Abortion

In May of last year, late-term abortion provider George Tiller was shot and killed at his Kansas church. Scott Roeder of Kansas City, Missouri, confessed to the killing, and was unapolagetic about his actions. In an interview with the Associated Press, Roeder explained: “Because of the fact preborn children's lives were in imminent danger, this was the action I chose…Defending innocent life—that is what prompted me. I mean, it is pretty simple.”

I think it's kind of surprising that incidents like this one don't happen more often. There are a lot of people in the United States who believe that abortion is literally murder, no less horrible than the taking of any other human life. Figures on the percentage of people who hold this belief are surprisingly difficult to find. A Gallup poll conducted last May found that more than half of all Americans consider themselves “pro-life.” Many of those pro-lifers would probably not agree that abortion is exactly equivalent to murder, but at least some do, particularly among the far-right religious crazies.

Practically everyone agrees that it's acceptable to take a person's life in defense of one's own or of someone else's. Wouldn't Roeder's killing of Tiller fall under this category? If Roeder really considered the fetuses that Tiller aborted to be fully human individuals (which, again, is apparently a common, everyday belief), then thier lives really were in danger, and wasn't Roeder perfectly justified in killing Tiller to protect them?

I am not against abortions; despite what the religious zealots would have you believe, fetuses really are just clumps of cells (to be fair, Tiller performed late-term abortions, where the person-or-not issue is less clear, but let's ignore that special case for the sake of the current argument). I am, however, against hypocrisy, and it's hypocritical to claim that abortion is murder, and yet respond to it with any less force than one would employ against any other act of murder.

I guess we should be thankful, then, that fundamentalist Christians are such hypocrites.

“Prove It!”

The much-publicized United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 is currently being held in Copenhagen, Denmark. In the weeks leading up to the conference, The Science Museum in the U.K. opened an exhibit and accompanying website dubbed “Prove It!,” intended to impart to visitors the overwhelming scientific evidence supporting the idea of anthropogenic climate change. Either at a computer terminal at the exhibit in the museum, or via the website, visitors could vote to register their agreement or disagreement with the following statement: “I've seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they're serious about climate change by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.”

More than 14,000 votes were collected. Popular science blogger P.Z. Myers even attempted to “Pharyngulate” the online poll by encouraging his readers to sign up and vote for the “agree” option. The results? After one month, 6,058 voters agreed, and 8,238 disagreed.

The Science Museum promptly closed the poll and issued a statement in which the museum director lamented that “more work needs to be done to convince people of the reality of human-induced climate change and of the urgency with which we must agree an international solution.” Writing for The Guardian, Jonathan Jones blamed the exhibit itself for the unexpected poll results, describing it as “patronising.” He explained, “the museum has produced a majority of nearly two to one against accepting the scientific reality of climate change.”

I don't entirely agree with Jones' assessment; I think that two issues are being conflated. Remember, the statement about which the poll asked wasn't “I believe in the scientific evidence for climate change.” Rather, it said, “I want the government to prove they're serious…by negotiating a strong, effective, fair deal at Copenhagen.” I wonder how many of the disagreeing voters were perfectly convinced of the science behind anthropogenic climate change, but alienated by the political rhetoric? As one reader remarked in response to Myers' plea, “‘Strong, effective, fair’ to me translates as ‘bureaucratic, ambiguous and counterproductive.’”

I'm no climatologist, but it seems to me that the science behind climate change is pretty solid. The earth is warming, and humans are responsible for a significant amount of that warming. Yes, there are “denialists” who claim that climate change is a leftist conspiracy, that the scientists whose work supports it are all part of some anti-corporate cabal. These people are wrong. But one doesn't have to be a denialist to disagree that pushing for ineffectual, bureaucratic legislation is the right approach to the problem.

Seat Belts Save Lives

This past Saturday, after having spent Thanksgiving with her family, Mona Hines was driving to her Baton Rouge apartment to pack up her belongings in preparation for an upcoming move. In the van with Hines were her sister, Stacey, and thirteen relatives of theirs, all of them children between six months and fourteen years of age.

As Hines was driving west on Interstate 10, the front driver's side tire blew out. The van hit a truck, crossed the median, flipped several times, and finally came to rest upright in the eastbound lanes. Hines died immediately. All thirteen children, none of whom was wearing a seat belt, were thrown from the van. Four of them died before they could be treated by paramedics. A sixth victim, another of the children, died from her injuries Monday at Baton Rouge's Our Lady of the Lake Hospital.

It goes without saying that this was a horrific tragedy. I don't even want to think about what it must feel like to bury six family members at the same time.

Edward Barnes III, one of the children who died in the crash

Most regrettable is the fact that this suffering could have been largely avoided. Simply wearing seat belts would have prevented the children from being ejected from the vehicle. Of course, that would have been difficult, since the thirteen of them were crammed into an area of the van designed to carry six. Obviously, the adults exercised extremely poor judgment by putting the children in a very risky situation.

