2010

ARCHIVE: 2010

To link to ideas associated with a posting, click on topic heading or the link under the topic heading.

Caveat: Inevitably, given the ever evolving state of the Internet, some of the links on past postings may be outdated.

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2010-01-01 -- THEME: HAPPY NEW YEAR AND END OF THE WORLD

You wake up with a hangover. You think you’re going to die from the agony. And then you realize you’re not––and now you’re even more despondent. You'll live. And a hangover isn't The End of the World. That was supposed to happen back at the turn of the millennium, when everyone was buying lots of bottled water and unplugging their computers before the whole technological infrastructure crashed just because some frugal, byte hoarding, computer programmer only used two digits to represent the year. But you know––promises, promises, promises! Well, the promises keep coming. Maybe our Western calender was flawed, and we should rely on the Mayan one, which cycles on the lucky number 13 and promises our end in the year 2012. The Mayans were, after all, a sophisticated people, full of good ideas which we still could gain from implementing. For example, some entrepreneur could make it big time by selling to soccer hooligans tzompantli, a stake the Mayans used to mount the heads of defeated ballgame opponents. It may even be possible to avoid the end of the human race by reinitiating the Mayan practice of human sacrifice, where children were killed by having a priest cut open their chests and tear out their hearts as an offering to the gods. Even if you don’t believe in these bloodthirsty gods and prefer you own slightly less nasty ones, this public policy would still do much to reduce that major threat to our species' survival: over-population.

WILL IT BE FIRE OR WILL IT BE ICE?
Frost favours ice. (Pun intended.)

WILL IT BE...THE LIST GOES ON AND ON!
So what are the chances of it being over in the next 70 years by various means? (Personally I would prefer to wait for the Second Law of Thermodynamics to get around to finishing the great heat death of the universe––but then I’ve always preferred unpleasant things being put off to the last minute.)

DOESN’T MATTER REALLY, FOR THE EARTH WILL BENEFIT ANYWAY!
In his book, The World Without Us, Weisman agrees with Horace: “You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back.” And then, of course, Gaia breathes a big sigh of relief! (Infection cured.)

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2010-01-08 -- THEME: I ROBOT

Is it time to put Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics on the books and hardwired into all our new devices? Robots are coming along nicely, although not as quickly as the ‘hard AI’ folk forecast several decades ago. Still if would be good to know that the command "Open the Pod Bay Doors, HAL!" would have to be obeyed. Interestingly, the development of AI and robotics has been most successful when modeled on biological evolution rather than human engineering. This is to say that natural selection seems to work better than “intelligent design”––assuming of course that we humans qualify as being intelligent.

ROBOTS INVADE

ROBOTS EVOLVE

ROBOTS BECOME BEACH BUMS

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2010-01-15 -- THEME: IT’S ALL IN YOUR MIND!

You can’t cure cancer by “the power of positive thinking”, nor will negative thinking cause cancer. But there do seem to be a lot of medical and psychological disorders that are caused by our attitudes as well as alleviated by our attitudes. The former are called psychogenic illnesses, and the latter are the mysterious result of placebo treatments.

PLACEBOS, NOCEBOS, AND ETHICS

PLACEBOS GETTING STRONGER?

WATCH PLACEBOS WORK

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2010-01-22 -- THEME: IT’S BEEN A YEAR!

It has not been a month of Sundays. It’s been a year of Fridays. Time flies when you’re having none.

TIMELINES FOR EVERYTHING
Wonderful resource for putting things in temporal perspective.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME
Movie very loosely based on Hawking’s book with a sound track by Philip Glass.
PART1 PART II PART III PART IV

SPACETIME CONTINUUM
The poetry of time.

