Why is Kaku commenting as an expert on the Fukushima Disaster?

Who do you go to when complicated sciencey stuff happens that needs to be broken down to the general public? Why, a physicist who writes books, of course!

Except Michio Kaku is not a nuclear scientist or engineer or energy policymaker (fundamental physics is not nuclear physics), he is not Japanese (perhaps relevant - he is born and bred American), and he most certainly is biased. Apparently that reasoning didn't stop ABC's Weekend Edition from having Kaku on as "our expert ... all through this crisis".

His lack of expertise makes commenting as an expert irresponsible - granted, we in physics often feel all-powerful in understanding everything, but when laypeople actually take us seriously, we have to give every possible inch of humility in our conclusions. His comparisons to Chernobyl (the comparison was even worse the next day) are sensationalist, as the disasters are nothing alike in mechanics or magnitude.

But he is not only irresponsible, but unethical, in that he never reveals his quite-relevant 30-year NNP activism for a complete dismantling of nuclear energy on Earth. See a response from Nuclear Dreams with full quotations given in a 2008 interview with the India Times. In addition, I refer you to the following quotation from a commentary Kaku wrote for The Guardian ("Ban Nuke Power, Ban Nuke Weapons") in 1979 while a highly-public activist:

"Nuclear power and nuclear weapons are two sides of the same coin. They are controlled by the same people, produced by the same corporations and serve the same political and financial interests. They give off the same radioactive poisons, generate the same deadly waste that nobody yet knows what to do with. And both threaten catastrophic destruction. The people who brought us Hiroshima now bring us Harrisburg."

Scientists grow up with all sorts of biases and shouldn't have to cite them in their work if they have sound reasoning. However, Kaku has a history of vocal political activism in this subject, but rather than giving a disclaimer or stating up-front his views on the complete dismantling of nuclear power, he uses his scientific authority (in spite of his field being completely unrelated) to spread hyperbole and misinformation -- in effect, fear-mongering.

His is an extreme case, but scientists in general have to be very careful about the topics on which they are sought for comment or authority. News reporters often think they can write accurately on biology, economics, and psychology, but admit ignorance on physics, seeking the most famous name they can find to comment on other people's research or topics outside their field. For those sought, famous or not, it is absolutely unethical to exert argument by authority alone. You are a journalist within science - speak carefully and cite your facts.

The Secret Language of World of Warcraft

A journalist has no clue. This has been covered in many many blogs already (kotaku, worldofwar, tetonhammer). But now the video has been taking down from youtube due to copyright claims, but more importantly it has been removed from the official website of the San Francisco Bay NBC 11 KNTV affiliate whence it aired! I recovered the video from the affiliate's google cache which may reset soon, and a second-person filmed copy of decent quality off youtube.

Meanwhile, I will try to give the ripped video some extra life from a direct link (flv) and from another source.

My comment on this: first, see the above blogs for why this is so funny (simple answer - she was "pwned" with a bit of an inaccurate portrayal of the use of language in WoW). Now, I was big into news/feature journalism in high school and undergrad, with several awards under my belt, even having attended summer camp in TV and print journalism at Northern Illinois University. One thing they told us at NIU though, as we were struggling in front of the cameras, is that us Chicagoans were putting ourselves under the pressure of the highly-polished standards of major metropolitan news outlets, whereas the professional nowheresville networks of this place just beyond the rural ring of Fermilab were decidedly amateurish - thus these journalism students in DeKalb had a bit more confidence in their performances than we who received metro Chicago broadcasts.

The point is that this report was horribly amateur by any metropolitan standards, even for a five-minute throwaway feature. She is blatant in personalizing the story (which is in itself a way of trivializing what is actually a very complex and important phenomenon) and even more blatant in not checking facts with even a quick Google search, which would reveal that she'd been a bit taken in by her "boyfriend". In raw substance, this could only be characterized as a personality piece about her live-in lover (since he was the only source, and not authoritative at that) which really merits her canning from a major metropolitan outlet.

The implications are twofold. First, I can decry the state of TV journalism, and I will. This was primetime, after the superbowl, on a major metro outlet, and let crap slip by, even possibly advertising for it beforehand as some comments have mentioned. Frankly, the best reliable TV journalism you'll get will be from the international outlets, like BBC, Fox (yes, they have journalistic merit of a different type), and cable (CNN, MSNBC, The Daily Show, etc). But for local coverage, I'd recommend two sources: local PBS and NPR carriers (Chicago Tonight is what I always used to watch growing up, which continues to maintain excellent standards of discourse) and specialty feature shows like 190 North, an ABC show covering plenty of cultural nuances from both the deep and shallow ends.

