Science Marches On!

Spanish researchers discover the first black hole orbiting a “spinning” star
-- headline, Astronomy Magazine (January 16, 2014)

Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes'
-- headline, Nature (24 January 2014)
+++
 And speaking of black holes...

Post-Darwinian Evolution

A Commonplace Observation

It is said that "we humans share more than half our genomes with flatworms; about 60 per cent with fruit flies and chickens; 80 per cent with cows; and 99 per cent with chimps."

This demonstrates something very important.

Namely, how little our genes signify.

Some folks take those percentages to show that humans are not all that different from cows or chimps. Others observe empirically that humans differ tremendously from these others -- you are not reading this on the bovine intertubes -- and wonder whether the genes are a meaningful metric of anything other than physiology.

The great scientific revolutions, Chastek once observed, turned on seeing the significance in things that were negligible within their context. The difference between a circular orbit and the actual elliptical orbits that the planets follow is negligible. The difference between the Newtonian and Einsteinian dispensations matter only at high speeds.  Yet the sliver of difference matters a great deal, even in so quotidian a thing as GPS. So the delta between man and monkey may well be very small genetically speaking -- but no one says we must speak only of genes.

A Glove Thrown Down

Argumentum ad Porcus Ventrum

This is from the WSJ Weblog:

"Police: Woman Stabbed by Co-Worker During Argument Over Hog Stomachs"
--headline, WYFF-TV website (Greenville, S.C.), Jan. 22

This is worrisome on so many levels.  That someone was stabbed is bad enough, but that they were arguing over hog stomachs boggles the mind.  What key points of disagreement could there be on such a topic?

The Oxonian TOF

TOF's essay, "Discovering Eifelheim" has been accepted into the anthology Medieval Science Fiction to be published by Oxford University Press.  

This collection of essays will aim to read the Middle Ages through the lens of modern Science Fiction, and vice versa. We ask whether ongoing contemporary discussions about medieval literature and culture on the one hand, and about the SF genre, its history and its future, on the other, can be brought into explosive contact. Contributors will consider where, how and why ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ intersect in the medieval period; explore the ways in which works of modern SF illuminate medieval counterparts; but also identify both the presence and absence of the medieval past in key SF texts.  As such, the collection will be divided into two parts: ‘Science and Fiction in the Middle Ages’ and ‘the Middle Ages in Science Fiction’. We believe that Medieval Science Fiction will appeal to anyone interested in the history of premodern science, medievalism, genre studies or, more broadly, finding new and innovative ways of reading early texts.

TOF is a little concerned about that "explosive contact" business and hopes that readers will not be injured in the process.

Fifty Years Ago

Fifty years ago this past week, LBJ declared war on poverty.

Poor people lost.

Fig.1 The official government poverty rate: ominous signs.

Or maybe not...

TOF's first question is: what caused that precipitous drop in poverty rates prior to the War on Poverty. The short answer is that TOF hasn't a clue. Perhaps the wartime economy resulted in poorer households and things were recovering toward normal in the 50s and 60s. Or perhaps the transition from rural to urban was just then running to completion.  (Late Moderns may not realize the extent of rural poverty in the 1940s and earlier.)  Or the general prosperity inherent in being the only large economy on Earth that was not bombed flat in the 40s. Or else the data collection was only just getting started and the numbers are really incommensurable to later measurements.

TOF's second question is: WTF? The War on Poverty seems to have stopped the drop! Since 1967, official poverty rates have fluctuated between roughly 15% and 12% in what looks like a 25 year cycle. There is no secular trend in the metric.

TOF's third question is:

Sometimes the Mask Slips, a Little

...and sometimes they don't even bother wearing the mask:

Behold the re-emergence of the lebensunwertes Leben!

Quote of the Day

"There's a seeming inconsistency in contemporary American politics: at the same time the central government's size and power have reached unprecedented heights, a smaller percentage of the public view the government in Washington favorably than at any time in the last half-century."

--Richard Winchester, AmericanThinker.com, Jan. 2

It is unclear why he believes it is an inconsistency.