‘
Doonesbury is right on the money today. Besides making fun of the attack on science and creationism, he’s also mocking the real White House science adviser, John Marburger.
And this strip is right on the heels of last week’s dead-on one as well.’
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March 5th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Both amusing, both accurate.
Last week’s reminds me of Michael Shermer’s argument in “How We Believe” that there is nothing wrong with faith or religion as long as they keep out of the domain where reason and science apply.
March 5th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
Trudeau keeps his touch. Still funny and still true — and he’s been doing Doonesbury for over a quarter of the entire history of newspaper comic strips.
March 5th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
One of my favourite Doonsbury cartoons on Intelligent Design
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date=20051218
March 5th, 2006 at 2:16 pm
It even looks a little like Marburger…
March 5th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Yes, very funny.
I love these strips, haha.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
Straight talker.
From the above link to John Marburger being interviewed.
GONYEA: But we’ve seen scientists leaving the EPA, talking about how their reports have been dismissed or ignored, or that political appointees have changed language.
Dr. MARBURGER: Well, I don’t think, I’m not sure we’re talking about the EPA. But I’m not, I mean if you’d like to discuss that in some other context, I would be willing to do so.
March 5th, 2006 at 3:55 pm
While I don’t always agree with Doonsbury, they’re right on the money on this one. There are no two sides two science. There’s facts, and then there’s fantasy.
March 5th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
When I saw this strip this morning, I was wondering if Phil was going to comment on it.
March 5th, 2006 at 6:27 pm
On a related note…
March 5th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
I find it somewhat annoying that my local newspaper has removed both Doonesbury and Non Sequitur in favor of continuing to run ALL of the boring soap-opera strips, and ALL of the old humorless strips (e.g. Hagar the Horrible, Blondie, Wizard of Id, B.C. …boy I hate B.C.). Of course, considering that my local paper is the Daily Oklahoman, that’s not really all that surprising.
March 5th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
Is Nathan Null the inventor of the null hypothesis?
March 6th, 2006 at 2:47 am
That’s right; he was a good friend of William of Ockham.
Although the character seems to have rejected the null hypothesis, despite there not being evidence to support doing so.
March 6th, 2006 at 3:10 am
I had to google “1980 olympic hockey team” to understand last weeks Doonesbury. Now, if it had said “How Crewe Alexandra stayed in the Championship last season” I’d have ‘got it’ straight away
March 6th, 2006 at 3:52 am
One small perk of working deep in the bowels of newspaper production is that I get to read the Sunday comics almost a week in advance. I thought about posting a “heads up” in BABBLING last Monday.
March 6th, 2006 at 4:16 am
I have a friend, a very bright guy, Ph.D. in Physics, retired now, a hmanist/rationalist. He had a cartoon above his desk for years- “For every Ph.D. there is an equal and opposite Ph.D.” Human thought is full of paradoxes, and the thought that there is only one side, the facts, is clearly naive. Just look at SciAm of a hundred years ago. They were clueless.
DrJPH
March 6th, 2006 at 5:44 am
http://www.ucomics.com/nonsequitur/2006/03/01/
March 6th, 2006 at 7:54 am
“…the thought that there is only one side, the facts, is clearly naive. Just look at SciAm of a hundred years ago. They were clueless.”
But that’s wrong. A century ago people weren’t clueless. They had a body of clues -facts- from which they inferred a model of how the world works. Now, many years later, more discoveries have been made, and there are more facts known than before. Thus, even though we are still “clueless” today, we’ve little scientific choice in now a theory of the world must be shaped.
It’s our observations of the world which prompt us to be curious as to its nature to begin with. It’s foolish to abandon observations -facts- if that is what we want to understand to begin with.
On the other hand, if one is not interested in understanding the world as it is discovered to be, but rather is interested in comfort & reassurance in some Freudian mode, then abandonment of the facts may be the way to go.
March 6th, 2006 at 8:14 am
I realize that magazines need advertising revenue, but I was more than a little miffed to find a classified ad in the latest “Sky & Telescope” advertising a site dedicated to “proving” that God is an engineer. He defines science as, “…a study of God’s physical laws” and the universe as, “….It is only rational that the universe as we know it today had to be created by an absolute powerful force and energy…” Gah! I’d also like to speak to him about his choice of background for his site, but that’s another story.
March 6th, 2006 at 9:48 am
Humans seem to require an end to ambiguity, replacing it with absolutism, a new way of remaining in the mud.
” Please don’t lift me up. I’m afraid of heights!”
Gary 7
March 6th, 2006 at 10:13 am
(/sardonic)
People who think they know it all, really annoy those of us that DO.
(/end sardonic)
March 6th, 2006 at 10:39 am
DrJPHauk:
Science isn’t opinion. It really isn’t. The key is not walking in with a blueprint in advance of what you should see, and not ignoring things that don’t fit on the blueprint you shouldn’t have brought with you.
Having a PhD does not nullify the position of another, especially if it is in a different discipline. One can study theology all one wishes at Ave Maria University; this will not make one capable of denouncing a PhD in physics and cosmology who states a rough estimate of the universe’s age at 13.7 billion years.
March 6th, 2006 at 10:52 am
The Doonsbury cartoon reminds me of a story by a former penpal of mine, a lady physicist who started college during the ’30s. She told of a lab exercise by one of the professors, in which the student was to take multiple measurements with a caliper of a metal cylinder’s diameter. The numbers ought to fall within an interval of variance, which the teacher specified in advance, and the average of the data would be very close to a certain value, also provided ahead of time by the teacher.