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2010-01-29 -- THEME: POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Every university in Ontario is being held hostage by the provincial government; in fact, apparently every public sector organization in the province is. The bosses demand 100% compliance from their employees to an indoctrination course on dealing with “persons with disabilities” or the consequences are dire. ($100,000 per day per organization and $50,000 per day for each director and officer of the organization!) Yes, while the course is inane, it is well-intentioned and relatively innocuous; and, unlike in Orwell’s 1984, one doesn’t have to pass a test that says 4 fingers are 5 or indicate one has learned in this course that it is wrong to call the disabled -- “people”! Not yet, anyway. Maybe the next round will require everyone ‘pass’ some PC test. So, just maybe, this is a precedent worth worrying about? Enuf. Friday is about offering up ideas, not about serving as a soapbox. This government’s idea is certainly an ‘interesting’ one. Two of the links below are humourous, for Political Correctness is inherently funny (except to the grim-faced politically-correct or those who are penalized for failing to be PC), and satire of it can be thought provoking. The third link is more serious, because censorship isn’t funny at all.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

ON A MORE SERIOUS NOTE CLOSER TO HOME

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2010-02-05 -- THEME: SCIENCE AND THE POPULAR MEDIA

Once upon a time there was a canon, a body of knowledge and a skill set that every educated person was assumed to possess. Any educational curriculum has to specify what percentage of time to devote to what are considered the essentials, the canon. An education exclusively devoted to what someone (or some committee) has decided is essential is bound to be parochial. (The Athenians wouldn’t even consider ‘electives’ in foreign languages, for they considered them barbaric.) But an educational system without a canon is no education at all--and education in Canada and The States is approaching that abyss. We allegedly have more educated people than ever before. More than 90% of Americans 25 or older have completed high school, yet according to one survey by Baylor University, 55% of Americans believe in guardian angels! And look at the widespread belief in astrology, homeopathy, faith healing, parapsychology, and other utter nonsense. Obviously one desperately needed item to be introduced to the mandatory curriculum is science. I don’t mean a whack of courses in specific sciences. I mean training in how science works, how to think critically and skeptically, and––very importantly––how to evaluate what is presented as science in the popular media. It is ironic that science has such cachet that con artists routinely dress up their nonsense in lab coats. It is disheartening that the solid scientific principle of opposing hypotheses battling it out is so misinterpreted by the popular media. One result is the attitude that because there is disagreement between scientists, one should just believe in what feels good. (Hell, if scientists debate whether the Big Bang occurred 13.5 or 14 billion years ago, you might as well believe some Almighty God made the whole mess in 4004 B.C. The hard-core creationists are all in precise agreement with their dates!) Another result is that of giving equal credence (and equal time on the tube) to some charlatan speaking pseudo-scientific gibberish as to a respected scientific expert in the field. Journalists interested in ‘presenting both sides‘ should realize that doing so doesn’t mean giving equal time to every nutcase disagreeing with an established scientific consensus.

DISAGREEMENT IS AT THE HEART OF SCIENCE
The author of this column is also the author of a wonderfully sane book: Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear. “We are the safest and healthiest human beings who ever lived, and yet irrational fear is growing, with deadly consequences—such as the 1,595 Americans killed when they made the mistake of switching from planes to cars after September 11. In part, this irrationality is caused by those—politicians, activists, and the media—who promote fear for their own gain.”

LETTER TO MR. MEDIA FROM MR. SCIENCE
A personification of science writes a letter to the personification of media. This is from from a neuroscientist with a great sense of humour. His whole blog archive is a delight. (Thanks to S. Hevenor for this link.)

“MEDIA SENSATIONALIZING SCIENCE” (PSEUDOSCIENCE ACTUALLY)
This is a short BBC news piece that somewhat acknowledges what is wrong with most news about science. The “see also”s are worth reading as well.

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2010-02-12 -- THEME: OTHER MEN FRIDAY

Seems this Man Friday isn’t the only Friday guy. (Gosh, and here I thought I was unique.) Check these websites out.

WHAT’S NEW BY BOB PARKS
The physicist, science commentator and author (Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud; and Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science) sends a Friday newsletter to anyone requesting to be added to his list. This one page, usually four-item report, of what is being done right––and what is foolishness––in science, as reported and as funded, is always delightfully frank and entertaining. The link is to the archive, but from there one can subscribe to a regular Friday email.

SPEAKING OF POEMS BY DAVID KOSUB
An incredibly thoughtful and articulate blog about poetry (and life) posted every Friday. Each posting is a beautifully crafted essay, and, unlike so many blogs, the contributors of comments are consistently literate and informed.