The second implication that troubles me is the state of linguistics in popular culture. Linguistics in itself is a very wide, multidisciplinary field. I studied and did some research in computational and generative linguistics as an undergrad, which encompass mathematical approaches to theoretical models and simulation of language, and which actually have very important predictive capability (as well as marketable results, as seen in every manner of computer speech recognition). However, many other slices of the pie exist in the forms of psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and, as would be relevant to this broadcast, anthropological (or social) linguistics (and this even excludes relevant clinical and literary cross-disciplines). In most cases, these people are serious, methodical scientists who are fortunate enough to be higher than most social sciences in terms of empirical purity due to the inherent rule-based and objective grounding of their medium of study.

But when a layman thinks about a "linguist", he sees the Grammar-Nazi columnist in the New York Times "society" sections, or the gifted, well-mannered Victorian polyglot translating for the Congolese savages (or his sci-fi equivalent of C-3P0). This is soooo not the scope of academic linguists that it's almost funny.

Almost. Except the public never takes academic linguists seriously. [further rant on linguistics in the public sphere saved for later]. One of many cases in point is that the perceived "expert" on WoW language and its interpretation is some amateurish reporter and her WoW-addicted boyfriend who sabotages her story.

The real tragedy for the public is that there is so much depth to the amazingly intricate linguistic change happening all around us every day. When "pwned" enters everyday conversation like it did in grad school among us who were non-gamers, you see one of the first truly English words (derived almost exclusively within our own language and culture) to utterly defy conventional typology. Or, in a more classical example, when we can document and possibly predict a continued changing (general frontening, actually, by some conjectures) in the pronunciation of vowels in Standard American English, that may give the older generations a greater appreciation of some of the tangled accents of today's youth. Or maybe, at the end of the day, if we simply understand the argument to raise awareness of how native dialects can affect students' benefit from grammar classes in America, we might be able to respond intelligently when such arguments are made instead of grossly misinterpreting them.

Top 5 greatest popularizations of science

DISCLAIMER: There are many great popularizations to choose from, and I can only accurately rank those that I've read. Please, post your own suggestions and/or lists. A thorough discussion is also available in the Cosmic Variance blog.

To complement my "jerks" post, I'd like to list the greatest pop-sci books by living popularizers in science based on how significantly they have helped their field.

Honorable mention: Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time" (physics - alive, a jerk, but a jerk who turns physics books into bestsellers, even though they're very misleading. I just can't put him on the list.)

Honorable mention: Richard Dawkins, "The Selfish Gene" (biology - alive, writes bestsellers, but has damaged science in recent years with his alienation of the "atheist scientist" from the mainstream.

Honorable mention: Carl Sagan, "Contact" (astronomy - dead, but would easily be #1 because of his encouragement of women in science alone, not to mention his powerful illustrations of the importance of astronomy, space exploration, and SETI)

Other honorable mentions for dead people: Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, Jules Verne, George Gamow, D'Arcy Thompson,

Suggested by others: Douglas Hofstadter "Godel, Escher, Bach", Matt Ridley "Genome"

5. Kip Thorne, "Black Holes and Time Warps" (physics - it inspired me into the field - it may be too complicated for people not yet in high school, but it explains the weirdest research in physics without claiming more than what the math says)

4. Michael Crichton, "Jurassic Park" (lay-author, paleontology - his sci-fi is actually reasonably accurate and very popular, giving new generations a reason to get excited about dinosaurs)

3. Steven Pinker, "The Language Instinct" (linguistics - a sorely-needed poster boy for a very publicly-scorned discipline, he's not the best writer but he's a very welcome change from Chomsky and newspaper grammarians)

2. Simon Singh, "Fermat's Enigma", "Fermat's Last Theorem" (physics, mathematics - these and "The Code Book" helped romanticize and solidify the importance of mathematics and computer science in the public eye)

1. Steven Levitt and Stephen D. Dubner, "Freakonomics" (economics - no book has ever been more important in explaining the importance of mathematical logic and correlation vs causation, and in getting people excited about a traditionally boring field. Truly revolutionary for all sciences, soft and hard)

The big Olympic halftime post

This will be happy post. Here I'd like to give my thoughts on the Olympics as they are now halfway into it. Most of this has been posted previously on private forums.

I've been watching all the Beijing Fencing events online religiously this past week, and I must say that I am absolutely as happy as can be that I can watch any bout on any piste I like as they happen (though only the finals are available for re-watch, and I can't download).

