Techmaeck: April 2017

this is happening on april 22nd ,In this understanding of science, there are no preconceived conclusions, no sacred dogma, no repression of disfavored thinkers or politically incorrect thoughts, no politics, no parties, no agenda beyond teasing out the truth. The March for Science isn’t really about all that.

Sure, it pays lip service to this common conception of science, derived for many people from science classes you took in high school and college. But judging from the coverage we’ve seen up till now, it looks like the march is set to be an exercise in self-congratulation and virtue signaling, political axe-grinding, a veiled grab by ideological partisans for power and funding. We venture to predict that most marchers won’t even be scientists but, instead, people looking to seize hold of the prestige of science for their own ends.

There’s been much talk of diversity, as organizers have revised the diversity statement on their website multiple times, so that nobody — no possible sexuality, ethnicity, or other identify — feels left out. This rainbow coalition, however, expects lock-step agreement with its views on controversial scientific claims.

The organizers, meanwhile, have been racked by infighting, and some clear-eyed scientists have warned colleagues to beware of conflating science with political agendas.

To all appearances, it’s going to be a hell of a mess, and we say: Bring it on.

Why? Because Americans are going to get a look at something we’ve been telling you about for years. And it’s not going to be pretty. Science, more and more, has been hijacked. Rather than glorying in freewheeling debate, it increasingly insists on conformity. It’s in step with the times on university campuses, where intellectual diversity is frowned on at best, or, at worst, drowned out by screaming, sometimes violent young people.

Advocates of the theory of intelligent design have been protesting for open discussion for two decades now. We’ve seen the closing of the American mind up close. We were the canary in the coalmine, as Darwin skeptics became among the first scholars to feel the impact of the insistence on intellectual conformity.

The academy and the media ignored our warnings. Evolution’s apologists claimed there was no controversy about evolution. They denied the existence of the rumblings going on in peer-reviewed science journals.

On the issue of evolution, Stephen Meyer in Darwin’s Doubt (2013) documented the growing discontent among mainstream scientists with orthodox Darwinian theory. He was dramatically vindicated this past November when the august Royal Society in London met to consider “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology.” The very first speaker, Austrian evolutionary theorist Gerd Müller, stood up and acknowledged that evolution lacks explanations for three major mysteries of life’s history, what most people think of when they think of “evolution.” See my article with Paul Nelson, “Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken.”

But the media covers all this up. As Meyer notes in Darwin’s Doubt, “Rarely has there been such a great disparity between the popular perception of a theory and its actual standing in the relevant peer-reviewed science literature.”

Rather than candidly acknowledge dissent among scientists, the media together with the academic community insists on assent from the populace in favor of what Douglas Axe calls Darwinism’s “self-righteous monoculture,” or what Jonathan Wells describes in a new book as “zombie science.”

The March for Science promises to be a massive demonstration of that monoculture, applied to several areas of scientific, political, and cultural disagreement. The marchers will demand an end to that disagreement. And if recent episodes on campuses such as U.C. Berkeley and Middlebury College are any sign, we should not be surprised to see violence.

The March’s website includes a “Statement on Peaceful Assembly and Nonviolence.” “We do not condone violence,” they say. But if they weren’t well aware of the possibility, they wouldn’t need to have a statement on it.

We take no pleasure in saying “We told you so.” But…we did tell you so. This monoculture with its intense dislike of debate seems set to be exposed in all its ugly quasi-fascism. Getting an eyeful of that, for the public, may be a step on the road to recovering intellectual freedom.

Jonathan Haidt of Heterodox Academy hit the nail on the head in a Wall Street Journal interview this past weekend. He spoke specifically of campus disorder and disrespect for genuine diversity. But what happens in Washington, DC, will likely be an extension of that.

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Risk is essential but some risk are dangerous

11. Thomas Andrews was the chief naval architect for the R.M.S. Titanic and it was his honor to accompany the ship on its maiden voyage. Andrews was aware of the Titanic’s vulnerability in ice-laden waters and originally called for the Titanic to be double-hulled and equipped with forty-six lifeboats, instead of the twenty it actually carried. He was overruled due to cost constraints. When the Titanic struck the iceberg on April 15, 1912, Andrews heroically helped many people into the lifeboats. He was last seen in the first-class smoking lounge, weeping. His body was never recovered.

10. William Bullock invented the first modern printing press. While installing a machine for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Bullock tried to kick a belt onto a pulley and got his leg crushed in the moving mechanism. He quickly developed gangrene and his leg needed amputating. During his surgery on April 12, 1867, Bullock died of complications.

9. Francis Edgar Stanley invented the photographic dry plate which he sold to George Eastman of Eastman-Kodak fame. With the profits, he founded the Stanley Motor Carriage Company and developed a line of steam-powered automobiles called Stanley Steemers. On July 13, 1918, Francis Stanley was testing one of his Steemers and swerved to miss some farm animals. He plowed into a wood pile and died.

8. Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier was a French chemistry and physics teacher as well as being the true father of aviation. He made the first hot air balloon flight in 1783. He was also the first to experiment with hydrogen as a propellant, testing it by taking a mouthful and blowing it across an open flame. After losing his hair and eyebrows, he dismissed hydrogen as being too volatile — something the makers of the Hindenburg would later confirm. On July 15, 1785, de Rozier attempted to cross the English Channel in his balloon. It crashed, killing de Rozier and his passenger.