SCIENCE FRIDAY RADIO AND PODCAST
This website links to an Internet radio and podcast program broadcast every Friday about what’s new and interesting in the sciences.

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2010-02-19 -- THEME: TRAVEL IN THE INTERNET AGE

The science-fiction writers and futurists of several decades ago got one thing very wrong. They believed there would be revolutionary developments in transportation, but it was communication where the revolution occurred. However this revolution did have a major effect on travel. We don’t fly around with jet-packs, but we do a lot of virtual travel that was inconceivable a mere few decades ago. I was thinking about this as we recently flew home from Malta. Planes haven’t changed that much. In fact many of the metal boxes that contain us as we fly over the Atlantic are older than almost any cars still on the road, and a transatlantic flight takes just as long now as it did fifty years ago. But the revolution in communication has made travel a very different experience. The Internet casts a wide net over the whole globe, and access to it is widely available while travelling. I wonder at how I managed the logistics of travel before the age of the Internet. Examples follow.

VIEW FROM THE STREET
You want to quite literally see what you’re getting into at your next destination? By now everyone uses Google Maps which is global, but the area covered by their Street View option continues to expand as well. Upon getting home I happened to notice that they’ve even done Northern Ontario. If homesick, I could’ve walked (virtually) up my street and looked at my house back here in North Bay. (Mind you it was my house last summer, so there was none of that white stuff to make me glad I was in the Mediterranean.) This link below is to the road into Nipissing University’s campus. (The URL is extremely long and has to be pasted in as one ‘word’. It is easier to simply type “Nipissing University” into the Google Maps’ search box and then drag the little man icon to where you want to ‘stand’ and look.)

A MULTITUDE OF PERSONAL GUIDES
It’s nice to have a guide, especially one who doesn’t make you follow a timetable -- or charge you for the service. No matter where you are, you can learn about the place online, get everything from formal detailed information about the place to personal advice from recent travellers to your destination. When in a Wi-Fi zone you can search out all the relevant websites and save them to your mobile device to carry with you as you explore. One such free software application is “Instapaper”.

A DROPBOX IN THE CLOUDS
At one point I needed a file from home. I emailed my son who uploaded it to a ‘cloud’ (a storage folder on a remote server), and I then was able to download it onto my laptop computer. “Dropbox” is a free application that connects one to several gigs of free storage in virtual space. One can upload files to this dropbox, and download from it, it on any computer or mobile device such as one’s iPhone.

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2010-02-26 -- THEME: SICK TV

Television is a great and versatile medium. But, as in books, it is content that really matters. (The medium isn’t really the message. It’s only the container that shapes it to some extent.) There are a lot of PBS, TVO and BBC (even CBC) programs that are more literate than the majority of books and magazines sold at convenience store check-out counters. Despite the once-justified contempt for most of network TV, in the cable and satellite era it is hard to say whether the ratio of trash to quality content really is worse for TV than for print media. It may just be that the crap that makes it into print isn’t as much in everyone’s face as it is with TV. The popularity of trash TV shows is more obvious, because it, unlike tabloids, is in our living rooms every time we turn on the Tube. The following links are to popular TV shows that seem to represent some strange ideas––and say something about our baser natures. All these clips are intended for immature audiences and viewer indiscretion is advised. It is worth contemplating what is the ‘idea’ behind each of these nasty shows.

THE JERRY SPRINGER SIDE SHOW
Each episode of this show focuses on some lurid topic and places guests in confrontational situations where they expose ‘dirty’ secrets which frequently result in physical fighting between these ‘guests’. Topics include bestiality, incest, infidelity admitted publicly, dubious parenthood, pedophilia, strange fetishes, dwarfism, or transvestism. Here is a sample episode.

PRISONER’S DILEMMA: GOLDEN BALLS
What could be more entertaining than watching people lie and cheat -- out of greed?! There are no winners in this game show. One person ends up broke. The other shows himself or herself to be a lying asshole in front of the apparently large audience for this sort of nastiness. Here is a sample episode.

