Human feeling

Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) has a primary challenger, Dr. Milton Wolf, a radiologist.

Dr. Wolf "posted a collection of gruesome X-ray images of gunshot fatalities and medical injuries to his Facebook page and participated in online commentary layered with macabre jokes and descriptions of carnage", according to an article in the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Wolf defended the postings as legal (the patients were not identified) and added that they served an educational purpose. He also suggested that they served a moral purpose; according to the article, "They also served, he said, to demonstrate evil lurking in the world."

You're supposed to get the permission of next of kin before you publish such images. I can see the families giving permission for an academic publication, but did Wolf really get permission to post the images on FB and compare them to Terminator 2 scenes?

Now, to be clear, the writer of this article, Tim Carpenter, seems to have been less than objective in this piece. Dr. Wolf comes off as a callous douchebag at best.

On the other hand, maybe that's because he is one. A callous douchebag devoid of human feeling.

He seems to have followed the letter of the law: at least, there's no evidence to the contrary, although I hope Kansas's medical licensing authorities are looking into this matter. He and his defenders (who pop up in the article's comments area) are also correct that such images can serve an educational purpose.

But doesn't context count for anything?

Don't courtesy and social niceties count?

There's a big difference between making jokes about corpses among your colleagues, and doing it within earshot of total strangers. The defenders of Wolf don't get that. They, too, seem devoid of human feeling.

Wolf may have adhered to the letter of the law, but that doesn't mean he's not a raging asshole. He seems completely indifferent to medical ethics and appears to have a low regard for patients, or he would never have contemplated making jokes about the X-rays. (He wasn't joking about people who hurt themselves doing something stupid, for crying out loud, he was joking about gunshot victims who died.)

Raging assholes are not unknown in politics, even in the U.S. Senate, but is a raging asshole who Kansans want representing them?

Links before I sleep, 2014/02/15

Some thought-provoking pieces I don't have time or energy to give their full due, but which are definitely worth passing along:

• "Beyond Belief", by Chris Lehmann — a review of a couple of new books that document "conservative religious thinkers and their intellectual crusades". The review itself is absolutely fascinating for those who, like me, aren't well-versed in this history. The books themselves sound quite interesting, too.
• "What Is NASA for?" by Charles Seife — this essay neatly encapsulates why NASA lost its way after we reached the Moon. It's not all the agency's fault, but that doesn't mean it's not the agency's problem to fix.
• "Silence Inc." by David H. Gans — or, as the page header puts it, "Hobby Lobby contraception mandate challenge: Why have corporations refused to take its side?" Most of corporate America, it turns out, is extremely wary of the idea of corporations being granted First Amendment freedom of worship, and this piece explains why. (Back in December I explained at some length why I think extending such a First Amendment right to corporations is such a terrible idea, and why it's a mere side effect of the even worse idea of treating corporations as people.)
• "Answers for Creationists" by Phil Plait — a kind of FAQ with which to refute some of creationists' allegedly most trenchant questions. I love having a handy reference to such information. Bookmark it for yourselves and let's beat back the nonsense spouted by the uninformed.
• "God vs. the Government" by Dahlia Lithwick — this is about the legal challenge by the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns, against the Affordable Care Act's mandate for compliant insurance plans to cover contraception. Many people who have only glossed the headlines (I sheepishly raise my hand) think this is an absurd flap over whether the nuns should have to sign a form. That's not what it means to the nuns, according to their lawyers. It's a far thornier problem for them, one that touches at the heart of what it means to have freedom of conscience and how far one can take freedom of worship. Even if you disagree with them, it's worth pondering their argument.
• "Homophobia Is a Real Fear ... but of What, Exactly?" by Zach Howe — this is a piece that really opened my eyes, and I'm embarrassed I had not seen its truth for myself. I and many others assumed homophobia stems from a fear of being assaulted by homosexuals (or, cynically, that it stems from a fear that you're homosexual yourself). Howe more than plausibly argues that homophobia is a completely rational response to a totally messed-up standard for male behavior.
• "What Americans Don't Know About Science" by Eleanor Barkhorn — I don't normally mention pieces like this because, well, what they say is so bloody obvious if you've been conscious for any part of the last thirty years. However, this one mentions how a little tweak changes the results for a couple of the poll questions that provide the fodder for the article. What that tweak says about us Americans is something of a mixed blessing. Not as many of us as I feared are ignorant of what the scientific community thinks, but a great many more of us than I hoped don't care what the scientific community thinks about matters which the scientific community is better informed on than the rest of us. In short, a lot of us believe what we want to believe, not what the best evidence tells us. That, my friends, should make you nervous: it doesn't bode well for the policy decisions we might make as a nation.