I think I have a problem with womens sabre. The speed, the aggression, the screaming, the intensity... my future wife may have to be a sabreist. Just so you know, I've fenced sabre a little, and I still can't follow the attack sequence (FYI, the electronics are pretty useless since almost everything is simultaneous; right-of-way is the determining factor). So I figure if I can't follow the action, I may as well think about the ladies.

Now you may think it weird that I think about fencers more than, say, womens beach volleyball players. But I love watching the sport for its own sake, and there's too little for the imagination in beach volleyball. The fencing lames (uniforms) reveal nothing, which means every one of those ladies has a flawless body. Am I an ass? Yes, but still not as much of one as Stephen Hawking.

Meanwhile, mens epee is full of jerks. See, in sabre you scream after every point to try to convince the judges that you had right-of-way. But then at the end, you act civilly. In epee, there is no right-of-way, yet the guys still have to scream occasionally, and then they (the winners, mind you) throw absolute fits at the end of the match. They don't salute or shake hands until the ref yells at them to do so. Also, I hate the jumpy-feet in epee and foil. The people I root for are those with deliberate, classical footwork. Finally, I'd like to see corps-a-corps rules reformed - there has to be some way of getting around these too-close messy touches and make things more classical. Thank god there's no more flicking, anyway.

Then there is Gymnastics, with its new scoring system. This arose in no small part because in 2004, the crowd booed the judges continuously for a low score given to the Russian in the high bar individual event finals, until finally the judges cave and raised the score. Note that in theory, judging in gymnastics is 95% objective (now closer to 99%), so there is no reason for such a reaction from the crowd, nor such a response from the judges. Of course, in judging, not everything is caught or compared accurately, so there is some room for error. However, as in many situations (like when some less-pure sciences enter public scrutiny), the audience should know that most of the time they need to shut up and defer to the experts. Side note: I think the science comparison is best taken in Linguistics, where every ordinary person thinks they're an expert (they are in some ways, being as they all know at least one language fluently), and this is precisely the science that needs to be able to assert its authority better.

The event for which I am most excited is Modern Pentathlon, the most eclectic mix of sporting events that one sees: distance running, sprint swimming, pistol shooting, epee fencing, and unfamiliar horse jumping all in a 12-hour endurathon. It was one of the original events of the modern Olympics, invented by the founder himself and modeled after a similar event in ancient Greece designed to seek the "ideal soldier". Unfortunately, it is threatened with cancellation in 2016. A side note:

Katy Livingston, will you go out with me?

So how can the sport be saved from oblivion? Should it be saved from oblivion? Isn't it our duty to try to preserve at least the spirit of combat that Coubertin wanted to preserve from the ancient Greeks?

If such be the case, my proposal for a reformed Modern Pentathlon would be as follows: run and swim as before, but also trap rifle, judo or freestyle wrestling, and jukendo (Japanese bayonette fencing). Of course then we'd have to introduce jukendo or at least kendo into the Olympic mix (the latter of which isn't far off, though). I also would vie for competitive skydiving (such as for landing accuracy), though my brother is convinced nobody would care to watch that. His idea for reforming the event would include tactical automobile driving (like slalom or autocross), incidentally. What other possibilities for a "modern" Modern Pent could be proposed?

Finally, on the subject of events on the cutlist for 2016 (baseball and softball are on it with taekwando narrowly escaping, by the way) what should be added and/or removed from the Olympics?

I'd like to see, of course, kendo added. Naginatado would also be great. I also think there's a military market for competitive skydiving (targets and landing formations are how it's scored). Muay Thai may have enough following these days for inclusion, though there's plenty of controversy around boxing in general. And then there's the modern "chariot race" of auto racing, and its many sub-events.

I'd like to remove the "dance"-like events: synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, just because of Olympic history: there used to be an "artistic" Olympics for literature, music, and visual art, but because of matters of taste, it simply didn't work. So aesthetic events are a bit of a slippery slope (yes, invalid argument, I know).

Top 5 jerks in science

These are jerks in science, most for being bad popularizers, but some for being bad scientists (yet respected nonetheless). To make the list you have to be both a jerk and living. If you'd like to add to the list, comment here. I hope to write a book on this once I get a top 10 list of people who are dead.