SURVIVOR SILLINESS
This is perhaps the original and archetypal “‘reality” TV show, extremely popular throughout the world. In the show contestants are allegedly isolated in the wilderness and have to compete to ‘survive’ for prizes. During each episode the members of the group vote off other ‘tribe’ members until only one final contestant remains as the "Sole Survivor". It, and its various spin-offs, may be a mini-psychodrama about how politicians and grifters behave, but it sure isn’t based on rewarding competitors for being the best at something. Like all these so-called ‘reality shows’, it is cheap to produce and focuses more on our species’ ability to be nasty than being really good at something. Here is an amusing parody of “Survivor”.

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2010-03-05 -- THEME: THE MULTIVERSE

If anything is likely to cause your head to explode, it is thinking about contemporary theories in physics. The Nobel laureate physicist, Richard Feynman, once remarked, "Anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics doesn't understand quantum mechanics." Well, if Feynman can say that, heaven help us dilettantes who try to grasp these ideas. An easy way to develop empathy with Alice in Wonderland is to venture into the Wonderland of modern cosmological theory. But then, hell, it's fun to get lost in this topsy-turvy world of modern physics. Forget the tired cliché of "thinking outside of the box"; these scientists are thinking outside the boundaries of the whole known universe. Back in the mid-fifties Hugh Everett proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI), which suggests there is a multiverse, of which our known universe is only an infinitesimal part. (Interestingly, it was the pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James who coined the term “multiverse” half a century before.) At first Everett wasn't taken seriously, but now his MWI is one mainstream interpretation of the established paradoxes that empirical support of quantum theory throws in our faces--such as the arrow of time not really existing!

ONE PHYSICIST HUNTS FOR THE ULTIMATE THEORY
A clearly written article about theoretical physicist Sean Carroll's theory to 'resolve' the time paradoxes of modern physics by turning to the multiverse idea. (Thanks to my son for pointing me to this.)

ARROW OF TIME TALK
A taping of a full one-hour lecture by Sean Carroll where he clearly and wittily explicates the current theories that attempt to resolve the mystery of the Big Bang, entropy, and time's apparent unidirectionality. It concludes with his own preferred explanation, one that posits a multiverse.

THE MANY WORLDS OF HUGH EVERETT
This article is about the tragic life of the originator of the revolutionary theory which started it all. It is sad that the personal lives of so many of the brilliant people who explored the farthest regions of philosophical science were so tragic. One thinks of Frege, Wittgenstein, Godel, Turing, etc.

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2010-03-12 -- THEME: THE USEFULNESS OF DEPRESSION

We’ve just had a week of sunshine, record temperatures, and an early spring is in the air. Seems like a good time for dark thoughts. Physical pain is necessary for survival. But chronic, unrelenting pain can override the basic instinct for survival. This also seems to apply to emotional pain, but it’s easy to forget that such pain is also necessary for survival. How we manage both physical and emotional pain raises all kinds of questions, especially now that we have much better resources for managing pain than in the past. If you have a toothache now, you can take drugs to kill the ache. But most of us are sensible enough to acknowledge it as an important warning signal and go to a dentist. We don’t just keep taking the painkillers, assuming the problem is resolved. However, we now also have drugs to relieve emotional pain, but in this case some people seem to think that this really does resolve the problem. (Of course, sometimes symptomatic relief is all one can expect and something to be very grateful for.) There is no ‘dentist’ to quickly fix the underlying cause of a person’s depression with some kind of psychological ‘root canal’. I know mental health workers and so-called “spiritual advisors” sincerely try to fulfil this role, but their efficacy is questionable. It’s all very complicated and controversial, but the following perspectives on one form of chronic emotional pain are certainly food for thought while enjoying the early spring.

DEPRESSION’S UPSIDE
“Darwin wrote, it is the sadness that informs as it ‘leads an animal to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial.’ The darkness was a kind of light.”

DEPRESSION AND CREATIVITY
“A number of writers propose that mental illness may even help nurture creative potential for some people.”

MANUFACTURING DEPRESSION
“Am I as happy as I should be? We've become so obsessed with that question that it's making us miserable, says psychotherapist Gary Greenberg.”

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2010-03-19 – THEME: FORGET AI, CONSIDER AC!

