All posts by Wintery Knight

https://winteryknight.com/
Polemics

Michael Strauss: are Earth-like planets common in the universe?

5 Comments
Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

Physicist Michael Strauss is one of my favorite speakers and scholars – he has a real love of experimental science which I find lacking in many Christian philosophers who seem to treat science (as opposed to naturalism) as the enemy.

Here is his latest blog post:

When scientists say that an Earth-like planet may have been discovered, they actually mean one of three things. Either (1) the planet is in such an orbit around its central star that allows the temperature on the planet to possibly harbor liquid water, or (2) the planet is about the same size as the earth, or (3) the planet is solid and rocky rather than gaseous. Of course any one of these criteria, or even all three, does not actually give us a true Earth-like planet. We know that our moon is in the correct location to contain liquid water, but it is not “Earth-like.” We know Venus is about the size of the earth, but it is not “Earth-like.” We know that Mercury is rocky and not gaseous, but it is not “Earth-like.” So none of these criteria really give an Earth-like planet. Headlines and sound-bites are not meant to be precise but to draw attention, and it is much more exciting to proclaim an “Earth-like” planet has been found rather than a “Venus-like” planet (if even that could be claimed).

[…]An enlightening book on this subject is Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee, published in 2000. One of my favorite chapters in the book is titled “The Surprising Importance of Plate Tectonics” which documents why plate tectonics is required in order for complex life to survive. Having lived 23 years of my life in California, I am well acquainted with the consequences of plate tectonics, but had no idea that such activity was crucial for my survival. Ward and Brownlee document how plate tectonics not only forms and maintains continents, but promotes biological diversity, regulates global temperature, and helps maintain a planetary magnetic field. They write, “It may be that plate tectonics is the central requirement for life on a planet and that it is necessary for keeping a world supplied with water,” (p. 220).

The astrophysicist Hugh Ross has done a rough estimate of the probability of finding a single planet that could support even simple unicellular life for a sustained period of time. Including correlations and longevity factors, and assuming there are 10 billion trillion planets in the visible universe, he concludes that the probability of finding a single planet that could support unicellular life for a prolonged period of time is 1 in 10556, (see Part B of this document). If this informed estimate is even close to being correct, then there are no other planets in the visible universe that can support life.

Previously, I blogged about a few of the minimum requirements that a planet must satisfy in order to support complex life.

Here they are:

  • a solar system with a single massive Sun than can serve as a long-lived, stable source of energy
  • a terrestrial planet (non-gaseous)
  • the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to preserve liquid water at the surface – if it’s too close, the water is burnt off in a runaway greenhouse effect, if it’s too far, the water is permanently frozen in a runaway glaciation
  • the planet has to be far enough from the star to avoid tidal locking and solar flares
  • the solar system must be placed at the right place in the galaxy – not too near dangerous radiation, but close enough to other stars to be able to absorb heavy elements after neighboring stars die
  • a moon of sufficient mass to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s rotation
  • plate tectonics
  • an oxygen-rich atmosphere
  • a sweeper planet to deflect comets, etc.
  • planetary neighbors must have non-eccentric orbits
  • planet mass must be enough to retain an atmosphere, but not so massive to cause a greenhouse effect

That’s a lot of characteristics that need to be present. When you calculate the probabilities of each one and then multiply them (product rule) to get the odds of getting a planet with ALL of them present, you get a number far smaller than the maximum number of possible life sites in the universe. We are alone.

News

Telford sex-trafficking ring involving up to thousand children was run by “Asian” men

1 Comment
Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

Every time I see one of these sex-trafficking of children stories in the UK media, it reminds me of the Labor Party’s decade-long strategy of importing unskilled immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries.

Here is the latest from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Up to 1,000 children could have been abused in Britain’s biggest ever child abuse scandal, an investigation has revealed.

Hundreds of children, some as young as 11, are estimated to have been drugged, beaten and raped over a 40-year period in the town of Telford.