Honorable mention: Carl Sagan (Astronomy - dead, lots of self-promoting, some crap in Cosmos, but did proper popularization and inspired young women especially to go into science)

Honorable mention: Sapir and Whorf (Linguistic Anthropology - dead, BS hypothesis of language controlling thought, still influences anthropologists today despite BSery)

Honorable mention: Francis Crick (Biology - dead, listed mostly for the Rosalind Franklin data controversy, but also for being an ass, still a good popularizer of cognitive science)

5. (Tie) Richard Leakey and Donald Johanson (Palaeoanthropology - hominid skeleton-finders, both thought their skeleton was better and represented early man more accurately, both made human evolution look like a complete public mystery and strengthened the Creationist cause in America)

4. Stephen Wolfram (Computer Math - published A New Kind of Science which was basically a treatise on BS physics, charges too much for his Mathematica software)

3. James D. Watson (Biology - same boat as Crick, also an actively-stereotyping bigot in race and physical appearance)

2. Noam Chomsky (Linguistics - did great work in the 50s, then became a stubborn self-promoting jerk, and is now a socialist anti-media jerk)

1. Stephen Hawking (Physics - a jerk)

Cells, visualization, and quantum consciousness nonsense

I'm a big fan of computer visualizations in science, both for the general public and for science students themselves (researchers, too). One project that I've been hoping to get off the ground soon is to build virtual worlds in special relativistic and quantum mechanical domains to help in building the modern "physical intuition" that all us students seem to lack.

Anyway, a couple videos caught my eye that were linked on Brain Windows: I enjoyed the videos by Drew Berry immensely (see Aptosis), as well as Harvard's The Inner Life of the Cell. Many more videos are available at the main site. Berry's videos were especially nice because of the use of environmental sound: there is a lot of useful information that can be effectively transmitted by sound. Accurate or not (and it's not, but neither is the visual information, since the scales of these videos are well below 400nm), it immerses the viewer in the environment.

One thing that kind of got me chuckling was the visualization of cytoskeletal microtubules and cytoplasm ions. Cytoskeletons are a nice modelling problem in physics (and under a lot of research at that), but I also came across them a lot in some light cog sci reading on quantum consciousness, or quantum computation in the brain (sometimes people, especially researchers in the field, confuse the two).

Yes, light cog sci reading. I could put the sum of physics in quantum consciousness theories on a napkin. I've seen two theories dominating the "literature" in this "field", with some overlap. The first is called Quantum Brain Dynamics (QBD), which asserts that applying the wave equations to the water in the brain creates a model for EEG signals while also creating quantum effects of wavefunction collapse and superposition. Then people decided a more convincing, less pseudoscientific mechanism for quantum processes than "water, ordinary water (laced with a healthy dose of LSD)" would be that computation occurs in the cytoskeleton of brain cells.

I won't say anything about the physics, because all the math that they do is probably fine enough, just not very interesting and certainly not enough to draw any conclusions from. But many good scientists (key example being Roger Penrose, a proponent of quantum consciousness theories) can fall victim to biasing their opinions based on how they think things should be. In spite of there being no reason for us to suspect quantum mechanics plays a role in cognition (no evidence for humans being capable of quantum computation, for example, and plenty of evidence that classical mechanics can model many cognitive processes), QBDers invoke it because consciousness is "exotic". I suppose it's an important idea to play around in just because any idea is worth investigating, but without even a mechanism for communication of quantum states between cells in the brain, the attention is very unwarranted. I shouldn't even be calling it a theory, since it has no basis in experimental or theoretical principles and makes no predictions.

Also, I will punch the next person who tells me to watch What The Bleep Do We Know?

Abortion and animal rights: the post that gets me pipe-bombed

Okay, so physics and philosophy isn't the most exciting thing in the world. Let's talk abortion! I just saw this video that asks abortion protesters whether women who have illegal abortions should go to jail. Most said something along the lines of that women who have abortions are "punished enough".

It's an important question, and has actually changed my mind: from a purely social-pragmatic standpoint, it seems clear that abortion has to be legal. Nobody is prepared to let poor people die on the street, so medical care must be socialized. Nobody is prepared to send desperate women to jail (except for one person in the video), so abortion must be legalized. Makes sense to me.

But I'm pretty terrible at political issues and often flip sides (or do what my brother, an army language/diplomacy officer with an economics degree, tells me). On the abortion issue I've always just stayed out of it - as a man, it's not my place to presume how women perceive life in their bodies, or how their psychology works (lord help us), or anything else about them for that matter. Ethically, I still feel that way - it's not my place to judge. But law must be pragmatic, not necessarily "moral".

But you didn't ask how I felt scientifically: in this sense I think that if it's okay to kill great apes, it's okay to kill fetuses and infants up to three months (or was it years? I can't remember the research) old or so, depending on when they reach a measurable state of self-awareness.

The point is that it's NOT okay to kill great apes, dolphins, elephants, or any other higher animal with demonstrable self-awareness. As said before, I think there may be a measurable phase transition of self-awareness, at which point we must step back and stop invasive testing.