A bad reason for supporting marriage equality

A group Republicans have filed a legal brief containing their argument for rejecting prohibitions on civil marriage between partners of the same sex. While we agree in the end, I must say some of their reasons are specious. There are tons of reasons to allow everyone to marry the consenting adult of their choice; we don't need the bad ones. Let's start with their quoting of this passage from this report on marriage from the National Marriage Project:

Children who grow up with cohabiting couples tend to have more negative life outcomes compared to those growing up with married couples. Prominent reasons are that cohabiting couples have a much higher breakup rate than do married couples, a lower level of household income, and a higher level of child abuse and domestic violence.

Sounds good, right? I mean, married couples raise children with less negative life outcomes. So more marriage = better families and better lives for kids? Not necessarily. In fact, this is a perfect example of correlation not implying causation. Just because married partners do a better job of raising their kids than unmarried partners doesn't imply that getting married will make two people better parents. In fact, when you say it that way it sounds kind of crazy.

Take Alice and Bob (sorry, I know I shouldn't use these names unless I'm talking about the firewall paradox or encryption protocols), a couple of crack addicts who are madly in love with each other as long as there is enough money to stay high, but whose chemically-enhanced bliss devolves into a melee after a day without a visit from their dealer. Lately they have had to choose between buying condoms and buying more crack, and are soon to discover the consequences of their decision. How good a parenting pair will they be? What if they got married?

Take Carl and Doug (I don't know the standard names past Alice and Bob!), Carl works for a software company and Doug is a moderately successful artist (the kind that wouldn't starve even without Carl, but that isn't famous enough that anyone would recognize the name Doug). They love spending time with their nieces and nephews, whom they babysit regularly. They are thinking of adopting kids and have started combing the parenting section of Amazon books. Would they be better parents if they lived in California (and hence had gotten married) or if they lived in Texas (and hence were "just roommates")? For that matter, what if they lived in California but just didn't believe in marriage? Is that a strike against them?

Maybe the kinds of people who are interested and invested in raising their kids the right way (and would therefore be predisposed to be good parents) are also more likely to be enchanted by the romantic ideal of being married and raising a family a la the Cleavers. Maybe. Maybe not. But I doubt the actual act of getting married has much to do with how well adjusted a couple's children will be, whether it's legal or not in your state.

Think of this the next time you hear a correlation used as evidence of causation in a political debate or column. It'll save you time by letting you wave your hand dismissively at the monitor/TV screen and mutter "Cum hoc ergo propter hoc", because correlation does not imply causation!

Everybody needs a pet asteroid!

Hello from orbit!

This looks like a good chance to introduce you all to my absolute favorite game of all time, Kerbal Space Program (KSP). It's a fantastically ambitious game that lets you build, fly, and probably crash rockets in a fictional universe where the challenge of space flight is just a little bit simpler than in ours. Play however you want in Sandbox mode, or play a career version of the game where you do science throughout the solar system to earn better parts (engines, fuel tanks, power supplies, etc.) to go further. The game is under development, but the aspects that are included are very polished and you can already play it and receive all future updates for free as the project finalizes.

The reason I bring this up is because the KSP development team has partnered with NASA to develop an in-game version of the Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) that will be released very soon. ARM is an incredibly ambitious project in which NASA plans to send a robotic spacecraft to a small asteroid (about 500 tons or so) with an Earth-like orbit, grab on to it, and fly it back to Earth, using some fancy orbital mechanics to swing it into orbit around the Moon. Astronauts would then be sent on the first ever manned flight of the Orion capsule to rendezvous with our moon's new moon (our grandmoon?) and take samples. To me, this is tremendously exciting, as it starts to push us towards the capability to manipulate our environment beyond the Earth. We will become interplanetary engineers! Check out the concept animation below to see how NASA plans to do it.

NASA's concept animation shows their version of how to catch a pet asteroid.

