Category Archives: Review Postz
[Book Review] “The Believing Brain” by Michael Shermer
Image via Wikipedia
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.
Movie Review: Transformers – Dark of the Moon
Image via Wikipedia
I’m a horrible critic, and an avid transformers geek, so I was delighted to see the premier in my home town of the latest flick about those cheesy but cool autonomous robotic organisms from Cybertron.
First I’ll note a few things that stood out as pluses for this movie, and then I’ll get to my biggest hitch with it. Now, I’m in the habit of switching off my critical faculties when I’m actually watching these sorts of films, and only after the movie is over do I turn them back on.
I’ll ignore the scientific implausibilities, since others more acquainted with the science do a much better job of it than I do. That, and it’s almost too typical for science fiction movies to have at least some bad science in them.
Don’t even get me started on that horrible little stillbirth of a movie, Battlefield Earth; That movie had logical plot holes big enough for Lord Xenu’s entire space-fleet to soar through.
‘Nuff said on that.
If you plan to see Dark of the Moon yourself, read no further until afterward, for here there be some spoilers!
The story starts out in the opening scene with the first landing on the Moon (of course!)by Apollo 11, though I’ll ignore the historical gaffe of the astronauts’ journeying to Luna’s far side, which is needed to make the plot work…Hey, it’s a different universe than ours, so it’s excusable.
After finding a crashed Transformer spacecraft on the Moon, where they discover a dormant Cybertronian named Sentinel Prime, the whole affair being cleverly concealed from the public and the mass media after our boys in pressure-suits get within sighting distance of it, after which all communication with Earth is only with need-to-know NASA personnel and American intelligence agencies. Including some real footage from 1969 and the early 1970s, the film switches scenes to a few years after the events in Revenge of the Fallen, picking up with a now older Sam Witwicky and his new girlfriend.
The basic plot revolves around some Machiavellian betrayal among the alien droids, with Sentinel Prime, Optimus Prime’s predecessor, deciding to screw over the Autobots by making a deal with Megatron to share power over an enslaved Humanity, by using Cybertronian artifacts he invented to reshape space and bring Cybertron to Earth for rebuilding by his Decepticon allies, intending to use the humans to work as an unpaid labor force.
The film involves a lot of action, and it was difficult sometimes to focus on any one scene before the next happened. I’m just lucky, I suppose, that I didn’t see it in 3-D.
Headache city…
It winds up that after the seeming victory by teh Ebil Robottz, and in several scenes almost being killed himself, Sam gets to show his mettle in the final conflict.
Following a typical episode of personal politics between Sentinel and Megatron, who feels he’s getting the short end of the stick after literally being called Sentinel’s bitch by Sam’s girlfriend, no less, the bridge between Cybertron and Earth is severed, and the enemy defeated.
Okay, now time for the criticism:
This film’s plot line almost directly derives from that of an old first-season animated Transformers episode, in which the same bring-Cybertron-to-Earth-with-a-space-warping-thingie is done, assisted in the episode as in this movie, by humans promised power by their alien masters, who of course, have no intention of fulfilling their word to their fleshy pawns.
BTW, the human traitor in the classic episode, which has not aged well at all, was a mad scientist named Dr. Archeville, and a rather pompous one at that (but aren’t they all?).
*sigh* I’m showing my age, aren’t I…
Save for this glaring lack of originality, I found the movie fun, and it had a lot of scenes that provided some good comic relief between the scenes of Cybertronians getting ripped apart and humans being disintegrated by alien weaponry.
I found it cheesy, but entertaining, though I wouldn’t recommend it for an Academy award.
Oh, about some of the artwork on this site…
Posting essays has been a little slow last week, and a lot of you I’m fairly sure have noticed the fractal artwork featured on this site over the last few months, especially the weekly feature image posted each Saturday.
Let me assure you that all such featured images, as well as the background and header for the Call are my own work, creating itself through me by way of an amazing shareware app called Fractal Domains, to which I am greatly in debt for its usefulness.
Most of my non-blogging time, when not studying, has been well-spent the past week creating and updating customizable templates for the software that I use to more efficiently and effectively produce the images I use.
