Author: Discover Main Feed

Have robots got the right stuff? We’ll soon find out, as NASA has announced that one of the last flights of the space shuttle will carry a humanoid robot, Robonaut 2, up to the International Space Station.

The two-armed ‘bot is the result of a venture by NASA and General Motors, and will help the researchers involved identify in what ways a robot could be a help to human explorers in space. Before it gets to go on its first space walk, however, it’ll be monitored to see how well it deals with weightlessness [DVICE].

The robot isn’t much more than 300 pounds of torso, head, and arms, with wheels for locomotion rather than humanoid legs. But NASA hopes it could one day work alongside human astronauts, perhaps helping them during spacewalks. While we’ve blasted plenty of unmanned explorers into space, this will be first largely humanoid robot to venture beyond our home planet.

NASA and GM first showed off Robonaut 2 (or R2) in February, and it will fly to the ISS for this test mission on board the shuttle Discovery in September. Back here on Earth, GM hopes to use R2 to help out workers building cars on factory floors.

GM and NASA have been in business together since the automaker produced lunar rovers for Apollo missions, and could see more collaboration as President Obama pushes for more collaboration between NASA and private enterprise (though the government still owns the majority share of GM).

The space agency is pushing the same kind of collaboration with Chrysler: What the three-year alliance between Chrysler and the space agency could generate are lighter-weight materials, more dexterous, even human-emulating robots and advanced batteries that ease drivers’ worries about running out of electricity on a transcontinental trip [Detroit Free Press].

Related Content:
80beats: Robonaut 2: Coming to Space Stations and Assembly Lines Near You
80beats: Obama’s NASA Plan Draws Furious Fire; The Prez Promises To Defend His Vision
80beats: Obama’s NASA Budget: So Long, Moon Missions; Hello, Private Spaceflight
80beats: NASA’s New Underwater Robot Chugs Along Indefinitely on Ocean Power
80beats: Photo Gallery: The Best Views From Spirit’s 6 Years of Mars Roving

Image: General Motors/NASA

Jason Salavon is a new-media artist whose solo show at Ronald Feldman Gallery opened last week in New York. He is also a research fellow in the Computation Institute and assistant professor in Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. I asked him last week about his image, Generic Mammal Skull, featured in the current show.

RH: Where did this idea of creating a generic mammal come from?

JS: I’ve been interested in evolutionary processes for a long time and wanted to explore them in my own way. I was specifically interested in representing fictional, imagined forms, things missed or skipped by evolution, in a rich, historical way. Combining that with a renewed interest in 17th century Dutch still life made for a challenging project.

RH: Do you decide what percentages of what mammal to use, or does the software determine that? If you decided, how did you determine which mammals to use, and what percentages? For example- why wild boar instead of blue whale?

JS: I designed four very accurate, high resolution models (bear, human, baboon, wild boar), hoping to capture much of the large land mammal “design space.” Percentages in the photographs were chosen for visceral impact as well as representing opposed regions in the “design space.” There is a parent project, a video animation of sorts, that covers a larger range of possibilities.

Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

Generic Mammal Skull (21% baboon, 18% bear, 17% human, 44% wild boar), 2010

My old friend Neil has something to say about NASA and inspiration.

I wonder how often he reads my blog? More likely, he and I just strongly agree on this topic. He is a very smart guy, after all.

Are Top Scientists Really So Atheistic? Look at the Data asks Chris Mooney. He’s referring to a new book, Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think by Elaine Howard Ecklund. Here’s the Amazon description:

… In Science vs Religion, Elaine Howard Ecklund investigates this unexamined assumption in the first systematic study of what scientists actually think and feel about religion. Ecklund surveyed nearly 1700 scientists, interviewed 275 of them, and centers the book around vivid portraits of 10 representative men and women working in the physical and social sciences at top American research universities. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls “spiritual entrepreneurs,” seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion. Her respondents run the gamut from Margaret, a chemist who teaches a Sunday-school class, to Arik, a physicist who chose not to believe in God well before he decided to become a scientist. Only a small minority are actively hostile to religion….

Some of Chris’ readers are rather agitated about this all, and he suggests that perhaps they should read the book to answer their questions. I haven’t read the book, but you can read much of it on Google Books or Amazon’s text search feature. Skimming a bit I encountered the term “spiritual atheist,” which many might find an oxymoron. Rather than present her interpretation, let me post some of the tables which have data in them.

In reply to Chris’ question posed, my own interpretation is that yes, scientists are that atheistic! The reference point is the general population. In fact, 72% of scientists hold to a non-theistic position. On the other hand, most are not militant atheists in the mould of Richard Dawkins or Peter Atkins. Interestingly, if you assume that all of those with no religion are in the non-theist category (I think this is unlikely, but probably sufficient as a first approximation) then 40% of those who claim a religious affiliation among these scientists are non-theists. Also, I believe that Sam Harris, with his interest in meditation and Eastern mysticism more generally, would probably class as a spiritual atheist, so the categories New Atheist and spiritual atheist are not necessarily exclusive.

