Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Nationar Review has 2010 predictions by their authors. My favorites:

• Most likely to come true (non-political): “Science: A more or less Earth-like planet will be observed in a more or less Earth-like orbit around a more or less Sun-like star.”
• Most likely to come true (political): “Chris Dodd loses his election. Capital police need to use a crowbar to loosen his grip on his office desk. ”
• Funniest crack: “North Korea: Kim Jong Il will be deposed by his military. (Yes, it’s true, I cut’n’pasted that from last year’s predictions. It’s bound to happen one year soon, though, unless the little toad dies first.) ”
• Most sobering: “The GOP will not take back the House. But it will be very, very close.”
• Most typical: “The economy will improve, despite the best efforts of the Democrats to weight it down with more regulations and the promise of future taxes. The Democrats will take credit for the improvement, the Republicans will dismiss the growth as inadequate, positions which would be exactly reversed should the parties’ relative political positions also be reversed.”

As for myself, I only have resolutions, same as 2009, to learn to use and own a gun and to meet minimum Marine corp selection criteria. The difference would be, well, I am more resolved and in the case of the second resolution, I have more time as well. Since I am not in the future-telling business, I will just leave with this quote from the wisest man that ever lived:

There is a time for everything,
   and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,
   a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
   a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,
   a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
   a time to embrace and a time to refrain,

a time to search and a time to give up,
   a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,
   a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,
   a time for war and a time for peace.

What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.

xkcd on “revolutionaries”

Yes, scientific process is treacherous. There are crackpots tilting at windmills—I see at least one at every large APS conference I’ve been to; I’ve listened to them and looked at what they have, but it turns out some of them can’t even do simple algebra—and then there are outsiders who have given plenty of time to learning the state of the art and either improving on it or fixing mistakes in it.

That’s why we have peer review. However, once that process has been corrupted either for political reasons or other reasons, we are back to square one: every claim must be examined as if it were serious claim, because we can’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I already know that Nature has thrown in its lot with the fraudsters. Fine. Nature isn’t Nature Physics, and given the culture of corruption among climatogists, it’s not too surprising that that culture seeps into the association of scientists.

But APS, the single organization that is supposed to be representing physicists in America and elsewhere? Have you sunk to these levels? This is the email I received today, and if you are a member of APS, you should have or will recieve one soon:

From: APS President <apsp...@aps.org>
Reply-to: APS President <apsp...@aps.org>
To: byun...@berkeley.edu
Subject: Unsolicited Climate Change Email
Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 20:26:05 -0500

Dear APS Member:

Recently, you may have received an unsolicited email from Hal Lewis,
Bob Austin, Will Happer, Larry Gould and Roger Cohen regarding the APS
and climate change.  Please be assured that this was not an official
APS message, nor was it sent with APS knowledge or approval.   A
number of members have complained to APS regarding this unsolicited
e-mail.  If the e-mail addresses used to send this message were
obtained from our membership directory, this was contrary to the
stated guidelines for members' use of the directory.   We are
continuing to investigate how the senders obtained APS member email
addresses.

As many APS members are already aware, the Council of the Society has
tasked the Panel on Public Affairs to examine the 2007 APS statement
on climate change for issues of tone and clarity.  Duncan Moore, the
current chair of POPA, is in the process of convening a subcommittee
to carry out the task.  The subcommittee, which he is also chairing,
will report its recommendations to POPA in early February, and shortly
thereafter POPA will post the text for a three-week APS member comment
period.  We will alert the APS membership by email when the posting
occurs.  Duncan Moore's subcommittee will use the comments it receives
to finalize the wording in time for the April Council meeting.

Some members of the APS have asked the Society to craft a statement
regarding the issues surrounding the release of climate files stolen
from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia.
The CRU maintains the repository for temperature measurements used by
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The APS
leadership has concerns about both the improper release of private
e-mails and any premature rush to judgment regarding scientific
integrity at the CRU.   Both the CRU and the IPCC are in the process
of investigating the affair.  Once the full range of information is
made available, the APS Panel on Public Affairs will examine the case
and recommend how APS should act.

We will continue to keep the APS membership informed about climate
change issues through postings on the APS home page; articles in APS
News; commentaries on the APS blog, Physics Frontline; and direct
email alerts to the membership when necessary.

