The scourge of lying and cheating in science

The trouble with science is the amount of lying and cheating of scientists, especially in reporting their work. Revelations and expressions of ethical concern are becoming frequent. A second hurdle for good science is the conceit scientists can embody with regards the importance of what they believe they know. These words are written with regret because I respect the profession, its general dedication to finding the truth, to its sense of service to humanity. Unfortunately those qualities are not universal to the extent that truth suffers, and people's welfare, even lives, are endangered.

All those general readers who enjoy reading about science, whether the likes of Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, or detailed articles in the press on the latest scientific work, are left with a deep sense of gratitude for the efforts of the scientists. But that history of science also laid bare the human weaknesses scientists show in what has always been a very competitive field. Now to the present.

The Economist

From Science has lost its way, at a big cost to humanity (Los Angeles Times, October 27, 2013): "The demand for sexy results, combined with indifferent follow-up, means that billions of dollars in worldwide resources devoted to finding and developing remedies for the diseases that afflict us all is being thrown down a rat hole. National Institutes of Health and the rest of the scientific community are just now waking up to the realization that science has lost its way, and it may take years to get back on the right path."

From a follow-up column: More on the crisis in research: Feynman on 'cargo cult science' (Los Angeles Times, October 28, 2013):  "One suspects that [Caltech theoretical physicist Richard] Feynman, who died in 1988, would be appalled by the current standards of research publication, which critics say favor audacious claims instead of the painstaking, judicious marshaling of evidence he advocated. It's even more striking today to ponder his confidence in science's ability to weed out factitious or mistaken findings.

"We've learned from experience that the truth will come out," he told students. "Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right.... And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science."

And from the most exhaustive account of what's rotten in the scientific enterprise, Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting - To an alarming degree, it is not (The Economist,  October 18, 2013):
"The governments of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, spent $59 billion on biomedical research in 2012, nearly double the figure in 2000. One of the justifications for this is that basic-science results provided by governments form the basis for private drug-development work. If companies cannot rely on academic research, that reasoning breaks down. When an official at America’s National Institutes of Health reckons, despairingly, that researchers would find it hard to reproduce at least three-quarters of all published biomedical findings, the public part of the process seems to have failed."

With headlines like these, the general public will be disappointed given the prestige in which they hold the scientific community. People are also increasingly fearful of scientific manipulations, and so the multiplying calls for detailed labelling of food products. For sure, prestige is based on integrity.

Who am I to judge another person?

Pope Francis in July talking to journalists on his return
from Brazil: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has
good will, who am I to judge?"

Must we tolerate everything another person throws at us? Matthew 7:1-6 is a good place to go for an answer. There we can see from the examples Jesus offers that, first, "Do not judge" means "Do not condemn", in other words, don't be self-righteous or hypocritical, reacting to others as if we ourselves never do anything wrong. "First remove the plank from your own eye and then the speck in the other person's eye."

The second feature of Jesus' teaching is that judging, in its improper form, is a failure to be encouraging. "It does not look for or appreciate the good that a person may do. When we judge [improperly] we refuse to understand the difficulties of a situation or the struggles a person may face", as one biblical commentator put it. Often we notice a different attitude if the wrong-doer is someone we love; we are more sympathetic.

"When we have a judging spirit, we are powerless to see others change. We cannot even accurately see the problem. Criticism and self-righteousness always cloud spiritual vision. When you notice another's sin, is your goal to restore or to condemn?" 

Therefore, withholding judgement does not mean agreeing with everyone and about everything people do, but it means responding to people and actions after striving to gain the necessary insight, and in the spirit of a God who is merciful and forgiving - all the while knowing the way we judge is the way God will judge us.

Mapping the myth of over-population

Source: redditor valeriepieris

The stunning information given in the picture becomes more amazing when it is recognised that the circle contains more water than land, and within it is the world's most sparsely populated country, Mongolia. Comments on the significance of this graphic's information are made here and here.

Then at Treehugger, we have a series of illustrations with the article 'At NY City's Density, the World's Population Could Live in Texas'.

The figures in the chart are for the area of land in the state of Texas. Another 2.5 per cent of the state is water

Source: By Tim De Chant as found here

Whether the world has enough space for everyone has aroused many imaginations as to the prospect of over-population. However, we can see for ourselves that this fear should be quelled. On the other hand, though it is well recognised that the world has the ability to feed all of humanity and adequately care for all, the latent willingness to attend to the difficulties of the poorest has not been converted into worldwide action. That is the next human project, one where everyone can play a part, especially in those buying habits where cheapest equals best or high profit margins means justice has been done.