I find table 3.1 intriguing. I suspect here scientists and the general public may be speaking somewhat about different truths, or more specifically, scientists are thinking of a narrower subset. For the general public religious truths are both descriptive and prescriptive. That is, they describe the world’s past, and its present, as a factual matter, and, they prescribe a set of actions and norms. I think most scientists are thinking in prescriptive terms here, not descriptive. In other words, the religions of the world have integrated within their belief systems basic core human morality and ethics. Fundamental moral truths. I would myself agree that there are basic truths in many religions.

Note: I’ve seen most of this data in Ecklund’s papers, so I’m not spilling treasured secrets by presenting the tables.

All tables from Science vs Religion: What Scientists Really Think

I’ve watched television shows via my computer since 2004, so I’m not too plugged in to the changes in channel line-ups. But some of the trends on this chart showing the political orientation of television viewers surprised me. In particular, that the History Channel, Discovery and TLC all lean Right in their viewers. But then again television viewing has a somewhat older skew I assume, and older people are more conservative today. Thoughts? It makes more sense now that TLC has Sarah Palin’s new show if they knew their viewer demographics well. CNBC’s slight Leftward tilt is surprising to me as well, but remember that a fair amount of the cultural Left is rather affluent (Barack Obama and Bill Bradley were both notable for initially fueling their insurgent campaigns thanks to big donations from investment bankers, Obama successfuly).

Source (H/T Steve)

A few days ago the following headline on the New York Times website caught my eye: Seeing What the Hubble Sees, in Imax and 3-D. There are two reasons this headline is worthy of note. First, it is amazing that an IMAX movie about the Hubble Space Telescope exists at all, and is worth mentioning on the front (web)page of the NYT. Hubble is a part of the popular imagination, and may be the object most closely tied with Science in the eyes of the general public (even more than the LHC). Furthermore, it is absolutely astounding that NASA launched hundreds of kilos of camera equipment and film into orbit, and spent valuable astronaut time (both on the ground and in space) to pull off the filming. I would claim one of the lasting legacies of the Apollo missions to the Moon are the photographs, and in particular Earthrise. That single photograph of our home as a small blue marble against the vastness of space put our planet into proper perspective for the very first time. NASA is well aware that part of its mission is to light up the public imagination, getting us to peer past our limited horizons, and out into the vast Universe beyond. This film is part of that tradition.

The second interesting aspect of the headline is that it’s nonsensical. Hubble has only one eye. It has one mirror. It can’t perceive depth, and therefore can’t see in 3-D. We see slightly different images in each of our eyes, and then a fairly impressive difference engine (called a “brain”) figures out the depth to everything we are looking at, and whether that rock is about to bonk us on the head and we need to duck NOW! 3D movies (such as Alice and Avatar) use circularly polarized light, and glasses with different filters in each lens, to produce the different images for each eye. (The light is circularly polarized so that, if you tilt your head, it all still works; the old linear polarization approach didn’t do this, and had a tendency to make one feel motion sick [at least, it did for me]).

In general astronomical sources are too far away for us to discern distance using parallax. That’s why the night sky looks “flat”, even though the planets and stars and galaxies are at a tremendous range of distances. If you wanted to be able to directly “see” the distance to the nearest star, in the same way that you ascertain the distance to an approaching lion, your eyes would need to be separated by roughly 10 billion km. (Eye separation = Distance*Angle. The human eye has an angular resolution of roughly 1 arcmin = 0.0003 radians, and the nearest star [Proxima Centauri] is 4 lightyears = 3.8e13 km.) The way we figure out distance in Hubble images is by using color information (and, in particular, the spectra) to discern recession velocity (redshift), and thereby distance (using Hubble’s law). This is not something we do with our eyes (although we do use color information to discern temperature; you’re unlikely to grab something that is so hot it’s glowing blue). Hubble sees a purely two-dimensional Universe. So “seeing what the Hubble sees …in 3-D” is a contradiction in terms. Was the headline carefully crafted to see if we were paying close attention?

“The main objective of this study was to compare the heating patterns of chicken fingers deep-fried conventionally and using a microwave. Two dimensional internal temperature maps of fried chicken fingers with rectangular geometry were measured post frying using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Frying was performed in a microwave oven at 365 W power level for 0.5 and 1.5 min after bringing the oil temperature to 180 +/- 1 degrees C. Samples were also fried in a conventional fryer at 180 degrees C for 2 and 5 min for comparison. Variations in internal temperature distribution increased proportionally to frying time in both microwave and conventional frying. Internal thermal equilibrium is reached in all samples after 13 min of holding time. Internal structural changes, void formation, were also visualized in the images. Void formation did not significantly impact cooling rates.”