As for the game, players will receive new in-game parts based on real NASA hardware, and the game's solar system will now include asteroids for players to fetch from the depths of space. Since NASA is involved (and it seems that this game is very popular with NASA employees, for obvious reasons), it appears the KSP team is taking this project very seriously, and has included all three major aspects of the ARM mission: Players must Identify a target asteroid of suitable size and favorable orbital alignment, Redirect the object to a suitable location for exploration, and finally Explore their bounty with a manned (or... kerbaled?) mission to investigate it.

The project looks like it could help generate some excitement with the public for the mission which otherwise has received mixed appraisals. One interesting question related to this would be to ask how  this benefits our ability to potentially deflect a dangerous object in the future. As we currently have no plans in place for such an event (not even with the help of a rag-tag bunch of roughneck oilmen and a drunken cosmonaut), this could be the first steps towards developing the relevant technology. What do you think? And (more importantly) what would your ARM mission look like?

The clock is ticking on properly funding NASA

Meet Titan:

Src: Wiki

The above image of Titan (compared with the Earth and Moon) was taken by Cassini, humanity's only ever orbiter around Saturn, which is fighting for its life against budget cuts. The image is not what your eye would see, but rather it is an infrared image which peers through the haze to the surface below. While our eyes would only see a smooth, butterscotch/orange fog, Cassini sees the dark and light areas as different types of terrain. Titan certainly has some interesting features, like boulders of ice, possibly ice volcanoes, and even seas of methane!

Src: Wiki

This radar image of the north polar region shows seas of methane in dark blue. Titan is so cold that methane, forever a gas on sweltering Earth, actually has a cycle like the water cycle responsible for much of our weather. It exists as a solid, liquid, and gas, and even forms clouds and rain! Titan is one of two known bodies in our solar system with liquid on its surface, and you're sitting on one of them.

This is incredibly exciting, and scientists have been clamoring for a probe to investigate the lakes ever since they were discovered. The problem is that Titan is so incredibly far away, getting a mission out there takes years and sending signals back to Earth takes hours and a lot of power.

Additionally, the lakes are at the north pole which is tilted (like the Earth's pole, which gives us seasons). Since Earth is so close to the Sun (viewed from Saturn), we can basically think of daylight on Titan as a good sign of a line of sight to the Earth. Like our own, Titan's poles experience long periods when the Sun never sets (when the pole is tilted towards the Sun), and long periods where it never rises (when tilted away). Currently, Titan's north pole is tilted toward us, giving us an opportunity to communicate with a probe floating in the lakes directly. In 2025, however, that will change, and the north pole will enter its winter season, never seeing the Sun or Earth for years (until 2040). This gives us a deadline: Get a probe onto the lakes in time to complete its mission before the clock nears 2025, or else we'll have to either wait 15 years, or pay the extra cost of bringing along another Saturn orbiter with our lake probe to relay communications (which may be impractical for other orbital-mechanics-related reasons as well as hugely inflationary for the mission cost).

2025 sounds far away, but when you realize that Cassini took 7 years to reach Saturn, it means that in order to ensure enough time for a successful mission, we'll have to launch our lake probe by 2016 or else there's a good chance we won't see the shorelines of Titan until after 2040. To put it in human terms: If you've got young children now, they'll probably give you grandchildren before we find out what it's like to float on an extraterrestrial sea if we miss this opportunity. The odds are not looking good with the current funding situation though, which highlights again the importance of properly supporting NASA's exploration and science directorates. If you want to find out what's in those seas, then join me in letting Congress know.

An open letter to save Planetary Science at NASA

Please feel free to copy+paste this letter and change the names or anything you like to send to your representatives. 

Dear Mr./Ms. President/Senator/Representative,

Due to budget cutbacks, NASA may soon be forced to cut short one of its two most important planetary science missions: The Mars Science Laboratory, Curiosity, and the Cassini Orbiter around Saturn. Despite years of potential life remaining in both vehicles, which have given us wonderful discoveries and images which help captivate and inspire us all --like evidence of fresh, clean water on early Mars and the potential existence of a habitable ocean under the ice of Saturn's moon Enceladus-- one of these missions could soon be cut short in a foolish effort to save an effectively irrelevant sum of money. This is unacceptable, both practically and in principle.

