About those ducks....

That thing I mentioned about Mandarin ducks being romantic? I totally take it back. Damn...

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11764-female-ducks-fight-back-against-raping-males.html

Hearts and minds revisited

Hokay, finally got round to listening to that lecture by Prof Damasio. Long story short, a dead end. It was a lecture delivered to an audience mostly comprising liberal arts students introducing his work in studying emotion, in a charming accent I can't quite identify which makes it sound as though he's meticulously putting every word in place with a pair of tweezers. So no answers for me just yet. Oh, well.

On a vaguely related note, I was listening to the radio the other day, and heard that David Guetta & Akon "song", Sexy Chick. And I facepalmed and despaired for the slow death of romance. I mean, really, have you heard the lyrics to that rubbish?



"I'm trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful..."

... and the best he could come up with is "sexy chick". "Sexy chick"?? Is this how far we have fallen? Is this how a man expresses his attraction for a woman in this day and age? Not 3 days ago I watched Gerard Depardieu playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Ah, that balcony scene... Now THAT's romance, not these crude grunts and babblings that pollute the airwaves*! Ah, the hell with it. No time to rant, there's books to omnomnomnomnom...


*For which many Malaysian DJs are also guilty...

Hearts and minds

This is just a quick note to remind myself on an interesting thought I had today:

Why do so many cultures associate the heart with emotional and mental character?

It seems to be a fairly universal thing. Solzhenitsyn once said:

The line between good and evil lies at the centre of every human heart.

I personally have a very Zen-influenced interpretation of that (which I'll be detailing in my book). Pascal said:

The heart has its reasons that reason knows not.

And I know Japanese and Chinese cultures both take the same view of the heart being associated with mental functions in their word for psychology: 心理学　(literally, heart study*). The only exception I can think of is Malay culture, which uses hati (liver) in much the same context where we'd usually use heart. This is known to lead to some hilarity in A-level biology in Malaysia when students sent to the butcher for a cow's heart to dissect translate the term wrongly and end up lugging several kilograms of liver back to an exasperated bio teacher.

I suppose the experience of heartache might shed some light on why this link has been made, but now I have to wonder, why does it feel like it does? Why should getting your heart broken result in that horrible, crushing feeling in your chest? I'm quite curious about the neurobiological reasons for this and so have decided to grab this lecture by Prof Antonio R Damasio and have a listen. Will try to remember to post a summary and my thoughts on the matter later...

* That's just off the top of my head, so I'd be much obliged if someone could tell me if it's a bit off.

繋がり

Sorry, I just found out how to type in Japanese with Vista and just can't resist tapping out bits and pieces every so often. Anyway, 繋がり (tsunagari) means 'connection(s)', which is the topic of this lovely video here:



I don't know what it does for you, but I haven't had such goosebumps since the first time I contemplated the big bang, deep star nucleosynthesis and evolution. I was sitting in the library of the Physics department at uni at the time, mind wandering while I studied for an exam. All around me were aspiring scientists and tomes and journals by the metric tonne, the distilled sweat, blood and tears of hundreds and thousands of scientists who had come before us. And in a file before me, in the frenzied scribbling of a student trying to keep up with the professor's OHP slides, sat my notes, a miniscule sliver of knowledge of the Universe.

A huge piece of the puzzle clicked into place for me back then, and I got that feeling one gets when you're, say, building a complex model and you put that piece in place which just puts you past the border between "chaotic mess" and "it's taking shape". I'm pleased to say I've had a lot of those moments since then, and such is the complexity of the Universe (and so much of it of our own making!) that I know I can look forward to many more.

The model-making analogy works the other way as well. Consider the acquisition of knowledge without the aegis of the scientific method, i.e. no formulation of hypothesis, no experimentation, no peer review, no constant testing against the realities of the universe... Is this not akin to grabbing a model off the shelf, dragging it out of the box, ignoring the instructions, casting aside files, knives and glue and slapping together whatever you like with duct tape? Well, I suppose this is but one possible scenario, exemplified in the real world by that special breed of person who is so open-minded his brain has dropped out.

The point is, there is a balance to be maintained. It's all well and good, perusing Wikipedia, National Geographic, Youtube and the popular science section of the local bookstore for these clips, articles and books exalting science and its bounty, but one would do well to remember the discipline and effort that went into them.

And right now, if I had a hat, I'd take mine off to the late Carl Sagan and all of those very rare scientists with the ability to communicate the beauty of science to the general public. Hum. It's been too long since I've watched a Royal Institution Christmas Lecture...

GAH, there's squalene on my fingers!

There's been a message circulating round on Facebook from some bloke called George Mazoumellos re: the evils of swine flu vaccinations. I suppose maybe there are valid arguments against vaccination, especially given the ugly reputation of 'Big Pharma' in administering the occasional diabolical failure that was quickly hushed up, or indeed any number of crimes against humanity, as covered in Michael Moore's Sicko. As yet, however, I've seen no solid evidence to suggest the current swine flu vaccine doing the rounds has any adverse effects on humans to speak of.

Anyway, this Mazoumellos character has been spreading a message written in a style quite reminiscent of the ridiculous sensationalism often found in cheap tabloids, obviously looking to make the age-old sacrifice of integrity for fame. An excerpt:

"If the regular flu kills 40 000 plus per year, and the swine flu only killed 2/3 000 – then why are governments buying it in advance, giving it to us for free, and giving drug manufacturers immunity to legal cases against them? Does that make sense? No!

The swine flu vaccine contains 2 horribly dangerous compounds – one is called thimerosol. It is made 50% of mercury. It binds to receptors in your brain, and basically causes brain damage. Is it smart to be injected with thimerosol, and get brain damage, dropping 10 IQ points and going dumb, in order to avoid getting a flu that kills 95% less people than regular flu? No!

The other horrible ingredient is called squalene. Squalene accidentally tricks your immune system into killing your own cells, which creates auto-immune diseases like asthma, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and a bunch of diseases that we don't have a name for yet (because squalene hasn't been used for that long, and we have little data on its effects) – is it smart to inject yourself with that stuff, in order to avoid a relatively mild flu, like the swine flu? No!"