First, let’s get something out of the way: The following thumbnails are images NOT of my creation, but are public domain work that I obtained from Wikimedia Commons before creating my own earlier this year:
There. That should be all of them…Breathtaking as some of these no doubt are, they are not mine to claim credit for, just to clear up any misunderstandings that may arise from my use of them.
See Wikimedia Commons for Fractals for the proper attribution of these images.
I’m hardly an expert on maths, but I just love fooling around with numbers, and this is a big plus in generating my own templates, most of which are identical for each of the Mandelbrot, Halley and Newton sets, and their derived Julia sets, save for the numerators, and with a few, other portions of the numerical formulas used by the app to tell the computer (I have a Mac, as many of you know…) how to produce the graphic images that result.
The basic form of the numerator is this: z³-1 — Pretty simple, but I like a little more from the app than just a stock setting, so here’s an example of one of the custom-programmed numerators saved for a template:
z²⁶+z²⁴+z²²+z²⁰+z¹⁸+z¹⁶+z¹⁴+z¹²+z¹⁰+z⁸+z⁶+z⁴+z²-1
This change to the basic formula in a set using Newton’s method (Yes, I’m referring to the cranky but brilliant English guy who co-invented calculus and was allegedly beaned by an apple good according to the group R.E.M…) results in an image looking sort of like this, depending on how far I zoom into the image, where I zoom into said image, and what color-scheme I choose:
One thing I’ve discovered is that breaking the exponents in the formulas into manageable bits keeps the program from quitting as it would if I had just added all of the exponents together into a single term, and I’ve found out that it produces a different image as well, such as with the numerator of z¹⁰+z⁵-1 as opposed to combining them as in z¹⁵-1, as with the following for each in turn, again using Newton’s method:
Ahem…
Note the differences. Fractal domains is for the moment the biggest and most favoritest time-waster on my desktop, and so worth it.
I think, though, that it’s a Mac-only app, and I’m not sure if there are any plans for a Microsoft-compatible version.
The unregistered shareware comes with basic features, that can be used without restriction, and without an expiration date for the app that I’m aware of, but I paid only $20 online for the registration code that lets me use the full features.
If you’re as into algorithmic art as I am, and have a Mac or similarly compatible system, check this app out, and start making your own truly incredible images.
For me, making fractals this way is an exploration of what’s possible each time I produce a batch of images, while saying to myself, “What happens if I click on this, or fiddle with this number?”
Book Review: The Spaceships of Ezekiel, by Josef Blumrich
Image via Wikipedia
An acquaintance and I were engaged in a rather impromptu discussion of the subject of the biblical book of Ezekiel, and in our verbal sparring he claimed, as has Erich Von Däniken, that the Old Testament book described a real, physical event, the literal visitation to the prophet by an alien spacecraft, and pointed me in the direction of this book.
It’s a work of fiction describing, sort of, the idea that there was something much more interesting going on than just the prophet being out of his ever-lovin’ tree during a mystical experience, and Josef Blumrich’s book goes into elaborate detail on the mathematics of this ‘spacecraft’s’ technical specifications, the math taking up a good portion of the book.
Well, having read Ezekiel prior to this review, I couldn’t help but note that there was no hint, no mention anywhere, in the prophet’s description of what he saw, of any relative scale, physical measurements, or any sort of quantitative descriptive terminology that would permit the alleged technical specs to be defined in any manner at all.
There was literally nothing at all in the biblical book which Blumrich could have possibly used to derive his elaborate and elegant math.
Surprisingly, this niggling detail did not impede the author’s brilliantly fertile imagination…
Could it have really happened? I doubt it. I mean, aside from the fact that’s there’s still the debatable question of the Old Testament prophet’s actual historicity, much less that ET had come a’ calling during the Bronze Age to a lone Middle Eastern patriarch to take him for a spin.
If Ezekiel did indeed exist, then given the evidence, it’s far more likely that nothing physical happened to be explained, beyond something biochemical going on in his brain at the time, and that he was simply spaced-out, instead of hitching a ride to outer space.
