The Soft Underbelly of Scientific Credentialism

Scientists go off the rails as often as other people – perhaps more often. The difference between the macro behavior of the science community and the macro behavior of the general population is that the profession of science is supposed to have a built-in self-correcting mechanism – the scientific method – that subjects even famous practitioners of the scientific disciplines to the same third degree that one would put a complete novice claiming, for example, to have discovered a fundamentally new particle.

In practice, however, the self-correcting mechanism has a few bugs. Famous practitioners can get away with publishing things that would be more highly scrutinized in other people. Recent retractions in the field of cloning should have made that crystal-clear to everyone.

Below the layman’s radar, not-so-famous practitioners (and let’s be blunt, mediocre-to-poor scientists) can worm their way onto editorial boards of fourth-tier journals or into positions of prominence in professional societies (the scut work of which most of the best and most talented scientists do not want to sully their hands with) in order to pave the way for publishing results that would be rejected even by the bottom feeders of the scientific publishing world were their authors not on the editorial boards of said journals.

But eventually someone tries to repeat the experiment, or applies the theory to newly discovered facts. That’s where the rubber meets the road, and so far, even when temporarily distorted by asceintific considerations within the human institutions of science, the scientific method prevails – eventually (even in the USSR). The great and not-so-great people of science, if they are worth their salt, retract their claims if it turns out that those claims are not justified. Everyone, and I mean everyone, even Nobel Prize winners, need someone to tell them when they are full of shit.

For the layman trying to make sense of scientific, or pseudo-scientific arguments in the public arena, it is not sufficient to know that scientists can go off the rails. Kooks and crackpots generally use this argument very selectively to attack scientists who disagree with their pet theories, while ignoring the tendencies of their supporters to take the train airborne, as it were. The layman needs to know how scientists go off the rails in order to evaluate the legitimacy of claims in a public scientific argument.

A few good examples are probably in order to calibrate the layman’s ability to determine which camp has hired Casey Jones as their engineer, to take the analogy a bit too far. But bad writing aside, examples are the best way to learn. Let’s begin with what is perhaps the most spectacular train wreck in all of modern science:

Linus Pauling was the son of a druggist who, in the 1920s, when education was definitely not offered to all and sundry, worked his way from his home state of Oregon to a graduate degree in Chemistry with minors in Physics and Mathematics, and then a professorship, at CalTech. His book, The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals , took the explanatory power of the Quantum Mechanical Valence Bond Theory of Heitler and London from a simple explanation for the formation of diatomic Hydrogen, to a theory that could explain the bonds of much more complex molecules. This revolutionized Chemistry, and his further explorations into the structure of proteins looked at the forces that hold life itself together, opening up huge new vistas in Biology.

Pauling won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. He deserved it, make no mistake. But Linus then fell prey to the hubris that fellow Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman was warning about in Cargo Cult Science. Leaving the study of the chemical bond in his older years, Pauling somehow became aware of the activities of one “Doctor” Irwin Stone. Stone actually was a food chemistry technician with a 2 year degree in the pre-war years (when obtaining a responsible position with an Associates was much more common, since there was much less to know) who was one of the pioneers of the use of ascorbate as a food preservative. Stone’s later theories on evolutionary nutrition and vitamin intake were unorthodox, to say the least. Quackery, if you want to be blunt (and I do).

Pauling probably picked up on Stone’s work because it sounded intriguing and unorthodox (but plausible to Pauling as an outsider to biology). Nobel winners unusually get that prize because they tend to think outside the box. But 90% of what is “outside the box” is outside the box because it is junk. Finding the other 10% is evidence of genius, usually (or being a blind pig – science has more than its share of blind pigs). Within their field, good scientists have a highly developed Bozo filter that allows them to separate an unorthodox, but possibly fruitful, line of inquiry from the red herrings. Not to say that good scientists don’t ever get an idea that turns out to have fins and gills with a decidedly crimson tint, but the practiced scientist rapidly recognizes the fish, and wipes the smell of the sea off of their hands. Outside of their field, the Bozo filter has large holes that represent gaps in knowledge and experience.

Why did Pauling’s Bozo filter fail him in the case of Stone? Because, despite working on the chemical structure of proteins, Linus Pauling was no Biologist. It is possible to make a contribution to science that several branches of study can make use of, but that does not make the contributor a qualified practitioner of those various sciences. For example, the ideas of Vilfredo Pareto are used far beyond economics and business in endeavors as diverse as mollusc farming and paleontology. That, however, does not retroactively make Vilifred wither a Marine Biologist or a Paleontologist – he was an Economist, and one can assume that his study of molluscs was primarily confined to those he found on his plate. Analogously, working on the structure of proteins did not make Pauling an expert on the evolutionary biology of Vitamin C synthesis and consumption.

But Pauling ran with Stone’s ideas anyway, violating Feynman’s admonition, never trying to poke any holes in the theory. Pauling made unscientific claims, defended obvious quacks, and generally engaged in behavior that would have gotten his license to practice medicine revoked, had he possessed one. He also was one of the driving forces responsible for removing the oversight of the FDA on Nutraceuticals, opening up the unsuspecting public to attack from a variety of charlatans just skirting the letter of the law.

I’ve long wondered what led Pauling down the path to quackery. Was it the fact that his earlier contributions had been primarily theoretical, and in his older years, with everyone coming to kiss the ring of his Nobel, he dismissed experimental evidence that did not match with his theories because he’d lived in his own mind too long? Was it a cynical desire to make money or retain a fame that was receding? Was it early-onset Alzheimer’s or some form of selective senility related to Asperger’s Syndrome? Or was it that colleagues had in previous years kept his less sane tendencies in line, but the awarding of a Nobel increased their reluctance to criticize and allowed what was a heretofore unnoticed mental illness to come to the fore? I don’t know. What I do know is that he had a pernicious influence on both science and public health, and this was primarily because laymen saw the Nobel Prize and didn’t inquire about which branch of Chemistry it was awarded for (Physical).

This is a key point in exposing the soft underbelly of scientific credentials. Some laymen see the letters “Ph.D.” after someone’s name and assume near-omnipotence.* Some laymen see “Nobel Laureate” after someone’s name and assume complete omnipotence. But science abhors argumentum ad authoritarium for a good reason, and Linus Pauling is the poster child for that reason. Claims to polymathy are to be met with skepticism by everyone, lay and expert alike. It is possible, given a strong mind and enough time, for a human being to become a world-class expert in two to three fields. No more than that. There is simply too much to learn, too many details that are not common to the various disciplines of science that can set the inexperienced off on a wrong tangent. Good scientists and mathematicians remember that they are standing on a small island of their own competence in a vast ocean of their own ignorance.

So what’s the take home message from Linus’s story? Check every claim for its consistency with other messages from science. Modern science fits together like a jigsaw puzzle, and pieces that don’t fit are a big red flag if the claimant is coming out of left field. If there is an inconsistency, find out why, which is going to take some time and intellectual effort. And finally, one of the biggest warning flags about weakly defensible scientific sounding discourse, one of the softest spots in the underbelly of science, is when experts talk outside of their fields of expertise.

For example, when Carl Sagan used his simplistic models to predict “Nuclear Winter” and then mumble, mumble retracted his position to “Nuclear Autumn” , when he predicted huge, catastrophic ecological consequences from Gulf War I, then mumble, mumble retracted his statements when those consequences failed to materialize, the same dynamic was in play. Sagan was not an atmospheric modeler, and his political hysteria clouded his scientific judgment and caused him to ignore Feynman’s admonition:

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can -- if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong -- to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

It was easier for Sagan to ignore this in a field that was not his primary field of study. This psychological quirk of many scientists to ignore the importance of getting facts straight in a field other than their primary discipline (because deep down they harbor the irrational feeling that any field but their own can’t be as well developed or as important) on top of the higher likelihood of making mistakes in any but the primary field of expertise, justifies the sort of pseudo argumentum ad hominem behind the rule of thumb that the claims of experts talking outside their fields should be more critically examined than the claims of experts talking within their field of primary training.

Pontificating in areas of non-competence is not the sole province of someone who jumps to a single second field after achieving superstar status - the method by which Pauling or a Sagan went off the rails - however. There is another way to go off the rails, one I call the “Pseudo Polymath” route. The middle-of-the-road scientist who gets a tenured position and then fritters it away dabbling in this or that, never really contributing much to any one field of endeavor, but collecting a large swath of (very) minor publications in a wide variety of fields. A person possessed of a sort of scientific ADHD.