Alrighty then, that's quite a lot of rubbish to fit in only 3 paragraphs, so let's get to work debunking... Note that the message cited NO sources whatsoever, which pretty much makes the entire message worthless, from the point of view of a scientist. But let's take this at face value and compare it with independent facts and see what happens, shall we?

First up, statistics. He compares 40,000 killed by "normal" flu a year against 3,000 H1N1 mortalities to date. WHO says 250,000 to 500,000 are killed a year by flu. Assuming he had a source for the 40,000 figure, when compared with the WHO figure it could only mean the 40,000 figure is for a single country, which is more than a bit dishonest to compare with the global figure for H1N1, which, by the way is just under 6,000 to date. But anyway, pointing this out reinforces his point that 6,000 H1N1 deaths don't sound like much compared to half a million. What the heck, I'm feeling generous.

Now, 6,000 killed may not sound like much, until you consider that it's a newly discovered strain, first reported in April. And the year isn't even over yet. And if you've studied epidimiology or even played a little Pandemic, you'd know that a relatively low death toll at the early stages doesn't mean it won't get monstrously virulent later. As it is, the swine flu is notably more brutal than the usual strains we're used to. It is only sensible to snuff it out NOW, while we're lucky enough to actually have a vaccine to hand that works. As for that remark about the government giving it out for free, Mr Mazoumellos betrays a woeful ignorance of one of life's inevitabilities, known to the civilized as taxes.

Second, thimerosol, aka thiomersal. Yes, it's true that it's nasty and toxic and what-have-you. So's oxygen, by the way. The fact of the matter is that there are a LOT of things we come into contact with that are hideously toxic (ever eaten an appleseed by mistake?) but we do not die from them. Why? Simply put, we're actually quite tuff and small quantities of toxic agents can often be expelled naturally. A study published online in Paediatrics laid out in great detail just how quickly thimerosol pops in and out again of the bodies of infants, with cumulative doses of up to ~160 micrograms of ethyl mercury. Now, if my maths is right, that translates to about 283 mcg of thiomersal in these babies with no ill effect. And the thiomersal content of the swine flu vaccine? 5 mcg, the last time I checked.

3rd, squalene. This one barely even deserves mention. Do you know where squalene is found? Here's a hint: ALL OVER YOU. What does the WHO have to say?

"The World Health Organization and the US Department of Defense have both published extensive reports that emphasize that squalene is a chemical naturally occurring in the human body, present even in oils of human fingerprints.

WHO goes further to explain that squalene has been present in over 22 million flu vaccines given to patients in Europe since 1997 and there have never been significant vaccine-related adverse events."

Ooh! Squalene, squalene! It's ALL OVER the place! Time to go live in a hamster ball! Pfft...

George's current address

George Mazoumellos, you fail. Big time. And you should be ashamed of yourself, but somehow, I doubt that's actually the case. Anyway, to the rest of you with access to the vaccine, go get jabbed. Needles aren't that scary, really. Here's a bit more from New Scientist on the matter.

Now, if you'd rather take your chances being on the unhappy end of the swine flu, that's your own lookout. If you're responsible about it and go find yourself a nice secluded corner to die in without infecting anyone, fine, go ahead. But a virus does what a virus does and if you get infected, you are a vector for passing it on to whoever who come into contact with. You are also a possible incubator for the virus to mutate, as viruses are wont to do, to a form that can infect all your vaccinated friends. Now that's just rude. Don't be a prick. Go get vaccinated.

You called your rocket what, now?

On one hand, I'm pleased to see that NASA's got a lovely new rocket to replace the space shuttle. On the other hand, I'm a bit worried that it's named after a Greek god of war and slaughter...

Intermission

Regulars to this blog (both of you, at last count) may have noticed I've kind of drifted from topics pertaining to philosophy, science and politics and in the direction of more mundane, happy things. There's any number of reasons for this, and I suppose I should explain myself.

On the front of politics, frankly, I'm fed up. On the local (still Malaysian) side, I skim through the papers daily to check for any sign at all of real progress. I find none. Nothing more than empty platitudes, cheap propaganda and, with dismayingly increasing frequency, outright backsliding. And the thing is these wonderful specimens were in fact democratically elected, which does not speak well for the intellectual capacity of the Malaysian public at large. As such, I've nothing more to say about Malaysian politics, but will continue to keep a weather eye out for any sign that it might crawl out of the hole it's digging for itself.

As for politics elsewhere, I'm not really paying much attention, to be honest, though I do keep an eye on what the Yanks are up to. I think it's a worthwhile exercise, because I suspect that today's Republican party represents a stance that guarantees the destruction of the human race, or at the very least a profound decline in one's standard of living. They chant the praises of freedom and faith when in fact it is merely a mask to justify ruthless social Darwinism (thanks to their special brand of capitalism) within, and a foreign policy based on fear and loathing without, all against a background of unbridled consumption at great cost to the environment. It is difficult for any thinking man to look upon the antics of such figures as Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Dick Cheney and their ilk with anything other than revulsion. But the fact remains that these people have risen to their positions of influence. Why?

Because deep down we're all really selfish, and we all want as much as we can gain for ourselves and our kin.

Because anything different from us is obviously wrong and must be wiped off the face of the Earth.

Because Democrats have been too busy pussyfooting about while the Republican propaganda machine marches on.

Because we're monsters.

Because we're human and that means that, for all that we've created for ourselves over our history, we are animals inside. We have passions and urges that drive us, many of which most people don't really understand nor do they care to understand. I suspect it is this blind acceptance of certain ugly aspects of our psychological makeup which, to paraphrase Russell, makes the stupid so cocksure. Most of us understand that there is usually more to be gained from patience and discipline, yet we are, at some base level, inexorably drawn to instant gratification. A lack of self control in enjoying material goods leads to rapacious consumption. A lack of intellectual vigilance allows the mind to be tainted with all manner of useless myths concocted to comfort the weak.

