Grr.
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