Illustrated Stories from the Bible

(That They Won't Tell You in Sunday School)


Everything from Elisha and the bears, to the rape of David's daughter by David's son.

Plantbot

Plants not getting enough sun? Try one of these:


Now, if I can get it to wander to the faucet every few days....

Beautiful galaxies

Today's APOD is particularly beautiful:

Now that's a megastick!

I've been sleeping too well at night. Fortunately, now I've got this to contemplate: They just discovered a half-meter long insect in Borneo--Chan's megastick (Phobaeticus chani).


I'm not sure which is coming true, Cloverfield or Starship Troopers; but whichever it is, it should keep me up at night.

Music Blooms

There's a pretty cool iPhone/iPod Touch application from Brian Eno that came out recently: Bloom. It lets you create your own ambient music, works pretty well, and is a hell of a lot of fun for $4.



Thanks to Bob Boilen.

Pot, meet kettle

Cool factoid: Next time you need to pot-and-kettle someone, quote Miguel de Cervantes

"[S]aid the frying-pan to the kettle, get away, blackbreech"

(Don Quixote, chapter LXVII)

Sounds much classier, don't it?

Carl Sagan's Cosmos

Well, this is pretty cool: Someone has gone and put the entire 13-part Cosmos series online for free (who knows how long it will be available, though.



Still an amazing series. The effects are, of course, a little cheesy and dated; but it is still as profound, touching, and moving as ever. Hopefully another billion people will watch it.

Go football!

*Sigh*



Looking forward to a long and lucrative career.

The Things He Carried

Jeffrey Goldberg's article from the November Atlantic titled "The Things He Carried" provides a frightening look behind the scenes at the supposedly-comforting-though-more-often-arbitrary-and-inconvenient sham that is airport security.

On another occasion, at LaGuardia, in New York, the transportation-security officer in charge of my secondary screening emptied my carry-on bag of nearly everything it contained, including a yellow, three-foot-by-four-foot Hezbollah flag, purchased at a Hezbollah gift shop in south Lebanon. The flag features, as its charming main image, an upraised fist clutching an AK-47 automatic rifle. Atop the rifle is a line of Arabic writing that reads THEN SURELY THE PARTY OF GOD ARE THEY WHO WILL BE TRIUMPHANT. The officer took the flag and spread it out on the inspection table. She finished her inspection, gave me back my flag, and told me I could go. I said, “That’s a Hezbollah flag.” She said, “Uh-huh.” Not “Uh-huh, I’ve been trained to recognize the symbols of anti-American terror groups, but after careful inspection of your physical person, your behavior, and your last name, I’ve come to the conclusion that you are not a Bekaa Valley–trained threat to the United States commercial aviation system,” but “Uh-huh, I’m going on break, why are you talking to me?”

Tim Minchin

What would you get if you put Ben Folds, Victor Borge, Randy Newman, and George Hrab in a blender? Probably a mess. But that mess might be something like this guy:



There are approximately 7 billion awesome Tim Minchin videos on YouTube; particularly enjoyable are "Inflatable You", "If You Really Loved Me", "If I Didn't Have You", "If You Open Your Mind Too Much", "Not Perfect", "Some People Have It Worse Than Me", and "Peace Anthem for Palestine".

Science in the goo

This was pretty cool: Science is reporting that vials have been found from Stanley Miller's original 1953 experiment, and have been chemically re-analyzed. Where Miller originally found five amino acids, the reanalysis found 22!

PZ Myers covers it over on Pharyngula. It was also on the Science Magazine Podcast, and Miller's 1953 Science paper is available here.

Feynman's last message

From Richard Feynman's blackboard at the time of his death in 1988:

Seth Shostak, "E.T., where are you?"

Here's an excellent lecture Princeton's Seth Shostak delivered at ASU last year discussing, among other things, how long we'll have to wait until E.T. comes calling. Specifically, he mentions Carl Sagan's, Isaac Asimov's, and Frank Drake's estimates of the number of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy, 1,000,000, 670,000, and 10,000, respectively. Applying Moore's Law to SETI's listening capabilities and these estimates, we could expect to detect the first extraterrestrial civilization by 2015, 2022, or 2027, respectively. He doesn't mention this, but even pessimistically assuming that N=100 civilizations, the date of first detection would only be pushed to 2039. And if we are the only one, we should know by 2051. So within my lifetime, it is almost certain that there will be a definitive answer to this question.