Photo: flickr/adamjackson1984

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: But I want to eat my cheese-pie now!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Fresh squeezed orange juice odor: a review
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Does pizza cause cancer?

In October 2009, a man and two women walked into a renowned Los Angeles restaurant called The Hump and ordered some sushi. This seemingly innocuous act was the start of a fascinating chain of events that would involve hidden cameras, genetic sequencing, a few arrests, and the first solid proof of an illegal international trade in whale meat.

The man in question was Charles Hambleton, a keen diver and assistant director of The Cove, an Oscar-winning documentary that exposed the annual killing of dolphins in a Japanese national park. Hambleton had heard that The Hump was serving whale meat and decided to investigate.

Hambleton ordered an “omakase meal”, a challenging assortment of different meats chosen by the chef, only offered to the “adventurous” and priced at a hefty $800. Sure enough, the platter included four strips of whale sashimi. The receipt said as much, but Hambleton wanted proof. When the waiters and chef weren’t looking, he slipped a sample of the meat into a plastic bag and sent it to Scott Baker from Oregon State University.

By sequencing the meat’s DNA, Baker confirmed that it came from an endangered sei whale. In fact, the meat was an exact genetic match to products bought in Japan in September 2007. The whale in question must have been killed in those years during one of Japan’s controversial “scientific hunts”. From there, its meat had been illegally exported to the US, flouting a strict ban on the international trade of whale meat.

Together with Cove director Louis Psihoyos, Hambleton took his evidence to officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). When the duo returned to California to attend the Academy Awards, they conducted their final stings. Psihoyos says, “Charles and I did two more operations to buy whale meat from the same restaurant with federal officials watching so we could establish a chain of custody.” The Hump was forced to close its doors a few weeks later. On 10 March 2010, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against both the restaurant and its chef.

The Hump wasn’t the only restaurant to be stung by the team. They found whale meat being sold in other diners in LA and Seoul, proving that the international trade spanned South Korea as well as the US. The Seoul restaurant served no less than 13 whale meat products, which came from minke, sei and fin whales, and one Risso’s dolphin. Once again, genetic analyses revealed that the fin whale meat came from a single animal that had been caught in Japan and had been sold in Japanese markets since September 2007.

Baker is just one of a wave of scientists who are using modern scientific techniques to track the trade of endangered species. Last year, Jacob Lowenstein found that some sushi restaurants were selling endangered southern bluefin tuna, despite claiming otherwise. And Ullas Karanth used photo-recognition software to match illegally sold tiger skins to animals once photographed in India’s national parks.

Needless to say, whale hunting is controversial – it’s cruel and unethical to some, but economically and culturally necessary to others. In 1982, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) set up a moratorium on commercial whaling that came into force in 1986. Both sides of the debate have pushed for the moratorium to be shifted, but Japan has neatly skirted around it by claiming to hunt whales for scientific research.

Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research says that it aims to provide “information on the role of whales in the ecosystem and the effects of environmental changes on whales”. It allegedly studies population structures, age and diet, although critics are hardly convinced. Baker says, “It is widely recognised that scientific whaling is primarily a front for limited (but expanding) commercial whaling.” And Psihoyos adds, “There has not been a single peer reviewed paper the Japanese whalers have done since 1987, when their “scientific whaling” program began, to justify the killing of a single whale.”

Under the banner of research, Japanese boats kill minke, Bryde’s and sperm whales, as well as the endangered sei and fin species. Meanwhile, whales are sometimes killed as “bycatch”, ensnared within fishing nets that target smaller swimmers. If caught in this way, their flesh can be sold commercially, and they sell very well. Despite this thriving national trade, it’s generally assumed that Japan’s slaughtered whales stay within national boundaries.

The IWC regulates 13 species of whale and according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), none of these species can be traded commercially between countries. Japan, Iceland and Norway have permits that allow for some limited trade between each other, but they’re absolutely forbidden from trading whale products with countries that don’t hold permits, including the US and South Korea. Nonetheless, this new study clearly shows that this legislation is being flouted.

Both Norway and Japan keep DNA registers of whales that are killed for “scientific” purposes, or that are sold after being accidentally killed. You could easily work out if a suspicious product came from an authorised source by comparing it to these registers. But neither country makes their records freely available, even to the IWC’s Secretariat. Nor have they sanctioned market surveys to monitor the origins of whale products.

Baker says that independent surveys and open access to the registers are vital for controlling trade and confirming that countries are staying within their catch quotas. “Like the smuggling of drugs, we cannot hope to stop illegal trade in wildlife,” he says, “but we can impose monitoring and inspection schemes to limit and prosecute these cases.” To that end, Baker’s team have submitted a request to the Government of Japan, via the IWC Secretariat, to access the country’s whale DNA registers.