The nature of creativity is one of my most passionate interests, and I’ll openly admit that my respect and admiration for the great creative minds in the arts and in the sciences verges on idolatry. However, the more I study creativity, the more doubts I have about this gift really defining our species as unique. And the paradoxes associated with creativity are confounding and counter-intuitive. One such paradox is that the heart and soul of creativity is not in the creating—but rather in the critical evaluation. Enough monkeys pounding on typewriter keys (or computers generating random characters) will eventually write “To be or not to be, that is the question.” But neither monkey nor computer can tell if that line is more worth keeping than “To be or not to be, that is the xjfjisll.” I’ve written software to write grammatically correct lines of poetry, some of which are awesome, but most of which are just silly. Although my program can sometimes produce lines I honestly wish I’d written, my program can’t tell they’re the keepers––only I can. Still, there is evidence of computers becoming capable of critical judgements. The advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are mind-boggling, but even more amazing (and disturbing) are the developments in artificial creativity (AC). They really threaten our probably exaggerated self-esteem, as evidenced by the reaction such developments elicit. Here are some articles to make us feel less secure about our allegedly unique human abilities––and make one seriously ponder what creativity really is.

THE TRIUMPH OF THE CYBORG COMPOSER
I’ve been following this guy’s activities for some time. Thanks to my son for this recent article about his work.

AN OVERVIEW OF ARTIFICIAL CREATIVITY
Worth noting is something I’ve often said: The random number generator is the poetic soul of computers.

COMPUTER STORY WRITER
Just one–somewhat silly, but fun–example of computer-generated fiction. Type in “story generator” in Google and one will see many examples of programs that are in some small way creative writers.

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2010-03-26 – THEME: THE LAST BASTION OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

Humour seems to be the last bastion of freedom of expression in these politically correct times. But that may have always been the case: the King’s fool could get away with saying things others in the King’s court wouldn’t dare say. So, too, can comedians say things that would get even tenured professors promptly fired. Not surprisingly there is a lot of humour about political correctness. One can only hope it makes The Crusaders For Virtuous Speech think a bit more about what they’re doing. Unfortunately, they’ll just be offended. These are just links to some of my favourite skits by some of my favourite irreverent comedians.

STICKS AND STONES WILL BREAK YOUR BONES, BUT NOT WORDS
Lenny Bruce

PC PANTOMIME: WHAT IS, AND WHAT IS NOT, OK
Mitchell and Webb

HEAVEN HELP US ALL
George Carlin

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2010-04-02—THEME: WHEN IS SCIENCE ART?

I’ve tried to convince my Psychology of Art students that science is an art form. But rather than try to convince them of the inherent aesthetic value in an elegant scientific theory, I take an easier path. To make my point, I offer up visual images––which are surely beautiful art––that science and technology have made possible. However, some of them argue, with some justification, that it is the photography that is the art. To this I can only respond that artists themselves have blurred the boundary between idea and object when it comes to art. That is what Conceptual Art is all about. The following links are to beautiful images, but in each case the context, the supplementary text (or subtext) about the underlying ideas can be an important part of one’s aesthetic appreciation. This is true of all art to some extent: e.g., appreciation of Impressionism is augmented by understanding the context in which artists like Monet and Renoir were working––and their very different ideas about what art should do, ideas very different from that of their academic contemporaries.

SCIENCE IDEAS VISUALIZED

Both the images and the ideas behind them are incredible. (Thanks to Phyllis Reeve for this link.)

http://www.sciencemag.org/special/vis2009/show/

LOOKING CLOSELY

Science looks closely at things, and that is a damn good definition of art as well. (Thanks to Kate Stange for this link.)

http://www.microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artjan07/bj-cacti.html

THE ART OF THE COSMOS

This classic series about science is a work of art in itself, as well as capturing most poetically the wonder of the scientific enterprise. (The link is to the first episode, but the whole series is now available online––thanks to the technology science has made possible.)

http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=4606291619468708689&hl=en#

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2010-04-09—THEME: TESTING SCHOOLS