As both of these missions are already active, they require only operational costs to continue providing invaluable data and perspective on our solar system --ending them would mean discarding functioning vehicles already delivered to distant planets at great expense. Further, replacement of these vehicles' capabilities would require an investment of many times the funding required to ensure that both continue operating as planned. If you believe, as I do, that scientific discovery, exploration, technological development, and the marshalling of our best efforts and ingenuity to solve the challenges of space flight have value, then this waste of potential discoveries already within our grasp is not worth the fraction of a fraction of a percent that could be saved from the federal budget by dismantling our crowning achievements. I believe that there are far better, more effective, and less destructive ways of lowering expenses, if that is a goal we wish to achieve.

I also find the very idea of cutting back on our most bold and exciting areas of scientific exploration foolish at a time when people need more than ever to see that the future is bright and that the greatest and most challenging problems can be solved by our best and brightest minds. When pondering the greatest challenges that lay ahead of our civilization, the ingenious systems devised by our engineers and the incredible discoveries made by our scientists are proof that, given the chance, this nation can overcome even the most daunting obstacles. These bold steps taken into the unknown are sure to inspire and energize the minds of millions of young people to dream of better futures for themselves and for all of us. If we long for improvement in our worldly station, then there is no more powerful force that can be marshalled to achieve it than to instill in this generation a dream and the belief that to see the future they have only to dare to build it.

Planetary science at NASA is about more than distant machines exploring the cold, dusty reaches of space; it is about the people who build them, those who use them to discover, and those whose lives are enriched and inspired by the knowledge of our origins. It is about all of us, who live in a world understood and improved every day by those lives. NASA needs $1.5 billion, less than one twentieth of one percent of the 2013 federal budget, for its entire planetary science program to remain funded at levels that will save these missions, most of which is already granted. I support granting them the rest, and I hope you will too.

Thank you,
Dustin Summy

The wonders of evolution - Deep in the heart of Texas

Over the Thanksgiving break, I was fortunate enough to have a chance to visit the Texas Memorial Museum on the University of Texas campus. It's a small building, but each of its four levels is packed with wonderful exhibits. There were some fantastic examples of the weird and wonderful products of evolution on display, not least of which was the 40-foot Quetzalcoatlus northropi fossil soaring over the great hall. I've embedded a slideshow of some photos I took during my visit for you to enjoy. Don't miss the last few photos of comments made by museum patrons about the evolution exhibit. (Album and more after the break)

Science vs. Wishful Thinking

"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." —Traditional

It seems that there is some distance between most people's understanding of this traditional aphorism, often mistakenly attributed in origin to Carl Sagan, and its meaning. The cause in most cases may be found in the nuance of its usage, but I'd like to explain another principle which is likely leaking into its meaning: the impossibility of induction.

Scientific knowledge is based on inductive reasoning; you take a small sample and infer the larger result. This is actually a very bad way of proving things! Imagine being asked to prove that there are infinitely many prime numbers and responding by listing all the prime numbers you can think of, noting that there are more than you can count, and pointing to a bunch of other problems in math that would be solved if there were an infinity of primes. You'd be laughed out of the room if you claimed this was proof of anything in front of a  mathematician! Mathematicians use this kind of reasoning to make conjectures and hypotheses, but since math is based on a set of axioms (facts that are considered true by definition), any claim in mathematics ought to be able to be proven deductively and inarguably (there are some complicated caveats to this, but for the kinds of math useful in practical problems, this is fair to say. Before anyone goes all Gödel on me, consider that you may be being an asshole, you know what I mean.)

Don't forget Kennedy's most enduring legacy.

A lot of people are still wrapped up in JFK's presidency, especially the end. Regardless of our obsession with conspiracy (and honestly, how hard is it to believe that a nut took an opportunity and shot the president as he rode by in an uncovered limousine?), let's remember something that Kennedy started that has not stopped affecting the way the entire world works: The Apollo Program.

This is a spectacular video starring a bit of JFK's speech at Rice University. You've all heard the clip "We choose to go to the moon!", but how much of the rest have you heard? It's as relevant today as it was then, and I hope you get that tingling feeling I get every time I watch it.

Enjoy: