Monthly Archives: August 2011
Principles of geometry + AntiVJ: a stereoscopic show
This is a recent discovery of mine, though the video dates from a couple of years ago on Vimeo, electronic band Principles of Geometry. This is a sort of 3-D-ish journey through space, with visuals by AntiVJ… This is from a bit in the past, but you can’t stop the future… Enjoy.
Music: myspace.com/principlesofgeometry
Visual production: Simon Geilfus, Joanie Lemercier, Desaxismundi.
Produced with support from Arcadi.
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Full details: antivj.com/pog/
Fractal of the Day: Mathematica
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
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Fractal of the Day: The Aviary
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
More Thoughts on Precision
Image via Wikipedia
I’m going to put forth some of my thoughts over the past weekend while the winds and storm surge of Irene kept me indoors and network disruptions away from the interbuttz…
Why must we be precise in discussions of matters of science, mathematics, and philosophy? Why must we attempt to be as clear as we can? Who gives a crap about precision, and why should they?
Science in particular is criticized for many things, and one of those is its need for precision in argumentation, in measurement, in its jargon, and its reductionist methods. This last is often compared, unfairly in my view, with ‘not seeing the lawn for the blades of grass’ to paraphrase Neil Tyson in one of his lectures.
To my understanding, reductionism is necessary for achieving holistic ends in science.
Science is best understood from both holistic and reductionist perspectives, using reductionist methods to examine smaller sets of data, and through that examination integrating them to generate such fundamentally unifying principles as biological evolution, quantum mechanics, general and special relativity, laws of motion, conservation, and thermodynamics, these among the most well-tested and comprehensive ideas in science to date, and which through their attendant sub-concepts let us see the proverbial ‘coup for the chickens,’ regardless of what any researcher(s) in a given sub-field sees or knows at a given time.
An unwillingness to be precise in our meaning and measurement often produces what I call fuzzy holism, ‘not seeing the blades of grass for the lawn,’ and this limitation on the ability to note fine detail, clarity of vision, so to speak, on not just things, but less tangible matters that interest us, restricts too our ability to fully understand and so usefully theorize our way to explaining things we see.
You cannot truly understand the solar system without understanding the sun, the planets, asteroids, dwarf-planets, comets and other assorted objects that make it the entity that it is, just as you cannot fully understand the galaxy without considering the behavior of the gas clouds, stellar systems and any other miscellaneous bodies and phenomena that make up its entirety.
It is a mistake to dismiss the parts in favor of the whole, just as much as its opposite, and I do not see science as being guilty of either — in part or in whole.
My concern for this stems from a tendency increasingly obvious in our culture to casually dismiss the great intellectual accomplishments of our species as being mere opinion, no better than any other, or even less valid, when the facts these achievements concern conflict with closely held beliefs and strong ideological views contrary to acceptance of objective knowledge and sometimes even reality itself.
I confess to even finding it a bit frustrating at times, hearing people make the same specious arguments time and again, but it is illuminating to say the least.
We cannot achieve infinite precision in any endeavor to seek knowledge, but we must be as rigorous, as systematic as our means allow to reach as useful an understanding as we can.
While we can’t with absolute precision describe anything, to conclude that we know nothing doesn’t follow. Finally, while reductionist methods are certainly not the whole ballgame of science, they are a useful, powerful step in the right direction, and do have one major strong point in my view:
They are not wrong.
What Makes Kitties Happy…
I thought I’d post something a little different today, to answer the question…What do kitties dream of?
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Fractal of the Day: Alien Folium
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
Fractal of the Day: Brynling
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
TED – Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations
A physicist shows that simple mathematical laws can govern such things as a city’s wealth, crime-rate and walking speed using only a single number — the population — and that these same laws can be applied just as usefully to living organisms and major business entities.
Fractals of the Week: Visage Palid & Drakemme
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
xkcd: Seismic Waves
A somewhat earlier post, but very appropriate for the occasion of the quake in Va. this last Tuesday…
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.