Reference: Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2010.0239

Image: whale meat by Stefan Powell; fin whale by Lori Mazzuca

More on conservation:

• Photo-recognition software catches tigers by their stripes
• Buzzing bees scare elephants away
• Genetic study puts damper on gray whales’ comeback
• Noise pollution drives away some birds, but benefits those that stay behind
• How research saved the Large Blue butterfly
• Human hunters unwittingly shrink their prey species at incredible rates

This is so cool: 3D anaglyphs of some of the Apollo landing sites as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter!

That’s the Apollo 14 site. Click to embiggen — and I urge you to do so. You can really see the lander popping right off the surface. In the Apollo 11 image you can even see that the lander feet are farther away from you than the top of the lander. It’s incredible!

These were done by Nathanial Burton-Bradford, and are part of a set of other 3D space anaglyphs. He took pairs of images taken by LRO (which is orbiting and taking phenomenal images of the Moon) and combined them to make the anaglyphs. They’re all worth perusing. I’m glad I have a set of red/green glasses! If you don’t have one, I again urge you to find ‘em — they can be ordered online, usually pretty cheap.

Normally, I ignore Apollo Deniers, since obviously no amount of evidence will ever wrench them from their fantasy world of ridiculous, top-heavy, and fact-free conspiracy theories… but these images really do hammer home that those landers are sitting on the Moon.

Oh, what we humans can do when we decide to.

---

Related Posts:

LRO Spots Apollo 12 Footsteps

One Giant Leap Seen Again

Tip o’ the spacesuit helmet to Emily Lakdawalla.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a sociologist at Rice University; we cited her work on the topic of science and religion in Unscientific America. Now, she is out with a book that is going to seriously undercut some widespread assumptions out there concerning the science religion relationship. The book, soon to be out from Oxford University press, is entitled Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think. And let me give you just a taste of her answers, from the book jacket (I haven’t dug in yet):
In the course of her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls “spiritual entrepreneurs,” seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion…..only a small minority are actively hostile to religion. Ecklund reveals how scientists–believers and skeptics alike–are struggling to engage the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and argues that many scientists are searching for “boundary pioneers” to cross the picket lines separating science and religion. You can learn more about Ecklund’s …

The people who lived in the Amazon regions back before any Europeans showed up on the scene had an ingenious way to survive there. By creating mounds of biochar, the pre-Columbian peoples made beds for their crops that drained far better than the native soil, which is nutrient-poor and prone to flooding. And, it seems, they unintentionally contributed to the biodiversity of the region.

In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists led by Doyle McKey of France investigated the savannas of French Guiana, in the far northern part of South America. These plains are flooded during the rainy season, dry and parched in the summer, and often burned by fires. It was while walking through this landscape that McKey started wondering about undulations in the terrain [New Scientist]. Just how effective were these people at creating favorable cropland? McKey found that the drainage capacity of the mounds was nine times that of the rest of the savanna.

As DISCOVER noted in the 2007 feature “Black Gold of the Amazon,” the nutrient-rich, fertile soil that resulted from the biochar mounds is a gold mine for local farmers even today. But it was the insects who really appreciated the gifts of the pre-Columbian peoples after those people disappeared. Species of ants and termites settled in the mounds, where their colonies wouldn’t flood. Their burrowing aerated the soil, and plant matter foraged from surrounding areas enriched it further. As a result, the mounds acted like sponges for rainfall, and outsourced insect labor made them rich in key fertilizer nutrients of nitrogen, potassium and calcium [Wired.com]. Because of the plentiful nutrients, plants on these mounds grew more successfully and their roots reached deeper.

All in all, McKey argues, the actions of those humans trying to better their agricultural situation actually improved biodiversity compared to what had been there before, the flat savanna. That’s not bad for a civilization about which our knowledge is extremely limited, and you can count McKey among the people who think that simple agriculture secrets like biochar could teach us something. “When people modified these ecosystems long ago, they changed the way the ecosystems work. We can use that knowledge,” said McKey [Wired.com].

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Black Gold of the Amazon
Discoblog: The Softer Side of Climate Control?
80beats: Ancient Agriculture Trick, Not High-Tech Engineering, Is Best Climate Defense

Image: Pre-Columbian raised fields around French Guiana, including on the left bank of the Mana River (A), near the Sinnamary River (B), west of the city of Kourou (C), and between the town of Macouria and Cayenne Island (D). Credit: McKey et. al. / PNAS

I read Noisy Astronomer’s blog every day — she’s a grad student at the University of Virginia, and of course known the world around as Nicole Hasenpfeffer.

Reading her blog today I found out it’s the birthday of the McCormick Observatory! This venerable observatory houses a 26 inch ’scope that I used many times in my career at UVa, and I have many fond memories of it (and some not-so-fond, usually involving long cold nights at the eyepiece).

She also mentions that it’s Thomas Jefferson’s birthday too. I think I’ll celebrate by reading the Declaration of Independence. That’s seriously one of the finest examples of writing in the English language.