“The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.” (Tom Bodett) Schools out, schools out, teachers let the monkeys out. For most Canadian university students, classes are over; only exams remain. In other words, it’s all over but the crying. And not just for the students. There is also a lot of crying out loud among the faculty—about how lazy and illiterate the students are. Me too. Mea culpa. But putting things in a global perspective can ease the pain. Since 2000, every three years the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) administers a test (PISA) to evaluate the scholastic achievement of 15-year-old students in its member countries (the majority of countries in what is called the “developed world”) and also, as of 2006, to approximately the same number of less economically well-off countries. It measures performance in literacy, science and mathematics. It may be hard to believe, but only Finland beat out Canada in science, and Canada also scored near the top in literacy and—go figure—mathematics. But rather than smugly resting on our laurels, or wondering how students in other countries could possibly be worse, it is worthwhile to try to determine what we are—amazingly—doing right and what we still must be doing wrong, considering the lack of preparation for university evident in so many of our students. However, looking at the list, it is befuddling to try to correlate performance with educational philosophy or any other variable (cultural homogeneity, money spent on public education, gross national product, etc.) For example, consider the two radically different approaches to schooling of two-high scoring countries mentioned in the BBC articles below.

THE LEARNING TOWER OF PISA

A nice, clear explanation of the test with summarized results. The OECD site has more data, but it is complicated to navigate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_Student_Assessment

NORTH: CHILL OUT, BE COOL

Finland.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8601207.stm

SOUTH: TOILING IN THE FIELDS

South Korea.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8605789.stm

RECOMMENDED LINKS RE LAST FRIDAY’S ART AND SCIENCE

Thanks to Tony Parkes for this link to some stunning images with accompanying ‘context’. Note Nipissing’s Ashley Marcellus’ winning entries (91 and 92).

http://www.nikonsmallworld.com/gallery/year/2009/1

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2010-04-16—THEME: THE DEAD POETRY SOCIETY

“Where have all the flowers gone? / Long time passing / Where have all the poets gone? / Long time ago / Where have all the poems gone? / Gone to graveyards every one / When will we ever learn? / When will we ever learn?” I don’t think that poetry is really dead, but at least in North American society poetry as an art form probably ranks below needlepoint or origami in popularity. One reason for this is that poetry is as much about sound as sense, but it has been silenced, has been bound and buried--in textbooks. Here are some ideas on how to raise it from the graves of academe.

READING ALOUD

Poetry is meant to be heard, but few of us read aloud anymore. Here we hear some major living poets raise their poems from the page.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/videoitem.html?id=221

MUSIC

An interesting project to sing some dead poets back to life.

http://www.ted.com/talks/natalie_merchant_sings_old_poems_to_life.html

PERFORMANCE

Shakespeare only really comes fully to life in performance. And film makes these performances more widely available, just as printing democratized the written word.

http://www.poetryvisualized.com/media/2244/Tomorrow___and_Tomorrow__-Ian_McKellen_-_Shakespeare/

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2010-04-23—THEME: ONE MAN’S TRASH IS ANOTHER MAN’S TREASURE

We are consumers and have to face up to that fact rather than pretend we can change our nature. The problem is not consumption itself, but rather that the consumption is never complete consumption. One consumes dinner, but never completely, or we wouldn’t need toilets. So too we consume the wonderful products of science and technology, but, again, never completely. These once wonderful things also end up being shit, and our toilets for them are getting clogged. (New York City isn’t alone in shipping its trash to another state to bury in someone else’s bigger backyard.) Yet one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. (How else to explain divorced people remarrying?) Here are three interesting ideas for turning trash into treasure—or call it “recycling” or “developing sustainable resources” or whatever—that struck me as getting too little attention.

BURN IT, BABY, BURN IT

Here is a great idea for turning trash into the treasure that is energy. I’ve seen very little media coverage of this. Although becoming more and more common in Europe, it seems it is not being implemented this side of The Pond largely because of a misguided NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard!) attitude.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/science/earth/13trash.html?pagewanted=all

PERSONALLY PASS IT ON

Rather than sending off something you no longer want to a landfill, why not give it to someone --someone who actually wants it? You feel good. You don’t have to pay a dumping fee or stuff it with your other garbage or sneak it off at night to an unlocked industrial dumpster. Give it away and someone gets something they want for free. And it’s as easy as sending an email saying, “Got this thing. Anyone who wants it can come and get it out of my face.” Until you have used this service called “Freecycle”, you can’t imagine how valuable the stuff you think of as trash may be to someone else—someone who might know how to fix it or is just delighted to get something they were about to buy. And it cuts both ways: you give, but you also get. I saved 35 bucks on a new “Gentle Leader” collar for one of my dogs because my wife thought to email the Freecycle list-server a “looking for” message. There are 1,700 North Bay members anxious to give and receive. (Freecycle has over 7 million members globally.) The link explains the simple system and how to become a member of your local group. Of course it’s free.