In my previous Graduate Advisor Taxonomy this kind of scientist usually become the Bitter, Fundless (but Tenured) Twit. In Europe, especially Germany, with their more hierarchical system and plenty of nooks and crannies to stuff deadwood, this person usually becomes a “minister without a portfolio” – someone kept on the rolls as a Docent, or lecturer, who has no graduate students, post-docs, nor indeed any research responsibility at all, but bears the title professor. The layman would do well to remember that in all things related to human beings, some people are more equal than others.

How does one become a piece of scientific deadwood? One popular piece of chemistry humor in the 70s featured a protagonist named Pudvin. Among the myriad ways that Pudvin appeared to work while goofing off was to listen intently for promising new avenues of investigation in his department. He’d then go sit in that lab for a few days, pick up just enough to design a minor experiment and execute it, then turn it in to the main authors as “just a little something I thought up’. It was never anything Earth-shattering (hah), or even particularly useful, but as he’d obviously done something in the area, he got himself listed as a third or fourth author an impressive number of times. Unfortunately this type of behavior is not confined to the frivolous humor pages in the back of chemistry publications.

In today’s world, with its emphasis on “interdisciplinary’ fields of study, it’s all too easy for Pudvins to slip through the cracks, as Metamanda noted some three years ago:

It's too easy to make a successful career social-sciencing to computer scientists, and designing it up amongst the social scientists, and being technical amongst the designers, and looking good without knowing your shit very rigorously. I am constantly afraid that I am doing this. And I am constantly trying to avoid being like that. We are valuable bridges between disciplines and communities of practice, but I don't think we can settle for being only that. We have to have rigor, and depth. We have to know the methods and theories used in these various disciplines... know them well and then be creative enough to understand where they can be applied that maybe no one thought to apply them before.

[Emphasis mine]. And this brings me to the actual point of this post, and that is a man who has managed to worm his way into the forefront of a recent scientific controversy via the Pseudo Polymath route. A man who has an impressively broad list of publications, until one digs a bit deeper. A real-life Pudvin as it were. A man whose papers are cited again and again by the anti-LHC crowd, the ones who think the collider is going to generate a black hole that will eat the world. The pseudo-scientific underpinning of that hysteria has been chiefly generated by this man. A man whose great breadth is constantly touted by those who want to believe in his arguments, while his overlooking his nanometer thin depth. And that man is Professor Doctor Otto Rössler.

Otto Rössler obtained his MD in 1966, choosing to study immunology for “ethical reasons”. That’s the first indication one gets when researching the man that one is dealing with someone who is prone to exaggeration. It’s an odd turn of phrase – all scientists like to think they are helping mankind, and that science, any branch of science, is by dint of decreasing the material poverty of the world, THE most ethical profession. Those words about ethics are likely not the quote of a science biographer. It is vague and vaguely supercilious turns of phrase like “ethical reasons” that tend to trigger the alarms in a real scientist’s Bozo filter. Normally, upon seeing this kind of phrase, I immediately relegate the writer to my “blowhard” file, and go on to find someone with more sense to read or talk to. Believe me, I’ve met more than my share of people like that, and so has every other scientist out there. Our tribe has some real idiots, yes it does.

Unfortunately for the good doctor’s sense of ethics, his contributions to the field of immunology appear to be minimal, consisting of one paper of minor importance. He himself admits that he was a lousy immunologist in his advisor’s opinion – the thesis for which he was granted a Ph.D. degree in pathology was only 24 pages! That’s about enough material for one paper in a decent scientific journal. This is clue number two that we are dealing with an odd duck.

I believe that Rössler was awarded his Ph.D. either as an act of pity, or just to get him the hell out of his advisor’s hair, or because they assumed he’d be using his MD degree instead of the Ph.D. so no blood no foul, or because he’d spent so much time and gotten so close that the powers in his institution thought it would affect the morale of new students to watch someone who’d been there so long walk away without a degree. I believe that one or more of those reasons came into play in his Ph.D. defense because 24 pages is not even enough for a Master’s thesis.

I probably need to explain some institutional mechanics to those of you who have never performed science at the graduate level. Ph.D. degrees ought to be awarded to someone who has done something publishable – and done it more than once! The rule of thumb in my advisor’s lab was 4 – 5 published papers would make an adequate Ph.D. thesis. That is a lot more than 24 typewritten pages.

Fresh from his Ph.D. debacle, Rössler bounced to Robert Rosen’s lab. Rosen is a controversial figure in biology, I’ll just leave it at that. A brilliant man, but one prone to flights of ascientific fancy.

Rössler went from there to a position as a professor of Biochemistry in 1969 at Tubingen, obtaining tenure in 1976. And there he stuck, dabbling in this, piddling in that (taking every chance to absent himself from Tubingen and the expectations of real work with a dizzying array of visiting professorships – that’s a big red flag to the professional scientist, as well), jumping on the new discipline of Chaos in its infancy when no one really knew what was going on and hitting upon a nifty system of differential equations that bear his name. He then spent the rest of his career mostly publishing minor extensions of that work in mathematics in minor journals and pissing his abilities away on asceintific speculation. He never acquired a research group as I can find no Ph.D.s who cite him as their advisor. He stuck around so long that someone Tubingen got embarrassed about having a a 54 year old associate professor around and made him a full Professor by decree, because he certainly didn’t contribute enough to his major field to earn the full professorship in the normal way. In fact it’s another red flag (of the Pudvin variety) to the professional scientist that someone calling himself a professor of Biochemistry publishes mostly in lower tier non-Biochemistry journals.

I actually went and looked all of his publications up. I pulled pretty much every scientific paper, published proceeding and book chapter this clown ever wrote. I searched the literature all the way back to 1949 in non-Google databases, because I took one look at this guy’s record and said “he’s scientific deadwood, but how do I explain how I know that to the layman?”. The above analogies were the best I could do. I hope they give you an idea of why the scientific community dismisses the man as a crank.

Now, at this point, I’ve got to come clean. Various people visiting my site have made me very angry, talking about the alleged safety issues with the Large Hadron Collider. The reason for my ire is not that they exhibit true believer syndrome, though they do. I can let that one roll off my back. The reason I’m upset is that these true believers quote Rössler’s paper on particle physics and his other public statements in their nonsense, and I’ve seen laymen all over the internet saying, in the face of some very scientific-looking citations from Rössler, “well, there must be something if this famous Ph.D. is raising alarm”. This line of thinking killed a girl in India.

Misuse of scientific standing upsets me in a very professional sense. Sagan and Pauling were two of my heroes growing up, but the above mentioned ascientific political hysteria Sagan engaged in and the above mentioned quackery Pauling engaged in certainly took the shine off of them as I grew into a mature scientist myself. I certainly don’t take kindly to that kind of behavior from people whose greatest scientific achievements don’t come within lightyears of those two giants – I cut them, I cut Rössler – no slack at all.

Let me be very clear. Rössler is someone talking far from his fields of competence when he’s talking about particle physics. He’s spent his entire career dabbling in this and that, and any claim to his polymathy by his supporters is glossing over the incredible lack of depth in any field of scientific endeavor. Most of his “polymathy” is in fact applications of his minor but - let me be fair here - very real contributions to chaos mathematics to various disciplines outside of Biochemistry (of which he is a professor). This is very analogous to the example of Pareto I cited above. The fact that the Rössler attractor can be applied to various disciplines outside his stated profession of Biochemistry manifestly does not make him an expert in those other disciplines – and the funny thing is that until this controversy even with his scattershot publication record, he had never published ANYTHING in particle physics and only once in a speculative article about macroscopic black holes – a vanity publication in a journal that has nothing to do with astrophysics. Chew on that for a while, true believers.

You can safely assume that Rössler is like the type of person whom I’m sure you’ve met at work or at school who gets on as many projects in a position with as little responsibility as possible, and then, when asked to do something substantial on any specific project, points to how busy he or she is with the rest of their workload. They don’t not do anything, but they do just enough on each project to claim some credit. Deep down everyone who works with them knows that their worthwhile contributions are minimal, though.

So if, as many of my friends are, you are tired of the LHC controversy, you can stop here. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to examine just how someone can turn himself into such a piece of scientific detritus, and how Rössler has squandered his potential. I’m also going to talk somewhat about other warning signs that the man is not a rational actor. But if you have had enough, and take me at my word that the above analogies adequately describe the man, then you can stop here. For the newbie to the LHC controversy, or the person so distraught by the wild claims of the true believers, please read on so that when another scientific controversy arises, you can go into the fray a little better armed against the arguments of alarmists.

As I pointed out above, as the man admits himself, he was a bit useless in his chosen field of Immunology. Obviously he has some skill in Mathematics, so he jumped on a new field that was just emerging in the 70s – chaos and complex systems. From there he did very little in Biochemistry.

His adherents list an incredible array of absences in other disciplines as evidence of a genius of the highest caliber. Let’s look at that in a little more detail in the man’s own words, shall we?