And oh, the third one? My brother, of course. Happy birthday Merril!

Ever wonder what might be the perfect vehicle to get around from point A to point B without getting out of your seat?

Introducing Honda’s U3-X Personal Mobility Vehicle–a vehicle that looks like a cross between a Segway and an electric wheelchair. Shaped like a figure 8, the device is omni-directional—it can move forwards, backwards, or even sideways. All you have to do is plop yourself on the device’s cushioned leather seat and then as PC Mag’s Lance Ulanoff describes, some smart tech does the rest:

Since the U3-X balances itself (a trick learned from Honda’s ASIMO robot), you can simply hold the handle and roll it along. Its lithium-ion battery holds an hour charge and features a rather unique omni-directional wheel system (called an Omni Traction Drive System) that can roll forward on the full-size wheel or sideways on dozens of little wheels that sit inside the larger wheel. Balancing is provided by accelerometers and sensors that detect the rider’s center of gravity and make constant adjustments to keep the U3-X and rider in perfect balance. Riding is simply a matter of leaning, slightly, in the direction you want to go.

It’s also a portable fella, weighing 22 pounds, which can be packed up neatly and stowed away in a car or under the desk.

But don’t expect to see the Personal Mobility Vehicle zipping across offices anytime soon, as it is still in prototype stage and not available in the market.

Bloggers, meanwhile, have already jumped on the prototype, pointing out that Ducktales’ fans would recognize Honda’s offering to be similar to GizmoDuck’s armor.

Here’s Honda’s own, more extensive, and sort of odd, video teaser (which is just begging for some spoof captioning):

It’s up. This time we discuss lactose intolerance in ancient Swedes. Dave has submitted it to iTunes, so I’ll put a notice up when that’s ready.

NEXT>

Thousands of people have applied to with NASA to be astronauts since 1959, but less than 400 have been chosen. The lucky few must complete about four years of training before getting launched into space. This training includes miles of sustained running in 120-pound space suits while holding weights, enduring extreme temperatures, and being plunged into frigid water, dropped from airplanes, and flung about in motion simulators. All this punishment makes for great pictures, allowing the rest of us to simply watch and perhaps feel a little better about being earthbound.

All images courtesy NASA

1957: The Gimbal Rig was engineered to simulate the tumbling and rolling motions of a space capsule and train the Mercury astronauts to control roll, pitch and yaw by activating nitrogen jets, used as brakes and bring the vehicle back into control. This facility was built at the Lewis Research Center, now John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field.

NEXT>

Astronomers keep turning up new exoplanets, and as the count rises, they keep edging closer to finding worlds like our own pale blue dot. Astronomer Jay Farihi thinks Earth-like worlds might be even more common in the universe than previously expected, based on evidence from rocky planets few astronomers are studying: The ones that don’t exist anymore.

Farihi research subjects are white dwarfs. In our galaxy, about 90 percent of stars will end their lives in this incredibly dense state once the star sheds its outer material and only the core remains. This is the fate of our sun. White dwarfs usually have atmospheres composed of the light elements helium and hydrogen, as the heavy elements have settled to the core. But about 20 percent of white dwarfs are different, showing heavy elements—what astronomers call “metals”—in their atmospheres. For decades, astronomers attributed this metallic pollution to the interstellar medium, the thin gas that permeates the space between stars. The idea was that white dwarfs were old stars that had been on several orbits around the Milky Way and had picked up bits of the interstellar medium as they went around [Space.com]. But Farihi thinks those elements are evidence of something else.

His hypothesis: the heavy elements came not from the interstellar medium, but rather from the remains of rocky planets that once orbited the stars back in their younger days. For a study he presented at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Scotland this week, he looked at 146 white dwarfs that showed calcium pollution in their atmosphere, and which haven’t hung around near the interstellar medium anytime in the recent past. If the heavy elements in these stars had come from the medium, he argues, it would’ve sunk to the core long ago—it wouldn’t be dancing around with the light elements in the upper atmosphere. Ruling out the interstellar medium, Farihi says there are two possibilities: the debris could come from an asteroid belt similar to our own, which essential represents a planet that didn’t form, or the pieces of a shattered planet [Space.com].

If he’s right it could be further evidence that rocky planets are rather common around stars like our sun. The proportion could be even greater than 20 per cent, as some planetary systems might be entirely destroyed and leave no trace rather than leaving behind a debris ring to pollute their parent star [New Scientist].

Farihi also argues that white dwarfs could hold secrets about long-gone watery planets, too. He saw a lot of planets with atmospheres of nearly pure helium. But atmospheres that showed hydrogen traces also tended to contain the heavier elements. If the two are connected, he surmises, then the hydrogen would have come on board the same rocks as the metals, and that means the rocks could have carried water as well.