She went about the assignment, carefully measuring the diameter. Quickly she became anxious, because no matter how careful she was, the data refused to come out as she’d been instructed they would. She assumed it was some deficit in her laboratory skills, and to evade embarrassment she fudged the data to be in accord with expectations.
In the end it turned out nearly *all* the students, working independently, had fudged their data, for the same reason. The professor then revealed that the cylinders issued were nowhere near the dimensions he’d claimed. It was impossible with the precision of the instruments to come by the numbers honestly. Everyone who’d doctored up their data had done so out of fear of not finding the right answer. It was a social pressure.
The moral of the teacher’s exercise was that the numbers are what they are. It doesn’t matter who says otherwise (the President, the Pope), or what their motives are (even if their motives are for good), or anything. If you want to know the diameter of the cylinder, you must ask the cylinder, not the professor.
March 6th, 2006 at 11:52 am
A truly clever student would swap the professor’s cylinder with one whose dimensions matched the original claim.
That’s a great exercise, though it seems like the sort of thing a professor could only do once. I mean, if classes in the ’30s were anything like classes today, the students would pass along the word to the next generation. The self-centered desire to make the next lot suffer as badly as we did is often counteracted by the self-centered desire to pull one over on the teacher, hence the “bibles” of homework answers and so forth. This doesn’t help anybody, of course, since the students learn nothing while the professors believe they are teaching well.
March 6th, 2006 at 11:56 am
The famous Sidney Harris cartoon in which the professor has written “then a miracle occurs” in the midst of a lot of equations is one of the best, referenced by many in the evo/ID debate, and is useful in many places to illustrate faulty thinking. The professor’s colleague comments, “I think you need to be more explicit here in step two.” This, along with many other Sidney Harris cartoons can be found at: http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/
As far as the “equal and opposite PhD” cartoon/saying: remember guys, it’s just a JOKE!
March 6th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Speaking of creationism … the second google add “Christian Astronomy” (sic) on the badastronomy.com site links to THIS site … http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/cms_content?page=290822&sp=60624&event=1016SPF&p=1018818
Never knew there was a CHRISTIAN flavor of astronomy!
March 6th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
“A truly clever student would swap the professor’s cylinder with one whose dimensions matched the original claim.”
Yes. But of course, the prof would then figure out that the student had an imposter cylinder. The game was rigged from the start.
But at any rate, this is possible to do with a small, sample cylinder. One cannot swap the Universe for another, less controversial one. If one wants to know the character of the observable Universe, one must observe the Universe.
March 6th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
And on the charge of people a century ago being “clueless”. . . .
There’s a great story in Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World about a scientist getting called up before the House Unamerican Activities Committee, during the Red Scare of the 1950s. This scientist, Dr. Edward Condon, was one of the most prominent Americans working in the field of quantum mechanics. The chief inquisitor of the Committee said to Condon, “you have been at the forefront of a revolutionary movement in physics called” — pause to check notes and read carefully — “quan-tum mech-an-ics. It strikes this hearing that if you could be at the forefront of one revolutionary movement…you could be at the forefront of another.”
Condon then proclaimed that he was most definitely not a revolutionary. “I believe in Archimedes’ Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton’s laws….” And so on, listing a dozen more scientists whose work, though centuries old, was still highly esteemed. The Committee didn’t appreciate his joking around, but even they couldn’t make charges of Communist conspiracy stick.
Sometimes, scientists in the past drew conclusions which were just wrong. (Aristotle, for example: heavy objects fall faster than light ones? Children inherit characteristics only from their fathers? Ari, Ari, what were you thinking? More importantly, why weren’t you looking?) In many important cases, however, it’s better to say they were right, just not as right as we are today.
Good job on those Laws, Kepler. And Archimedes — that method for finding areas under curves is pretty darn cool.
March 6th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
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March 6th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
See also Wiley Miller’s strip, “Non-Sequiter,” from last week. He’s been paroding the “ID” idiots, too. Very funny. The main character’s dad calls his daughter’s school to complain about non-evolutionary religious beliefs being taught in science class. One of the employees who took the phone call turns to another and says, “What corner of the Earth is THAT guy from?”
March 7th, 2006 at 8:21 am
SF Writer:
Perhaps we need the Lords of the Instrumentality to guide humanity to its destiny. On the other hand, I’ve yet to meet a human who was capable of not abusing such power. I guess we’re stuck with our age old method of reconciliation of our opposing ideas, ie, politics. It’s clumsy, but it does, eventually, get the job done. It just takes so bloody long to wend our way to equitable solutions. First we move left, then right. What a zig zag course into the future. ( tired shaking of shaggy, gray mane should be noted here). Still, I maintain hope,,,
Gary 7
March 7th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
Ha, this was pretty funny. Some of the things the current administration does is so idiotic that political satire is almost irrelevant nowadays — almost.
January 14th, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Let’s not forget the real Nathan Null:
In the summer of 1876, Nathan Null (reputedly Dr. Weaver’s son-in-law) and his friend Irving Void founded “Nathan and Irving, Incorporated.†In 1879, they changed their last names to Nulle and Voyd to minimize any ethnic stigma and founded Nulle & Voyd Enterprises. They had just obtained the first U.S. Patent on the eyes in needles. (Later, they designed and produced the holes in scissors handles.)
http://www.drweavers.com/Nulle&Voyd/nulle&voyd.html