1969 Visiting Appointment Award, Center for Theoretical Biology, State University of new York at Buffalo, New York State. Cooperation with Robert Rosen.

1981 Visiting Professor of Mathematics, Guelph University, Canada.

1983 Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Studies, Center for Nonlinear Studies of the University of California, Los Alamos, New Mexico (non-military).

1992 Visiting Professor of Chemical Engineering, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia.

1993 Visiting Professor of Theoretical Physics, Lyngby University, Denmark.

1995 Visiting Professor of Complexity Research, Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico.

All of these appointments have to do with his contributions to Chaos mathematics. However, when you see that kind of jumping around on a non-science resume, does it not raise red flags that the person is not serious, is hard to work with, or has some other professional problems? Then why do the true believers point to Rössler’s professional ADHD as a positive? From a scientist’s perspective, one expects to see perhaps one or two visiting appointments over a 20 or 30 year career – being absent from one’s own lab leaves one’s own graduate students adrift, not a nice thing for an advisor to do. Ah, but Rössler does not train graduate students. Another red flag, that is.

Finally, we come to the publications themselves. There are 272 of them in Google Scholar, an impressive publication list, even for someone professing in Academia for 39 years.

I’m going to have to digress again, I’m afraid. I have a scientist’s intuition about this man, and I’m trying to explain to laymen why my intuition is sending me alarm bells, so I hope you see the method in my madness. I’m trying to show what normal behavior is, then I’m trying to show how Rössler violates normal behavior in ways that send off my alarm bells.

The first odd publication behavior is the disconnect that I’ve noted before. Rössler does not publish in Biochemistry journals. I went through that rat’s maze of a publication list with a highlight pen and came up with 36 articles out of the 272 (that’s a whopping 13% for those of you keeping score at home) relate to either chemistry or biology only one of the 272 papers directly related to Biochemistry as I understand it. (This one.)The biology papers mostly have to do with chaos in evolutionary biology (for example this one), and the Chemistry papers have to do with reaction kinetics (where chaos shows up most noticeably in the fields of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and explains the Visiting Professorship of Chemical Engineering).

OK, says the layman, perhaps he branched out into physics, which is why he’s so concerned about black holes. Maybe he’s really respected outside of Biochemistry, which is why they put up with him not actually publishing anything in the discipline he’s a professor of.

So we come to another the second odd behavior and another digression. Rössler publishes mainly in journals most scientists don’t bother to read regularly, so this is a digression about the prestige of scientific publications and the peer-review process. Remember what I said waaaay back in the beginning about mediocre to-poor scientists working their way onto the editorial boards of fourth-tier journals? Perhaps I ought to define the term “fourth-tier journal”. We scientists acknowledge that not all scientific work is of equal value. We also acknowledge that peer-review is a necessary but odious and time-consuming task. So we set up a system where certain journals publish top-flight stuff of interest to all, or at least most, scientists and articles submitted there get rigorous peer review by a number of reviewers and the editor. This is the first tier. Certain other journals publish interesting stuff that gets a good working over, but is less interesting to people outside the field. This is the second tier. Other journals publish stuff that’s only interesting to people in the field, stuff so mundane it gets peer review, but is unlikely to generate controversy. This is the third tier. And finally, there’s the garbage cans, where you stuff things that have to be published because it’s publish or perish, or because the poor grad student you’re flushing out of the Ph.D. program with a Master’s as a consolation prize has to publish somewhere, poor bastard. This is the fourth tier.

Publishing in this kind of fourth-tier journal was exactly how the Intelligent Design camp finally got their first “peer reviewed” paper into the literature. So, you can see how much water papers in those kinds of publications hold with serious scientists.

Now, those tiers as I outlined them are not well-defined, in fact some people think there are three, four, or five tiers, but scientists within a field know what’s good and what’s not. However, it is publish or perish, and guys who put out one stellar paper a year got tired of being unfavorably compared to guys who put out 8 or 9 crappy papers a year, and thus the Impact Factor was born. If you really want an idea of how petty scientists can be, Google yourself some information about the various criticisms of the Impact Factor and the other proposed methods for ranking journal prestige.

So, where has Rössler published? I’m going to give credit where credit is due, then I’m going to deduct some interest. The highlight of his career is a paper he published in Nature – this one. A publication in Nature or Science is impressive, no doubt. Many scientists have distinguished careers without ever gracing their pages. Both publications are journals that are regularly read by scientists of pretty much all disciplines, so to get in there your work has to be of high import and be of interest to people outside your field.

So Rössler published in Nature. He a observed a newly described (at the time) form of Chaos in an oscillating reaction that had been known for about 10 years in the West, and about 20 years in Russia. Let’s give the man the props he is due – he was the first to observe this, and he was looking in the right direction for Chaos. And he discovered a system of differential equations that behaved in a different manner from the classical Chaotic example of the Lorenz system that anyone who’s read Gleick’s book on Chaos should recognize. But here is where I take the interest back out of the transaction. The question is, was this evidence of genius, or was it a case of the proverbial blind pig and his truffle?

You can either get into the pages of Nature or Science by dint of a major discovery or synthesis, or you can nose around in Nature and observe something that no one has ever observed before. When fields are new, that second type of major publication is most possible, it’s much more likely to be a discovery of the blind pig variety, it’s the time in a field that Dirac was talking about when he contrasted the Physics of the 1920s with the Physics of the 1970s:

The problems are more difficult now and there is not the same hope of making rapid progress which there was in those days. Excitement is usually combined with the hope of making rapid progress, when any second rate student can do really first-rate work.

That quote was kind of nasty in this context, wasn’t it? I’m fully aware that this is the Internet, and Rössler himself might read these words someday. Tough cookies. Normally I’d not tear into a fellow scientist this way, but this clown is fear mongering, pontificating on topics out of his specialty, and generally behaving badly. The gloves are off, here. So let’s get to examining the record, in Rossler’s own words:

Then this narrowing tunnel-like slinky got magically flattened in my mind into a spiral which strangely was expanding rather than contracting before being bent into a reinjection loop toward the neighborhood of its origin. (The opposite feat, reinjection inside-out, was later discovered by Normann Kleiner and Sebastian Fischer. This was much as Shilnikov had done topologically some ten years earlier in the other time direction, as I later learned.)

…

Thus a letter-Z like slow manifold (in Christopher Zeeman's terms), but laterally extended into a sheet, was kind enough to offer itself as a host in my mind. One could prove the existence of chaos, with a 1D return map. But the equations, later re-discovered by Christian Mira, were messy. Floris Takens had a similar idea at about the same time. Simulating the expanding spiral on the lower floor of the letter-Z paper worked in December of 1975.

…

Later René Thomas saw much deeper into the topology of this feedback circuit.

I think it’s pretty clear that Rössler was the first to see something that was floating around in a lot of minds at the time, and did not do a whole lot of detailed analysis after the discovery. Starting to look, if not like a blind pig, at least like a one eyed porker.

So let’s examine the rest of the 271 publications. If I read his own words wrong, and there is something to Rössler’s genius, we ought to see a lot of publications in all kinds of journals with good Impact Factors that expand on his mathematical genius. Despite its flaws, I’m going to stick to Impact Factor when looking at Rössler’s output. When you publish in a field and have an ahem, impact on that field, you generally want to publish in a journal in that field with an impact factor of at least 3, or 2 at the very minimum. That means that most people in that field will read it, and it has a pretty good peer review process. If you just want the vanity of a publication, there are plenty of fourth-tier journals where the peer review consists of a trained monkey, a talking mouse, and a senile emeritus professor.

I’m going to list Rössler’s publications in journals with impact factors of 2 or higher:

An equation for continuous chaos
Rössler, O. E.
Physics Letters A, Volume 57, Issue 5, p. 397-398. 1976

Horseshoe-map chaos in the Lorenz equation
Rössler, O. E.
Physics Letters A, Volume 60, Issue 5, p. 392-394. 1977

An equation for hyperchaos
Rössler, O. E.
Physics Letters A, Volume 71, Issue 2-3, p. 155-157. 1979

Chaos in the Zhabotinskii reaction
Nature 271, 89 - 90 (05 January 1978)
OTTO E. ROSSLER & KLAUS WEGMANN

Hyperchaos and chemical turbulence in enzymatic reaction-diffusion systems
J. Chem. Phys. 104, 9974 (1996)
Peter Strasser, Otto E. Rössler and Gerold Baier

Higher chaos in a four-variable chemical reaction model
Killory, H.; Rössler, O. E.; Hudson, J. L.
Physics Letters A, Volume 122, Issue 6-7, p. 341-345. 1987

That’s it. Six publications in really good journals over a 39 year career at Tubingen. That’s not to say that other journals with impact factors in the 1.5 to 2 range are not good (some are, some aren’t), but over a career that long, the career of someone trying to be taken as an expert in anything, one expects more publications in higher impact journals. Many more, by at least an order of magnitude, in a 272 item publication record. I bent over backwards, looked at all 272 entries, and looked up the impact factors of the journals I had never heard of. And if you look (I’m not wading though that list again to count exact numbers, you want to argue with me, do your own research) a good part of the rest of Rössler's output is book chapters and the like, which are invited papers with little to no peer review, and really just amount to a review article of one’s own work, which in this case, isn’t much.