Weird coincidence: I blogged about watching David Bowie's The Man who Fell to Earth just a few days ago. About nine minutes into this lecture, Dr. Shostak mentions this movie, and that Bowie made a big mistake coming to earth for water, when there are in the same solar system moons with 60-mile-deep oceans and several trillion comets. This points out one of the central flaws of many fears people have about aliens: That extraterrestrials would show up to enslave us, to eat us, or to steal some essential resources (all of our water, our atmosphere, etc.). These are all very unlikely to occur; the galaxy is filled with all of these resources in much higher abundances, more easily obtainable, in shallower gravity wells, and without several billion sentient beings protesting. And as far as enslaving or eating, we can barely hurl a few tons out of low earth orbit, and we're already on the verge of artificial meat, so it's very unlikely they'd come all this way to eat us when, if they have a taste for humans, they could easily grow their own tasty human flesh (that's the first time that phrase has appeared in this blog). And the technology to bring them all the way here would be easily able to do anything human slave labor might accomplish.

Other interesting factoids he points out: We (well, not me) are currently trying to spectroscopically detect methane in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets. Methane cannot exist for long periods in a warm oxygen atmosphere; it relatively quickly breaks down into CO2 and water. Distant civilizations should be able to detect us (well, the presence of life) by the above-equilibrium level of methane in our atmosphere. A large amount of this methane comes from the . . . posterior eructations of livestock. Thus, if we detect methane in a distant atmosphere, we may very well have discovered pigs in space.

Final interesting fact: The human brain runs on about 25 watts. That's just amazing--the most complicated structure in the known universe uses the same power as a lightbulb.

Darmok and Jalad

Darmok and Jalad at . . . ow, my face!

Turing Test

The Turing Test remains safe . . . at least for now. Of course, the machines are still scheduled to rise up and kill us all just three years from now. . . .



Dr. Steven Novella on An Upcoming Turing Test and Artificial Consciousness.

Full text of Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and the original article from Mind (1950) 59(236):433-460, if your institution can access it.

Cartoon-Off

The Great 2008 New Yorker/XKCD Cartoon-Off!

Who is Barack Obama?

Who is he really?

FACT! Barack Obama spent twenty years in the same church as radically black pastor Jeremiah Wright, who has been known to make such incendiary claims as "white people enslaved black people" and "white people killed Native Americans." Is Barack Obama part of the international black conspiracy to trick white people into thinking about racism? Answer: maybe.

FACT! Barack Obama has been friends with Rashid Khalidi, an openly Arab Arab who is so Arab he writes about other Arabs. Is Barack Obama part of the international Arab conspiracy to trick white people into thinking about Arabs? Answer: also maybe.

Facts don't lie, people. (Neither do FACTS.)

Sad customer service

It's sad when you know more than customer service. I've got a fancy Nike watch-heartrate-pedometer combo that's supposed to download from the watch through a USB receiver. Unfortunately, the software hasn't recognized the connection since I got a new computer. So I called Nike. After three holds and transfers:

Me: "Yeah, my Triax Elite isn't being recognized by the computer."

Nike: "What software are you using?"

Me: "...the Triax Elite software?"

Nike: "No, what software are you using?"

Me: "You mean operating system? It's OS X 10.5."

Nike: "I don't know why a new computer would make it stop working..."

Me: "Apple changed its processors; it's a new chipset."

Nike: "Oh. Let me check. [Five minutes later] We don't have any software for new Macs."

Me: "Nevermind. That's OK, I'll just go buy a new $300 watch."

Well, at least all three people I talked to were very friendly about it. It's too bad--the Nike Triax Elite HRM/SDM has been a very good system for me for two or three years now. The only major problems are that the watch bands don't appear to be sweat-proof (two of them have corroded completely through), and that the battery hatch on the foot pod is accessed through a screw-off cap made entirely of plastic. The slot to twist it strips very easily, and it is now jammed in there unmovably. Fortunately the compartment can be accessed by removing four tiny screws and taking the thing apart--kinda a pain in the ass, but at least it works.

