Monthly Archives: July 2011
Fractal of the Month for July, 2011: The Engine
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2010 Troy Loy
Richard Kent and his theory about the Brontosaurus
This is a new one courtesy of Potholer54.
Disclaimer: The air friction caused by laughing so hard from this may cause your mouth, nostrils and lungs to catch fire.
There. You’ve been warned.
APW | Astronomy Pix of the Week for July 24-30, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
APW is a weekly installment, published each Saturday between 7:31 and 8:30 am EDT, of links to each daily entry on NASA’s website Astronomy Picture of the Day. I hope you enjoy looking at these often breathtaking images as much as I do.
Related articles
- Threat of James Webb Space Telescope Cancellation Rattles Astronomy Community (scientificamerican.com)
TWX | The Week’s XKCD for July 29, 2011
This is the first installment of a new semi-regular feature on this site, posted on Friday, and featuring the popular webcomic xkcd, which I’ve recently become a big fan of.
May you find it just as interesting commentary as does this nerdulent guy!
Speculation
Days of the Week (Click To View Full)
Not to make light of a serious disease, having lost both friends and people I admire to it, this next is something you don’t often hear on cancer from the mass media, and why there is often such uncertainty and resulting anxiety by many survivors.
Lanes
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.
This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to sell them). More details.
[Book Review] “The Believing Brain” by Michael Shermer
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I just finished my first reading of Mike’s new book, “The Believing Brain” and this, like Shermer’s other works, such as “Why People Believe Weird Things,” and “How We Believe,” this shows his characteristic highly readable writing style and careful choice of words.
It’s the culmination of some 30 years of his work as a research scientist in attempting to understand, as the title blurb says, “how we construct beliefs and reinforce them as truths.”
In it, he lays out and describes the concept of Belief-Dependent Realism, how our concepts of reality hinge on preexisting beliefs both true and false…
The basic thesis of the book is simple: Belief comes first, reasons for belief come after. Each chapter elaborates on this with study after study confirming that we are not the strictly rational logic machines envisioned during the Enlightenment, but emotional beings who all too often rationalize what we already believe, with the smartest of us supporting our belief in weird things with rational explanations for what we believe.
In Part I: Journeys of Belief, the first three chapters highlight the paths taken by two believers, Emilio D’Arpino, and biologist Francis Collins, and Shermer‘s own path as a skeptic. All three are good illustrations of how people often come to believe what they do, weird, and not-so-weird things, alike.
We often wind up believing weird things because we need to believe the not-weird as well…
Part II: The Biology of Belief, Shermer describes the concept of Patternicity, the tendency to seek and find patterns in both meaningful data and meaningless noise, but which is absolutely essential to our ability to learn, as well as the idea of Agenticity, the tendency we have as storytelling and pattern seeking animals to attribute meaning and causal or intentional agency, both where it exists and where it does not, and a good description of the neural mechanisms of belief which dispenses with dualistic terminology in favor of the monistic model of ‘mind’ being simply and succinctly something the brain happens to do.
Some may disagree with the neurological model strongly, but it is well-supported by the data and scientific literature.
Part III: Belief in Things Unseen, using the science described in part II, Shermer goes into detail on various beliefs in an afterlife, in God or gods, in aliens, and in conspiracies, and presents the claims, and where applicable, the arguments and evidence for and against these things.
Mike does a good job, I think, in presenting the claims with his usual scientist’s care, and nowhere does he seem to sneer at believers, but he also doesn’t dance around the issues in pointing out the lack of compelling data for aliens and an afterlife, good reasons for the ultimate insolubility of the ‘God’ question, and in noting that while real conspiracies do happen, pointing out the distinctions between probably real and likely imaginary conspiracies.
In Part IV: Belief in Things Seen, deals first with political beliefs, the cognitive biases that can skew our perceptions and thinking, making our beliefs impervious to disproof, and the power of theory and paradigm in shaping our understanding of data, to make us see, not always what is actually there, but what we expect to see.
Finally, the epilogue, The Truth Is Out There, describes the Null Hypothesis and Burden of Proof as they relate to science, as well as two alternatives to the Experimental method in science, the Convergence and Comparative methods, both widely used in the historical sciences, and just as useful as laboratory experimentation.
He elaborates on the need for positive evidence for scientific claims, and why properly meeting the burden of proof hinges on this.
He wraps up by concluding that the book only begins the journey toward a fuller understanding of how and why we believe the things we do, and why it is a Good Thing™ that we are not and should not be strictly, completely rational, and why science is the best means we have for finding out what’s true, and revealing what’s not.