Best Regards,

Cherry Murray
APS President

From private communication (forwarded to me by someone else), I can attest that Prof. Happer did not access APS member directory in the manner APS president claims he did. In fact, I did not receive Prof. Happer’s email (if one was sent), and I know quite a few (including myself) who would have liked to receive that email and not the one from APS.

And she says: “The APS leadership has concerns about both the improper release of private e-mails and any premature rush to judgment regarding scientific integrity at the CRU. Both the CRU and the IPCC are in the process of investigating the affair. Once the full range of information is made available, the APS Panel on Public Affairs will examine the case and recommend how APS should act.” So in the case of serious scientific fraud by people APS has no duty to represent (climatologists are not physicists, at least not as a rule), she would like to wait until all the information is available before making any judgment. But in the case of a respected member of APS, whose crime, in the worst case scenario, would have been one of spamming, she jumps to conclusions without letting him defend or explain his actions. If this is not a double standard and intellectual dishonesty, well, I’ve been using the wrong definition of “dishonesty” my whole life.

Partisan politics, and the attendant politics of personal destruction that APS president is engaging in by defaming (since that’s what accusation sans evidence is) a well-known and respected physicist like Prof. Happer, has no place in a professional organization such as American Physical Society. And someone like a president of APS must remember that she works for us, not the other way around. Represent member interests—and as a corollary, stop attacking members personally without due cause—and not the leftist agenda, especially not against the accepted standards of proper scientific conduct.

I know climatoligists, as a group, have been corrupted by the allure of public funding and now cannot be trusted to conduct good science, not without supervision from adults. I was holding out some hope that physicists, guardians of the oldest modern scientific endeavors, would be somehow immune to the corrupting forces of the state. I guess it’s my fault for having that hope. I guess I should have known that liberals have no principles or concept of Truth, not even Scientific Truth, so such lofty ideals as Scientific Method means nothing to them, when that gets in their way.

But then, where do I go from here? I don’t want to go Galt.

Update: APS, with its action to demonize its own dissenting members, is only adding fuel to this fire. Please. Now isn’t too late to stop. Don’t get on the Titanic.

Update: This post has the full text of Prof. Happer’s email that was sent to a few physicists, but not all the members as they did not have access to the APS members mailing list, nor did they use the APS member directory in contradiction to the anti-spam rules (as for the blog itself, I don’t know who that is; I’m linking only because it has the full text of the email that is very relevant). How can any honest physicist find anything wrong with the content of that email? All that the petitioners are trying to do is get APS to withdraw its statement on a subject that it had no business commenting on anyway (we are physicists, not climatologists; many of us, including myself, have not examined climatologists’ work in detail and we have no business, as a collective, rubber stamping someone else’s work), and given the Climategate scandal, are we so sure of our climatologist “colleagues” that we are willing to go down with them? Climatologists have mixed public policy with science and may have destroyed science in the process. We physicists need to defend it.

Update: ‘Might as well post the full text here, since widest distribution is the intent of the petitioners:

Dear fellow member of the American Physical Society:

This is a matter of great importance to the integrity of the Society. It is being sent to a random fraction of the membership, so we hope you will pass it on.

By now everyone has heard of what has come to be known as ClimateGate, which was and is an international scientific fraud, the worst any of us have seen in our cumulative 223 years of APS membership. For those who have missed the news we recommend the excellent summary article by Richard Lindzen in the November 30 edition of the Wall Street journal, entitled “The Climate Science isn’t Settled,” for a balanced account of the situation. It was written by a scientist of unquestioned authority and integrity. A copy can be found among the items at http://tinyurl.com/lg266u, and a visit to http://www.ClimateDepot.com can fill in the details of the scandal, while adding spice.

What has this to do with APS? In 2007 the APS Council adopted a Statement on global warming (also reproduced at the tinyurl site mentioned above) that was based largely on the scientific work that is now revealed to have been corrupted. (The principals in this escapade have not denied what they did, but have sought to dismiss it by saying that it is normal practice among scientists. You know and we know that that is simply untrue. Physicists are not expected to cheat.)