The major thing that the Triax had going for it was that it was compatible with a Mac (and the software isn't too bad). I don't think the Garmin, the Suunto, the Polar, or the Timex are. :P

Chemistry is hot

I don't know what it is . . . there's just something about {trans-1,4-Bis[(4-pyridyl)ethenyl]benzene}(2,2'-bipyridine)ruthenium(II) that gets me all . . . excited.



On second thought, it must be the β-cyclodextrin. Yeah, that's the ticket--look at the acetal linkages on that babe!

Religulous

Saw Religulous tonight. It was an excellent movie, if that's the right adjective; others appropriate might be hilarious and terrifying. It was certainly full of laughs, and very enjoyable.

It was filled with remarkable examples of (often) seemingly intelligent people tripping over themselves making ridiculous arguments in support of things they are determined to believe at all costs. And Maher is sharp, quick, and dead-on in pointing out logical implications, ridiculous assertions, and hypocrisies.

With the exception of one instance where Jesus left him speechless.

Lighthouses are more useful than churches.
-Ben Franklin

Hayden Panettiere PSA

Hot enough to keep your attention for 30 seconds.

See more Hayden Panettiere videos at Funny or Die

John McCain: Everyone gets fucked.

I Drew This

Well, no, I didn't. But the blog I Drew This consistently has excellent commentary on political happenings. And the most recent post is even more excellent than the usual excellent excellence*.

You see a lot of false equivalencies in the media. It's sort of their creed: if you report that Republicans have done something that makes them look bad, you must immediately find a way to say that Democrats do it also. That is how you seem "fair." If the Republicans are, for instance, lying through their teeth, and the Democrats aren't, you're obligated to say something like "Republicans are claiming that Ted Kennedy is a serial killer, but Democrats today used a very generous interpretation of their tax plan, so both sides lie."

She then goes on to use Paul Krugman as an example the day before he won the Nobel; pretty good timing!

*Note to self: Buy thesaurus.

Worst . . . movies . . . ever

Tonight I watched both The Man Who Fell to Earth and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, which I think is the most surrealistically crappy combination of movies possible.

And I made my SO watch them, so I guess I'll be sleeping on the couch.

(Breakin' 2 actually has a surprisingly good scene where a character dances up the walls and across the ceiling, accomplished by rotating the room--they pulled it off pretty well. The rest was crap, though.)

Christopher Hitchens, Ira Glass, and the melting economy

I love Christopher Hitchens--I'd read a Hitchens commentary on the phone book. He just did a piece for Vanity Fair titled "America the Banana Republic", in which he skewers the powers that got us into this mess. Best line:

Remember the scene at the end of Peter Pan, where the children are told that, if they don’t shout out aloud that they all believe in fairies, then Tinker Bell’s gonna fucking die? That’s what the fall of 2008 was like, and quite a fall it was, at that.

Also, back in May, This American Life did a very popular episode explaining the then-breaking mortgage crisis in layman's terms for those generally unfamiliar with financial doublespeak. This week they did part two of the series, covering the global financial meltdown--pretty good, if terrifying.

Bette Davis is missing something...

Roger Ebert blogged yesterday on the new Bette Davis stamp, which is sans her ubiquitous cigarette (although her fingers remain extended around the missing cylinder). And, as Ebert points out, stamp collecting is clearly a gateway to hard-core smoking for the impressionable youth.

Now my paternal grandmother died all to young from lung cancer--ten years on my three other grandparents are all healthy octogenarians--so I'm no fan of smoking. If all cigarettes disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't mind in the slightest. (Although the occasional cigar is fun in an oooh-I'm-a-50s-sophisticate kind of way.)

But give me a break: Screwing with the historic record so as not to offend modern sensibilities is ridiculous. My mother owns a children's book store, and many (probably most or all) classic books which featured authors smoking in their jacket photos have been cropped, switched, or digitally edited to have the smoking removed. Goodnight Moon's Clemont Hurd has been digitally de-smoked. Shel Silverstein not only smoked, he was pot-smoking hippie Playboy cartoonist--it'd probably be safest to ban him altogether. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Mark Twain smoked, as did most heroic baseballers from the golden age; characters (titular or secondary) smoke in Curious George, Babar, Tintin, and many, many others.