I have little doubt that the next great step forward in human endeavour will be the spiritual conquest of the human animal*. It will not be easy, and, if the Republican party is any indication, there is still a great swathe of humanity who knows too little and is sure of too much. While I've great faith in humanity's resourcefulness in surviving, particularly in times of great adversity, I can't escape the feeling that we are blithely bumbling onward to a great adversity of our own making.

On philosophy, what can I say? I was educated a physicist, and as such, find myself sympathetic to logical empiricism. And that's that. I suppose at some point I'll write something about my views on A J Ayer's principle of verification, but for the most part, I'm totally with Ayer and Russell in writing off metaphysics and theology as a lot of pseudointellectual mucking about.

On the popular science side, I've been slacking a bit on that front to focus moar on my Jap skills. I've been more fascinated by language than ever these days, not least because for me, studying the Japanese language involves:

1) consuming large chunks of Japanese culture to make sense of the vocabulary. This in itself is a subject to cover many books...

2) thinking about the contrast between English and Japanese and how it affects one's thinking.

I consider myself to be reasonably well acquainted with the English language, i.e. I have almost no trouble expressing any thought that comes to mind. In the process of learning Japanese, I find myself quite enthralled by the process of new words and sentence structures clicking into place. A lot of the time, I try to think every sentence that pops into my head in English a second time in Japanese. Obviously not with this blog post, else I'd be here til November. As my skills with Japanese improve, it feels like a 2nd brain is growing in my head. Ultimately, I hope to reach the same level of skill with Japanese as with English, or at least be able to read this.

So, that aside, I'd say that I'm more satisfied than I've ever been about my understanding of the human animal. I'm not sure if I'll quite have the fire of some of my previous posts again, but I consider that a good thing. Precisely how much of this understanding I'll divulge on this blog is, as yet, unknown to me. My grasp is still a bit hazy, and the subject matter is immense. As I think more, and more becomes concrete to me, I'll lay it down here, I suppose, 'ere the ravages of old age claim my hard-gotten spoils.

Until then, I'll be puntuating this blog with random natterings on various things that happen to entertain me. I'm in total agreement with Russell on many, many points, not least being:

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time ."

I am led to wonder if Bertrand Russell would have revised this opinion on encountering Facebook. Anyway, until the next post, here's a cute little kitten to "Awwww!" at:

* More on this later, you can be sure of that!

Who remembers what a 486 looks like?

Here's a bunch of websites worth a peep:

I did stumble upon this site a couple weeks ago and memories of my wasted youth did come flooding back. Well, in retrospect, I'm not sure if wasted is the right word. These days it seems any schmuck with a pair of functional thumbs can escape into lavish, photorealistic world of mindless bloody FPS violence. But back in the day, when a 256 colour display was a luxury, there was a touch of class to gaming. There's just a certain charm to a game on four 3.5" floppies, with a 200+ page manual, 16 colours and almost no music. Do check it out. There's treasure to be found there. I for one am itching to try out the Krynn series...

In other news, I poked around a bit more on GW's site, and verily, I despaired somewhat, because the prices are simply prohibitive. A quick guesstimate puts the cost of assembling a respectable 1,500 point Imperial Guard army at about GBP400 to 500! Looks like the only way I'd ever get my hands on that is if I worked for GW again and used the luvly staff discount. But on the upside, Codices are no longer an issue, seeing as the Japanese GW site has all the major codices up as pdfs for free! In Japanese, of course. Nan da? Nihongo o wakaranai no ka?

Slightly more serious note, when I look back to my childhood in Malaysia, I have no doubt that with the exception of mathematics, I was taught more through computer games than I ever learnt through textbooks. Between games like UFO: Enemy Unknown, Civilization, SimCity, Chip's Challenge and TFX, I was introduced to logistics planning, world history, aeronautics engineering, the art of war and some good honest lateral thinking. You know, as opposed to the Malaysian education system standard of Omnomnomnom-BLEARGH!-Repeat. So my interest was piqued when I looked upon the Daedalus Project. If you're interesed in peeking at the computer game's impact on human psychology, have a read.

Here's something a bit random - ever wondered what the insides of a Lego man would be like?
Yep, someone actually did the anatomy of a Lego man. And a gummy bear and balloon dog. Go see.

Lastly, a damn good laugh. Have a peep.

Quick thoughts on thinking

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the way we think. About things like how we learn, how we so easily delude ourselves, why we feel what we feel, about emotions and decision-making and the like. The material floating about on the intertoobs re: the brain is voluminous, to say the least, so I thought it best I make some effort to record some thoughts on the matter before a particularly vicious bout of kendo knocks something loose. As it is, I get the feeling that I'm horribly confused about certain aspects of the brain, but what the hell, getting myself organised means I can weed out the crappe easier.

So, the basics are:
1) The mechanism for neural plasticity is more or less summed up by the Bayesian brain. It's quite heavy reading and I'm not quite sure I get all of it, but from what I can understand, the long and short of it is, the way the brain learns is to function as a predicting engine, to minimize the amount of surprises we experience. For instance, we see a physical phenomenon as a baby, like a thrown ball rising and falling back to the ground, then bouncing away. Since everything is new at first, as a baby we'd be surprised by this. As we see more of the world, we build up an intuitive set of physical laws in our head. But the thing to remember here is that the brain will try to do this in the simplest, most economical manner possible. For instance, by the time we're, say, 5, we'd know it to be blindingly obvious a thrown ball will fall back to earth, but we've no idea how to express it as a mathematical law.

So, from the moment our sensory apparatus are activated, the brain is subject to a constant stream of sensory data which builds up our understanding of the world, not all of which we are consciously aware of. The thing to remember is that, in every way, the brain always looks a little bit ahead in time an quietly tells all of our senses what to expect. If anything deviates from this, say, the experience of misjudging how many steps there are on a staircase, we get a sharp "DANGER!" signal, in the form of surprise, a brief switch into fight-or-flight mode.