17. Louis Slotin was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhatten Project. After the war, Slotin continued to experiment with plutonium and accidently set off a fission reaction which released a hard burst of radiation. Realizing what he’d done, Slotin heroically covered the material with his body while the others made a run for the hills. He died on May 30, 1946, two weeks after the exposure.

6. Karel Soucek was a Czechoslovakian daredevil and inventor. He built a specially-designed, shock-proof barrel and repeatedly flowed over Niagara Falls. To top this feat, Soucek invented a new capsule which was dropped from the roof of the Houston Astrodome on January 20, 1985. It missed its target, which was a small water container, and Soucek was killed on impact. World-renown stuntman, Evel Knievel, tried to talk Soucek out of it, saying “It was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.”

5. Sylvester H. Roper invented the world’s first motorcycle. He called it a velocipede and it was actually a converted bicycle powered by a steam engine. On June 01, 1896, Roper was testing the machine on a bicycle racing track and was lapping the pedal-powered two-wheelers at over forty mph. Suddenly, he wiped out and died. The autopsy showed the cause of death to be a heart attack, but it’s not known if the attack caused the crash or if the crash caused the attack. He was seventy-two.

4. Horace Lawson Hunley invented the submarine. His first prototype trapped seven sailors underwater and killed them all. Hunley went back to the drawing board and came up with a new and improved sub, aptly named the H.L. Hunley, which he skippered himself. On October 15, 1863, Hunley was testing the Hunley off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, when it failed to surface and again killed the crew — including Hunley himself.

3. Aurel Vlaicu was a Romanian inventor and test pilot of his own line of aircraft, called the Vlaicu WR I, II, and III. He achieved many notable firsts such as the highest, longest, and fastest flights. On Friday, September 13, 1913, Vlaicu’s luck ran out when he attempted the highest altitude flight ever — crossing the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. The cause of the crash was never determined.

2. Valerian Abakovsky invented the Aerocar, also known as the Aerowagon, which was a steam-powered, propeller-driven rail car intended to whisk railway executives quickly across the vast lands of Siberia. On July 24, 1921, the twenty-five-year-old Abakovsky was whirling a group of twenty-two big-shots from Tula to Moscow when he approached a curve at over eighty mph. His Aerocar went airborne and killed six, including the inventor.

1. Marie Curie was a Polish chemist/physicist who pioneered research into radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize — twice. Besides proposing the theory of radiation and discovering two elements, she is credited with inventing radiography or X-rays. Curie died on July 14, 1934, in a French sanatorium from aplastic anemia due to long-term exposure to radiation, probably from her habit of carrying test-tubes of plutonium in her pockets.

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Microsoft last week announced that it would shutter its nearly 11-year-old CodePlex project site and migrate its library of work to GitHub.
Microsoft has invested in Visual Studio Team Services as its "One Engineering Project" for proprietary projects and exposed many key open source projects -- such as Visual Studio Code, TypeScript and the Cognitive Toolkit -- on GitHub, noted Brian Harry, vice president for cloud developer services at Microsoft.
The company has been forced to deal with a couple of major issues, such as a 2015 spam epidemic and a substantial decrease in usage, he said, with fewer than 350 projects getting a source commit over the past 30 days.
Microsoft disabled the ability to create new CodePlex projects on Friday. By October, projects on the site will be read-only, and the site will be shut down completely by Dec. 15.
The company made the right decision in shutting down the Codeplex site, said Peter Christy, research director at 451 Research.
"In the time since CP was created, the open source world has evolved enormously, and GitHub is clearly the sharing site of choice,' he told LinuxInsider. "If a project was very MS-Centric, the change might be slightly negative, but the broader direction of OS is to be platform-agnostic, I think."
When Codeplex made its debut, Microsoft was a great deal more protective of its intellectual property, and the company management had a pretty open disdain for open source at the time.
Bite the Bullet
The transfer from Codeplex to Github was inevitable, observed Al Gillen, group vice president for software development and open source at IDC. After taking the helm at Microsoft in 2014, Satya Nadella adopted a more pragmatic approach toward embracing the open source community.
"Steve Ballmer was ceding ground to supporting open source software within Microsoft where it was necessary, but when Satya Nadella took over the helm, the willingness to work more collaboratively with open source communities and technologies accelerated pretty dramatically," Gillen told LinuxInsider.
"Ballmer and Nadella came from very different backgrounds within Microsoft, and Nadella did not have the same 'not invented here' bias that Ballmer did," he pointed out.
Microsoft released open source Visual Studio Code for multiple .Net languages and the non-.Net language Go, and it open sourced the Azure Container Language, SQL Server and Powershell.
"Concrete actions matter more than words," said Paul Teich, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
"Microsoft is backing up its recent statements and attitudes toward open source," he told LinuxInsider.
In an important symbolic move, Microsoft joined The Linux Foundation as a platinum member, which it announced last year during the Microsoft Connect conference. John Gossman, architect of the company's Azure team, joined the board of directors.
"Long term, this means that GitHub continues to be a central technology used broadly within the industry," said IDC's Gillen, and it is "incrementally more credible today than it was a week ago.