We have asked the APS management to put the 2007 Statement on ice until the extent to which it is tainted can be determined, but that has not been done. We have also asked that the membership be consulted on this point, but that too has not been done.

None of us would use corrupted science in our own work, nor would we sign off on a thesis by a student who did so. This is not only a matter of science, it is a matter of integrity, and the integrity of the APS is now at stake. That is why we are taking the unusual step of communicating directly with at least a fraction of the membership.

If you believe that the APS should withdraw a Policy Statement that is based on admittedly corrupted science, and should then undertake to clarify the real state of the art in the best tradition of a learned society, please send a note to the incoming President of the APS ccal...@princeton.edu, with the single word YES in the subject line. That will make it easier for him to count.

Bob Austin, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Hal Lewis, emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
Will Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics, Hartford
Roger Cohen, former Manager, Strategic Planning, ExxonMobil

Update: CBS article covering the debate and issues.

These people are unbelievable.

Signs illegally put up at Wheeler on Dec. 9, 2009

You probably heard about occupation of Wheeler by students (and non-students, as not all protesters were students at UC Berkeley) in the week before Thanksgiving. They caused thousands of students to miss their class—or deal with the extreme inconvenience of re-scheduling at the last moment. These people are trying the same thing again. Just before the finals week.

Apparently their motto is “open university”, “24/7″, “education is a right, not a commodity”, etc. And unless I am reading the wrong news, their goal is to stop the university from raising student fees, force them to keep hiring custodians that it may not need (or at least can afford to lay off, as far as work load goes), and, I don’t know, use black magic to make money when none is forthcoming from the state?

Well. If these people have their way, yes, we will have an open university, as in buildings will be open and classrooms will be open to public (as if they weren’t before; you could, as long as I have been in UC Berkeley, practically walk into any class and “audit” it without paying or any registration; no instructor would have stopped you; it’s the diploma you need to pay for, not education), in fact, if these people have their way, the buildings will even be clean, thanks to a glut of custodians.

Too bad the classrooms will not have competent lecturers and labs will not have prolific researchers. Too bad, after paying for custodians, building upkeep, and not raising student fees to raise necessary funds, the university will not be able to attract the top faculty. Too bad, with all these protests and disruptions to research and education, prospective faculty and students will turn away from UC Berkeley—if they care about education and research.

Support these people if you want UC Berkeley to become a diploma mill. I know their motto is “education is not a commodity”, but well, if they have their way, UC Berkeley diploma will become a commodity, a piece of paper without the prestige it used to carry.

Update: I’m not going to claim all or even most protesters are violent criminals. But given that about 70 of them are, if you support the protesters, you risk supporting criminals who would endanger others’ lives and destroy properties. Is that what you want to do?

A post at LewRockwell.com is worrying whether U.S. army will have a new enemy: American citizens:

Members of all branches of the United States Military will soon be facing a most critical decision. The European Union Times is reporting here that Obama is using the deployment of additional troops to Afghanistan to cover for the movement of some 200,000 troops, presently on duty in countries other than Iraq and Afghanistan, to USNORTHCOM to prepare for the “expected outbreak of Civil War within the United States before the end of winter.”

The claim is just so out there, I don’t know how to take it. Is this one of those truther or birther type conspiracy theories (or, say, DHS report on right-wing domestic terrorism) that have no legs to stand on? Or does this have some basis on facts?

In the end, even if the worst fears (about the ruling elite’s intentions) of Mr. Gaddy come true, I wouldn’t worry about it. Men and women of American military have been one of the most fiercest defenders of individual freedom—including the individual right to own and carry firearm—I have ever known. If orders were to come down for these patriotic men and women to trample on the constitutionally protected individual rights of Americans, I have every confidence that they will mutiny before following those orders—after all, Nuremberg tribunals proved that “just following orders” wasn’t an excuse for ignoring one’s conscience, and if I had to put my trust in anyone else’s conscience, I would put it in the conscience of American volunteer army.

If I am betrayed by this trust, well, the world as I know has come to an end and my most deeply held beliefs might as well break.