Not everyone sees it that way, however. An article about the accident on NOLA.com drew reader comments that included the following:

• “Sealtbelts can be good and they can work against you sometimes and have you trapped in a vehicle.”
• “WHATEVER GODS WILL IS THATS WHAT IT IS. NO ONE CAN CHANGE WHAT HAPPENED…IT DOESNT MATTER IF THEY HAD A SEAT BELT ON OR NOT, BECAUSE THE DRIVER HAD ONE ON AND SHE STILL DIED SO IT WAS GODS WILL”
• “they have a lot of recall on seat belts if they were safe why call back”
• “Seatbelts…are not foolproof and even sometimes more harmful. So it's really not fair to characterize this acciedent as avoidable. Tires blow out, it happens. And in light of the fact that a woman who WAS wearing a seatbelt was still killed, there is absolutely no way to predict whether or not seatbelts would have saved anymore lives.”
• “…the article states that the driver WAS wearing a seatbelt…however, she still died. When it is time to go, not a seatbelt or anything will stop you from going.”

I think these remarks represent a very dangerous attitude. I concede that the blowout itself was probably unavoidable, but most of the injuries and fatalities were the result not of the accident itself, but of having thirteen children tossed out of a moving vehicle onto the pavement. Yes, people have died in traffic accidents while wearing seat belts; a seat belt is not a magical force field that completely protects its wearer from all harm. Nevertheless, it does make it much likely that the wearer will survive an otherwise fatal accident, and that he'll suffer less extensive injuries than he otherwise would have. According to James Madison University, “motorists are 25 times are more likely to be killed or seriously injured when they are ‘thrown clear’ than when remain inside their vehicle.” And since most of the victims in this case were children, it's especially relevant to note that “of every 100 children who die in motor vehicle crashes at least 80 would survive if they were properly secured in an approved child safety seat or safety belts.” Of the five children that died as a result of Saturday's crash, we can expect at least four of them to have survived, had they been wearing seat belts.

Craig Williams, stepfather of Barnes, sits in Barnes' bedroom.

I understand and appreciate that, in situation like this, it's natural to attempt to rationalize the attendant suffering. But posturing that wearing a seat belt “doesn't matter” or that basic, everyday safety precautions are futile because everyone has a predestined “time to go” is just asking for something like this to happen again. It's difficult to step back from a tragedy of this magnitude and assess it calmly and rationally, but I think it's important to do exactly that, so that no one else has to suffer this kind of nightmare.

Please, always wear a seat belt.

I extend my condolences to the victims and their families.

“Impossible to Explain”

I recently listened to a radio debate between P.Z. Myers, biology professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and author of the popular blog Pharyngula, and Geoffrey Simmons, author of Billions of Missing Links and Senior Fellow of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think-tank dedicated to “intelligent design,” a particularly sneaky form of creationism disguised as legitimate science. The subject of the debate was, “Are Darwin's Theories Fact or Faith Issues?” Myers took the pro-evolution side and, naturally, he annihilated Simmons. The fossil record is replete with transitional forms, exactly as the theory of evolution by natural selection predicts, but you wouldn't know that from Simmons' Missing Links book, in which he falsely claims there to be a dearth of physical evidence documenting the evolution of modern animals from their prehistoric ancestors. Myers adroitly took Simmons to task for his ignorance.

I was especially shocked to hear Simmons pull out that old creationist canard, the assertion that “evolution is just a theory.” This particular dismissal of evolution has been so thoroughly debunked, it's embarrasing to hear even the most ignorant creationists invoke it, let alone the author of two books on the subject. Yes, evolution is a “theory,” which is to say that it's a theoretical framework that explains empirical observations and makes testable predictions. It is not a “theory” in the colloquial sense of the word, which means something more like a hunch or a guess. As scientific theories go, evolution is a particularly robust and elegant one. After that lame nonstarter, I half-expected Simmons to ask, “if humans evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”

But we'd be here all day if I just went point-by-point down the list of stupid creationist arguments that Simmons trotted out. Instead, I'd like to talk about a couple of strange things Simmons said towards the end of the program, in his closing remarks. I was kind of surprised that they went unchallenged by Myers, who was given the last word, but time was short and he did a fine job of hitting most of the important points.

At 36:27 in the recording, Simmons shares his rather negative opinion of the naturalist who first proposed the idea of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin: “He was bigoted, he had a lot of nasty things to say about women and blacks…and yet he's revered as somebody significant.” This is patently false. Yes, Darwin's name has become synonymous with the theory of evolution, but Darwin himself is emphatically not “revered” by the scientific community, who have come to accept evolution as a fact not out of any deference to the man who first suggested it, but because it is supported by a preponderance of evidence.