Dali and the beauty of science

Salvador Dali was thrust deep into scientific mysteries. For instance, with regards this Crucifixion, he stated:

In the first place, in 1950, I had a ‘cosmic dream’ in which I saw this image in color and which in my dream represented the ‘nucleus of the atom’. This nucleus later took on a metaphysical sense; I considered it ‘the very unity of the universe’, the Christ! In the second place, when thanks to the instructions of Father Bruno, a Carmelite, I saw the Christ drawn by Saint John of the Cross, I worked out geometrically a triangle and a circle, which ‘aesthetically’ summarized all my previous experiments, and I inscribed my Christ in this triangle.

Dali named his 1951 work Christ of Saint John of the Cross. The sketch below is that by St John of the Cross from the 1570s made after a mystical experience.

The effect of the bowed Christ that Dali conceptualised in a optical or scientific manner continues to have an impact on those who visit the Glasgow Art Gallery to see it. When the gallery bought the work in 1952:

It was met with considerable criticism from the art press for its price (£8,200 was considered exorbitant) as well as its quality.  It was derided as ‘skilled sensationalist trickery’ and ‘calculated melodrama’, but despite this, the people of Glasgow flocked to see the picture.  Fifty thousand visitors saw it in the first two months, and it was reported that ‘Men entering the room where the picture is hung instinctively take off their hats.  Crowds of chattering, high-spirited school children are hushed into awed silence when they see it.’  Even now, it is still the most celebrated painting in the gallery’s collection.

When it was painted, Dali explained, ‘My aesthetic ambition… was completely the opposite of all the Christs painted by most of the modern painters, who have all interpreted him in the expressionistic and contortionistic sense, thus obtaining emotion through ugliness. My principal preoccupation was that my Christ would be beautiful as the God that he is.’ 

The comment continues:

The power of the picture rests in part in the paradoxes it presents to the viewer.  The monumental figure of the crucified Christ hovers above the world, yet we look down on him.  In the detail of Christ’s body and his closeness to the picture surface – he really does appear to project beyond it – Christ is immediately and physically present and yet he is distant, above the clouds, his face hidden.

The scientific element in Dali's work is particularly clear in another striking crucifixion. Here are some worthwhile comments on this point:

By the 1950s, Dali had abandoned his atheism in favor of the religion of his birth and baptism, Catholicism. Combining this with his beliefs in so-called "nuclear mysticism" he created paintings such as the Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) [see below]. Christ is suspended on an eight sided dodecahedron - an octahedral hypercube or a cube in the fourth dimension. Dali's critics often stated that his use of these mathematical symbols as "visual opportunism" and that the artist knew nothing of the meanings and mathematical principles behind them.

However, Thomas Banchoff, a Brown University professor who did pioneering work using computer graphics to illustrate geometry beyond the third dimension in the 1970s, insists that this assumption about Dali is untrue. "Dali wanted to be treated seriously by scientists," Banchoff said of the artist. "He knew what he was talking about he was not just using the symbols." Banchoff and Dali became friends after a 1975 article in the Washington Post about Banchoff's work caught Dali's eye. Banchoff stated that Dali had specific mathematical questions and sought the professor's help to solve optical problems in some of his more extreme works.

We can't leave this topic of Dali's struggle to make us aware of beauty through science without delving into his work, Cena or The Sacrament of the Last Supper.

One commentator makes these important observations:

 Believing that the number “12” was “paranoiacly sublime,” Dali painted the backdrop as a dodecahedron – a 12-sided figure. The number 12 figures in as Christ’s 12 apostles, the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 12 months of the year, etc. Dali believed that the Communion must be symmetrical, thus giving rise to the strict symmetry of the work, with each apostle on the left a virtual mirror image of his counterpart on the right.

The overall feeling of spirituality and mysticism is achieved through the transparency of the Christ figure, appearing as if he could be rising from the sea, and of the dodecahedron. Dali’s blond, beardless and otherwise unconventional depiction of Jesus set skeptical fingers wagging when the large painting was unveiled on Easter, 1955. Some presumed – in shock, but erroneously – that Gala (his wife) posed for Christ! In fact, a male model sat for the artist.

The large male torso at the top of this canvas may be interpreted at least three ways: as the Holy Spirit; the ascension of Christ; or perhaps God the Father, watching over all, his face not to be seen.

In like manner, enjoy this last work - The Ascension. That same commentator wonders here if we are witnessing the splitting of an atom or activity of a human cell:

Dali – master of illusion and of manipulating space and time – throws us off some by the oddly juxtaposed perspectives and points of view in Ascension. The Christ figure is seen emerging either backwards or upwards – we don’t know. Meanwhile, it’s less than clear just what [the woman, perhaps mother] would be standing on in relation to the angle of the rising Christ. What’s more, we have a more normal and natural field of vision in the landscape shown at the bottom, below the large yellow circle, further confounding our perspective here.

And just what is that brilliant golden sphere? Is it a splitting atom or human cell? Is it the sun? Does it represent the circle of life? Could it be a sea urchin? What we do know is that directly behind the ascending Christ figure are the florets of a sunflower – a natural design by which Dali was intrigued, because its continuous circular pattern follows the laws of a logarithmic spiral – a naturally occurring phenomenon he also found in the horn of a rhinoceros and the morphology of a cauliflower.

Samuel Pepys and the blogosphere

In my way home I 'light and to the Coffee-house, where I heard Lt. Coll. Baron tell very good stories of his travels over the high hills in Asia above the clouds, how clear the heaven is above them, how thicke like a mist the way is through the cloud that wets like a sponge one's clothes, the ground above the clouds all dry and parched, nothing in the world growing, it being only a dry earth, yet not so hot above as below the clouds. The stars at night most delicate bright and a fine clear blue sky, but cannot see the earth at any time through the clouds, but the clouds look like a world below you. Thence home and to supper...

The "coffee-house" nature of the internet, especially the blogosphere, has taken a while to sink in, but the news and discourse offered by these new channels of communication are becoming wondrous in diversity and, most importantly, in depth. I checked randomly as to how Samuel Pepys saw the situation of his day, and the above is part of a long entry for February 1, 1664. As for February 2:

At noon by coach to the 'Change with Mr. Coventry, thence to the Coffee-house with Captain Coeke, who discoursed well of the good effects in some kind of a Dutch warr and conquest (which I did not consider before, but the contrary) that is, that the trade of the world is too little for us two, therefore one must down.

And February 3:

In Covent Garden to-night, going to fetch home my wife, I stopped at the great Coffee-house' there, where I never was before; where Dryden the poet (I knew at Cambridge), and all the wits of the town, and Harris the player, and Mr. Hoole of our College. And had I had time then, or could at ether times, it will be good coming thither, for there, I perceive, is very witty and pleasant discourse.

   Hearty discourse at Will’s Coffee House

  

Though Pepys was a rich and influential man in government and at the court - he humbly thanked God for this - he obviously found much to attract him at the coffee-houses and taverns he visited, giving him access to fresh ideas and news about people and places near and far.

Likewise myself with regards sites like Salon, Slate and Huffington Post and Daily Beast to a certain extent, but pre-eminently Andrew Sullivan's The Dish, which I have subscribed to, marvelling at the quality of the material offered and the low annual fee (US$20). I wish the newspapers would set their subscriptions at a similar level, making it possible for the average Jane or Joe to read what is behind the paywall. 

Using The Dish as an example, the discourse, that is the viewpoints tapped and the range of topics broached, as well as the merry items, is more than worth the money of a subscription. The purview is wider than what the Arts and Letters Daily started offering many years ago, before sinking from sight after being bought from its creator, a countryman of mine, by the owners of the Chronicle of Higher Education. What makes The Dish distinctive is the voice of Sullivan, who uses his background in journalism and controversy to shape a strong perspective, but one that does not seem to want to dominate the discussion, which makes for an invigorating 21st Century coffee-house.

Prayer as answer to ideology

Those convinced about the rightness of their beliefs can fall into the trap of the rigidity of mind that seems to be a characteristic of ideology. Religious believers are also prone to developing an attitude that is "rigid, moralistic, ethical, but without kindness". This is Pope Francis speaking. He points to the solution, a solution conveyed in the painting shown here.

Mother Teresa, by Hyung Koo Kang

He who does not pray is “arrogant, is proud, is sure of himself. He is not humble. He seeks his own advancement.” However, "when a Christian prays ... he speaks with Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness.”

•  Hyung Koo Kang has spent over 20 years painting portraits on huge canvases, over two metres square. His facial portraits do not reveal any type of backdrop or environment, instead they focus on depicting the subjects' faces in great detail.