. . . especially if it’s another bigfoot hunter who’s hurling the insult?
Ken white, over at the Popehat blog, argues that calling bigfoot hunters crazy doesn’t count as libel, but is instead expressing an opinion, which, here in America at least, is protected speech under the First Amendment.
What I find fascinating is the fact that some bigfoot hunters have standards of rationality that lead them to label others as “crazy.” I’d like to find out what standards the bigfoot hunter has in mind.
Also, I was intrigued to learn about a Bigfoot Massacre, that I had never heard of.
(Santa Bigfoot is from a fun bigfoot news story here.)
Here's a great poster of the history of life on Earth with indications of timescales and major developments. Note the indication of symbiotic events (including the formation of eukaryotes by endosymbiosis of bacteria and archaea).
HHMI also has an EarthViewer App which lets you travel back in time and see what the Earth used to be like. You need an iPad, or Android device -- which I don't have, so I haven't been able to play with this one.
But I do have the Time Tree app, which tells you when the last common ancestor of any two types of organisms lived. You just type in "human" and "frog", for example, to find out that our last common ancestor wats about 371 million years ago (which is about right, since that was the time of the first tetrapods).
John Brock says yes, but we need to understand how models work in science. (Check out the video on Rosaland Franklin at that link.)
At Discovery Blogs, Neuroskeptic says we're asking the wrong question. That may be so, but I think Neuroskeptic's substitute question ("Is it true?") isn't much better. A lot of very good science isn't "true." But it's still much better than pseudoscience. We should be looking for quality of justification rather than for "truth" here.
Phil Plait (the "Bad Astronomer") deals with a denialist who thinks only a bad scientist would claim there's no place in science for "proof."
A few quick points that tie into lecture:
When logicians and mathematicians speak of a "proof" what they have in mind is a demonstrably valid argument form. Keep in mind that validity is distinct from soundness.
Typically, when a laypeople speak of "proof" then have in mind a set of evidence that should produce a degree of confidence in the truth of some claim. The question of just how much confidence is warranted by the evidence is the crucial question here, and is one that is left unaddressed by the layperson's usage.
If "proof" is supposed to imply certainty in the truth of some conclusion, we will never have a "proof" of anything.
The legal notion of "proof beyond reasonable doubt" is arguably out of place in science.
Our thinking and speaking about these matters will be clearer if we employ the concept of degree of uncertainty and we assess the risks in light of the uncertainty.
It looks like the bigfoot population has spread to Nebraska:
A 15-year-old reported seeing the creature, which he said stood about 7 feet tall on two legs as it ran in front of the vehicle the youth was driving about 5:30 a.m. The creature then disappeared into the trees along the river. (link)
It's not clear from the article whether the 15-year old had been up all night, or whether he or she was up early.
It seems, though, that not all bigfoot reports are genuine Sasquatch sightings:
Luben said he has fielded two previous reports of Bigfoot sightings in his nearly 24 years with Game and Parks. One, he said, turned out to be a rabbit that had left big tracks in the snow. The tracks were misidentified by a Dwight-area resident who had recently moved to the area from Chicago.
The Daily Mail headlines, "And now it's global COOLING! Record return of Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60% in a year," while the Telegraph reports "A cold Arctic summer has led to a record increase in the ice cap, leading experts to predict a period of global cooling."
Sounds like good news for the polar bears, right? I guess those pessimistic eco-scientists were wrong after all.
Or maybe not.
Turns out that 2012 was a banner year for sea ice loss, so no one expected that this season would reach those lows. We find that the sea ice fluctuates with weather, some years there's more, some years there's less. But the overall trend is downward.
Here's a graph that puts it in perspective:
Notice that even though this year's sea ice extent is substantially above last year's, we're still well below the average from last decade, which is below the average from the prior decade, and so on. You can get an even better sense of the annual variability and the trend by looking at this graph of the extent over the past decade.
Dana Nuccitelli at The Guardian does a good job of explaining just how wrong these denialist claims are. And he includes some great animated graphs, which I'm placing below the fold, since I wouldn't want them to get lost. Read more »
Many are the instances of business people not liking what scientists say. And if there's money involved, when people don't like what's being said, they sometimes try to keep scientists from saying it.
In this case, the issue is a proposed ban on deep-sea trawling:
Lobbying groups have threatened legal action against scientists for publishing data deemed to be critical of the industry. The EU Fisheries Committee includes Members of the European Parliament from French, UK and Spanish areas in which deep-sea fishing vessels are docked. These ties have slowed the committee’s consideration of the proposed ban to a crawl.
. . . especially if it’s another bigfoot hunter who’s hurling the insult?
