Rufus Porter, founder of Scientific American. The man on the left is Rufus Porter. You’ve probably never heard of him, but during the middle of the 19th century, he was well known in certain circles. He was a professional painter, specializing in painting directly on the walls of homes to decorate them. Throughout his career, he painted murals in more than 160 homes. He was also a prolific inventor, designing things like passenger blimps, windmills, and rotary engines. He even designed a “revolving rifle,” which was purchased by Samuel Colt but never put into production. Finally, he was a promotor of science, which culminated in him founding Scientific American, the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States. It contains the works of many important scientists, including Albert Einstein.
While most people who are trying to keep up with the latest scientific advances probably know about Porter’s magazine, they probably don’t know about his vision for science. That’s because Scientific American has abandoned it, despite the fact that it is clearly stated in the very first issue. Here is how Porter put it:
First, then, let us, as rational creatures, be ever ready to acknowledge God as our Creator and daily Preserver; and that we are each of us individually dependant on his special care and good will towards us, in supporting the wonderful action of nature which constitutes our existence; and in preserving us from the casualties, to which our complicated and delicate structure is liable. Let us also, knowing our entire dependence on Divine Benevolence, as rational creatures, do ourselves the honor to express personally and frequently, our thanks to him for his goodness; and to present our petitions to Him for the favours which we constantly require. This course is rational, even without the aid of revelation: but being specially invited to this course, by the divine word, and assured of the readiness of our Creator to answer our prayers and recognize our thanks, it is truly surprising that any rational being, who has ever read the inspired writings should willingly forego this privilege, or should be ashamed to be seen engaged in this rational employment, or to have it known that he practices it. (R. Porter, “Rational Religion,” Scientific American1: 1845)
Notice what the founder of Scientific American says at the end. He says it is “surprising” that any rational being who has read the Bible would avoid giving the Creator His due or be ashamed about doing so. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what Scientific American is doing today. It gleefully promotes an atheistic worldview and even refuses to hire those who have the same vision as its founder.
While it’s sad to see what used to be an incredible magazine reject the vision of its founder, the fact is that science as a whole has been trying to do the same thing. The modern scientific method is a direct result of the Christian church, and most of the truly influential scientists of the past engaged in science because of their Christianity (see here, here, and here, for example). Nevertheless, the High Priests of the scientific community are diametrically opposed to the very faith that gave us modern science.
Thank God there are a few holdouts who honor the vision of those who founded modern science. I pray that they can do something to turn this truly unfortunate situation around.
Over the past two weekends, I attended two homeschooling conventions. They were both Great Homeschool Conventions, and after a year of doing no live conventions at all, I was overjoyed to be back in the saddle. I was also thrilled to see so many families refusing to live in fear and gathering together as a community. I had a lot of wonderful conversations with homeschooling veterans, new homeschooling parents, homeschool students, and homeschool graduates. While many people told me things that were deeply meaningful, there was one event that stands out in my mind, and I must share it.
A homeschooling mother stopped by my publisher’s booth and gave me a manila envelope. It contained a very nice card from her, and a report on some original research her high-school-age daughter had done under the supervision of a professor at a local college. It involved the interaction of bacteria and fungi with certain antibiotics and fungicides. The experiments produced some novel results, and it might end up being published in the scientific literature. The title page of the paper contained this handwritten note from the student:
Dr. Wile, I took what you taught me, and I ran with it. Thank you.
Apparently, she had used my book, Discovering Design with Chemistry, and was inspired to pursue a career in biochemistry, so she started taking college classes while still in high school. There, she met a professor who was happy to encourage her, and that’s how she ended up being able to do the experiments that are discussed in the report. She ended up coming by my publisher’s booth. We got to talk for a while, and I could see her eyes light up when she discussed what she had done. She clearly has a passion for scientific research, and it really made my day!