2) The brain will take shortcuts. This is probably most apparent when we consider vision. There's any number of optical illusions out there which have our brain trying to shoehorn what it sees into a framework built from what it has seen. In ambiguous illusions, like the diabolical Duckrabbit below, our brain is in a little conflict with itself, trying to tell your consciousness that it sees a left-facing duck on one hand and a right-facing rabbit on the other.

DUCK season! RABBIT season!

Funnily enough, with a little effort, we can actively choose what we want to see, which leads me to wonder what effect our desires have on our perception. Yes, I am most certainly looking in the direction of religiously inspired hallucinations.

3) The brain comes pre-packaged with some software. Most notably, the capacity for language, as detailed by Chomsky and his Universal Grammar. More recently, Marc D Hauser, author of Moral Minds, has pushed the notion that we all carry a certain sense of Universal Morality. I've a feeling it runs deeper, but for the life of me I know not how. For instance, take phobias. I have never been bitten by a spider. No spider has ever harmed me in any way whatsoever. I've heard any number of stories from people who keep pet tarantulas that they're absolutely lovely. But when I see this:

Look up at ceiling. See this. What do?

... a part of my brain is screaming: "HOLY FUCKING SHIT RUUUUNNNNN!!!" Happily enough, I'm sufficiently in control of myself to continue this blog entry, albeit with the hairs on the back of my neck standing at attention.

Another example would be the revulsion many of us feel on encountering a cockroach. Perhaps you may recoil or grimace when I tell you that once, in a public toilet (in Malaysia, of course) while taking a leak, a whopping 2.5-inch-long roach did fly down from the ceiling, buzz around me for a bit and land next to my feet, drumming a tattoo on my left shoe with its feelers. To this day I marvel at how I managed to muster enough self-control to actually finish what I started, zip up my trousers and quietly leave the cubicle. But when you think about it, the revulsion has no real basis. I'm orders of magnitude bigger than said roach, and it is completely incapable of harming me. Even if I were to grab it and crush it in my fist (I really feel like washing my hands now) it's a mess that's easily sorted out with modern cleaning products. But even now I feel like I'd rather kill one from 2 miles away with an artillery barrage.

4) The brain has some leftover hardware. What I'm referring to here is the human's unique place in evolving on two different fronts at once, i.e. genetically and memetically. As such, urban dwellers, whose lives are more heavily influenced by memes than by genes, are sometimes led astray by hormonal urges better suited to aid in the survival of a savannah dwelling primate. And of course, some of this hardware may have something to do with the software mentioned earlier in 3).

5) Objective reality is not just an input. This is most clearly seen in the form of the placebo effect and its evil twin, the nocebo effect. In believing that an inert lump of sugar is a ground-breaking new treatment, the brain can actually convince the body that its condition is improving, a very strange case of delusion defining reality. Of course, it's a double edged sword. People convinced they're on the nasty end of a witchdoctor's curse can actually find their physical condition deteriorating.

Anyhow, that's briefly what I've got, off the top of my head (aha) re: the way the brain works. I'm-a just leave this here for now. May come back and edit this, when the mood takes me...

Oh, and before I forget, I came across a very interesting statement in Susan Blackmore Conversations on Consciousness which firmed up the way I look at the relationship between science and philosophy. I forgot who said it, and I may have put it on this blog before but I can't be arsed to check right now. What he said was something like:

Don't look to modern philosophy for answers. It has none. BUT, it has very, very good questions.

And somewhere later he mentioned that it's good old empirical science that provides the answers. It looked about right, to me.

Zomg the Glorious Dawn!

By Carl Sagan, featuring Prof Stephen Hawking:



Epic win is epic.

Links, links, links...

Why have humans domesticated cats? Dogs do lotsa work and are easy enough to train (or so I'm told) but cats do nothing constructive whatsoever. Granted, they're great fun to play with, and waking up to find a purring cat leaning against you (hopefully not in your face) is a nice start to a day, but seriously, they've got our species duped, haven't they? Here's Scientific American on the issue.

One of my favourite books of all time is Guns, Germs and Steel, it being the most interesting summary of human history I've ever read, minus the fiddling about with dates, politics and nations, and just telling the story of the human race as just another interesting animal on our big, blue planet. Since reading that book, and a few others, Jared Diamond has been one of my favourite authors of all time. So I was a bit dismayed to find out about his article in the New Yorker being mostly fiction, and in breach of journalistic and anthropological standards. As such, he is presently in deep shit, and I'm not quite sure what to think of his books. :-(

On a related note, shortly after I'd read Guns, Germs and Steel, I despaired, because everything seemed to point towards a future in which humanity blithely bumbled into the Malthusian nightmare. I have since learned that though this may be true, there's no point in living in perpetual dread, because life's simply too short for that. Still, it's good to be reminded of what's coming every so often. Maybe the right people might actually do something about it.

I've suspected the existence of linguistic relativism to some small extent long before I'd read about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. As yet, I'm not convinced that any given language really determines cognition as much as reinforces the cultural norms in which said language developed. In any case, one thing that far too many Malaysians simply don't get is the sheer importance of achieving an adequate level of proficiency in a language, and the vulgarity of their command in any language they come into contact with shows in every aspect of their being. Here's an article from the Edge which gathers together much of what I've encountered in Kovecses' Language, Mind and Culture, and more.

Lastly, wanna know why Japan isn't taking a more active role in nipping North Korea's nuclear arsenal in the bud? Here's why:

That's right. When the going gets tough, the Gundam comes out to pop a can of whupass on you. More pics here.

Right, time to give those useless cats a bath. Seriously, sometimes I wonder just who owns who...

I would totally buy a wind-up walking stick...

... IF and only if I could be absolutely sure that every penny went to Trevor Baylis:



And soon to DR Trevor Baylis! There just aren't enough charming old English gentlemen in this world...