Finally, Santa Clause smokes, according to Clement Moore. Plus, he's unhealthily overweight. Guess we'd better change

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laugh'd, like a bowl full of jelly:
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;

to

The stump of a candy cane he held tight in his teeth,
And the scent of it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and some tight little abs
That stayed firmly in place when he laugh'd, like an iron-hard slab:
He was fit and trim, a right jolly old elf,
And I laugh'd when I saw him in spite of myself;

Honeybees can count to four

Honeybees (Apis mellifera) can count up to four — giving them another string to their navigational bow. Working at the Australian National University in Canberra, Marie Dacke and Mandyam Srinivasan trained the insects to fly down a tunnel in search of food placed beside one of five identical landmarks positioned at intervals.

When trained bees flew into a tunnel that had no food, they searched most at the previously rewarding landmark — unless it was number five.

Moving the landmarks nearer to or farther away from each other did not fool the bees, showing that they were not relying on distance, but were counting the number of landmarks before the food. Changing landmarks from stripes to spots had no effect either, suggesting that bees can use numbers in an abstract way.

Summary from Nature (25 Sep. 2008) 455(7212):435; original work from Animal Cognition (2008) 11:683-689.

Interestingly, this is the same Nature issue that featured this unfortunately coincidental front and back cover:


(The closing sci-fi story is worth a look, too.)

Meteoroid impact

There's been some recent buzz about a meteoroid that hit us last Tuesday. Basically, for the first time, an object this small (2m) was detected significantly in advance of its hitting the atmosphere, allowing prediction of the time and point of impact. Unfortunately, it hit over the middle of nowhere northern Sudan at 5:30 in the morning, and apparently no one on the gound has reported sighting it (a shame, since it should have been amazing).

But apparently the one-kiloton flash was captured by at least one weather satellite.


Some cool videos, simulations, and more info can be found on these sites:
http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/Main/Media/Features/707785?l=en
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/news/home/30686199.html
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news159.html

Three reasons to move to Canada

The news (especially on BoingBoing) is full of crazy today.

120-page EULA for children to watch Disney BluRay.

According to The USA Today, teenage girls gaining weight makes them "fat".

The McCain-Palin base is 1) the rich and 2) the ignorant.



That is all.

World Exclusive!

MOST SIGNIFICANT and UNDENIABLE UFO VIDEOS OF ALL TIME THAT ALSO COVER ALIENS IN THEM WERE CAUGHT ON TAPE in ISTANBUL! . . . WITH MOST AMAZING FOOTAGES OF ALL TIME!!

With hyperbole and grammar like that, this can't be anything other than legit.


İstanbul / Kumburgaz UFO's and ALIENS ARE BACK in 2008! from fox mulder on Vimeo.

Holy crap--that video is totally unfakable! (It's an amazing coincidence how the quality of UFO videos is so much better in these days of ubiquitous video editing software. I wonder why videos today look so much more . . . professional, while those from 20 years ago look much more like hubcaps on fishing line. It's almost like there's some sort of conspiracy...)

So . . . much . . . want

Holy crap! This guy is a serious bibliophile and general collector of nerdabilia. He's got an original Sputnik, an original Robert Hooke's Micrographia, an Enigma machine, a Kelmscott Chaucer, books bound in rubies, a napkin on which FDR outlined his plan to win WWII, and about a billion other things, all collected in the coolest wood-paneled multi-level Escheresque library I've ever seen.

I don't think I've ever been so jealous; I need to invent a Priceline.com and become an Internet millionaire.

Hal Bidlack

Skepticality this week interviewed Hamiltonian scholar and retired Air Force lieutenant colonel Hal Bidlack, who is now running for Congress. We need more politicians like this guy.

(I obviously don't agree with all of his positions; for instance he implies that universal health care might not be a top priority, and that NASA might not need quite so much money. But he's clearly a guy with intelligence, integrity, and compassion--why is it strange to find those qualities in politicians?)

Fireside comfort

Sarah Vowell was on The Daily Show the other night and gave an excellent interview:



She mentions that she has recently started listening to FDR's fireside chats for comfort and reassurance in a time of national economic crisis that she's not otherwise receiving. I got curious and went poking around; you can find the fireside chats (and many other cool presidential speeches) here, and here is the first fireside chat from March 12, 1933.

I also found the earliest extant recorded voice of an American president (there was reportedly an older recording of Rutherford B. Hayes, which is now lost). It's Benjamin Harrison's inaugural address from 44 years earlier; March 4, 1889:

Amen

I wouldn't include my dad in this category, but definitely other family members and a father-in-law.