Since the time this enthusiastic young lady left my publisher’s booth, I have been waxing a bit nostalgic (being sappy is what my daughter would call it), thinking about all of the students who have told me about their scientific accomplishments. One student discovered a new virus. Another developed a new way of producing heavy elements. Another has published more than 40 articles in the scientific literature and is a leader in the field of prenatal imaging. I could go on and on.
What’s my point? Well, when I went to university, my plan was to do exactly what these incredible individuals are doing. I was going to get my Ph.D. in chemistry and become a world-class scientist. While I accomplished the first goal, the second never materialized. I got my Ph.D., became a professor, got grants to do research, and did research that lead to many publications in the peer-reviewed literature of nuclear chemistry. Had I continued, I would have gotten my shot at becoming a world-class scientist. But then something happened. I met my first homeschool graduate.
He was a student in my general chemistry course, and he was head-and-shoulders above his classmates. When I learned that he was homeschooled, I was shocked. I had no idea how a mother without any training (his mother hadn’t even gone to college) could produce a superstar science student. As time went on, I met more outstanding students who were homeschool graduates, so I investigated this “odd phenomenon” on my own. I found that my experiences were indicative of the norm: homeschool graduates are (on average) the best university students. As a result, I started working with homeschooling parents, and eventually, I started writing homeschooling curriculum for them.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that I loved writing curriculum more than university teaching and scientific research, so I eventually left the university and did some consulting work in order to spend more time writing. After my curriculum became popular enough, I stopped consulting and became a full-time writer. I did that for several years, but now I have found a way to balance teaching and writing, so I now teach both high school and university students while still producing new homeschooling curriculum.
While I truly love what I am doing, I sometimes wonder about the choices I made. Once I went to university, I had a solid plan. What would have happened had I followed that plan? Would I have made some great scientific breakthrough? Probably not. While I have made some modest scientific discoveries with the help of others (such as radial energy scaling in heavy-ion collisions and an explanation for an odd chemical phenomenon), I don’t think I have the talent that is required to do great scientific research.
After this past weekend, I have come to realize that I have a tangible reason for being glad my life didn’t go according to plan. Had I followed my plan, I would have probably been a mediocre scientist. Because I followed the opportunities the Lord placed in front of me, however, I have helped inspire some truly incredible people to become scientists. I am certain that they will eventually produce more scientific advancements than I ever could have.
I guess what I am saying is that if the Lord puts opportunities in your path that require you to change or abandon the plans you have made, you should take those opportunities. His plans are better than yours!
The device Harvard plans to use to study the effect of small particles in the upper atmosphere (Click for source)
A reader sent me this article and asked for my comments on it. For some reason, the experiment that is discussed therein escaped my attention, but I read a more detailed discussion of it and found it to be quite intriguing. Essentially, a team of Harvard scientists wants to know if they can block some of the sun’s light so as to counter the effects of global warming, aka climate change. They want to do it by releasing a fine powder of calcium carbonate (chalk) high in the atmosphere. The tiny particles will eventually fall to the ground, but while they are in the air, they will reflect some of the sun’s light so that it never reaches the surface of the earth. That way, it doesn’t have a chance to participate in the greenhouse effect.
Nevertheless, it is certainly possible that global warming (aka climate change) might have serious long-term consequences. As a result, we should look for ways to mitigate the effects, if we eventually find that there will be some. We know the result of cutting carbon dioxide emissions with current technology: people will die. That’s because reducing emissions with the technology we have now makes energy more expensive, and the more expensive energy is, the more people die. (see here and here). Thus, we should examine other methods that might mitigate global warming with a lower body count. That’s what this Harvard experiment is all about.
Are there risks associated with it? Initially, no, because the first experiment, planned for June of this year, would only test the hardware (pictured above). It wouldn’t actually release any powder. If that goes well, the scientists plan a small-scale test that would release no more than 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of the powder. That’s not enough calcium carbonate to produce any negative effects. However, it will allow the scientists to study how the calcium carbonate behaves and whether or not the computer simulations of its behavior are correct.