Fun questions to ask Wolfram Alpha

If you haven't tried out Stephen Wolfram's delightfully clever answer engine yet, do so now. This cunning website tries to go one better than Google (!) by answering your questions, whatever they are, and laying it out systematically for you, with sources cited and/or calculations done step by step. Have a peep at the answers gallery to get an idea of what you can ask. As the name suggests, it's still something of a work in progress, so it still gets a bit lost sometimes. For instance, you can't ask it how to make a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, and it most certainly won't give you a recipe for Wow-Wow Sauce.

Fun questions with snappy answers:

- Are you Skynet?

- What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?

- Open the pod bay doors.

- To be or not to be?

- Who are you?

- Who am I?

- Who made you?

- Are you self-aware?

And of course...

- What is your name?

- What is your quest?

- What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen African swallow?

Try it. Have fun. If this thing takes off, coursework's gonna get a lot easier...

Update [9/6/09] - Some more, from Gizmodo:

- I love you.

- How many roads must a man walk down?

- Hello?

- Hello. How are you?

- I hate you.

- Are you a computer?

- Where are you?

- Hello world.

- How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?

Not amused this time, Mr Clarkson...

I was reading Jeremy Clarkson's thoughts on science and, as distasteful as I find them, I am forced to acknowledge that how he feels about science is not far off from the general public (mis)conception of science, which boils down to a woeful inability to answer these two questions:

What is science?

and

Why is science important?

I have devoted much of my readings in this life towards understanding the sciences, so the answers to such questions have been a part of me for a very long time. To be brutally honest, I cannot help but feel a twinge of anger at those with no understanding of such questions, and smugly blow them off with those most loathsome words: "Ignorance is bliss". I have vented most furiously on this blog at such people, and more. But then I have to remind myself that such thinking from those versed in the sciences is yet another reason why people get intimidated into the monstrous trap of anti-intellectualism in the first place. Anyway, it's good to reflect every so often on whether I myself have fallen into the trap of blindly adoring science.

So, my answers to the above questions, laid out in the simplest terms I can muster, are as follows:

What is science? - The most common error people (including Mr Clarkson) make regarding this question is mistaking science for technology. Handphones, digital watches, the Porsche Carrera GT and peach defuzzers are technology, though you are free to argue that the Porsche Carrera GT is art. Science, simply put, is the process of gaining knowledge through empirical* means. It is embodied in the scientific method, which is:

1. Query -Identify the phenomenon that needs explaining.
   
2. Hypothesis - Formulate a hypothesis explaining said phenomenon.
   
3. Experiment - Devise an experiment to test the hypothesis.
   
4. Theory - Based on experimental results, formulate a theory governing the behaviour of said phenomenon. (If you're lucky, clever, or both, your hypothesis at Step 2 won't be far off.)
   
5. Testing - Test the theory against the phenomenon.
   

The thing to bear in mind here is that Step 5 never stops. We keep our eyes and minds open, and if something should crop up proving the theory wrong, the theory must be revised, or even thrown out in it's entirety, making way for new theories to be devised, and perhaps edging a few steps closer to the truth.

Thus, science is a means by which our knowledge of the universe is gained and constantly refined, that is, evolves. Of course, the reality of it isn't quite so perfectly hunky dory, but, as any decent engineer knows, you learn more from your mistakes.

Why is science important? - The answer to this question is twofold.

The first part of the answer is very mundane, but nonetheless extremely important and it is simply that science works. Science, by virtue of it's self-correcting nature, is an unstoppable juggernaught, an ever growing snowball of knowledge. As mentioned above, errors are not an issue, they are a learning opportunity.

The second part of the answer is that science represents an ideal. One might as well ask: Why is truth important? It is the child of humanity's noblest intellectual passions. It is the unflinching, unwavering desire to learn and understand. It is fearlessness in the face of the unknown. It is tearing down the barriers of delusion and reaching out to grasp reality. It is the humility and courage required to admit and learn from your mistakes. It is a shield against the hypocrites, snake-oil salesmen and bullshit-mongers of this world.

Search for and protect truth. Question everything. Hold nothing sacred. And expose falsehood without remorse. It is a powerful, and sometimes harsh, ideal to live up to, and I would be terribly naive to think it to be the reality of the scientific community. Scientists are human, too! But then is that not the point of an ideal? To be a distant star for us to reach for, even though we know we may never attain it? In science we find an ideal with real benefits for humanity. Knowledge. Understanding. These are real. Not childish promises of a blessed afterlife, but let's not drift in that direction.

Anyway, there you have it. My answers to 2 questions which are close to my heart. I should state now that even I don't think science is the be-all and end-all to healthy living, but a small measure of understanding of science** most certainly helps.

Why does kitty always pick this point in my blog posts to forcefully remind me she wants to be stroked?

* The Japanese/Chinese version of this word is actually very descriptive: 経験主義 (Keiken shugi). A literal translation into English yields "experience ideology ".

** Of which, if the Angels & Demons movie is any indication, Dan Brown has none whatsoever.

Fred Flintstone must DIE...

An interesting conversation popped up recently in which I was made painfully aware that far too many people on this Earth are under the odd impression that humans walked with dinosaurs, like in the Flinstones. This is unacceptable. As such, I have decided it worthwhile to construct a brief timeline of the glorious history of Earth for the benefit of those unclear on the matter.

Chinami ni, sessha wa kinou no kurasu no toukyuusei tachi ni sumimasen to hanashitai. Kinou no setsumei wa zenzen chigau! 'Man' toka, 'sen' toka ni touwaku sareta no de, ano setsumei o mushi shite kudasai*.

Note: In the course of this entry I will use terms like "turn up" or "appear" in relation to species within a stated geological period. In case this is isn't obvious, I state now that this does NOT mean angels/aliens/gods flew down and put them on Earth, like some sick game or some such. I use such terms as shorthand to say that fossil evidence for the stated species has been observed at such-and-such a time. This will make more sense if you have a rudimentary understanding of how evolution works, which was also covered in this blog, a long, long time ago...

The drastically abbreviated history of Earth is as follows:

~4.5 billion years ago - Earth forms. Somewhere between now and the Cambrian period life happens. The proper term for it is abiogenesis, and it's details are still hotly debated. Many theories have been put forth, some are quite plausible, but you can bet your life that it didn't happen in 7 days. In any case early life on Earth spent a long, long time figuring out how to form cells, then multicellular organisms and such.