A Ha!

"Take on Me," the literal version. Now I finally know what this song is about!

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Wil Wheaton

Have I mentioned yet in this blog that Wil Wheaton is awesome?

Make-Believe Maverick

From a Rolling Stone article titled "Make-Believe Maverick" by Tim Dickinson:

This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.

In its broad strokes, McCain's life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Ouch.

What are you doing here?

Just saw the last episode of Doctor Who (a little late in catching up). The new series have been unquestionably awesome, and the last season even more so. A whole slew of excellent episodes: "The Unicorn and the Wasp," "Silence in the Library," "Turn Left," the finale...all excellent.

You know the best thing about Doctor Who? The writing.

Dawkins and Krauss

Here's an excellent discussion between Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss at Stanford University titled "Against Ignorance". It's available in various formats at richarddawkins.net, as well as free on iTunes.

Among the things the biologist and physicist discuss is whether Darwin or Einstein was able to make the more fundamental intuitive leap in human understanding. Interestingly, the biologist expresses admiration for the achievements of Einstein, and the physicist for Darwin, both stating how difficult their respective intellectual leaps were; perhaps reflecting that through years of experience their own disciplines seem overly simple, or through unfamiliarity the other discipline seems overly difficult.

Dawkins very enjoyably ponders why it took so long for science to get its Darwin; the fact of evolution should have been evident as far back as Aristotle, or even for as long as humanity has been breeding plants and animals. Again, someone open-minded enough to violate the fundamental assumptions needed to make that simple leap took thousands of years to come along--much longer than the 30 years needed for an Einstein--indicating, perhaps, that the assumptions in question were that much more deeply ingrained, and perhaps explaining why the simple and easily-observable theory is still so gut-level controversial today.

It will be interesting to see, if a Unified Field Theory ever comes along, what basic assumptive stumbling blocks might have been in place that prevented its development for so long.

Einstein's smart

I just read the original Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper, source of their eponymous paradox. (Check it out--it's only four pages, and probably nearly two of them are mostly skipable math.) It's a really interesting read. It is absolutely precisely reasoned (obviously--it's Einstein), and the conclusions are inescapable. What's remarkable is that they choose exactly the wrong conclusion.

It's interesting to note that Special Relativity was lying around waiting to be discovered for about 30 years before Einstein noticed it. It was (in retrospect) completely obvious from Maxwell's equations and the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment, and several people, such as Lorentz and Poincaire, were within a gasp of discovering it. But no one did discover it. Because what the equations implied was the contradiction of an assumption so basic that no one could conceive of discarding it; no one even realized it was an assumption. It was apparent from theory and from observation that light moved at the same speed for all observers. And it's plainly obvious that v=d/t. But no one came out and said that if velocity remains constant, distance and time must be changing. I mean, that's third-grader math. Sure, the details are more complicated than that, but if all observers measure the same speed for light, their perception of time must be different. But it took an Einstein to say it, because adjusting that postulate seems ridiculous.

And 30 years later, he* makes the exact same mistake in the first line of the EPR paper--hell, you can't even call it a mistake; he goes through inescapable steps of logic and comes to an unavoidable conclusion. He admits that it's absolutely clear from theory and experiment what the implications of Quantum Mechanics are. And he realizes that either QM is mistaken, or our basic concept of what "reality" is is wrong. And he concludes reducto ad absurdum that it must be QM that is wrong, because the assumption that reality is "wrong" was beyond his comprehension; it's ridiculous. For SR it was the absolute nature of space and time; for QM, it's the concreteness (or the "singleness") of reality. However, it is now absolutely clear from theory and experiment that our intuition about reality is wrong: there are no hidden variables; the located particle has every momentum; the electron travels through both slits.