Related Content:
DISCOVER: Burnout, a preview of the sun’s death
DISCOVER: Sliced: Inside a Supernova
DISCOVER: One Spectacular Stellar Death
80beats: Detoured Light from Tycho’s Supernova Finally Makes It To Earth

Image: NASA / Casey Reed

My post on the religious make up of the Supreme Court is getting a bit of traffic spike due to current events. Specifically, John Paul Stevens, the high court’s lone Protestant, is set to retire, and two out of the three front runners are Jewish. Let’s assume that the future nominee is not Protestant (Elena Kagan, who is Jewish, is arguably the first choice). Statistically this is curious because ~50% of the the American population is Protestant. Assuming that a a Supreme Court justice is randomly drawn from the population you have a 0.20% probability that this would occur in a sequence of nine draws. Of course if Kagan is the nominee and confirmed all of the justices will be graduates of Ivy League universities, so there’s nothing random about the selection process.

Some of the commenters on the first post observed that the pipeline is probably going to shape the demographics of the high court. That is, elite law schools may simply have fewer Protestants than Jews or Catholics. I don’t know about that, but let’s look at Harvard University’s total demographic balance. I don’t see Catholic or Protestant breakdowns, but ethnic breakdown is public:

69% white
16% Asian
8% black
7% Hispanic

Hillel estimates that ~25% of Harvard’s undergraduate student body is Jewish. This means that no more than 44% of student body are white Christians (lower than the national average interestingly). Let’s use the American Religious Identification Survey to estimate Protestant/Catholic numbers according to proportions by each ethnic group. I get 47% Protestant and 17% Catholic at Harvard. This is probably an overestimate for both since I suspect that the irreligious would be a higher proportion within the Harvard student body than the general population, but the ratio between proportions may be more accurate. There are major caveats here, as I think the Catholic numbers are probably somewhat higher because of regional biases and such.

Why there are two, and possibly soon three, Jews on the high court doesn’t require much thinking to understand. There are a lot of Jews at elite academic institutions which produce future justices. With the filters we know of two or three Jews seems entirely reasonable, even expected. But I doubt there’s an enormous dearth of Protestants coming out of elite law schools. Rather, if there is a reason that we see so many Catholics, I think has to do with what some commenters were pointing out in regards to George W. Bush wanting to make sure he nominated people who had the “right” attitudes on abortion and the like. There of course plenty of Protestants with conservative attitudes, but they’re evangelical Christians who are underrepresented at elite institutions.

Which brings me to the point of this post, and the reason for the title: the exact numbers of Protestants, Catholics and Jews is pretty much irrelevant today in the United States. That is because Americans who are Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and even irreligious, have a fundamentally Protestant understand of how one “does” religion. To understand how and why I say American Catholics and Jews have a Protestant understanding of religion I recommend In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension and American Judaism: A History. In Catholicism and American Freedom: A History John T. McGreevy outlines the realignment in the 1950s of Jews with elite east coast Protestants in the culture wars against traditional Catholicism, a reversal of the historical white ethnic coalitions within the Democratic party which emerged in the wake of the Civil War. In The Impossibility of Religious Freedom Winnifred Sullivan argues that American jurisprudence in the domain of church-state separation and accommodation is rooted in Protestant presuppositions. Finally, in The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, And The Triumph Of Anglo-America Kevin Phillips asserts that American Protestantism is fundamentally a dissenting faith which was aligned with the Whig party. I believe that this is most precisely the influence which frames how Americans of all faiths and no faiths understand religion.

And that is why it doesn’t matter if there’s a Protestant in name on the high court, Americans view religion through a lens which dissenting Protestants of the English speaking world pioneered in the 18th and 19th century. Recall that the Baptists of Virginia were aligned with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in their drive to disentangle the state from the church.

This means that on the coarse level you can’t tell much about a person when you find out they are Protestant or Catholic. Their views range across the full arc of American public opinion, and their conception of what their religious tradition entails is going to be strongly inflected by their politics. Social justice Protestants and Catholics arguably share much more with each other than with their more conservative or traditionalist co-religionists.

I’ll make this concrete and quantitative. The General Social Survey has a range of questions it asks. I looked at four of them which are “hot button”, constrained the time period from 1990-2008, and examined a range of religious groups and how they shook out. I combined some categories, so for Protestants the Evangelical includes Fundamentalists and Mainline includes Liberals (these two categories are for Protestants only). For Methodists, Presbyterians and Lutherans I threw all of the various sub-denominations into the same pot. I do know that there’s a lot of division between conservatives and liberals by sub-denomination in these groups, but I wanted a general sense of denominational diversity at a coarser scale.

The variables are:

ABANY- “Please tell me whether or not you think it should be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if the woman wants it for any reason?”

HOMOSEX – “What about sexual relations between two adults of the same sex?” [Always wrong to not wrong at all]

PRAYER – “The United States Supreme Court has ruled that no state or local government may require the reading of the Lor’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools. What are your views on this – do you approve or disapprove of the court ruling?”