Aside from that, an awful lot of the other stuff Rössler publishes is not actually science. Wade through that list and you’ll find titles such as these:

A system theoretic model for biogenesis

Does a centralized clock for ageing exist

Deductive biology—Some cautious steps

Slower aging in women: A proposed evolutionary explanation

How chaotic is the universe?

Recursive evolution.

On the possibility of a new relativistic contraction law

The self: a processual gestalt

Do 'super suns’ and 'super planets' exist: An endocosmological hypothesis.

Energy-nonconservation in Physics? (uh oh, BIG ol’ red crank flag)

The scale change of Einstein’s equivalence principle

The relativist stance

Leveraging the Future-Existence of a new endo-reality in economics

Anti-flaring: how to prevent the market from overheating

Some remarks on the experimental realization of a mind machine

Needle People and Pancake People: The Gulliver Effect

Does the Moon Pull à la Newton or à la Einstein or in a Third Way?

Mirror competence implies person competence

And my favorites:

Endophysics: The World As an Interface

Ultraperspective and endophysics

Endophysics? You mean a re-hash of the Observer’s paradox?

Even in the absence of the crank notion of “endophysics”, titles such as these raise the red crank flag and wave it around like, well, a madman. We scientists like to do a bit of speculating and navel gazing once in a while, but it is imperative to remember that what is put forth in most science publications must be able to be tested. Anything else is high sounding speculative fiction with math. Grand old men of science can get away with the occasional speculative piece, but a publication record full of pieces like that is another red flag for crankhood. Science is testable. It’s a fundamental tenet. This was the gist of Michael Crichton’s diatribe against the Drake Equation:

This serious-looking equation gave SETI an serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses-just so we're clear-are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.

As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. Speaking precisely, the Drake equation is literally meaningless, and has nothing to do with science. I take the hard view that science involves the creation of testable hypotheses. The Drake equation cannot be tested and therefore SETI is not science. SETI is unquestionably a religion. Faith is defined as the firm belief in something for which there is no proof. The belief that the Koran is the word of God is a matter of faith. The belief that God created the universe in seven days is a matter of faith. The belief that there are other life forms in the universe is a matter of faith. There is not a single shred of evidence for any other life forms, and in forty years of searching, none has been discovered. There is absolutely no evidentiary reason to maintain this belief. SETI is a religion.

Those titles I just named from Rössler’s list of publications are religion in the same sense the Drake Equation is – untestable hypotheses at the current moment. Nonscientific speculations dressed up with math. And the red flag that they are not even serious speculative fiction, but more the type of stuff L. Ron Hubbard came up with, is that they are not published in journals that have anything to do with the subject matter content. That means both that the peer review did not consist of the best scientists in the field, and that very few people who actually work in the field that is the topic of the article will every read the arguments presented. It is scientific vanity publishing.

Let’s just take one. This one: “BSE Viewed Dynamically: A Possible Early Cure Based on Passive Immunization Against PrP Sc”. I almost had to break my self-imposed rule of no profanity in this post, right there. Did Rössler and his chemical engineering pals honestly think they had something worthwhile to say about BSE, only to bury it in a publication like that one? Come on, if you honestly thought you had a good method for treating Mad Cow Disease, wouldn’t you try to get that article into the best medical or pharmacology journal available? Articles like that in Podunk publications are the scientific equivalent of paying a vanity press to publish the novel that got rejected by every agent you submitted it to.

And finally, an awful lot of what Rössler has published in recent years looks just plain weird, even to the non scientist. I won’t go into too much detail, but I will quote the article that the anti-LHC crowd is so fond of, the one that the On Screen Scientist referred to when he took Rössler to school back in the heyday of the anti-LHC lawsuits:

There is one point left to mention even if this goes against the grain of scientific etiquette: the discreet charm of planet saving. A street ballad comes to mind as a conceptualbridge:

“Last time I tried to do something for the planet was thirteen years ago,
‘Lampsacus hometown of all persons on the Internet‘ [15] was the name,
by coincidence the police were ordered-in
to keep me out of my lecture hall for months in a row,
three times was I carried out in front of the students,
each time the plain-clothes officer in charge spontaneously
apologized afterwards which invisibly restored dignity, but the
requisite 10 billion dollar fund never materialized.”

Does inserting that into a scientific paper sound like the mental process of someone you want to be touting as an expert all over the web? I thought not.

Now that I’ve nearly finished beating on the man’s publication record, let me come back to that part of the record in journals with IFs of 3 or higher, because my above list is not entirely complete. The reason being that in recent years ol’ Otto has published a lot in the journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, which claims an impact factor of just around 3. That surprised me, because I’d never heard of the journal, and I’ve heard of most of the physics / physical chemistry-related journals with impact factors of 1.5 or higher. If you didn’t read the link in my statement above about how petty scientists can be about journal prestige, now might be the time to go back and take a look, because it explains how low impact journals with editors lacking a good moral compass do things like requiring submitted papers to have a significant number of references to papers in that very same journal and other self-referential, circle-jerk, no ethics cons to artificially raise the Impact Factor. And lo and behold! What did I find on the Net? Why this (I left the mis-spellings intact to avoid charges of quote tampering):


IF only cannot refelct the atual level of journals even from the some field. For example, everyone in community knows that "Chaos, Solitons, & Fractals" is a journal with poor reputation but with a higher IF. Why does it happen? It is manmade totally. The Editor and AE of this journal usually negelect the strict review of each submitted paper, and order authors to cite articles in a list they provide as many as possible. The list always contains articles published in this or related journals. It is clear why this journal has a higher IF.

Oh, there we go. Thank you Wen Zhen.

That’s not the only thing that struck me as odd about many of the articles in this list of publications in CS&F . Rössler is obviously publishing stuff in CS&F that has nothing to do with Chaos, Solitons or Fractals. Even low quality journals don’t publish non-subject matter related articles with any regularity. Why would it be that CS&F makes an exception for Rössler? Could there be something else going on? Oh, wait, remember my comments about editorial boards? Ah bingo! Scroll down the page to find the members of the editorial board. Rössler obviously got tired of having to go through even the minimal peer requirements for originality of Zeitschrift Naturforschung Teil A (most of his stuff published there was a re-hash of other work) and the peer review of journals that, you know, actually have reviewers who understand the topic of the article, and decided to slide his cut-rate mathematical masturbation into the journal on whose editorial board he sits.

So it is no surprise that the one “peer-reviewed” Rössler paper about black holes was published in in CS&F. The paper so commonly touted by the anti-LHC crowd did not even pass that low hurdle – it is self-published. If the publication were worth the paper it was printed on, it should have been published in Nature Physics. But then, the complete shredding of the argument would have been done as private reviewer comments accompanying a rejection notice, instead of as this public humiliation. And we would have been spared both aggravation and unintentional comedy.

Where is the publication record showing that Rössler knows his own field of Biochemistry very deeply? Nowhere. Where is the record showing that, after his initial discovery, Rössler engaged in deep analysis of his secondary field of Chaos? It is contained in six papers, and six papers do not an expert make. Where is the record showing that Rössler’s brand of Chaos math is applicable to the LHC? Nowhere. Where is the publication record that shows that Rössler knows anything about particle physics? Nowhere. And where is the evidence, however circumstantial, that Rössler is not a serious scientist? Everywhere.

Rössler, sadly enough, is a guy who had some talent in science, but frittered it away staring at his navel. Sean Carrol just posted about Frank Tipler, another guy who had some talent and went off the deep end (though Tippler’s talent was an order of magnitude greater than Rössler’s), and Sean said something profound here:

In science, we tend to valorize (to the point of fetishizing) a certain kind of ability to abstractly manipulate symbols and concepts — related to, although not exactly the same as, the cult of genius. (It’s not just being smart that is valorized, but a certain kind of smart.) The truth is, such an ability is great, but tends to be completely uncorrelated with other useful qualities like intellectual honesty and good judgment. People don’t become crackpots because they’re stupid; they become crackpots because they turn their smarts to crazy purposes.