I finished reading Mrs. Palin’s Going Rogue: An American Life. It’s a good memoir / political treatise, and I am very glad that she got to tell her side of the story—it was so frustrating with the “mainstream” media bashing her with tips from “anonymous sources” and not getting answers from McCain-Palin campaign, but with this book, I see that for every one of the frivolous complaints (about her wardrobe and her children traveling with her) there is a very good explanation.

But this is a good book not only for getting her story out, but also for explaining her political and policy views and her expertise—especially in energy policy, which will only become more important as time goes on. I suppose if you are reading the book just to get her positions on various issues, you’ll get frustrated because of all the narrative in the way, but then, if you are so interested you can probably find other sources. On the other hand, for the ordinary Americans who identify more with Mrs. Palin on the personal level and not just her political views, this book takes a very good approach to sell her positions, surrounded and explained by her narrative.

As for liberals who attack her for “settling scores”, well. I guess bias is a liberal characteristic and we can’t really … blame them for being so bigoted all the time, but read with an open mind. There is only one person Mrs. Palin is settling score with, i.e. Steve Schmidt, a.k.a. “headquarters”, and given all the nasty things Schmidt said about her, can you blame Mrs. Palin? At least she’s saying it out in the open, with her reputation on the line. Schmidt didn’t even give her the chance to face her accuser by making all those leaks anonymously.

In any case, this book is much heavier on her narrative (independent of the McCain campaign) and her political views than her settling score, and that should be evident to any fair-minded reader. If you hear or read anyone claiming that Mrs. Palin is settling score with this book, well, consider the possibility that they are simply repeating the leftist party line. The evidence may be more convincing than you suspect now.

The College Life group at New Church Berkeley wanted to do something to keep in touch over the winter break, so we are reading the book, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller.

I’m just through the first chapter, and well, it’s an interesting read (I’ll have more to say once I’m done reading). At the moment, I guess I have a few points on which I think I disagree with Rev. Keller: the point of view that says every religion is equally right, that they represent different parts of the Truth (coupled with the elephant and blind men analogy) does not need to be coming from a position of arrogance (i.e. that you somehow know that Truth is bigger than any of these religions). It can be a simple logically consistent position that begins from a simple assumption: “Every religion is correct to the extent of what they claim.” Given the contradictions and disagreements between these religions, the only way this assumption can be true is if there are significant areas where these religions … do not overlap as far as Truth is concerned.

Of course, how one arrives at that assumption (is it out of charity and assumption of goodness of religions? or is it as to arrive at the conclusion which diminishes every religion equally?) is a different question, but direct assumption of a view at greater truth is not … required.

Anyways. Aside from this, I guess there are some areas where I don’t feel quite comfortable (“social justice”; when it means anything other than voluntary private charity, it’s a great tool for ambitious statists), but I’ll have more to say after I’m done.

Because no good scientist or scientific institution should be able to defend scientific fraud on any grounds:

In the end, what the UEA e-mails really show is that scientists are human beings — and that unrelenting opposition to their work can goad them to the limits of tolerance, and tempt them to act in ways that undermine scientific values. Yet it is precisely in such circumstances that researchers should strive to act and communicate professionally, and make their data and methods available to others, lest they provide their worst critics with ammunition. After all, the pressures the UEA e-mailers experienced may be nothing compared with what will emerge as the United States debates a climate bill next year, and denialists use every means at their disposal to undermine trust in scientists and science.

Oh, really? I won’t go into details of unfairness of words such as “denialist”, “stolen emails”, etc. Those word choices only serve to reveal the author’s strong bias, which may be a valuable service to the astute reader.

But the author’s conclusion is disastrous from moral and scientific point of view. First, from the moral point of view, how can one argue that circumstances excuse anyone’s criminal actions? Scientific fraud is crime—against the society and against the nature—there is no excuse for that. Just as no murderer can be excused that he is “a victim of the society”, those who murdered the peer review process—one of the pillars of Western scientific institutions—cannot be excused based upon what their opponents did. If their opponents were fellow scientists then they should have listened to their peers. If their opponents were idiots undisciplined in the way of science, then climatologists should have been able to rise above the unscientific criticisms.