This is not a criticism of Einstein, of course (I mean, who looks at a result and says, "That's right, and existence is wrong"? Even now, I think pretty much no one has a fundamental grasp of what's really going on, and just what the theory implies; hell, I probably made half a dozen fundamental errors in the last paragraph). This is just an observation about humanity: I notice a similar thing whenever I'm debating a Creationist, or a conservative, or pretty much having any argument. Most people are not deluded, irrational, or dishonest; they are more or less capable of forming logical constructions from a set of assumptions. Arguments usually (or at least often) seem to arise from constructions built out of different sets of postulates. Is freedom of each individual or protection of every individual the most important right? I think that one axiomatic difference explains about 90% of the differences between liberals and conservatives. If your postulates include the inerrancy of the Bible or that 2+2=4 or that Muhammad spoke to Gabriel in a cave, then trying to talk you out of them would be like convincing Euclid that triangles have more than 180º; postulates are by definition basic assumptions which can't be proved, and their definition is what keeps philosophers employed. And some of these postulates are so fundamental to our nature and our worldview that it's very difficult to break them; it sometimes takes an Einstein or a Darwin to do so. (I'll post about Darwin's postulate-breaking breakthrough next.)

Thanks to Eliezer Yudkowski's post on this topic, which was much more clear and eloquent than I've been able to achieve.

*I actually have no idea who did most of the work on the paper. But Einstein's going to get most of the credit because he's, well, Einstein.

Bill Maher on The Daily Show

(I meant to post this last week, but forgot:)

Bill Maher was a guest on The Daily Show last week. I know he's not had an impeccable record of judgement over the years (no, I'm not talking about Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death), but this interview was pretty funny, and the movie looks pretty good, as well.

Piggies

Ever wonder what to call the nameless toes on your feet? The ones between the big toe and the pinky toe? Well, thanks to a 1991 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, all five toes now have proper Latin anatomical names! Ready? They are, from biggest to smallest:

Porcellus fori
Porcellus domi
Porcellus carnivorus
Porcellus non voratus
Porcellus plorans domum

Translation is left as an exercise for the reader.

(Thanks to A Way with Words.)

Which Shakespeare?

I think I might need a new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare. The edition I have (the Pelican edition) is just fine, but who can be satisfied with a Pelican when there's an Oxford edition available (which contains Edward III & Sir Thomas More)? Normally, if there's an Oxford, I'd call that definitive and be done with it. But my very clever friend, who instigated this introspection, has the Yale edition, which appears to be pretty up-to-date, but for some reason doesn't seem to be very available (I wonder if Yale University Press doesn't sell through Amazon?). There's also an interesting-looking Norton edition based on the Oxford, but which is almost three times as long; a handsome Modern Library edition; a Bevington edition; and a Riverside edition, all of which got 4.5 or 5 stars, compared, strangely, to the 3-star Oxford (though it's the Oxford that's the source most found on Wikipedia).

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find any consensus as to which is the best or "definitive" edition. Guess I'll probably just wind up getting the Oxford...

Materialistic intelligence

On this week's The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, a listener wrote in saying that her debate opponents, essentially, argue for the irreducible complexity of human-level intelligence--that some miraculous force is required to explain human intelligence; i.e., the old materialism/dualism debate. The Skeptics did a great job in pointing out the logical errors in the arguments the questioner was encountering. However, it got me thinking about what arguments she can use for her position--i.e., that there can be a scientific basis for intelligence materialistically arising simply from the interaction of our neurons, that we are "more than the sum of our parts". She might find some discussion of the phenomenon of emergent behavior helpful. This concept results from the observation that many systems exist where the high-level behavior is not immediately apparent from the properties of the low-level components. That is, it is not inherently apparent from the properties of quarks or electrons that the aerodynamics of a plane's wing or the display of high-level information on my computer screen should be implicit, yet these emergent properties are the sum of trillions of base-level interactions.

The predominant example is probably the social insects: No study of the abilities of individual termites would ever suggest the complex collective accomplishments they are capable of when taken by the thousands or millions. No individual possesses significant intelligence; there are no orders from the queen; there is no psychic hive mind that makes decisions. But when each termite makes individual decisions based on inherent genetic instructions and environmental perceptions including chemical signals, complex behaviors emerge, such as the optimization of path-length to food resources or orientation of mounds relative to sun and airflow. Interestingly, in analogy to the apparent "obvious" gap between humans and animals, there is an "obvious" gap between collective insects such as termites and individual insects with no socialization--there don't seem to be a lot of semi-social insects. Again analogous to human/animal cognition, I suspect this gap is in a large sense perceived or imaginary, caused by factors such as: 1) The enormous evolutionary success of the two endpoints, with the semi-social middle not being terribly advantageous. 2) My own, and, I suspect, the general public's, ignorance of these middle groups. There are probably fossilized pre-social insects, insects that only form loose colonies, insects such as locusts with intermittent emergent behavior that might not strictly be called "socialization." But I'm much more familiar with social or asocial types, which are understandably more often covered by science media. This somewhat overlaps with: 3) Our human nature of categorizing things distinctly, leaving little room for grey-area exceptions (and, in the case of intelligence, our hubris).