Personally, I found the book informative, interesting, and eye-opening with a lot of good science packaged just right for a popular audience. Shermer’s outdone himself here as a scientist and popularizer of science.
It’s definitely on my “must read again list” along with Carl Sagan’s “Demon Haunted World,” and James Randi’s “Mask of Nostradamus.
TED – Jeff Hawkins: We Need a Theory of Brain Science
Jeff discusses the need for a coherent paradigm, grounded in sciences like biology, physics, mathematics, and yes, neuroscience, for how the brain works as a better model of making truly intelligent machines, which would be based, not on behavior, but on the same ability of our own brains to take in data and make predictions about what we perceive.
While this probably wouldn’t lead to Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw or the Terminator, it would be a better, much more realistic model resulting in computers as more than just fast processing machines, but truly intelligent in the same way we are, using better criteria to assess this intelligence than the Turing tests we use now.
TNQ | The Noontide Query for July 27, 2011: Sport & the Hunting Instinct
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I remember a discussion by Carl Sagan about the idea that some of our aggressive instincts, baggage left from our paleolithic heritage as small bands of hunter-gatherers on the plains of Africa, are apparent today in our predilection for war and competitive games such as athletic sports, role-playing games, miniature wargames, more cerebral pastimes like card games, and board games such as chess or mancala.
But we not only play games. We often like to vicariously whet our appetite for competition by watching others play games on television and the internet, often vigorously swearing at and debating which player or referee screwed up, and rooting loudly for ‘our team.’
Many of us sate our appetite for the hunt in a more direct fashion, by, well, hunting unsurprisingly.
As we developed over tens of thousands of years into our current global civilization, we never lost our capacity for aggression, which we needed then to survive, and to fall short of actual violence to each other, we’ve invented a bewildering number of games to channel that zest for the hunt, and intertribal war, to much more constructive ends than we might — aggression without the use of lethal force — though there was also a game popular in Mesoamerica in which the captain of the losing team was beheaded!
Oops! Now there’s a game in which you’ll really feel sorry for fumbling the ball. Talk about the penalty for failure!
I’m not much of an athlete, so I tend to be more of a boardgame and role-playing aficionado, and this ties into my more geekish tendencies as an SF, horror, and fantasy fiction fan.
So my questions are these:
What sort of games or sport do you like to play or watch during free hours? Why? If a professional in any sort of game or sport, from which do you get your kicks and/or paycheck by playing?
TNQ is a question that I pose to you, my readers, and is posted intermittently during the week at 12:00 PM EDT. Do feel free to comment, and don’t worry yerselves overmuch… I’m not an ogre and I don’t bite…much.
WPS | Web Picks Sceptique for July 27, 2011
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by Michael Roberts… SMBH NGC 3783: A Rapidly Spinning Black Hole…
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by Marty Pribble… Religion Running Scared…
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on NeurologicaBlog… The Internet and Skepticism…
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by Ethan Seigel… We’re Going to See a Black Hole!..
WPS is a selection of links to blogs, news outlets, and cool little sites on the Web that relate to science, reason, skepticism, atheism, the fringes and borderlands of science, memes relating to science or skepticism, and anything that catches my eye or which I’m deluded enough to think might arouse the interest of you, my perspicacious and discriminating readers. WPS is published intermittently once or twice a week from Wednesday to Saturday on the Call.
Fooling by Magic & Unblinding by Science
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It’s no secret that professional conjurors like to keep secrets…about how they do their tricks, and the honest among these expert liars, frauds and cheats, to paraphrase James Randi (Word!), will tell you that they are going to fool you, trick you, deceive you, up front I might add, and then they will do exactly that.
Alleged psychics and god-men are not so honest, as they will tell you that what they do is real, when it is the same sort of tricks used by the more honest frauds, as oxymoronic as that last phrase sounds, often using the same techniques.
Because the entire field of magic gets most of its entertainment value from the practice of skilled deception and misdirection, relying on the many ways that our brains can be fooled, even when working correctly, it thus requires the preservation of the secrets of how magicians do their stuff.
It’s generally bad form to reveal another magician’s secrets without their consent, and doing that can win you their ire, and often ostracism, or at least round criticism, from others in the magic profession…
Some magicians, whether mentalists, conjurors, street magicians, mathemagicians, and others, are so skilled in devising new techniques for their effects that they sometimes purposely reveal the workings of a trick, and then change it to another method you don’t know for the next performance, just to keep you guessing.
They’re that good, or they couldn’t pull it off as well as they do, like many of Penn and Teller‘s performances, which just reek of awesome.