SPKATH – “There are always some people whose ideas are considered bad or dangerous by other people. For instance, somebody who is against churches and religion….if such a person wanted to make a speech in your (city/town/community) against churches and religion, should he be allowed to speak, or not?”

Below all the proportions are for the more liberal response. Some of them, such HOMOSEX, have a wide range of potential responses and I simply picked out the most extreme liberal one (in that case, that homosexual sex is not wrong at all).

Here are the raw percentages:

	Yes to abortion on demand	Homosexual sex not wrong at all	Approve of ban on school prayer	Allow anti-religionist to speak
Evangelical	17	7	26	69
Mainline	46	23	35	77
Protestant	37	18	32	72
Catholic	38	30	42	76
Jewish	78	63	87	86
None	63	54	69	89
American Baptist	43	14	20	68
Southern Baptist	28	10	21	63
Methodist	46	22	39	75
Lutheran	45	25	43	79
Presbyterian	48	27	45	81
Episcopal	62	37	49	86

The variables are strongly correlated with each other, as is evident in this correlation matrix:

	Yes to abortion on demand	Homosexual sex not wrong at all	Approve of ban on school prayer	Allow anti-religionist to speak
Yes to abortion on demand	*	0.92	0.87	0.85
Homosexual sex not wrong at all	*	*	0.98	0.88
Approve of ban on school prayer	*	*	*	0.87
Allow anti-religionist to speak	*	*	*	*

I took each variable and simply averaged them out into a “Social issues index.” The higher the index, the more liberal.

There are two big take aways from this chart:

1) The group “Protestant” has a huge range of views contingent on denomination or theological conservatism

2) The group “Catholic” is solidly in the middle of the distribution between very liberal groups (Jews) and very conservative ones (Evangelicals)

As a point of fact it is obviously not correct to say that all Catholics are moderates. Rather, the class “Catholic” includes many different viewpoints, from those presumably as conservative as Evangelicals to as liberal as Jews. Similarly, though Jews are very liberal, the small orthodox minority is often very conservative (Eric Cantor, who is minority whip in the House is an example of this). And, unless one is a member of Opus Dei, a Hasidic Jew or Theonomist, arguably the vast majority of Catholics, Jews and Protestants in the United States share common presuppositions about the outer bounds of what is religion in a pluralistic society.

Addendum: Just so readers know, I’m really not the type too concerned about the race, religion or sex of Supreme Court nominees personally. As a straight atheist brown libertarianish man with a “Muslim name” I’ve never gotten into the habit of wishing for mentors, colleagues or friends were people who I could “identify with,” because frankly I’m a very special person with a unique perspective and experience which is unlikely to be replicated. This doesn’t change the structure of my argument above, but I thought I would head off any bidding war as to the relevance of diversity X or Y in the comments under the preconception that the person writing the post here actually cares about such things. My main concern is intelligence, curiosity, and frankly in the case of something with political importance, ideological affinity. That’s it. The rest are accidents. Though broader American society disagrees with my own viewpoint on this issue.

Since Twitter blew up into the mainstream last year, it’s become rife with teenybopper types who join the microblogging service just to follow their favorite airheaded celebrities. Which raises the question: Which airheaded celebrity has the, uh, most unsophisticated teenybopper followers?

Comedian and geek Tom Scott got his creative juices cranking to create Stupid Fight–a website that lets you compare whose Twitter followers are dumber. This is great, in case you’ve ever wondered what sort of a person would follow actor Ashton Kutcher or all-around diva Kim Kardashian and try to send them messages.

Scott proclaims on his website:

FACT: A lot of people on Twitter are stupid. Many of these people follow celebrities and try to send them messages. But which celebrity’s fans are most stupid? It’s time to find out.

The idea itself is pretty simple. Scott explains:

Stupid Fight can’t go out and administer an intelligence test to each person that’s sending messages to a celebrity. So instead, it estimates based on several stupid indicators. Are they using twenty exclamation marks in a row? Do they endlessly use the abbreviation ‘OMG’? Do they seem incapable of working out where their Shift key is? These indicators have a strong correlation with the message, and its sender, being stupid.

Just go to the site, plug in the names of two people you want to compare and bam! The indicator tells you whose followers are dumber. Of course, the caveat is that this is not a scientific process and Scott himself says, it’s a lot like calculating your Body Mass Index: It works perfectly for some and not at all for a few others.

So, when we plugged in Glenn Beck to compare his followers with Rachel Maddow’s, here’s what we found.

Related Content:
Discoblog:Introducing the Twettle: The Tea Kettle That Tweets
Discoblog:The Best Way to Predict Box Office Hits: Twitter Chatter
Discoblog: Your Plants Have More Twitter Followers Than You—Literally
Discoblog: New Device Aims to Read Your Dog’s Mind—and Broadcast It on Twitter
Discoblog: How To Make Your Twitter Followers Uneasy: Use ShadyURLs

Image: Stupid Fight

Stupid reality, always mucking about with our ideas. How dare it!