Rössler’s obviously come a little unglued in recent years. I really didn’t enjoy writing this after the first blush of anger wore off, but I’m tired of the anti-LHC crowd citing this guy as an “expert”. I hope that, if you are sitting on the fence about whether to take him seriously, that you understand why this scientist would not trust him to read his own weight off the display of a digital scale, let alone have anything intelligent to say about the safety of the largest physics experiment on earth.

I Know You Can Get There From Here, but How Do You Do It?

What comes after this short introduction is an old blog post of mine from 2005. What reminded me to do this post was this one of Jim's over on Stonekettle Station. Jim asked why there are no good general science quizzes on the net.

There are probably a lot of factors behind the dearth of general science quizzes on the net, ranging from the fact that such a thing won't draw a lot of eyeballs or advertisers, to the fact that it would take a team of people to do it right, to the fact that that team is busy teaching or doing science already. There's also the fact that such a quiz would involve math, not everyone's favorite pastime.

Personally, I am ambivalent about such quizzes. On the positive side, they encourage scientific literacy. On the negative side, they encourage the belief that science is just a collection of facts to be memorized, rather than a systematic method to understand the physical world.

However, Jim muses that another reason is that while Americans give a lot of lip service to the value science and technology, what they really are interested in is whether Britney Spears is going to lose her kids.

Jim's right, of course. A Hungarian immigrant, a physicist, once told me that America has always imported her scientific talent, and not to worry that so few of my fellow countrymen study science. I refuse to accept that. But unfortunately he was not totally wrong. One surface manifestation of the problem is that we don't really give our kids role models and heroes who are scientists. One of the few ways in which I think the Soviet education system was superior to the American one is that every Soviet high school student could tell you who Euler, Lomonosov and Mendeleev were, while I'd bet not one American kid in ten could tell you who J. Willard Gibbs was. Ask kids who they admire most, and it's usually political figures or artists of some stripe. Of course those people are important, but there is no balance to the average American kid's pantheon of heroes.

Today we celebrate the anniversary of one of the great inventions of mankind. Elementary School kids may note this day, but I do not remember it being mentioned a single time in Middle or High School. That's a shame, because an in-depth study of the story of this anniversary holds a lot of lessons that go well beyond the fact that today you can sit in a metal tube hurtling 500 miles per hour through the sky five miles in the air. But that's pretty cool, too, and worth celebrating in its own right.

I admit I’m a geek*. When I see something like the Wright Anniversary pass by, I spend a little time marveling at the achievement of something that was previously thought impossible. Then I start to ask questions. By inclination, I’m a big picture guy, but by training, I’m a details guy. I have to remember to turn the training on, but once it’s on, it takes over. So the first thing I ask about the Wrights is: “why them, when the whole world over people were working on this problem?”. Like so many things in life, the answer is complex, and involves a little luck.

The first part of the answer can be found in this passage:

Prior to their famous 1903 flight, Orville and Wilbur had to rework the existing lift and drag tables which were found to be all wrong. New and correct tables had to developed by working with gliders and control designs to get more lift. Similarly, they had to design and build the first wind tunnel to validate their designs without jeopardizing life and limb in full-scale tests. Finally, they had to design the airplane propellers from scratch. This was because it quickly became apparent that an airplane propeller design cannot be adapted from a ship propeller design.

They were systematic thinkers, and they went through each step inventing the “enabling technologies” as we call them today, the things that you need in order to design and build an airplane: the drag tables, the wind tunnels, and the airscrews.

This is a key point that elementary school accounts gloss over. The Wright brothers created the first wind tunnel. That in and of itself is a significant achievement. It's also a great object lesson in the stepwise achievement of dreams. As Terry Pratchett put it:

"Are you listening?"
"Yes," said Tiffany.
"Good. Now ... if you trust in yourself ..."
"Yes?"
"... and believe in your dreams ..."
"Yes?"
"... and follow your star.. ." Miss Tick went on.
"Yes?"
"... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy. Good-bye."

The brothers also realized that the existing knowledge of propellers was based on ship screws, and water behaves as a fluid quite differently from air:

The twisted airfoil (aerofoil) shape of modern aircraft propellers was pioneered by the Wright brothers when they found that all existing knowledge on propellers (mostly naval) was determined by trial and error and that no one knew exactly how they worked. They found that a propeller is essentially the same as a wing and so were able to use data collated from their earlier wind tunnel experiments on wings. They also found that the relative angle of attack from the forward movement of the aircraft was different for all points along the length of the blade, thus it was necessary to introduce a twist along its length. Their original propeller blades are only about 5% less efficient than the modern equivalent- some 100 years later.

The first props were only 5% less efficient than a model 100 years later! This is why the story of the Wright Brothers should be taught in depth to high school students. This is what Edison meant about 99% perspiration. The Wrights did not just dream, they paid attention to the details necessary to make that dream a reality.

Good things come to minds that think like that, when those habits of thought are combined with creativity. Unfortunately, that’s a rare combination. That’s why there are a lot more accountants than prize-winning scientists and engineers.

There was one more enabling technology that the Wrights needed, though. The engines of the day were primarily cast iron and brass - too heavy to push themselves and an airframe into the air, even with the Wright airscrew. The Wrights sent out to automotive manufacturers for bids on a lightweight (180 lbs) engine that could crank out 8 hp. The car manufacturers could not be bothered with piddling one-off custom orders at the price the brothers were willing to pay:

Immediately upon our return to Dayton, we wrote to a number of automobile and motor builders, stating the purpose for which we desired a motor, and asking whether they could furnish one that would develop eight-brake horse power, with a weight complete not exceeding 200 pounds. Most of the companies answered that they were too busy with their regular business to undertake the building of such a motor for us; but one company replied that they had motors rated at 8 h.p. according to the French system of ratings, which weighed only 135 pounds, and that if we thought this motor would develop enough power for our purpose, they would be glad to sell us one. After an examination of the particulars of this motor, from which we learned that it had but a single cylinder of 4 inch bore and 5 inch stroke, we were afraid that it was much overrated. Unless the motor would develop a full 8 brake horse power, it would be useless for our purpose.

So, the Wrights turned to the mechanic who built the engine that powered their wind tunnel, Charles Taylor:

In just six weeks from the time the design was started, we had the motor on the block testing its power. The ability to do this so quickly was largely due to the enthusiastic and efficient services of Mr. C.E. Taylor, who did all the machine work in our shop for the first as well as the succeeding experimental machines. There was no provision for lubricating either cylinders or bearings while this motor was running. For that reason it was not possible to run it more than a minute or two at a time. In these short tests the motor developed about nine horse power. We were then satisfied that, with proper lubrication and better adjustments, a little more power could be expected.

Taylor’s engine was a marvel. To borrow a line from Douglas Adams, the first thing I’d think in an aircraft powered by this engine is “please may I get out”:

What was missing from the 1903 Taylor engine is equally significant. There was neither a fuel pump, carburetor nor oil pump. Raw gasoline dripped into the cylinders from a tank mounted on the wing strut. Because it was not expected to run for long, the engine was pre-oiled.

The valves were not cooled, they ran red hot. Despite the fact that all those parts were missing, a cast iron engine would still have been too heavy. So the Wrights turned to a metal available in bulk only for about 50 years – aluminum (hell yeah, I’m Amurrican, what of it?**). But aluminum has flaws as a construction material: it melts at much too low a temperature, and it is relatively soft. By trial and error, the Wrights came up with an alloy strong enough and temperature-resistant enough to make an engine block out of. It consisted of about 8% copper, and pre-dated the systematic scientific discovery of such alloys by at least 3 years:

In 1906 Dr Alfred Wilma, a German metallurgist, discovered that aluminium alloyed with copper and heat treated correctly could be made far stronger. The alloy of aluminium with 4% copper is called Duralumin and the heat treatment process is called precipitation hardening. These alloys have typically low specific gravity (around 2.7) and high strength (450 MPa). They are limited by a maximum service temperature of about 660°C. Since then, other heat treatable aluminium alloys have been developed for aircraft use. These include a range of complex aluminium-zinc alloys which develop the highest strength of any aluminium alloy. These alloys have led to modern aircraft design where the skin of the fuselage and wings are stressed aluminium alloy members which reduces the overall weight.

Note the difference in the 1903 Wright alloy copper content and the 1906 Duralumin content. That right there is an object lesson in what David Foster was going on about here. You can’t steer a ship that isn’t moving, and Wilma was looking at Al alloys because of their aircraft applications.

As an aside, the metallurgy of these alloys is quite fascinating, and an example of nanotechnology that predates the current fad by about 90 years:

Metallurgists have long known how to make strong alloys, even without understanding their microstructure. First heat the constituents until they dissolve in one another, then allow the alloy to "age" for several days; one or more of the constituents may precipitate out of solution and form microscopic inclusions in the matrix, forming a considerably stronger alloy. Precipitation hardening has been crucial to aviation since the first powered flight- although the Wright brothers didn't know it.