If you like somewhat dry, technical science fiction, then this book is for you, but with a wee bit of amphibole, I cannot recommend this book highly enough as a serious scholarly work. Read into that what you will…
Related Articles
Book Review: Death From The Skies – by Philip Plait, PhD
Phil Plait has really outdone himself with his most recent book, in which he describes all sorts of realistic ways for the universe to do us in that dwarfs into microscopic insignificance the most twisted and ambitious fantasies of religious nutters who are horny for the Apocalypse™.
Not only does he achieve this, he goes into the details of how these events, all of them scientifically possible, could at the very least bring about the ruin of the world’s economy and infrastructure and at worst annihilate not just all life, but the Earth and the universe itself.
But does he talk over his audience’s head?
Certainly not.
Even this skeptophrenic blogger can understand the details he so carefully and with enviable wit and humor goes into. Throughout the book, he avoids gratuitous use of arcane jargon and facilely explains the terminology he does use that may be unfamiliar to some picking up an astronomy book for the first time. He never talks down to his readers, showing his skill as a scientist and science communicator by avoiding pedantry.
In those cases he uses mathematics, he does so in ways that are illuminating, not intimidating, that last, except to convey just how awesome…and awful, some of these cosmic disasters really are, or would be if the cosmos decided to severely b*tch-slap us with its might.
Nor does he engage in the fear-mongering that characterize similarly-themed popular works of catastrophist pseudoscience.
An important feature he uses to introduce each chapter is a vignette graphically detailing a fictional scenario of the sort of events the chapter describes, afterward giving brutal but clear detail of the science behind the event of discourse, noting the real (and in most cases incredibly unlikely) chance of occurrence of the cosmic smack-down, and where possible, what we can do about it.
Yes, in some of these scenarios he describes what we can do to prevent or mitigate some of these events, while conveying the dangers they pose if we do nothing. The first events he discusses are the easiest to deal with, asteroid and comet impacts, as well as the aforementioned preventive measures nicely explained even to a beginner, and moving up on that scale are solar flares and coronal mass ejections — the former being solar tornadoes and the latter hurricanes by comparison.
These last two, while we can’t prevent them, we can lessen the effect on our infrastructure and economy, and offset if not prevent their collapse and the fatalities that could result, say, in the dead of winter.
Some of these events are inevitable, given enough time, three in particular: the death of the Sun, the collision and merger of our Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy, and of course, the demise of the entire universe literally uncountable years in the future. In the space of this review, I cannot overstate how mind-bogglingly far in the future it will be — to get a sense of it, buy or borrow the book! Phil puts it in much better terms than my Troythuluness can ever hope to.
The appendix at the back is useful, highly so, and shows the currently estimated probabilities of each of these things happening to us, with some shown as incapable of estimation beforehand, like our likelihood of being attacked by aliens, since for this we have nothing to base the estimation on.
That being said, he notes that the evidence that we are still here, despite the short span of time needed to colonize the galaxy by an ambitious and aggressive species, is a good indication that this currently has a probability very close to zero. If they were around, they would have found us and wiped us out already, which indicates either that they lack hostility and ambition, or they aren’t around to do us in.
The fact that we are here to speculate about it is telling.
Thanks, Phil (*whew*).
An example of the probability of anyone being killed by one type of event, the Gamma-ray burster, is given at about 1 in 14 million — I’m a lot more likely to be killed by a shark, and I don’t swim.
My only problem with the book, and this is just a nitpick, is the couple of typos I found in the text, and to be fair, I suspect that’s the printer’s fault, not Phil’s. It will probably be corrected in future printings, so it’s all good.
Overall, I found this book engaging, highly entertaining, and a welcome dose of astronomical reality in a veritable sea of similar-themed but crappy books written for the lowest common denominator.
My advice: Buy it..or borrow it from the local library!
You’ll learn some really cool things about the universe, not just how vulnerable we are, but how lucky we happen to be to exist and flourish on this tiny globe, spinning around a largish but typical yellow variable star that has a temper, the only place in the universe we know of in an incredibly hostile cosmos that harbors life.
Good job, Phil!