In this case, reality is interfering with how we think planets form around stars. And the monkey in the wrench belongs to a handful of newly discovered planets that go around their stars the wrong way.

That’s an artist’s illustration of one of these planets. As you can see in the diagram, the star rotates left-to-right, but the planet orbits right-to-left. That’s a bit of a puzzler, and here’s why.

First, how do we think planets form? If you look at my last post, you’ll see a giant cloud of gas and dust collapsing in places to form stars. The stars form from little knots of overdense regions in the cloud. As the material collapses, any slight amount of rotation it has — from eddies and vortices in the gas, say — get amplified (think ice skater as she draws her arms in and spins faster). Random collisions of particles inside the cloud tend to drop more of the matter toward the center, along the equator of the spin, forming a flat disk there.

The disk spins, rotating around its center like a DVD (though stuff toward the center goes around faster than stuff near the outer edge). The middle of the disk is where the star forms. Farther out, local eddies and vortices can form planets. But the important thing to note is that in this scenario, everything spins in the same way. If the disk appears to be spinning clockwise, say, then the star will spin that same way, the planets will orbit that same way, and the planets will spin that same way. We’re pretty sure this is how things work because that’s pretty much what’s happening in our own solar system.

This theory has been tested by observation and by increasingly complex modeling. Sometimes there are problems with it, but in general new ideas have been added that fix those problems, and over time we’ve been pretty happy overall with the idea that stars and planets form this way.

However, a bunch of newly discovered planets have messed this nice idea up. They orbit their stars the wrong way!

How do we know? That part is pretty cool. First, these are transiting planets. As the illustration above shows, from our point of view the planets pass directly in front of their stars every time they make an orbit. When that happens, they block a fraction (usually around 1%) of the star, and we see that as a slight dip in the light detected from the star. A lot of planets have been found this way, and it’s a pretty good method of finding planets.

Now picture the star in the image above. It’s spinning, so the left side of the star in the diagram appears to be headed toward us, and the right side moving away from us. But that means there’s a Doppler shift, a slight change in the color of the light from the star. Just like a car roaring past you makes that “EEEEEEeoooooooow!” sound, light changes pitch if the source is moving toward or away from us, and that change in pitch is seen as a shift in color.

The light from the part of the star rotating toward us shifts a bit to the blue, and the side moving away shifts a bit to the red. That shift is very small, but measurable.

But the planet messes that up. As it transits (moves in front of) the star, it blocks first one side, and then the other. If it orbits the star in the same direction as the star spins, it will first block the blueshifted side, and then a bit later the redshifted side. That change in the starlight can be seen and measured.

But for some of these planets just discovered, it’s all backwards! The redshifted side gets blocked first, and then the blueshifted side. That means the planet is going around the star the wrong way. The press release about this discovery has a nice video which makes this a bit more clear.

Does this mean our theory is wrong? Well, not exactly. It probably means that overall the theory is solid, but that there are exceptions, modifications, we don’t understand. Most likely the planets that form around other stars start off revolving around the star the same way, but then some sort of gravitational interaction with other forming planets knocks them off course. Some of these newly discovered systems do appear to have outer planets that could do the trick; the tug-of-war resulting from a close encounter could slingshot one of the planets into a retrograde (backwards) orbit.

This would play hell with the system. The planet knocked backwards would migrate in close to the star, tossing other smaller planets either into the star or out of the system entirely. If that’s true, then it means these weird planet systems won’t have many planets, just the one backwards-revolving one and one or two outer planets. That’s a nice prediction, in fact, and one that can be confirmed or falsified with more observations.

And it’s not like this is a rare event: fully 6 out of 27 systems appear to have these backwards-moving planets! That means that however these planets get knocked about, it has to happen fairly often. Obviously, we need to observe a lot more of these systems so we can get better statistics, and be able to see what similarities and differences they have with each other. That’s the best way to figure out what the heck is going on.

What does all this mean? Well, it means, as usual, that Nature is a bit more clever than we are, thinking up all sorts of ways of forming planets and systems of planets that didn’t initially occur to us. But that’s how science works. Things get complicated, so the first thing to do is simplify. Make your idea general. Then start adding complexity to it to explain what you actually see. As observation techniques get better, the idea has to get modified to account for new data.

In this case, it’s a pretty big modification, but that’s not surprising: we’re new at this planet finding thing. We’re bound to get plenty of surprises for a while, until we have a better grasp of the situation. Surprises are good: they help us test the theory, they help us understand reality a little better, and they help us learn a little bit more.

But they’re also fun. Who wants a Universe we understand completely and utterly? How boring that would be! Science is all about peeking around the next corner and seeing what’s there. And there are always more corners. Always.

ESO/L. Calçada