[…]The investigation claims that allegations dating back to the 1980s were mishandled by authorities in Telford, who repeatedly failed to punish a network of abusers.

Victims claimed that similar abuse, which has been linked to three murders and two other deaths, has continued in the area.

The newspaper’s probe alleges that social workers were aware of the abuse in the 1990s, but that it took police a decade to  launch Operation Chalice, an inquiry into child prostitution in the Telford area in which seven men were jailed.

It is also claimed that abused and trafficked children were considered “prostitutes” by council staff, that authorities did not keep details of abusers from Asian communities for fear of being accused of “racism” and that police failed to investigate one recent case five times until an MP intervened.

Complaints of abuse were ignored:

“Night after night, I was forced to have sex with multiple men in disgusting takeaways and filthy houses. I must have been getting the morning after pill from a local clinic at least twice a week but no one asked any questions.

“I was told that if I said a word to anyone they’d come for my little sisters and tell my mum I was a prostitute.”

Another victim, aged 14 at the time, alleges that she had the baby of her 18-year-old abuser. Now 47, she said that she told the council and school of her abuse at the time but does not believe action was taken.

[…]Two other investigations were launched alongside Operation Chalice after two victims named dozens more abusers, yet victims have claimed that they were put off helping inquiries.

One said that she left the investigation because she was not “emotionally supported” by the police. The other claimed officers deterred her from pursuing her request for evidence after they learnt she had contacted the paper.

Why didn’t anybody ask any questions? Because in the feminized, pluralistic UK, people don’t want to hurt the feelings of evildoers. Every crime is just an accident, and we wouldn’t want to confront evil with force. That would be so… masculine.

This Telford case isn’t the first UK sex-trafficking ring.

Oxfordshire

I blogged before about an article by the ultra-leftist BBC, so they are very politically correct.

They write:

As many as 373 children may have been targeted for sex by gangs of men in Oxfordshire in the last 16 years, a serious case review found.

The investigation came after a sadistic sex gang of seven men were jailed in 2013 for abusing six girls in Oxford, between 2004 and 2012.

Thames Valley Police and Oxfordshire County Council made “many errors” in that case and could have acted sooner.

A victim of the gang said the issue had been “swept under the carpet”.

Of the 373 cases, the council said about 50 victims were boys.

[…]The report also called for research into why a significant proportion of people convicted in these kind of cases are of “Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage”.

In the Oxford case, known as Operation Bullfinch, two of the men were of east African origin and five of Pakistani origin.

Rotterham

How about the Rotterham sex-trafficking gang?

Here are the facts from Powerline Blog:

Full text:

You are probably familiar with the Rotherham scandal. Rotherham is a city in England where over a period of years, more than 1,400 girls, many of them pre-teens, were raped and trafficked by a loose consortium of men. The men were all Muslim immigrants or sons of immigrants, the girls were all, or nearly all, white. When the scandal finally came to light in 2014, city officials said that they had been reluctant to do anything about the problem for fear of being accused of racism.

Several criminal trials have resulted from the scandal. The third such trial has just been completed. Six defendants were convicted and sentenced to 10 to 20 years for rape and other crimes. The Sun identified them:

Brothers Basharat Dad, 32, and Nasar Dad, 36, of both of Rotherham, and Tayab Dad, 34, of Sheffield, were jailed on Tuesday for sex offences along with Matloob Hussain, 41, of Rotherham, Mohammed Sadiq, 40, of Rotherham, and Amjad Ali, of Worksop, Nottinghamshire.

This is the most curious aspect of the news report:

There were emotional and chaotic scenes at Sheffield Crown Court after two of the defendants shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they were led from the dock.

But wait, there are more examples.

Rochdale

Another case reported in the UK Telegraph:

Taxi driver Shabir Ahmed, 59, was already serving a 19 year sentence from May for conspiracy, two rapes, aiding and abetting rape, sexual assault and sex trafficking. His domineering temper earned him the nickname “Daddy” by the white teenage victims.