But there are mistaken comparisons of the profession of magic and that of the sciences in this regard, asserting, to put it one way, that just like the loss of awe that happens when you know how a conjuring trick is done, science sullies and destroys the mystery and beauty of the natural world, and like a vampire on steroids, sucks all the joy out of life for drawing back the curtains and revealing nature’s secrets.
This is a misunderstanding, despite that magic employs well-known facts of how the human mind operates, as confidence games also do, making use of well-establish findings of psychology.
Significant differences exist between the arts of deception and the sciences, and through these differences, far, far different things are intended and achieved between each of them.
One seeks to confuse and mystify through deception, to divert the eye, and the other seeks to inform and illuminate by looking closer with that same eye, peeling back the darkness to reveal nature’s secrets in their full majesty.
Which is better; to see mere dots of light in the night sky and ignore understanding of what they really are, or to look closer at those same dots of light with the understanding that the stars are immense suns so far away from us in a universe much vaster than we can easily wrap our imaginations around?
My money’s riding on the latter as more conducive to wonder.
I argue that learning the secrets of science, and discovering the unknown rather than hiding it for its own sake actually enhances, not degrades, the beauty, mystery, and awe of the real world, in ways that are evocative, illuminating, even uplifting, meaningful, and fulfilling, in many of the same ways as traditional theistic religions and New Age spiritualism to many believers.
In skepticism, magic and science can inform and often complement each other.
First, the conjuring arts and science do both emphasize mystery, but approach it in very different ways.
Magic relies on mystery for the purpose of entertainment, or sometimes less noble objectives with confidence artists, whereas science seeks to reveal the tentative truth, reveling in solving the mystery, rather than merely perpetuate it, to find answers to the questions posed to nature through hypothesis, experiment, reason, and observation…
…and in so doing reveal deeper mysteries still. Ad infinitum. I doubt very much that science shall ever run out of questions to ask, mysteries to solve, and wonders to reveal. Not only is knowledge power, it is also enlightenment, and for those willing to find out, a source of joy and purpose from within.
It is the fascination of looking to see what is behind the next hill, and the next, and the next…or like a set of infinitely nested dolls, each within the larger before it, but going on forever.
Scientists love mysteries, to paraphrase Dr. Lawrence Krauss.
They seek to understand what is most likely to be true, to learn what is real, rather than merely appealing to mysticism and ignorance, calling it a miracle, throwing up their hands and ending the search by declaring with much pretense of profundity “…we can’t explain it.” often with the implication, in my view arrogant as well as willfully ignorant, that no one can ever explain it, that their personal knowledge and comprehension is the sum of all that is.
I think that the above declaration would better be ended by replacing the period with a comma, and concluding it with, “…yet, so let’s look further until we can. We’re bound to find something interesting.”
Let’s be clear on something; when science explains something, it is not ‘explaining it away;’ it is not dismissing it, debunking it, denying it, discounting the significance, or in any way degrading the worth and beauty of what is explained.
Science only adds to the beauty, the elegance, the value, of what it explains, and it’s alien to me, beyond my ability to directly visualize how it could ever do otherwise.
I can’t intuitively envision, in my mind’s eye, the concept of destroying the worth of something by getting a better understanding of it, though that doesn’t stop me from thinking about why…
I can easily understand the emotional need to preserve mystery, to perpetuate it, in typical human fear of the unknown, since we are all human and the unknown often involves an element of risk, to avoid seeking answers to those mysteries for the fear that we won’t like the answer when it stands revealed to us.
I’m not completely foreign to that fear myself, nor to varying degrees are most people I know.
But a knee-jerk avoidance of risk has never gotten us anywhere, and certainly not out of our prehistory to where we are now.
Our civilization stands as a testament to the risks our pioneers have braved for tens of thousands of years to the present, and I hope, the future.
Also, perfectly intelligent people can be uncomfortable with change, and learning surprising new things is a form of change, and change is often painful, so many deliberately disenfranchise themselves by trying to avoid learning new things, in defiance of their own human heritage, and often at great cost to themselves when others take advantage of them by exploiting this tendency, this denial and rejection of their own curiosity, that which has done so much to advance our species to the most successful of mammals over the span of the last 2,000 centuries.
But, to paraphrase an old friend of mine, that’s cowardice in the face of reason.
Your choice. You have the right to accept, or not to accept. You have the right to remain in the Bronze Age while the rest of us reach for the stars…
…You have the right to build closed walls around your own mind, but not to build the same around the minds of others by indoctrination, deceit or threat of force, by arms or by law.
You can remain in the darkness if you wish, but do not presume to impose this on others.
Related articles
- Penn and Teller: Fool Us (guardian.co.uk)
- Houdini and the magic of the movies (guardian.co.uk)