Charles Darwin

And so what if Darwin was a bigot? Darwin may have been a racist and misogynist (not that I'm conceding that he was—I know very little about the man himself), but that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not his ideas about evolution are true. Here, Simmons has stooped to an ad hominem argument. Whatever one thinks of the person making a claim, the claim itself should stand or fall on its own merit. As it happens, Darwin's claims about common descent and evolution by natural selection have stood extraordinarily well for 150 years, and continue to do so today.

Just seconds after making those boneheaded comments, at 36:36, Simmons proffers another piece of “evidence” for intelligent design: the birthing process of monkeys. “It's actually 180 degrees opposite of ours, headwise,” he describes, “and impossible to explain.” I think this is the most telling comment Simmons made in the whole debate, as it betrays the argument from ignorance upon which every creationist argument is necessarily based, because there is no positive evidence for creationism.

Monkey births are nothing at all like human births.

I don't know the first thing about monkey births. For the sake of argument, I'll take Simmons' word for it that they're the physical opposite of human births with respect to the orientation of the baby. For all I know, biologists really don't know why that is. Maybe it is very difficult to explain. But how can Simmons claim that it's impossible to explain? How does he know what biologists will learn about monkey births tomorrow, next year, or a hundred years from now?

Ultimately, every creationist argument reduces to this fallacy. “We don't know how X happened; therefore, God did it.” Because the creationist is unable to find a scientific explanation for X, he hubristically assumes that one doesn't exist. Cdesign proponentsists like to call their brand of creationism “science,” but in reality, their defeatist attitude stops all science in its tracks. Where would the state of human knowledge be if, every time we were confronted with an unknown phenomenon, we satified ourselves by concocting a fanciful, magical explanation (which actually explains nothing, of course), rather than actually engaging the unknown by using the tools of science and reason to investigate and, ultimately, to discover the real explanation?

A Brief History of Widescreen, Part 2: Anamorphic

Last week, I described the process of shooting a 1.85:1 widescreen film, and explained why the full screen version of such a film often exposes more image area than the widescreen version. However, a fair number of widescreen movies are shot with an even wider aspect ratio, 2.39:1. This is often called the “scope” format, short for CinemaScope, the forerunner to the current photographic process used to shoot films in that aspect ratio. The scope aspect ratio is sometimes listed as 2.35:1, which was the standard until 1970, or 2.40:1, which is simply the result of rounding, but don't let this confuse you—all three figures refer to the same basic thing.

An image from the movie Contact, in its full 2.39:1 aspect ratio

Remember that 1:85:1 films are shot by exposing the entire frame of film, whose aspect ratio is 1.37:1, then extracting a smaller 1.85:1 area from within that frame. Unfortunately, 2.39:1 films can't be shot that way, because too much of the frame would go unused. With 1.85:1 films, just over a quarter of the film's resultion goes unused because it's taken up by the extraneous areas above and below the 1.85:1 area. That's a fair portion, but the remaining three-quarters can still produce an image of perfectly acceptable quality. However, shooting a 2.39:1 film that way would entail giving up more than fourty percent of the available resolution. That amount is not considered acceptable; the resultant image would lack detail, and would have to be blown up significantly, resulting in an excessively “grainy” image.

Ultimately, two different approaches were developed to solve the problem of shooting a 2.39:1 film on 1.37:1 film. One of these techniques, dubbed “Super 35,” actually works similarly to shooting a 1.85:1 film in that the 2.39:1 image is extracted from within a larger overall frame (I'll describe the process more fully in the future). The more novel approach involves using an “anamorphic” lens to shoot the film. An anamorphic lens distorts the image by compressing it horizontally. In an image captured using an anamorphic lens, everything appears tall and skinny.

The same image from Contact, as captured on film using an anamorphic lens

Films shot anamorphically are played back on a projector whose lens does exactly the opposite, stretching the image horizontally, back to its correct proportions. When this is done, the image, captured on film with an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, is now of course a lot wider: 2.39:1. This technique allows filmmakers to capture a wide 2.39:1 image while retaining the full resolution of the 1.37:1 frame of film.

As a result, an anamorphically-shot film doesn't have any extraneous picture information that can be exposed in a full screen release. When an anamorphically-shot film is shown full-screen, it must be done via the much-maligned (and rightly so) “pan and scan” process, whereby the sides of the image are cropped to achieve the 1.33:1 aspect ratio (that of a standard television). The 1.33 area that remains is sometimes shifted around with respect to the original 2.39:1 frame in an attempt to capture the “most important” parts of the image, but the inescapable result is that more than fourty percent of the image as composed by the director and cinematographer is simply discarded, seriously compromising their work.

The same image from the full-screen/pan-and-scan version of Contact