Of course, the issue is what happens next. In order to change the earth’s greenhouse effect in any significant way, there would have to be a lot more calcium carbonate released, and it would have to be released on a semi-regular basis. That could definitely produce serious, long-term consequences. Nevertheless, there is no way to realistically know what those consequences might be unless the initial tests are performed. Thus, this experiment seems reasonable, at least in the initial stages that have been proposed. It will simply be a way of judging the safety and efficacy of the process. The results won’t be definitive, but they can at least guide the scientists in their future plans.
Here’s the bottom line: We know that all currently-planned attempts to slow global warming (aka climate change) will result in people dying. This new approach might result in that as well, but we don’t know. If experiments like the ones planned by Harvard proceed, at least we can have some data that will allow us to see if this method has a lower body count than the currently-proposed methods. It seems to me that’s something worth learning.
A nerve from a chicken (left) compared to one isolated from a dinosaur fossil (right). (Images by DSTRI, click for originals)
In several previous articles (here, here, here, here, and here), I have been highlighting the groundbreaking work of Mark Armitage at the Dinosaur Soft Tissue Research Institute (DSTRI). If you haven’t heard about the amazing work he has been doing, you should read every link given above. If you have been following Armitage’s cutting-edge original research, then you will be pleased to learn that he has published yet another article with yet another first in the field of paleontology.
The article is entitled, “First Report of Peripheral Nerves in Bone from Triceratops horridus Occipital Condyle,” and even if you get lost in the terminology, the pictures are well worth perusing. Essentially, Armitage does a microscopic analysis of nerves from a chicken (like the one pictured on the left above) and compares them to nerves that were isolated from the condyle (the rounded end of a horn) of a Triceratops fossil (like the one pictured in the right above). He shows that the structures from the fossil have all the physical characteristics of the chicken nerves, which indicates that they really are nerves from a vertebrate animal. That means they are not contaminants. They came from the dinosaur.
Look, for example, at the pictures above. The white bars tell you the scale in micrometers (millionths of a meter). Notice the pattern of dark lines wrapping around the chicken nerve on the left. That is characteristic of a sheath that wraps around the bundle of fibers which makes up the nerve. As you can see, the same pattern appears in the structure that was isolated from the Triceratops fossil, which is shown on the right. Two even more stunning photographs appear on page 5 of the article. In Figures 12 and 13, you can actually see deatils of the sheaths themselves. They are extremely thin and delicate, and yet they were found in a bone that is supposed to be 65 million years old!
It is important to note that these aren’t stiff, petrified structures. Armitage removed the minerals that had preserved the bone (he “decalcified” it), leaving soft tissues behind. As he says in the article:
The flexibility of individual decalcified nerves was astonishing. Nerves held at each end with fine needle forceps only broke into two pieces after repeated tugging. An example of the flexibility of these nerves is seen in Figure 15 where the fascicle rotates through a gentle, unbroken loop and descends into other curvatures before terminating to a point.
Those who are forced to believe in an ancient earth will, no doubt, come up with more special pleading to try to explain how soft tissue can avoid decomposition for millions of years. But for those who are willing to actually follow the data, it is clear that the most reasonable explanation is that the bones are not millions of years old.
An inhaler similar to the ones used in the study (click for credit)A new study was recently posted on Medrxiv, a preprint server that allows you to post research articles that are currently being reviewed for publication. This particular study focused on using a very common inhaled medication, budesonide, as a treatment for COVID-19. It was conducted in a single community in the UK and used 146 subjects, all of which were over the age of 18 and had experienced symptoms suggestive of COVID-19 for 7 days or less. All were given the standard treatments for COVID-19, but half were also given an inhaler that contained budesonide and were told to use it twice per day. The authors wanted to see if this medication, which is known to reduce exacerbations related to COPD and asthma, would be effective in reducing the severity of COVID-19.
The study indicates that it is very effective. The authors found that 10 people in the group getting the normal treatment had a COVID-19-related urgent care visit, emergency department assessment, or hospitalization. Only 1 person in the group that got the usual treatment plus budesonide had that kind of outcome. In addition, the group that got budesonide recovered, on average, a full day earlier than those who did not get it. Finally, fewer patients in the budesonide group had persistent symptoms after 14 and 28 days. Thus, it seems that budesonide does aid in the treatment of COVID-19.
What prompted the study? As the authors state:
In early reports describing COVID-19 infection from China, Italy and the United States, there was a significant under representation of patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in patients hospitalised with COVID-19. We hypothesized that this may be due to the widespread use of inhaled [chemicals like budesonide] in these patients. (reference marks removed by me)
It looks like their hunch turned out to be right. Now, of course, there are limitations to the study. The sample size is reasonable, but not as large as that of a full-scale clinical trial. Also, it was conducted in a single community, which would provide a more homogenized group of people than a study conducted over a large geographic range. Nevertheless, the results are so dramatic that it is hard to understand how these limitations could invalidate the results.
If you end up experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, ask your physician about this study and whether or not budesonide might be a viable treatment option for you. Please note that like all medications (and foods), this medication has potential side effects in some people, so you shouldn’t take it without consulting a physician who knows your medical history.
I just finished reviewing an excellent book on home education. I will discuss it more when it gets published. The author quoted this piece, which I had never read before. As far as I can tell, no one knows who originally crafted it, but I agree with it wholeheartedly!
1 Corinthians 13 for Homeschoolers
If I teach my children how to multiply, divide, and diagram a sentence, but fail to show them love, I have taught them nothing.
If I take them on numerous field trips, to swim practice, and flute lessons, and if I involve them in every church activity, but fail to give them love, I will profit nothing.
And if I scrub my house relentlessly, run countless errands, and serve three nutritious meals every day but fail to be an example of love, I have done nothing.
Love is patient with misspelled words and is kind to young interrupters. Love does not envy the high SAT scores of other homeschool families.
Love does not claim to have better teaching methods than anyone else, is not rude to the fourth telephone caller during a science lesson, does not seek perfectly behaved geniuses, does not turn into a drill sergeant, thinks no evil about friends’ educational choices.
Love bears all my children’s challenges, believes all my children are God’s precious gifts, hopes all my children establish permanent relationships with Christ, and endures all things…
Where there are college degrees, they will fail; where there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we teach in part. But when the trials of life come to our children, the history, math, and science will be done away, and faith, hope, and love will remain.
Dr. Judith Curry, a climate scientist who is actually committed to the science. (click for credit)Dr. Judith Curry holds an earned Ph.D. in geophysical sciences from The University of Chicago. For the last 14 years of her career, she was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. For the majority of that time, she was the chairperson of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She has authored 196 peer-reviewed scientific papers and has two books to her credit. By any objective measure, she is a giant in the field of climate science. Because she is actually interested in understanding how climate works, she was officially branded a heretic by the High Priests of Science. Seven years later, she resigned her professorship at the Georgia Institute of Technology because she could no longer figure out, “…what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science.”
Because I respect her knowledge, intellect, and commitment to science, I read her blog. On Saturday, she posted the transcript from an interview she did for a podcast. I am not familiar with the podcast, and I prefer to read rather than listen. In reading the transcript, I found nothing new related to her views on climate change, but I was fascinated by her historical analysis of the field of climate science. While I encourage you to read the entire transcript, I will highlight what really struck me.
When asked about how climate scientists viewed climate change when she was getting her degrees (the 1970s and 1980s), she said that aside from a few “very rambunctious people,” climate change was not a big issue with scientists. When the IPCC formed in the late 1980s, she said that most climate scientists didn’t want to get involved with it:
They said, this is just a whole political thing. This is not what we do. We seek to understand all the processes and climate dynamics, we don’t want to go there. And that was really a pretty strong attitude, through, I would say the mid nineties, say 1995. We had the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at that point, they’re trying to get a big treaty going. And so defenders of the IPCC started pushing the idea that anybody who doubts us or challenges us, they are in the pay of big oil. After that, it became much more difficult to really challenge all that. And certainly by the turn of the century, anybody who was questioning the hockey stick or any of these other things were slammed as deniers and ostracized. And then after Climategate in 2010, the consensus enforcers became very militant. So it’s a combination of politics, and some mediocre scientists trying to protect their careers. And, they saw this whole thing as a way for career advancement, and it gives them a seat at the big table and political power. All this reinforces pretty shoddy science and overconfidence in their expert judgment, which comprises the IPCC assessment reports.
I found this interesting because as an outsider looking in, I have to agree with her assessment that the IPCC has reinforced “shoddy science.” I don’t know even 5% of what Dr. Curry knows about climate, and I know precisely 0% of what she knows about the internal dynamics of her field. However, after reading each IPCC report (from the 2001 synthesis report on), I was amazed at the shoddiness of the science and the overconfidence they had in their conclusions.
Consider, for example, their view of how humans have impacted the earth’s climate. In 2001, they said that human-emitted greenhouse gases are “likely” responsible for more than half of the earth’s temperature increase since 1951. By 2007, climate scientists had shown that the models used in 2001 were wrong, and they also found new variables related to climate which were poorly understood. Nevertheless, in their 2007 report, the IPCC said that human-emitted greenhouse gases are “very likely” responsible. Over the next six years, climate scientists continued to show that the models used by the IPCC were wrong and continued to find more uncertainties in our understanding of climate. But over that same period, the IPCC decided that that human-emitted greenhouse gases are “extremely likely” responsible.
In real science, when uncertainties grow, the conclusions become more and more tentative. In climate science, the reverse seems to be the case. More uncertainties seem to lead to more confidence in the conclusions. That’s pretty much the definition of shoddy science.
Dr. Scott Carr does a demonstration that shows gravity accelerates all object at the same rate. From time to time, I teach classes at Anderson University. While I usually teach science for science majors, over the past few years, I have been co-teaching a class with Dr. Scott Carr called “Teaching STEM in the Elementary Classroom.” It is designed to give elementary education majors the tools they need to incorporate science, technology, engineering, and math lessons in their K-6 classrooms.
I started teaching it just because I enjoy working with Dr. Carr, but I have continued teaching it because the class is really fun. A good portion of the class time is spent having students come up with experiments that their students could either do or watch. Of course, I have seen all sorts of science experiments for elementary students, and my elementary series actually contains a total of 450 of them. Nevertheless, every year I see at least one new experiment or a new variation on an experiment I already know. This year is no exception. We have only been in class for two weeks, and already, a student named Melodie Nord presented a great experiment that shows gravity accelerates all objects at the same rate. A slow-motion video of it is given below:
As you can see in the video, water is falling out of a hole near the bottom of the cup in a stream. However, once the cup is released, the water stops falling out of the hole. It is still falling, of course, but the cup is falling with it. Since the cup and its entire contents fall at the same rate as the water that would have come out of the hole, the cup “keeps up” with the stream that was coming out of the hole. As a result, there is no stream of water. This shows that whether it is a tiny drop of water or a cup full of water, gravity accelerates everything at the same rate, regardless of mass.
I have a plaque on my wall that says “Docendo Discimus,” which is a Latin proverb that means, “By teaching, we learn.” It is true whether I am teaching nuclear physics at the graduate level or STEM for elementary education majors!
A comparison of Sweden and Denmark in terms of COVID-19 (click for higher resolution)
I have written two posts comparing the COVID-19 situation in Sweden and Denmark (see here and here). I find the comparison useful, because they are very similar countries in the same basic region of the world, but they had remarkably different responses to the disease. Sweden initially avoided lockdowns and tried to target their social restrictions, while Denmark followed the practices of most other countries, strongly limiting what their citizens could do during the pandemic. Sweden thought that if they allowed the disease to run its course among those who are not at high risk, they would achieve herd immunity, and the disease would lose its impact. As a result, they tried to target their severe restrictions to those who were at high risk, allowing the rest of the population to live life more normally.