~600 million years ago - Beginning of Cambrian period, during which life on Earth undergoes a huge increase in biological diversity. Those happy little trilobites turn up. Some time between now and the Triassic (see below), the earliest amphibians start appearing.

~235 million years ago - Beginning of Triassic period, Mesozoic era. Early (small) mammals and reptiles make their appearance.

~205 million years ago - Beginning of Jurassic period. Seriously large reptiles, i.e. dinosaurs claim the top spot on the food chain. Mammals are still small. Contrary to what that fanciful, if a bit misleading movie/book tells you, T Rex did not make his appearance until...

~65 to 68 million years ago - End of Cretaceous period, and hence the Mesozoic era. Sometime around here, there was a mass extinction event, wiping the Earth clean of the dinosaurs, and opening up new oppurtunities for whatever survived (including, obviously, our ancestors). Geological evidence suggests a cataclysmic meteor impact was to blame, and this is presently the most popular theory, though others, equally plausible, exist. Whatever the case may be, life goes on, and now it's the mammals that gain the upper hand, and we start seeing early horses, elephants and a freaky huge sloth. Things continue in this vein until the arrival of the most diabolical freak of nature of them all around...

~3 million years ago - Earliest known signs of the branch of interesting apes that would later become homo sapiens. Kindly note that the gap from here to the last known traces of dinosaurs is so huge that there is no way at all that anything even vaguely resembling a human had ever had any dealings with what we'd know in popular culture as dinosaurs. From there, some other interesting points in human history are...

~2.5 million years ago - Homo habilis, descendant of abovementioned clever monkeys, starts using stone tools.

~1.9 million years ago - Homo erectus, the upright man. Earliest known hunter-gatherer societies form.

~1.3 million years ago - A split occurs, with homo sapiens on one side, and Neanderthals on the other. On both sides we find the earliest known displays of burial rites. Homo sapiens display their proficiency in the art of genocide, wiping out the Neanderthals.

~450 thousand years ago - Humans figure out fire, and every other organism on Earth knows fear...

~13 thousand years ago - End of most recent Ice Age. From this point on, the history of the human race is best captured in Jared Diamond's singularly magnificent book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Or, if you can't be arsed to read it, you can peek at the light version, The Third Chimpanzee.

And that, in a nutshell is where humans are relative to dinosaurs, i.e. far, far away. As always, comments and criticisms are welcome. And this post now ends here, because there is a cat rubbing herself on my face...

* Oi, wakatteiru ka? Wakaranakereba A2 o hontou ni sanka dekiru ka? Nihongo o naraitakunai no ka??? Orokamono! Of course, if you actually did understand all that, I'm especially willing to hear out any corrections to my Japanese. Onegaishimasu!

I am vexed...

Here I was happily tapping out a great big post about an article on open-mindedness I read in the March/April issue of Skeptical Inquirer, when teh stupid intertoobs decides to misbehave and keep Blogger from saving my post. Okay, no problem, I thought. I'll just keep going until the net's happy again and I'll save then. Well, what did you think would happen? Stupid Firefox done DIED on me is what! Dammit, I was really rather pleased with that post. No, there's NOTHING left. I am vexed.

So here's a video of Brian Cox, giving us an update on the status of the LHC:

Need a new tenugui...

Hokay, updates been a little slow lately. Apologies to anyone who actually derives any entertainment from reading my wee corner of teh intertoobs. Been inundating myself in books, Jap studies and kendo* lately, and will continue to do so for a bit longer.

Kendo feels GOOD. Even for those brief instants where I get bopped on the head and the tip of the bamboo blade hits the soft bit of my helmet and makes me see stars. It's like a flash of enlightenment! But seriously, I've gotta keep my damn chin up - I've still got use for those brain cells.

Anyhoo, saw this and thought of Ben Goldacre. I mean, seriously, having the words 'miracle', 'diet' and 'pill' in the headline reeks of cheap sensationalism. Check this out:

"It works by absorbing about 25 per cent of the fat from food, thereby preventing it being turned into extra pounds by the body."

Made by GlaxoSmithKline, too. Big pharma + weight loss miracle pill? I don't like the look of it one bit, and eagerly await Goldacre's eventual unmasking of yet another big pharma attempt to grab quick profits off the gullible masses.

Speaking of Goldacre, do check out his site. One of the chapters of his brilliant book, Bad Science is up for grabs. Not available in the hardback edition, because he was being sued for said chapter at the time. Yep, it's that good. Go grabbit. And be careful what your multivitamin supplements claim...

In other news, here's how to get out of bed, get dressed, have breakfast and get your ass out the door in less than 5 minutes:



There's some damn good tricks there. I like his necktie kung fu. And I'm really going to have to try putting on trousers without using my hands at some point, preferably when no-one's looking.

That's it from me for now. Today's a kendo day, and in a couple of hours, I'll be off to go shout very loudly and hit people with sticks, hurrah!

* And broken my first sword for the year...

Earth Hour, my ass...

Regular readers will know I'm fairly fierce in my criticism of local papers, so today, I'd like to dissect a short article typical of the Star's standard of journalism. Here's the Star on Earth Hour. My comments in red:

*Article starts*

550MW dip in power use for Earth Hour

PETALING JAYA: Electricity consumption dipped by some 550MW during Earth Hour on Saturday. Thank you for wasting even more ink on reiterating the title. Anyway, 550MW is a completely meaningless number if you don't actually state what that 550MW is in relation to.

This, said Tenaga Nasional Bhd (TNB) chief executive officer Datuk Seri Che Khalib Mohamad Noh, was equivalent to the consumption of about 14 million 40-watt fluorescent bulbs. 550MW = 550W X 1,000,000 = 14 million 40W bulbs. Well done! Yet ANOTHER reiteration of a completely meaningless number! This time, using the word "million" because it just feels really nice to say it.