Landing at the wrong airport

Mistaking one airport for another is more common than we (or at least I) thought. This happens mostly in areas where there are multiple airports in proximity, such as the San Francisco Bay Area's South Bay where Moffett Field and Mineta San Jose International are separated by only ten miles. (Huge kudos to the Associated Press for doing the investigative journalism behind this story.)

In nearly all the incidents, the pilots were cleared by controllers to guide the plane based on what they could see rather than relying on automation. Many incidents occur at night, with pilots reporting they were attracted by the runway lights of the first airport they saw during descent. Some pilots said they disregarded navigation equipment that showed their planes slightly off course because the information didn't match what they were seeing out their windows — a runway straight ahead.

My first instinct was to fault the pilots for not heeding their instruments, but then I considered how untrustworthy GPS devices have proven in my own wanderings. Most of the time they work well, but occasionally they seem to lose their electronic minds; it seems possible the same problem might apply even to presumably more sophisticated jet navigation systems.

I'm not thrilled by the idea of making pilots even more dependent on instruments. Anyway, it seems to me that airports could deploy a lower-tech solution: a big, bright sign that displays a visual cue unique to the airport and the approaching flight. It could be a colored symbol, e.g., a green asterisk, although colors could be problematic for the color-blind (are pilots allowed to be color-blind?). Or it could be as simple as the flight number, though there might be safety concerns about flashing the number of the approaching flight to everyone in visual range of the airport. Whatever the cue, it should be both unique and easy for the pilot to check; this leaves out one of the computer scientist's favorite solutions, a random string of symbols, since that would be difficult to verify quickly. Ideally, the symbol would not be difficult to describe, either, given the language issues that surround international flights.

The protocol would be for the pilot and the flight controller to agree on the visual signifier, and for the pilot to confirm the signifier is being displayed next to the runway. Geographically proximate airports would coordinate so that they didn't share visual cues.

Air traffic controllers already have a lot to do and requiring them to coordinate a unique landing cue for each aircraft might be more than they can handle. However, that doesn't seem to me an insuperable problem: I imagine that controllers' landing procedures can be altered so as to free them up enough to carry out this additional task, possibly by shrinking their areas of responsibility and adding more controllers. It seems to me that the possible danger of landing at the wrong airport — one where the runway was undergoing maintenance, for instance — justifies the cost and inconvenience to airports, air traffic controllers and flight crews.

Think about your site design

Okay, I admit that I have a ludicrously underpowered system (memorywise) and use a browser that swells up like a pufferfish over time (Firefox, itself a refuge from the even sorrier memory pig that is Safari).

Even so, some of you site designers out there have some 'splainin' to do.

WTF, Talking Points Memo and Salon? Why is it that whenever I load multiple articles from your sites my system goes from middle-aged to arthritic? Why does system swap suddenly balloon like a cartoon mosquito that hit an artery? Why is some frakking script from adnxs.com always busy and unresponsive?

And in particular, TPM, why in the name of Christ are you still running your site on Flash?

I can leave my browser window open all day and night on the New York Times home page and return to a fully responsive browser. I can read dozens of articles from that site without bringing my browser to its knees.

Why does an old media site have a more responsive and less burdensome Web site than you guys on the allegedly new media side of things?

What the hell are some of you site designers doing?

Adios, Jay

In the modern myth of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson went out with grace and aplomb and at a time of his own choosing. The sainted Carson is still the man to beat, in Leno's mind. So if Johnny went out on his own terms, then that's what Leno wants, too.

The modern myth is probably wrong. I've heard Carson wasn't thrilled about giving up the show; it was just the least bad option open to him. (That he wasn't entirely ready to drop tools was evident in his occasional post-retirement feeding of jokes to Letterman.)

Whatever the truth, Carson was beloved because he wore his crown as king of late night lightly. When he played power games, they were low-profile and he didn't drag the audience into them.

Leno has never seemed to accept that he isn't Carson, nor that the late-night landscape has changed drastically since Carson's heyday. Leno seemed to resent being treated the way most entertainers are treated by the bean counters, i.e., shabbily. He wanted to be special, like Carson was (in Leno's mind, anyway).

When Leno felt disrespected, he did not play the good soldier: he needled NBC executives in the monologue and groused about them in interviews. Whether he was right about them was irrelevant. Going after them hurt him, not them, by laying bare his neediness.