The story of the engine itself is fascinating. It was wrecked in a crash not long after the first flight, Since it was a custom job and none of its parts fit other planes, it was left with the other detritus of the Wrights’ shop:

Although the airplane was repaired and flew again, the crankcase disappeared and was not found until 1985 – 80 years later. The National Park Service at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina had it squirreled away and was not aware that anyone was interested in it.

As an aside - what kind on numbnuts did we have curating the Wright collection, anyway? Well, they seem to have got their act together, now, and have a nice little page devoted to the engine.

Once found, the NIST conducted some tests on the engine, confirming the alloy composition.

The history of the mechanic, Charlie Taylor, is a sad one. He left the Wrights (big mistake), and suffered a series of failed business deals which impoverished him. When Henry Ford created a museum of American industry, he was found in a California machine shop making 37 cents an hour. He went to work for Ford until WWII demanded skills for the war effort. Orville found him penniless again after his WWII service in an aircraft factory, having suffered a heart attack. Orville set up a trust fund that was wiped out by post-WWII inflation, and Taylor died in a charity ward.

Taylor’s working method and his post-Flyer demise struck me as an object lesson in what Prof. Dutch was going on about in this screed:

It is useful, however, to distinguish between tinkering and creativity. Tinkering consists of exploring relatively minor variations on known themes, or subjecting new stimuli to an array of already known techniques. Thomas Kinkade rarely creates and mostly tinkers. Babies tinker constantly. They put every new object in their mouth. Eventually they figure out that most things are not good to eat. When they develop motor control, they throw things. Serious curiosity consists of actively seeking new kinds of stimuli. Creativity consists of juxtaposing objects and ideas in new ways, and having a sound intuition for separating the significant result from the trivial.

There are inventors and there are tinkerers. Charlie was a tinkerer. I seriously doubt he would have invented the engine of his own accord, but once the Wrights set him to the task, he accomplished it:

Given the Wrights' reputation for detail, the seemingly straightforward task of recreating the original engine has proved to be surprisingly difficult. While Orville and Wilbur kept careful records of their wind-tunnel and flight tests, engine builder Charlie E. Taylor took a more casual approach. The cranky, cussing mechanic who ran the Wright brothers' Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop, and irritated their sister Katharine with his incessant cigar smoking, did his work on the fly. It wasn't carelessness. It was just the way Taylor preferred to work, says Howard R. DuFour, the author of Charles E. Taylor: The Wright Brothers Mechanician. "Charlie was the first aircraft mechanic in the world," DuFour tells POPULAR MECHANICS. "One of them--Orville, Wilbur or Charlie--would sketch out the part they were talking about on a piece of scrap paper. Then, Charlie 'spiked' these [scraps] on his workbench for reference in machining and assembling the engine." As the parts were completed over the next six weeks, these scraps of paper were lost, along with the details of the engine that would revolutionize transportation.

The lay public, and apparently Jared Diamond (among other sociologists of science) have a hard time distinguishing tinkerers from inventors. It is far, far better to be one of the latter than one of the former, and we rightly celebrate them (but, as I mentioned above, we don not celebrate them enough, or encourage our children to study their methods). I have a feeling that Charlie’s problems in later life were caused by his lack of systematic approach to business affairs and life in general.

A creative mind that is not systematic enough may be the polar opposite of an accountant, and exactly who you want in the machine shop, but unlike the accountant, such a mind also runs the risk of dying penniless and being memorialized posthumously. But philosophical ruminations aside, a lot of creative work is also catalyzed by the technicians and machine shop workers who build the stuff the inventors design. So stop for a moment and remember the Wrights, their work methods, and especially Charlie, the tinkering mechanic who gave us wings.



* Two little factoids stuck in my head, leading to this post. One, I saw a comment about the use of copper – aluminum alloys on a plaque attached to an early Wright engine at the WPAFB Museum. I also remember reading a Science article on the Wright Flyer crankcase by Gayle and Goodway back when I was in grad school.

** Some heathens put an extra "i" in aluminum:

The metal derives its name from alumen, the Latin name for alum. In 1761 L. B. G de Morveau proposed the name alumine for the base in alum, and in 1787 Lavoisier definitely identified it as the oxide of a still undiscovered metal. In 1807 Sir Humphrey Davy proposed the name aluminum for this metal and later agreed to change it to aluminum. Shortly thereafter, the name aluminium was adopted to conform to the "ium" ending of most elements, and this spelling is now in general use throughout the world. Aluminum was also the accepted spelling in the United States until 1925 when the American Chemical Society officially reverted to aluminum.

Various aviation stuff

I've been wanting to get back to my "weird old plane" posts, and was doing some research, looking for a good candidate. That led me to some other interesting aviation stories that aren't exactly weird old planes, but interesting nonetheless.

The aircraft was a Lufthansa Airbus landing in a bad storm in Hamburg. According to this post on Flightaware, the winds were 33 gusting 49 knots, within limits, barely, maybe, for the Airbus

The recovery from that approach was pretty miraculous - I thought for sure he was going to take out some runway lights along with his undercarriage. According to the comments on YouTube, the copilot flew the approach and got into trouble and the pilot took over to execute the waveoff. Both were reportedly suspended by Lufthansa.

I guess the pilot deserves a lot of credit for saving the aircraft on the waveoff, but I didn’t think the overall approach was that good. His transition from the crab didn’t look that good, but giving him the benefit of the doubt perhaps there was a bad gust at that instant. I tend to transition from crab to “wing down top rudder” earlier than he did, to gauge whether or not it will be possible to track centerline without dipping the wing too much.

Most multiengine aircraft (especially 4 engine ones) have a bank limitation for landing to prevent dragging the outboard/upwind engine/prop and the max crosswind component limitation is based on that bank angle. Setting up earlier in the bank lets you compare your situation to the limitation to avoid this situation.

I've heard, but do not know for sure because I'm not qualified on the 'Bus, that you can't do a "wing down-top rudder" approach in the Airbus because the fly-by-wire flight control system won't allow you to cross-control like that. If that is true, it would mean you would have to kick out the crab at the last moment and try to maintain centerline. I've been in that situation in bad winds like that and tried that technique and had a very similar result - inability to maintain centerline followed by a quick waveoff.

The actual winds in this case must have been outrageous. I remember landing at Luqa, Malta (LMML) in an advertised 45-gusting-60 crosswind component - beyond the crosswind limits for the aircraft I was flying, but the operating manual stated that if you could maintain centerline without exceeding max bank angle, the approach could be continued. We landed and shortly there after a Condor (Lufthansa charter subsidiary) 757 showed up to shoot touch-and-goes. They did about 10 VERY impressive circuits - on centerline, perfect technique, in max-component-crosswind conditions, just for training. We were REALLY impressed with their skill and airmanship, if not with their decision to do it in the first place. They did it the way I describe - switching from a crab to a wing-down-top-rudder approach before the flare. In Boeings you can definitely do it.

Airbus passenger jets have a variety of unpleasant characteristics associated with the totally computer-controlled flight control system, and reportedly the Airbus consortium, in collusion with the French government allegedly has gone to considerable lengths to cover up those characteristics and blame the pilots for any flight-control-related mishap.

In 1988, an Airbus 320 crashed in Mulhouse-Habsheim, France while making a low-slow approach at an airshow. The pilot reported adding power to level off at 100 feet, but the throttle did not respond. The pilot then completely cycled the throttle but the aircraft settled into the trees at the end of the runway:

A lot of really strange things went on with the investigation of this crash. It looks like Airbus and the French government didn't want flaws in the A320 design to be revealed, and hung responsibility for the crash on the pilot, who was jailed.

This is a strange one, though. The pilot probably does bear some, if not most, of the responsibility. He was flying awfully low and slow for an airliner with passengers on board, and reportedly was surprised when he hit the trees, which would tend to contradict the statement that the throttles did not respond. The copilot has reportedly kept his mouth shut tight since the accident.

In other news: Nancy Pelosi reportedly wants her own VC-32.

The VC-32 is a 757, flown by the 89th Airlift Wing at Andrews Air Force base, normally to transport the Vice President, or large government delegations (multiple members of congress, senior administration officials, etc) on overseas junkets/diplomatic missions, etc.

Since 9/11, the Speaker of the House (Hastert and now Pelosi) has been provided with an Air Force VIP aircraft for "security" reasons, allegedly because the government became concerned about a terrorist attack against the Speaker him- or herself.