From scientific point of view, now we have an editor at Nature, formerly one of the most prestigious peer-review journals, writing an editorial defending those who conspired to destroy and re-define “peer review”. This is either a case of scientific Stockholm syndrome, or this is a glimpse at how deep the corruption goes. Science, as a fundamentally experimental academic endeavor (all theories are subject to experimental verification), relies on the integrity of data. These climatologists endangered that integrity and quashed those who question their actions—because when data has been fudged with, sooner or later that fact becomes evident to fellow scientists—by attempting to—and given what Nature publishes now, probably succeeding in—destroy the peer review process, one of the checks and balances in science and academia.

No scientist should be able to defend these actions upon any ground, including but not limited to insanity—after all, do we want the insane using public funds to conduct fraudulent research?

The fact that Nature defends these criminal climatologists suggests that Nature may not be a scientific publication any more. Am I right?

And people like them cannot be stopped

C4L staffers have been working very closely with Senator Jim DeMint’s office in recent days to advance Audit the Fed (S. 604) in the Senate.

Just a little while ago, it was announced that Senator DeMint, who is the lead Senate cosponsor of Audit the Fed, has put a “hold” on Bernanke’s confirmation for a second term as Federal Reserve chairman until S. 604 receives an up or down vote on the Senate floor.

Keep reading for more details on how your immediate action could help make this vote possible.

Sen. DeMint is one of the few people in Congress that I really do admire—even if some Republicans (was it Sen. Graham?) look down upon his accent, etc.

Incidentally, Sen. DeMint is also the one who had been holding Obama’s feet to fire regarding Honduras. I mean, without him, Obama would have backed communist dictators like Zelaya unopposed.

But thankfully, not everyone in the senate is a spineless, principle-less crook looking out for no one but himself. Sen. DeMint is the proof.

Prof. Muller puts it perfectly

Among the speakers was physics professor Richard Muller, who was arrested during the 1964 Sproul Hall sit-in. Ultimately, Muller said, the Free Speech Movement was a failure because of today’s intolerance on campus.

“We could not invite Condoleezza Rice here, as a prominent black woman, because of the fear she would be booed down,” he said. “We have less free speech today than on the day I was arrested.”

This is all very consistent with the typical “liberal” sentiments today: freedom for me but not for thee. Nowhere can we find any hint of Voltaire’s attitude “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

And how typically “liberal” of them to have such an elevated opinion of themselves:

Some Free Speech Movement veterans who watched Wednesday’s event said the current issues have yet to take on a life of their own, as they did in the 1960s. But many on the Berkeley campus at first ignored rallies 45 years ago, said Bob Roundy, an analyst in the academic personnel office who was a UC Berkeley student in the 1960s.

“The broader understanding (of the issues) grew with the Free Speech Movement,” he said. “It wasn’t instantaneous.”

One former leader of the movement told current students to keep up the fight.

“What you’re seeing here today is really a continuation of the fights we went through,” Gretchen Lipow told the group as many protesters chatted among themselves. “Do your research and stay out there.”

A free speech movement speaks to human nature itself. Freedom of expression is inalienable right given to us by Creator Himself (or, if you don’t believe in a Creator, the process of evolution which culminated in the human race). That’s why Free Speech Movement became what it became and carries the legacy it carries. Had it been described as the anti-Vietnam War movement we wouldn’t even consider it worth talking about it now—that war’s over now, right?

The fight that protesters today fight are not the same fight that was fought in the 60s. Free Speech Movement was everyone’s movement—no reasonable person is ever against reasonable (i.e. not violence-inciting) freedom of speech. The fight today—fight to keep UC public university, fight to stop raising student fees, fight to re-hire union workers who got laid off—is not everyone’s fight; it’s definitely not my fight: I believe the future of UC Berkeley as an academic institution and not a diploma factory lies in further privatization and enlargement of endowments; I see the economic reality and don’t really blame the administration for raising student fees (it was the best among the realistic options they had); and I’d rather that the administration fire custodians than lecturers and, god forbid, GSIs.

But now, on this campus, could I voice these sentiments (say, on Sproul plaza at one of those rallies) and not feel threat to my personal safety? Perhaps I could—I never tried it—but I do not risk it, not in person. And that is the failure of Free Speech Movement. We have less freedom of speech—if by speech you mean to include commonsense conservative opinions, and by freedom if you mean freedom from demonization and threats—on this campus today.