It's baffling that nobody in Leno's inner circle seemed to be able to explain this simple truth to him: if you want to be loved, don't look petty. You take the high road and suffer your indignities in silence.

Ah, well ... live and learn, Jay.

Leno might be offered a second (or would it be a third?) shot at late night, maybe by Fox. He would be mistaken to take it, though. If he has any self-respect, he'll make his retirement from that arena stick this time.

Understanding fundamentalism's true nature

Sean McElwee and Abigail Salvatore's piece in Salon, "New Atheism's big mistake: Debating creationists solves nothing", is a fine, relatively short explanation of why, among other things, rationalists like Bill Nye shouldn't waste their time "debating" creationists, as Nye will on 4 Feb. Any debate involving creationism is taking place in the wrong context. It's a fight on the terrain fundamentalists have chosen.

The problem is the enduring streak of anti-intellectualism in American life, one that has been with us since the arrival of the first settlers from England. It's rooted in the very nature of Protestantism.

Protestantism is based on the premise that truth about God and his relationship with the world can be discovered by individuals, regardless of their level of education or social status. Because of its roots in a schism motivated by a distrust of religious experts (priests, bishops, the pope), Protestantism today is still highly individualistic. In the United States, Protestantism has been mixed with the similarly individualistic American frontier mythos, fomenting broad anti-intellectualism.

Attitudinally, then, Protestants of all stripes are predisposed to mistrust authority. Science has emerged as a domain dominated by authority figures, since the vast majority of us do not have the knowledge to understand for ourselves what they do. If your instinct is not to trust the bishop who assures you he knows what's good for you, it's not that great a leap to bring the same skepticism to a climatologist or a paleontologist or even your family doctor.

But mistaken beliefs tend to die out over time (literally, in the case of vaccination deniers). The reason American anti-intellectualism is so tenacious is that it's backed by a visceral fear.

In “Fundamentalism and American Culture,” George Marsden describes fundamentalism as “essentially the extreme and agonized defense of a dying way of life.” The American Protestant response to the Industrial Revolution was engendered by the fear that a small cabal of experts would dictate to Americans how to live their lives and that science would somehow replace their religion.

Opportunists long ago figured out how to stoke that fear and harness it for their own purposes. In doing so, they perverted the Bible, counting on their followers not to catch them at it. (It undoubtedly helps that the Bible is not internally consistent: seek and ye shall find a verse that supports your view.) To take but one example, it's obvious that denying climate change and urging us to maintain our current fuel infrastructure hugely benefits fossil-fuel companies.

The religious right’s stance on climate change, economics and evolution is not informed by their religious beliefs. Rather, these political and economic views are imposed on Scripture, which is often read without theological rigor. It is not religion that is the problem, but rather the use of religion as an ideological weapon. But to respond by using science as a weapon is equally problematic.

As McElwee and Salvatore argue, you can't take on the end results of this anti-intellectual attitude and expect to make a difference. You must

... confront the underlying political and economic concerns that are obscured by religious dogma, rather than attacking the religion directly.

By attacking religion, as McElwee and Salvatore seem to think Nye will do in his debate, Nye will simply be hardening the battle lines and not advancing the national conversation. I've never thought of Nye as a polarizing ideologue like Dawkins, but if they're right then the debate really will be pointless. In any case, the article is well worth your time. It can only help all of us to understand the reasons fundamentalism thrives, for only thus can we understand how to change the human condition such that fundamentalism no longer has mass appeal.

Darth Vader on The Big Bang Theory

I'm a late convert to The Big Bang Theory and I'm still not caught up, so I only watch reruns on TBS. The preview for this week's new episode, though, did exactly what it was supposed to do. James Earl Jones on a Ferris wheel with Sheldon? Really? In spite of being a year and a half behind, I couldn't pass that up.

Jones plays an uninhibited version of himself. As I had occasion to discover a number of years ago during the brief run of his starring turn in Gabriel's Fire, he has a decent comic instinct. The BBT episode, though, went far beyond any funny business he did in that earlier show. He turned into the world's biggest kid in the course of the story, and although I generally dislike the adult-as-big-kid trope, his glee was too delightfully infectious to resist.

The episode is evidence that the show hasn't entirely lost its way. When Bernadette, and even more so Amy, came on board, the show changed direction to focus on their relationships with their respective boyfriends. The characters are all quirky and unique but relationship humor isn't, and my interest quickly waned when that became the center of the writing. The James Earl Jones episode finds the characters' relationships stable enough that they can talk about other things instead. It's a relief. May their geek flags fly freely once more.