It doesn't seem to be at all implausible that the firing of 100 billion neurons with an average of 7000 interconnections each would result in emergent properties not dissimilar in some respects to a learning or chess-playing computer--especially since this seems to be what is observationally suggested. There is still plenty of room for speculation about the rules of how this behavior emerges, what the specific properties and processes are, and the philosophical implications thereof, hell, it's possible some mechanism other than emergent properties may ultimately be determined to be responsible for human cognition. But regardless, there are certainly plausible scientific explanations which are the basis of current research, no metaphysics required, which shoot down suggestions of miraculous requirements as well as the evolution of eyes or flagellum shoot down irreducible complexity.

Some resources that discuss emergent behavior, some directly, some tangentially:

Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach
Much of Richard Dawkins, especially perhaps The Selfish Gene
I believe E. O. Wilson covers some of this, perhaps in The Insect Societies
Richard Feynman played around with ants and discusses, among other things, their path optimization in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
(And here's PZ Myers discussing ant trails that stumped Feynman, and the Nature paper solving the mystery.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky discusses emergence in posts such as "Reductionism" in his excellent blog series on taking the mysterious out of quantum mechanics, which is very enjoyable for many other reasons, as well.

Finally, I enjoyed Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence, which attempts to materialistically describe the emergence of intelligence from the brain. I'm not a neuroscientist (neither is the author), but, while his specific models and mechanisms may be wrong, his gestalt concepts of emergent mechanistic intelligence struck me as pretty plausible (rather than, say, Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, which implies that quantum effects are necessary to explain intelligence, which seems unlikely).

Hope you haven't just eaten...

Sir David Attenborough discussing some truly humongous Australian earthworms. Two-meter long earthworms. Yeah, that could only come from Australia.

James Randi on homeopathy

Title pretty much sums it up, I think.

I'm Obsessive

I have a confession to make: I've never read The God Delusion. Or On the Origin of Species. I know: I'm a fraud. Worst . . . atheist evolutionary biologist . . . ever.

The problem is that I'm obsessive: I find an author that I simply love, and then I read them and read them and read them until I've read everything they've ever written. I mean, when you read a novel like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you want the entire world to be filled up with Douglas Adams' books. You'll read their proverbial laundry list. Or the posthumous leavings on their computer.

Some authors over whom I've obsessed: Douglas Adams, Stephen King, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, F. Scott Fitzgerald*, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Simon Winchester. I started Isaac Asimov a few years ago. How's it going? Ask me in 400 books. It's so bad, I actually resent prolific writers. Part of me despairs that there will never be a new Stephen Jay Gould book to read, but part of me is glad that I might now actually catch up.

You'll notice Dawkins was on that list. Unfortunately, it's been about seven years since I finished all of his books, which means I'm now two or three books behind. And all of his were such Douglas-Adamsy profoundly good classics that I really ought to read them again.

One of the reasons I love Homer, Dante, and Cervantes? They had the common decency to save up their life's work into a reasonable number of magnum opi. Similarly Sam Harris and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Socrates? Genius. Aristotle? Fuck you. Goddamn geniuses like Martin Gardner, E. O. Wilson, and Mark Twain are going to kill me.

I'm similarly obsessive about music. Those bands who's songs make you feel like they were written for you, and you don't want to risk the chance that there's something out there just as good that you're missing out on. Artists I've obsessioned: The Beatles, Ani DiFranco, Cake, Ben Folds, Barenaked Ladies, Grateful Dead**, Nick Drake

Somebody help me.

*I don't even like Fitzgerald. This brings up a second category of author: Those who are interesting and/or culturally or historically relevant. The likelihood that they'll get read varies inversely to the size of their canon. Fitzgerald fortunately only had a few novels and some short stories.

**OK, I'm obviously a liar about having everything the Grateful Dead have ever done--that'd be like collecting all of the water in the ocean. But I have at least reached the point where even Dick Dick's Picks would concede I'm at saturation. I mean, how many concert versions of "Sugar Magnolia" can you discriminate?