I don't think there has ever been any specific or credible evidence or information that terrorists even know who the Speaker of the House is, much less care enough to attack her. This looks like just another example of the "imperialization" of the federal government. Government officials gradually assign greater and greater perks and grandiose trappings of power to themselves, pretty much reflexively. It's nauseating, and disappointing. We deserve better, and should demand better, from our so-called representatives.

These days, with the approval ratings of pretty much all branches of government at all time lows, it looks like all these trappings of power are mainly intended to separate our elected officials from their angry constituents.

The whole thing is just disgraceful. Nancy Pelosi says she wants the very large jet so she can fly non-stop from Washington to San Francisco. That makes me wonder what she was flying before.

The 89th Wing doesn't fly anything that doesn't have the range to reach San Francisco from Andrews unrefueled, so that whole argument (that she needs the plane for the range) doesn't appear to make a bit of sense.

You can check out Speaker Pelosi making that claim on video, however:

"It's not a question of size. It's a question of distance. We want an aircraft that can reach California," Pelosi said.

Every aircraft flown by the 89th Wing has an unrefueled range over 4000 miles. It is 2550 miles from Washington to San Francisco.

According to the White House, Nancy Pelosi has only flown on military aircraft between San Francisco and Washington once since becoming Speaker, and that one time she flew a C-20B, which is a Gulfstream III with an unrefueled range of 4250 miles. It could fly from San Franciso to Washington, turn around and fly back to Chicago, and still have about a legal IFR reserve.

Reportedly Pelosi also requested an aircraft to carry her from Washington to Williamsburg, Virginia, for a political event, but was refused.

Pelosi's arrogance and hubris simply astounds me, and she's pretty typical of the creatures that inhabit Washington DC. It reminds me a lot of the Roman Empire, around the time of Caligula.

I guess its too much to ask for her to think more about doing her job, so maybe our economy might not be in the worst mess since 1929?

Constellation

Now for a serious post about outer space...

Constellation is the name of NASA's program to return to the moon, and possibly continue on to Mars, or even maybe other destinations in the solar system. It consists of two major components, the Ares booster system and the Orion crew vehicle.

The Ares system consists of two major components, the Ares I for launching the Orion crew vehicle into orbit, and the Ares V heavy-lift booster for launching major Constellation components into low earth orbit for on-orbit assembly and rendezvous with the Orion for subsequent deep space exploration.

The first thing that strikes almost anyone about the Constellation program is its uncanny resemblance to Apollo. The Ares I and Ares V boosters seem very similar in performance, size, and function to the Saturn Ib and Saturn V. (Perhaps they will eventually rename it the Ares Ib.) It seems almost impossibly retro.

NASA clearly recognizes the obvious similarity, and refers to Apollo five times on the Orion web page. They point out that Orion is much more advanced technology, despite the outward similarity, and has 2 1/2 times the internal volume of the Apollo command module, and referred to Constellation as "Apollo on Steroids" at the introductory press conference.

The Orion "crew exploration vehicle" (CEV) will carry 6 astronauts to low earth orbit, or four to the moon, will land ashore instead of at sea, and be reusable. It is NASA's final format to replace the space shuttle, which is a very disappointing decision.

The reason that the US space program ended up being based on missiles (specifically on the Nazi V2) is because the people at NASA who developed the program were Nazi rocket scientists. At the same time, the Air Force (with some NASA cooperation) was developing aerodynamic spacecraft - vehicles capable of using lift, instead of pure thrust, to escape the earth's atmosphere.

Although there were some additional technical obstacles with true "flying" spacecraft (mainly associated with the heat shielding), the potential advantages were substantial. There's a reason that United and Southwest fly airplanes and not rockets - they are a lot more efficient. You can lift a lot more payload with a lot less fuel than you can with a rocket.

The Air Force was already, by the early 1960s, flying to the edge of space in an aircraft, the rocket powered X-15. There was a huge and impassioned debate about the best strategy to launch payloads into space, via aircraft or rockets, with NASA and the Army on the side of rockets and the Air Force and much of the aerospace industry favoring aircraft. Ultimately NASA won out because of the enormous influence and persuasive abilities of Werner von Braun. Ironically, von Braun had proposed and advocated aerodynamic space vehicles at various times in his career, but had been employed by the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency (which became NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center) since WWII and was parochially aligned with the Army and missiles.

The Air Force had a "mini space shuttle" design by the late 1950s - the X-20 Dyna-Soar, but that program was scuttled by the political efforts of NASA and Werner von Braun, who claimed it would compete with and reduce resources available to the Apollo lunar program.

This was all very unfortunate. Von Braun originally proposed the moon mission be stages as an Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR), using re-usable boosters and spacecraft to deliver large quantities of material and components for a very substantial moon expedition. That model - which has been revived for Constellation - would have been very well served by simple, rugged, reusable aerodynamic orbital vehicles like the Dyna-Soar.

Officially, Dyna-Soar was killed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1963 because he said "there was no significant advantage in controlled re-entry", the publicly-stated main difference between Dyna-Soar and the Gemini Program. But a tremendous amount of the real history of the Dyna-Soar is shrouded in secrecy.

Dyna-Soar was originally intended to serve as a global exo-atmosperic, hypersonic weapons platform, similar to a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS). It was a direct decendent of the Eugene Sanger's proposed Silbervogel, also known as Hitler's Amerika Bomber. Eugen Sanger, of course, was a colleague and competitor of Werner von Braun in Nazi Germany. The Amerika Bomber was the Nazi's planned unstoppable delivery platform for their nuclear bomb. The Silbervogel, which was designed in 1934 but never flew, looked a whole lot like an X-15. I think in my old blog I did a post comparing the designs of Sanger, the Horten brothers, and others in Germany in the early 1930s with the most advanced aircraft in the United States at the time.

A summary:

Germany, 1934



United States, 1934:



Clearly there were very different things going on there.

What was going on in the early 1960's, however, was very heavily influenced by the cold war and the desire to contain the Soviet Union. Anything that could potentially prove to be an assymetrical advantage, such as a fractional orbital bombardment system or orbital reconnaissance systems, was very heavily classified.

The apparent promise of aerodynamic space vehicles, however - their ability to maneuver much more radically in orbit than NASA's capsules, their re-usability, and their ability to fly to any point on the earth and land in a very short time - made their seeming abandonment in the early 1960s, after the spectacular success of the X-15, very puzzling indeed.

While the publicly known history indicates it was NASA and von Braun's political persuasion that shifted the emphasis to rockets and away from aircraft, there have long been rumors that the space-planes simply "went undercover".

Those long-circulating rumors were ratified in 2006 by Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, with a cover story claiming the existance of a highly covert space plane program, derived from the Dyna-Soar and known as "Blackstar". According to "Aviation Leak", as it is often known, the "Blackstar" program was a two-stage-to-orbit binary system based on not only the Dyna-Soar but also the cancelled XB-70 "Valkyrie" supersonic bomber. The Valkyrie served as the first-stage "mother ship" which lifted the orbital vehicle to around 100,000 feet for launch into space. Such a system makes a lot of sense as a much more efficient way to achieve orbit, in comparison to a multi-stage rocket.

The theory goes that the Air Force has had a space-plane program for many years, possibly since the mid-1980s, and many of the publicly-announced space plane development efforts since then, such as the X-30 National Aerospace Plane, were derived from, or used as cover for, the secret spaceships.

But if any of this is true, it's a really good secret. While there is plenty of evidence the Department of Defense spent billions on the 80s and 90s on very highly classified projects, there's no good evidence they bought any manned spacecraft with all that money. There is also solid evidence that the Air Force has flown something that goes very high and very fast since the retirement of the SR-71, but again there's nothing to say with any reliability its a space plane. An unmanned hypersonic demonstrator prototype may be a more likely scenario.

It should be remembered that there were several aerodynamic spacecraft proposed to replace the Space Shuttle. Lockheed's most recent proposal in 2006 looked pretty much exactly like the X-20X Dyna-Soar III.

But once again, after many years of signaling that the Space Shuttle would be replaced with something truly versatile and innovative, NASA decided to go back to the 1950s with Werner von Braun's rocket-and-capsule format.

What the heck? After all the work done on aerodynamic space vehicles, hypersonic pulse-detonation-wave and aerospike engines, advanced composite heat-dispersing materials, and digital flight controls, we're going to chunk it all and build "Apollo on steroids".

Is there something I'm missing here? The Apollo redux will use von Braun's original Earth Orbit Rendezvous, which is tailor-made for a rapid-turnaround, highly efficient aerodynamic lift platform. What you need to do is make a lot of trips to orbit to assemble the parts for your deep-space exploration vehicle, which could be boosted in pieces on existing launchers. You create a new "space shipyard" to exist as the permanent launching point for further exploration, which you can get to easily by launching an aerodynamic vehicle from a two-stage-to-orbit system like the rumored "Blackstar", or cancelled Dyna-Soar. Why do you want a new Apollo system for that requirement? It just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

One of the angles that might explain it is the desire for safety. The loss of Columbia and Challenger revealed just how dangerous the aerodynamic Space Shuttle is, while the Russians early-60s vintage Soyuz capsules are tried and true. In many ways, the Soyuz system is much superior to either Apollo or the Space Shuttle, and certainly it's proved its worth. The first Soyuz flew in 1966, and the United States will rely on Soyuz for access to the International Space Station in between the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 and the first flight of Orion, which is hoped for 2014, but given the US Government's record in recent years with this sort of thing, may be fantastically optimistic.

Regardless of the format or direction NASA wishes to take in the manned spaceflight program, it may be that almost anything associated with space exploration could be very hard to pay for in the coming years. Its looking like the government isn't going to have the money to pay for much of anything "optional", because of steadily increasing non-discretionary costs and steadily decreasing revenues.

President-elect Obama initially said he would defer Constellation to pay for improvements in education, but has since changed his position, saying he would ask for additional funding for NASA to accelerate development of Constellation.

It is very interesting that Obama did a near "about face" on NASA, and it is somewhat hard to determine what motivated the change. The most obvious and likely cause was the desire to win votes in Florida, which hosts much of NASA's infrastructure. Another scenario is that Obama became aware of the difficult and potentially embarrassing situation the country will face when the shuttles are retired and NASA must contract with Russia for access to the space station. A more improbable scenario is that Obama was briefed on how NASA's development of Constellation interrelates with some possible classified military space program.

But the apparent ultimate reality is that NASA wouldn't be planning to build a new version of Apollo if it had any better ideas. Given the record of the government in recent decades (since the 1960s) for building anything new and innovative, perhaps NASA is making a very smart decision by keeping the technological risk to a minimum.

But wouldn't it be great if we could recapture the spirit and the energy of NASA's "golden age", and strive to do something really new and exciting?

Quote of the Day

From ChicagoBoyz commenter Comatus:

Only a skilled game butcher should mess (term used advisedly) with road kill. If the integuments between the upper and lower body cavity are ruptured–typical in a car encounter–the meat is essentially poison, shot through with fecal bacteria. Despite what you’ve heard, the Dodge Ram is not the hunting weapon of choice.

Indeed.

And a question for all you people more experienced with wildlife than I am: I thought real Coyotes are solitary hunters. The Coyotes around here seem to have more wolf-like facial features, and they hunt in packs. The common wisdom is that they interbred with Canadian or Western US wolves as they migrated East. Anyone know anything about that?

I had one of those things walk right over my patio the other day, eyeing me through the sliding glass door. I'm keeping the rifle handy as winter approaches and I keep hearing them pull down deer closer and closer (within 500 meters) of the house. One was howling so close to my house about 2:00 AM the other day that he turned on my motion sensor light at the edge of the drainspout. They are getting too comfortable with humans for my comfort.

Regulating Ninjas

When ninja socks are criminalized, only criminals will have ninja socks.

Apropos of the political season, I've been studying the restrictions on various items in various states around the country. I was inspired by this page on Amazon.com saying New York and California ban anything vaguely associated with the famous but actually-pretty-marginal Japanese martial art of Ninjutsu. (For a comparison, read up on Daitō-ryū_Aiki-jūjutsu, a non-marginal Japanese school).

Many people may be aware that New York and California ban possession of nunchuku*. Nunchuku, for those unfamiliar, are two short sticks connected at their ends with a piece of string or rope. The story linked above describes a case in California where the police came into the home of a martial arts instructor and demanded he surrender all his connected sticks. Subsequently he pled no contest to a single count of possession of nunchuku and was sentenced to jail.

(* In California, martial arts schools, but not individuals, may possess two small sticks connected by string.)

Remind me not to even visit California. Like my partner John, I practiced martial arts for many years and somewhere around the Adios Airways HQ I have several pairs of practice nunchuku - lightweight plastic, covered with foam rubber, couldn't hurt anyone if they tried. Those could get me 1 year in jail for each pair in California (or New York, where Eliot Spitzer demanded the manufacturers in Florida and Georgia turn over the names and addresses of all their customers who had purchased the linked-sticks in New York).

Reading the California penal code (section 12020), I discovered that not only nunchuku, but also:

any metal knuckles, any belt buckle knife, any
leaded cane, any zip gun, any shuriken, any unconventional pistol,
any lipstick case knife, any cane sword, any shobi-zue, any air gauge
knife, any writing pen knife, any metal military practice
handgrenade or metal replica handgrenade, or any instrument or weapon
of the kind commonly known as a blackjack, slungshot, billy,
sandclub, sap, or sandbag.

The good news is that I cannot find any actual language in the California penal code that bans socks, whether or not they are Ninja Socks.

I don't even know what a "slungshot" is, but it would seem that California intends to ban slingshots (although that would be an interesting legal case: Little Billy v. the Government of the State of California over possession of a slingshot, not a "slungshot".)

I didn't know what they meant by a "shobi-zue", but research indicates it is a stick with a blade attached, AKA a spear. (John maybe you can help - as far as I can tell, the term is jibberish in Japanese or Chinese). I'm not sure where they get their definitions of these things, so a traditional spear (with a sharpened wooden point) might still be OK, but my guess is they'd put you away for possession of an indian-style spear with a flint arrowhead. The same source indicates that a "slungshot" is not a slingshot, but a different type of weapon no one has ever heard of.

Additionally, California's section 12020 bans sandbags (?!? - I guess they don't have hurricanes out there. No wonder they have such problems with mudslides.), saps (a broad category meaning "anything heavy with which you might hit someone"), and "billys", which apparently can mean any stick. No visiting California with the cut-off broom handle I use to close my hurricane shutters!

Cross-checking New York law reveals a very dangerous place to possess a stick, two sticks connected with string, or a sandbag as well:

A person is guilty of criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree when:

1) He possesses any firearm, electronic dart gun, electronic stun gun, gravity knife, switchblade knife, pilum ballistic knife, metal knuckle knife, cane sword, billy, blackjack, bludgeon, metal knuckles, chuka stick, sand bag, sandclub, wrist-brace type slingshot or slungshot, shirken or "Kung Fu star"; or

(2) He possesses any dagger, dangerous knife, dirk, razor, stiletto, imitation pistol, or any other dangerous or deadly instrument or weapon with intent to use the same unlawfully against another;

If Little Billy visited New York with his toy cap pistol he'd be in deep doo-doo. Also New York is much more specific - his slingshot is definitely illegal, as would be a "slungshot", if anyone knew what it was.

What's the point of all of this? It's that some very bad laws sometimes get made, and subsequently otherwise non-criminals get punished for breaking said bad laws. Those laws are almost never un-made - usually quite the contrary: every time prosecutors are able to get a plea out of aforementioned non-criminals, more bad precedents are set.

Compounding this problem is the "shadowing", where various things that aren't actually prohibited (like Ninja socks) are lumped together with things that are, including by law enforcement:

Attend a PTA meeting or a high school football game with a small buck folding knife in your pocket or handbag, or even a tiny pocket knife on your key chain, and you are subject to the same legal disqualifications meted out to murderers and rapists. If there is even a small pocket knife in your pocket or car when you drive your child to school, or perhaps exercise your right to vote (many jurisdictions' plots are located in school buildings), various rights which you may have thought to be "inalienable" may be in jeopardy...

Ejusdim generis - Latin for "the same kind." It is common technique in writing laws to specifically list various prohibited items followed by a general inclusive term. For instance, you may find a statute which prohibits "any dagger, dirk, switch-blade, gravity knife, buton knife, cutting instrument the blade of which is exposed in an automatic way by switch, push-button, spring mechanism, or other such implement". Under the rule of ejusdem generis, "other such implement" could not legitimately be read to include for instance a drop point fixed blade hunting knife. In other words, the drop point fixed blade hunting knife is not of the same kind or class as the specifically listed items such as the dagger, dirk, switch-blade, military knife or fighting knife, etc. However, you must be careful. In construing a New York statute prohibiting the possession of a dagger, dirk, dangerous knife, razor, stiletto, automatic knife, butterfly knife or any other dangerous weapon, an ice pick was found to be a "dangerous weapon" under the principle of ejusdem generis.

My concern is that the incoming government, both congress and the executive branch, overtly state that they wish to broadly expand the power and role of the federal government in our lives. That means more laws, which inevitably means more bad laws that will never get un-made.

Wouldn't it be great if they could occupy themselves with the Ninja Rights Agenda instead?