“Everything went smoothly and we were able to respond to the slightly lower demand without any operational glitches,” he said in a press statement yesterday. So the fuck what? No, really, that's like saying I drove on the highway, let go of the accelerator for 5 seconds, and OMFG my car still works!

He was commenting on the hour-long lights-out campaign to create awareness on the need to combat global warming. *Facepalm*

However, Che Khalib added that demand picked up rapidly at 9.30pm to follow the normal Saturday night pattern. Captain Obvious is obvious.

Many Malaysians joined the annual campaign, which began in Sydney in 2007, by switching off their lights for an hour from 8.30pm. Captain Obvious is obvious(er).

*Article ends*

Okey dokey, let me try to fill in some of the yawning great big gaps in this utterly worthless nasal discharge that the Star calls an "article", and try to put into perspective: How big of a dent is 550MW for an hour?

In 2006, M'sia consumed ~96 billion kWh. Let's assume, for simplicity's sake, that that amount is spread nice and even over the whole year, so we just divide that number by the number of hours in a year, 8,760.

96 billion kWh = 96,000,000 MWh
96,000,000 MWh / 8,760 hrs = ~10,960 MW.

Now, 550 MW is just about 5% of 10,960 MW. A 5% drop, for one hour, out of the 8,760 in a year. And that's just using the estimated consumption in 2006. Take a look at this*:

So, if 550MW for one hour is about 0.0006% of the consumption in 2006, how much of a dent to you suppose it made to our consumption in happy 2009, hmm? Somebody, please check my numbers, because they're just so pathetic, I have trouble believing them myself.

Now, if you believe that Earth Hour is meant to be a symbolic gesture, say so. If you think that Earth Hour will set a precedent of some sort, and create a greater awareness of the need to be green, fine, but it would be nice to see some numbers attached to the cute platitudes. But DON'T wave the number "550 MW for one hour" in my face and jump around and celebrate because you think you've made a difference, because WAKE UP and SMELL the Ipoh White, you fucking haven't.

And this is what passes for science reporting in the Star. Right. I've got more science reporting kung fu in my frickin' toenail clippings. And don't even ask about other M'sian energy-related figures like, ooh, total exports and generating capacity. Really. Don't.

*Data from here. Except for the 2006 figure, which is off the CIA site.

Meanwhile, in the world of medicine...

There was a time when I would have felt at least some measure of righteous indignation on finding out about the dastardly deeds of Bernard Madoff. USD 60 billion is nothing to sneeze at, and that kind of money could have done a lot of good, especially now, in a world where there's really never enough. These days, however, such things feel... normal. They feel like the status quo, that a Bernard Madoff lurks wherever there's an abundance of gullible people easily tempted by easy money. And that's the awful tragedy of it, I suppose, that such things have become "normal".

So it came as no real surprise to me when, in the field of medicine, another unscrupulous wretch was uncovered. The URL says it all, really:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-medical-madoff-anesthestesiologist-faked-data

That having been said, I am irked by this, which is to say, this pisses me off a lot more than the Madoff case. Why? Oh, where to start...

I'd like to think that medicine is a science. I find it comforting to believe that the body of medical knowledge is acquired through means empirical, i.e. placebo-controlled trials, peer-reviewed journals, checks and balances, etc. Matters of health are close to everyone's hearts* so an insane amount of time and money and hope are invested in medical research. Especially money, as Ben Goldacre points out. So it's a harsh and unsettling reminder to all just how badly the medical profession has been compromised by the profit motive when we see someone like Reuben rise to prominence and bamboozle everyone with falsified data and unscrupulous practices. Forging signatures, for fuck's sake!

So what does it mean for the profession when such filth as Dr Reuben turns up? Obviously there is a serious flaw in the system, and this is no small matter, given that the word of one prominent doctor can, at the same time, earn said doctor hundreds of thousands of dollars and cost millions of lives. And it doesn't stop there, mind you. Even after the perpetrator is caught, the profession is dealt a serious blow to its credibility, sending sod knows how many thousands of the paranoid and gullible scurrying off for alternative treatments. You know the type. Crystals, homeopathy, laying of hands, quacks, maybe some magic ointment from the local shaman**. How many more lives do you suppose that will cost?

And it ripples out still further. Medicine, to the uninitiated, is, like many sciences, an impenetrable bastion of diabolically complex terminology, and, by association, a failure in the field of medicine is a failure for all of science. Because of the taint of one scumbag, the boffins are all that little bit less trustworthy. One more justification for the anti-intellectualist, the Luddite, the religious conservative...

Perhaps you may think that people aren't that stupid. I think not. Maybe it could just be because I'm in Malaysia. I could walk into any shopping mall*** and rope in, say, 100 people, and safely bet that less than 5 of them could tell you, in the simplest terms, what is the scientific method. I'd expect very much the same rate of scientific literacy in, say, an accounting firm, Republican states and damn near any house of worship you can name.

This whole Dr Reuben debacle is indicative of an awful failure at so many levels it's embarassing to look at them. Because the medical establishment failed to police itself, his papers got published. Because society fails to police it's corporations, conflicts of interest arise within the medical profession. Because of failures in the education system, the greater part of the populace is ignorant, gullible and scientifically illiterate.

And this is in the USA, mind you, where, despite the best efforts of the Republicans, groundbreaking research is still being carried out in many fields of science. Can you imagine how deeply the cancer of ignorance spreads in Malaysia, where the highest one can aspire to is come out on top of a scrum of vapid, inane, consumerist cubicle-jockeys? One need only turn on the TV or the radio! Verily, our air is abuzz with the very best (and utterly tasteless) efforts of our unspeakably crass marketing executives. If our government has failed to educate, it is they who perpetuate into adulthood the intellectual wasteland put there by our textbooks.

So, thank you very much, Dr Reuben. Don't misunderstand my meaning, you are still a 24-carat cunt, and deserving of the very worst tortures imaginable for your crimes against humanity, but your crimes are a sharp reminder to us all, that we can do better, and that we must do better.