The ringleader, who called the judge a ‘racist b——‘, was one of nine men jailed at Liverpool Crown Court for a total of 77 years for passing round the youngsters and plying them with drugs and drink.

[…]His victim, who cannot be named, revealed Ahmed once made her kneel on the floor in a pose called the ‘chicken’, with her arms threaded through her legs and touching her ears, before striking her on the back with a cricket bat.

The girl, now an adult, claims she was repeatedly raped over many years. He left her never wanting to have sex again or get married.

The girl said when she was first raped she was so young she needed to stand on a chair to reach a sink.

[…]Ahmed told the court he was a standard-bearer for “targeted and weakened British Muslims”, and claimed the police were anti-Muslim

He said of the Rochdale grooming trial: “We were all innocent. My only crime was to be Muslim. Not of the majority race.”

In May, Ahmed and his eight co-defendants were jailed for their role in a child-sex ring.

In other cases, the police ignored the complaints of the victims.

This happens often because the UK deliberately chose a “compassionate” open-borders immigration policy. We should not imitate their example. Merit-based immigration is best.

News

New study: single-sex schools more successful than mixed-sex schools

2 Comments
Do female-dominated schools discriminate against boys?
Do female-dominated schools discriminate against boys?

Here is the very latest study on this important topic from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). They found that boys and girls both do better in single-sex schools, when compared to boys and girls in mixed-sex schools.

Excerpt:

We find robust evidence that pupils in single-sex schools outperform their counterparts in co-ed schools, by 5–10% of a standard deviation for boys and 4–7% for girls, with similar estimates across subjects (which include Korean, English, and maths). This is consistent with the findings reported in Park et al. (2013).

And this study was done in South Korea, where things are a lot more focused on academics than in North America!

In most schools, women comprise on average about 80% of the classroom instructors. This is not even to mention the administrators and the curriculum designers. It is not a friendly environment for boys. In fact, studies have shown that the typical curriculum is biased against boys. Teacher bias may also be a factor, since boys outperform their classroom grades on standardized tests (where there is no bias against them from the teachers).

Regarding the feminist curriculum, consider this report on a study from the UK Telegraph:

A lack of male role models at home and school is turning boys off reading at a young age as they increasingly reject books as “feminine”, it is claimed.

[…]Gavin Barwell, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy, said reading was not seen as a “masculine thing” by boys – leaving them lagging behind girls from the age of four onwards.

[…]According to Government figures, boys are less likely to read basic words or recite the alphabet by the age of five and the gap widens throughout compulsory education.

By the age of 16, fewer than 59 per cent of boys gained a good GCSE in English last year compared with 72.5 per cent of girls.

According to a brand new report from the American Enterprise Institute, this discrimination against boys is having a long-term negative effect on their participation in graduate school:

For the eighth year in a row, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities in 2016. Of the 78,744 doctoral degrees awarded in 2016 (Table B.25), women earned 40,407 of those degrees and 52.1% of the total, compared to 37,145 degrees awarded to men who earned 47.9% of the total…

[…]Women represent 57.5% of all graduate students in the US, meaning that there are now 135 women enrolled in graduate school for every 100 men.

Here is one of the AEI charts:

Graduate school enrollment, male vs female, 2016
Graduate school enrollment, male vs female, 2016

You can read about a couple more studies here that also argue that the male-underformance problem is a lack of male teachers in the classroom. It’s important to understand this, because it shows why ignorant cries of “man up” are not going to get men to perform better in school and at work. And men only marry if they feel comfortable taking on the roles of husband and father – which costs money. Men have to be able to earn money in order to engage in marriage and family, and the schools we have right now are set up against them doing that. If you want your daughters to have husbands (instead of marrying government social programs), then you’d better pay attention to these studies and vote accordingly. If you can pull your boys put of mixed-sex schools, it’s a good idea to do that. Homeschooling or single-sex private schools work better for boys.