By fall, there were those who thought the strategy had worked. Case rates were falling, and Sweden seemed to have weathered the storm. However, in my August post, I said that Sweden had not reached herd immunity, and it turns out that I was right. If you look at the above graphs (data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control), you will see that while both Sweden and Denmark saw a leveling off in the summer and early fall, COVID cases and deaths quickly shot up later on. To date, Sweden’s COVID-19 deaths per million are more than three times that of Denmark’s, and right now, there is no indication that either country will see a slowdown in cases or deaths, at least not until the vaccines are widely distributed.
Now please understand that comparing two different countries is fraught with peril, and even though Sweden and Denmark are similar in many ways, we cannot use these data to definitively say that government-imposed lockdowns are responsible for the difference. Indeed, there is a fairly recent study that tries to compare different countries, and they conclude that while some social restrictions did reduce the spread of the disease, severe restrictions (like lockdowns) didn’t help at all. Interestingly enough, they use Sweden as part of their baseline for countries that didn’t implement severe restrictions, but they do not use data from Denmark in any way. I personally think their analysis uses countries that are just too different to be compared in any meaningful way.
To show you what I mean, I added the U.S. and Italy to the graphs above to show you where they fit.
Notice that while the general shape of Italy’s death graph is similar to that of Sweden and Denmark, the U.S. deaths look very different. Conversely, when it comes to cases, the U.S. graph has the general shape of Sweden and Denmark, while Italy is different. Finally, notice that the total number of deaths per million varies by nearly a factor of five, despite the fact that three of the four countries on the graph had strict limitations on what many of their citizens could do.
I think there is one firm conclusion we can make from the data presented above: Sweden’s strategy of trying to control the disease using herd immunity acquired through exposure did not work.
This is an example of one of the many false things you will read on social media. As I have said countless times before, social media is a horrible source for information. Someone can post a lie, and people who are too lazy to investigate issues for themselves will simply share that lie. Pretty soon, lots of people have been fooled. This is especially true when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic. Consider, for example, the image on the left. It claims that with just two weeks left in 2020, the total number of deaths in the United States was lower than the total number of deaths in 2019. This, of course, is meant to support the conspiracy theory that the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t real. The problem, of course, is that the post is simply false, and anyone who spends even a short amount of time investigating it will see that.
Back in September, I posted a graph that was widely available on the internet. I checked it with the data that were known at the time and found it to be accurate. Even back then, we knew that 2020 was lining up to be the deadliest year in history. In July, several news outlets (like this one) ran a story on a medical study that showed deaths in the U.S. had spiked by 18%. In October, more stories (like this one) reported that there were 300,000 excess deaths in 2020 compared to the same time frame in 2019. In late December, several stories (like this one) reported that 2020 was on track to be the deadliest year in U.S. history.
If you don’t believe these reports, you can check the data for yourself. I downloaded the file yesterday, and it indicated that there were 3,128,646 deaths in the U.S. from 1/1/2020 to the week ending 12/19/2020 (the last week available at that time). In 2019, the total death count was 2,852,610. Now please note that these numbers are still not final; they will both increase. The 2020 numbers will increase more with the final weeks being included and with new information coming in from very rural areas. Nevertheless, it is quite clear that 2020 was significantly more deadly than 2019. In fact, in terms of total numbers, it is the deadliest year on record. Even when you look at the increase in deaths between 2019 and 2020 as a percentage of the population, you find that it is second only to what happened between 1917 and 1918, when deaths as a percentage of the population rose by 46% because of World War I and the Spanish influenza pandemic.
There are many reasons to distrust the government. Indeed, there are many things that I think the government is lying about. In each case, however, I have come to that conclusion because I think the data demonstrate that the government is promoting falsehoods. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the data are clear and easily found by anyone willing to invest even a modicum of effort investigating the issue. It is real, and it turned 2020 into the deadliest year in U.S. history.