* And every other part of their anatomy, ahahaha...

** Still plenty of those here in Malaysia, alas. See, this is why many foreigners (including my Jap teacher) think people still live in trees over here.

*** Except maybe for the wonderfully geek infested Low Yat Plaza.

Spectrum of Desire, and a pinch of memes

I came across the title phrase in We Think, Therefore We Are, a fun little collection of AI-related sci fi. In the story in which it was mentioned, we have a tale of a future in which huge trucks haul their loads across continent-spanning highways, driven, of course, by AI. An interesting feature of said AI is that they're supposed to have free will, which is held in check by their spectrum of desire.

The AIs love the open road. Nothing makes them happier than to haul cargo from one place to another. They feel duty-bound to protect human life to the best of their abilities. They follow a Highway Code, which is much like Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, adapted for use by robots whose sole purpose is to haul cargo on huge roads. These AIs are so advanced, they need to have other robots designed to handle their neuroses. Here's a few words from the robopsychologist:

"You have free will, just as humans do. In matters of moral decision, you have the option of not doing the right thing. That's a fundamental corollary of self-awareness. If the programmers could make it absolutely compulsory for you to obey the Highway Code, they would, but they'd have to make you into an automaton - and we know from long and bitter experience that the open road is no place from automata incapable of caring whether they crash or not. In order for free will to operate at all, it has to be contextualized by a spectrum of of desire; in that respect, robots, like humans, don't have very much option at all. What makes us so much better than humans, in a moral sense, is not that we can't disobey the fundamental structures of our programming - the Highway Code, in your case - but that we never want to."

This struck me as odd. Does this state of affairs not simply make the truck AIs automata anyway? Slaves to their desires? Those desires were put in their programming as surely as any other line of code, were they not? And what about us? Are we not automata, too, programmed by our own spectrum of desire?

In our physical forms, we find the raw materials of our dreams - pain, pleasure, lust, hunger... These desires were put there - selected for - by the needs of savannah-dwelling primates. These raw materials, forged by genetic evolution, are given their present, more refined shapes by our cultural evolution - art and avarice, I suppose, but do bear with me, I'm largely writing off the top of my head here.

I'm sure I've mentioned this before somewhere on this blog, but it's worth reiterating that the key to wrapping one's head round evolution, especially in humans, is timescale. The worthiness of traits determined by genes is decided over the lifetimes of organisms, but the worthiness of ideas is decided, by comparison, in the blink of an eye. Fads come and go, knowledge builds upon knowledge, histories are written and rewritten, thinkers think, doers do - and our bodies, our scruffy, hairy, frail bodies, not really very good for anything, other than walking on two legs and some manual dexterity, have barely changed at all. With our bodies alone, we are next to nothing. An insignificant blob of biomass, prone to engaging in much inter and intra-species violence. But paired with the Leviathan that is our culture and science, the fate of this 3rd (rather wet) rock from the sun is in our hands.

130,000 years. That's what it took for us to get from poking stuff with sticks to quantum physics. To a floor trader, it's simply an inconcievable span of time. To an accountant, it's enough working papers to smother a continent. To a historian, that's all of recorded history and a fair bit more. To an evolutionary biologist, a chapter in a lenghty book. To a geologist, a comma in the story of Earth. To a cosmologist, it is nothing, nothing at all.

I once met someone who called himself an atheist, yet didn't believe in evolution. Perhaps he thought he was being prudent by occupying a middle ground between the Creation Vs Evolution "debate". I will state here, flatly and honestly, that no, that is NOT a middle ground. That's not even in the same ball park. That is somewhere way out in the parking lot of Ignorance. But don't worry, ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you don't try to delude yourself into thinking it's a good thing.

Anyway, the reason for his doubt lay in a common Creotard question: "How come intelligence only evolved in humans?" Fair enough, but this was followed shortly by another popular Creotard statement: "When I see chimpanzees evolve human intelligence, then I'll believe in evolution." I try very hard to keep a clear head at all times, but, faced with a statement of such mind-numbing stupidity, pronounced in the flesh with such an air of smugness that I've only ever seen summoned forth by the most wilfully ignorant of televangelists*, I could not maintain sufficient composure to answer his question, but stood agog at this epic failure of reason.

So, I'll answer it here, and I'll try to keep it simple. It takes a truly staggering coincidence for 2 completely separate, genetically incompatible (i.e. can't make half-breed kids together) species to stumble on the same trait at more or less the same time. In this case, the key trait is a neurological one - the ability to copy behaviour. This is the cornerstone of what, genetically, gives us our supremacy. With the arrival of this little tweak, along with the right confluence of hardware to use it, our ancestors now had access to the world of memetic evolution, i.e. culture, which would accelerate our evolution to a ludicrous pace, not unlike giving someone running in a footrace a Harley halfway through. Neanderthals came close, but alas, they simply weren't as advanced, and were wiped out. Similarly, if you gave someone else a Harley in said footrace, even 10 seconds later after the first, the 2nd guy is simply not going to catch up. Humans being humans, we can barely tolerate living with each other, let alone another species exhibiting similar intelligence, and thus posing a possible threat. Tracing the fossil record we observe a sudden acceleration in brain size increasing in our ancestors, a clear indication that something was exerting some sort of evolutionary pressure to select for greater brain power. This pressure, from memetic evolution**, pushed our genetic evolution in our current direction to where we are today, a physically unimpressive primate with a mental capacity completely disproportionate to our bodies, as compared with other animals.

Now, it took just over 3 million years to get from Lucy to us. And our self-professed doubting atheist is waiting for a chimp to spontaneously develop intelligence in his lifetime. So now you know the sheer magnitude of how stupid such expectations are.

Anyway, I'm done here for now. If there's anyone out there who's managed to read up to this point, do tell if I'm missing something in my brief explanation of meme-augmented evolution in early humans. I've got to chase my nephew away from the cat food...

* Or, if you frequent Youtube, VenomfangX, who is clearly living proof that modern man is obviously descended from some sort of primitive ancestor.

** Covered in detail in Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine.