Science

Vindication Is So Sweet

by

Way back October of 2004 I posted a critique of a study published in the Lancet that purported to show that:

…about 100000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

I called foul immediately, and I ended up writing a series of posts detailing my arguments. Now I find out from Michelle Malkin (via Instapundit) that David Kane, Institute Fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University has authored a paper, soon to be presented, that demonstrates using detailed statistics just how deceptive (my adjective) the original study was.

Kane shows that if the Falluja cluster is included in the statistical calculations, the confidence interval dips below zero, which is a big no-no. Since the study’s raw data remain a closely guarded secret, Kane cannot be absolutely certain that the inclusion of the Falluja cluster renders the study mathematically invalid…

…but that’s the way to bet.

In science, replication is the iron test. I find it revealing that no other source or study has come close to replicating the original study. All my original points still stand.

Ah, vindication is sweet.

Heroism in our Midst

by

Update:   Instapundit links to another editorial on Borlaug by Pejman Yousefzadeh.

Regarding narratives:   Yes, it is our human nature to seek a satisfaction that is not always true.

Nonetheless, here is a simple narrative of challenges overcome – from the one-room schoolhouse to the Congressional Gold Medal, from a world prophesying famine throughout Asia to a world of a booming India: Norman Borlaug’s life has been long and useful. This story from a student newspaper may lead us to hope that a model such as this can be internalized by those who read it. This is a heroism of unbelievable productivity, of humility, of a passion for others. That mildness may well have saved billions of lives; few in man’s long history can claim (not that he does, of course) such an effect. Mostly we think in terms of death, so many died because of Stalin or Hitler we say. To think of lives is harder to wrap our minds around – we compare an absence, a nil, with a presence. But how wonderful each presence is. People like Borlaug are the quiet heroes that we can hope win hearts and minds.

PostScript below:

Read more

The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

by

Johnson, Steven, The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic — and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, Riverhead Books, New York, 2006. 299pp.

The Ghost Map is a retelling of the events and consequences of a famous outbreak of cholera in Golden Square Soho, London in the late summer of 1854. As a result of dogged investigation by a polymath doctor (Dr. John Snow) and a gregarious Anglican assistant curate (Dr. Henry Whitehead), the ultimate cause of cholera was pinpointed, and practical steps were taken to contain the disease. Because the cholera bacteria was too small to see in the microscopes of the day, the efforts to control the disease were not only constrained by the tools of science but also by the competing theories of disease etiology (causation).

The major competitor at the time was the “miasmic” or “bad air” theory … bad smells were the basis of disease. Johnson opens his book with a detailed and hair-raising chapter on how the Victorian city of London managed the feeding and waste management for two million closely packed humans. Suffice it to say, people got their hands “dirty” … and conducted daily animal slaughter and recycling on a scale, and at a level of detail, that would put the modern industrialized world to shame. The humble and poor of the London would have quickly recognized the lives of garbage-pickers in Mexico City or Mumbai, however. Pity for a moment, those designated to collect each day’s supply of dog excrement on the London streets, recycled for use in the tanning industry. Nothing was wasted … in a way that would make any Hollywood Indian proud.

Read more

‘History’s Shortest Geological Column’

by

Russel Seitz offers at the Adamant ‘Deep Time For Dummies’, ‘Biblically Correct Geochronology’, based on ‘the addition of Begats by eminent 17th century divine Archbishop Ussher and the noted Revelation scholar & alchemist Sir Isaac Newton’:

A brief excerpt:

…

2584 B.C.: Earliest sedimentation; discovery of slate leads to stone tablets.
…

2384 B.C.: Breathable atmosphere develops; first sermon preached.
…

1794 B.C.: Children of Ham split from Israelites, insisting that the Burgess Shale fauna are kosher; chowder invented.

1704 B.C.: Charshumash the Hittite bitten by first vertebrate; lawyers emerge from slime.
…
A.D. 494: Snakes evolve and are driven out of Ireland.

Read the whole thing, for it is good.

Genes and Culture

by

This is, in part, a review of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (hereafter SV&C), which I am carelessly posting here without even checking to see whether actual smart people, notably the ones over at Albion’s Seedlings (to say nothing of Gene Expression), have already written it up, mainly because they’ll have done a better job than me. Notice: “in part.” The book doesn’t take long to summarize, so after the genetics I’ll wander off into culture, including but not limited to linguistics.

Warning: spoilers. SV&C is, in a sense, a series of cliffhangers, and I’m going to reveal the ending.

Read more