Fractal of the Day: The Phage
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
I Refuse to be Ashamed of My Humanity
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As an ex-Adventist, though I’ve mentioned elsewhere my position on use of the self-descriptor ‘atheist,’ it’s sometimes necessary for a number of reasons to use it, though that use is reluctant — it is used as an epithet by theists, and a form of often defiant self-branding by atheists themselves.
More power to the latter, I say.
I prefer to go by the less baggage-laden ‘nontheist,’ and there are problems with even that, since the semantic neutrality of verbal language is often extremely difficult to obtain in practice due to the multiple, even contradicting evaluative meanings and usages we give to words in different places and times.
So at times, atheist it is, as meaningless though it sometimes seems.
Theists I’ve read and talked to offer as one reason out of many, and no doubt it is a powerful one, that they believe because it gives them hope…
…but hope for what?
It’s apparent that much of the hope offered by some traditions, including but not limited to hope for a better world, a better life (often beyond this one), or a better future is often limited, depending on the tradition, to hope for those who are, according to the tradition’s doctrines, among the ‘Saved’ or ‘the Elect,’ even if that hope of salvation may only be realized through harm to or intolerance of others different in some way from them.
Many traditions (and in Christianity alone there currently exists more than 30,000 denominations worldwide, some of which will passionately dispute that the others are actually Christians) claim that salvation may be reached only through them.
Believers have different approaches to salvation, in some, it is a way to gain perfection in the next life, and in others, more perniciously, it is obtained by being perfect in this one.
Both are based on questionable assumptions, but I’m going to focus on the latter here.
My thinking is that much of this hope is the hope to avoid the often greatly feared consequences of not being among the Chosen, often, though not always, those of not having membership in the faith, which typically only a potentially willing convert or long-time believer will actually think worthy of serious consideration.
After all, no Muslim I’ve read or spoken to fears going to the Roman Catholic hell, nor do any Catholics I know dread going to the Adventist hell, and vice versa for both.
And so, as a nonbeliever in nearly every concept of God out there — including, shockingly enough, Cthulhu and Azathoth — I don’t, for instance, fear transmigration to the Center of the Universe™ upon death to be eaten by the mindless Other Gods of Lovecraft.
Anyhoo.
Religion’s principle lack of appeal to me is its anti-humanism — In my own youthful religious affiliation, there was much emphasis on being flawless in this world so as to gain access to all the good things of the next — a view that painted humanity as inherently unworthy, sinful, and fatally defective because a remote ancestor of the fair sex ate a piece of fruit no more than 10,000 years ago, a species whose members were thus tragically doomed to burn in the hereafter unless they were (of course…) Adventists in good standing.
And that means a lot of guilt over some very human and unavoidable traits, and shame when these imperfections are seen and noted, with much disapproval, by other Adventists…
…A lot of guilt and shame over those very things that make us what we are, both vices and virtues, but especially the former.
Needless to say, the quest for perfection, especially in an inherently imperfect world as seems the case, is something that’s doomed to failure from the start.
Seeking absolute perfection in anything is both irrational and a self-destructive enterprise.
As a nonbeliever and a skeptic, I keep hope, one based on my understanding of the likely prospects for, the limits, and the strengths of my species, a powerful species whose flawed but brilliant and highly successful nature I without guilt embrace, with meaning and purpose that is not dependent on arbitrary imposition from somewhere on high.
If offered a choice between awe and reverence for the parochial and shallow wonders offered by supernatural dogmas and revelations demanding faith, or that for the real and profound wonders uncovered by the sciences which make no such demands…
…then I unequivocally and unhesitatingly, while keeping a questing mind, choose the latter.
Fractal of the Day: The Gyrus
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
Fractal of the Day: The Masque
All images in this post are original works by the author, and are copyright 2011 Troy Loy