http://www.freecycle.org/

PUT ALGAE TO WORK

This sounds like a solution that kills two birds with one stone. Algae are often a blight, clogging lakes and rivers and destroying high-diversity ecosystems. And of course carbon as a by-product is seen as a primary cause of global warming. So why not cage the algae and feed the little buggers the carbon—and get fuel out as a by-product?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=co-location-could-make-algae-biofue-2010-02-22

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2010-04-30—THEME: NATURE VERSUS NURTURE

Common sense is a misnomer, for it isn’t common. So when an individual says publicly what should be common sense, we find it so very remarkable that the appropriate but paradoxical response has to be, “He shows uncommon, common sense.” Stephen Pinker is such an individual. Furthermore his uncommon, but very sensible, ideas are based on solid empirical evidence, for he is a scientist. (He is also a ‘psychologist’, which, alas, doesn’t necessarily follow from being a scientist.) His ideas about the perennial ‘Nature versus Nurture’ debate are worth one’s attention. He also has ‘walked the talk‘ by participating in the Personal Genome Project, which involved incredible personal disclosure.

THE HUMAN AS A BLANK SLATE?

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_pinker_chalks_it_up_to_the_blank_slate.html

MY GENOME, MY GENETIC SELF

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11Genome-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

CHALLENGING THE KNEE-JERK ISSUE OF VIOLENCE

http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

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2010-05-07—THEME: SURVIVAL OF THE (MORALLY) FITTEST

What has biology to offer by way of explaining morality? A lot, it turns out. Evolutionary psychology has illuminated many dark areas of human behaviour, and Dawkins’s idea of the “meme” (a cultural equivalent of the gene) has expanded the whole conception of evolution. An innate moral grammar analogous to the innate language grammar postulated by Noam Chomsky has been proposed. Certainly, on the surface, altruism seems inexplicable when viewed in the simple context of natural selection, survival of the fittest, and the selfish gene. But even animals have been shown to have an innate sense of fairness. Psychopaths, who seem to be without any ethical concerns whatsoever, have been shown, through brain imaging technology, to have specific dysfunctional cortical areas. Philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, have turned to science to help them answer what are fundamentally philosophical questions. This week’s links are about this confluence of that prescriptive branch of philosophy, ethics, and science’s purely descriptive data on what we call morality. These very interesting insights may help us understand more about that really strange idea that there is a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’ thing to do––something that appears to not be unique to us Homo sapiens – or adults.

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2008/04/theemergingmoralpsychology/

PRIMATE MORALITY

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050212191635.htm

BABY MORALITY

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/magazine/09babies-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

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2010-04-14—THEME: VALUES AND SCIENCE

My wife tells me that contemporary philosophy textbooks no longer use the term “axiology”. And I discover that it isn’t even common enough to be included in my computer’s software dictionary. This is an unfortunate example of a useful and precise word fading from use. Clearly a word to describe the branch of philosophy that deals with values (aesthetics and ethics) is categorically useful and descriptive––and important. The logical positivists defined themselves by trying to saw off this branch from the tree of meaningful philosophy. Scientists make a point of claiming science has nothing to say about values: Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. No more of Keats’ nonsense about “Truth is beauty, and beauty truth.” Truth is value-free. Beauty is subjective. Empirical research in aesthetics can reveal what makes different people find something beautiful, and even why, but it cannot say what is in fact beautiful. Social psychologists can gain insight into why sometimes we behave altruistically and other times don’t give a damn about other people’s suffering, but they cannot say what is the morally right or morally wrong thing to do. Or so at least this seems to be the contemporary consensus on values, both aesthetic and ethical. A dubious extrapolation from this is aesthetic and ethical relativism. There is no beautiful and ugly: beautiful is just what I like. There is no good and evil: good is what I consider good. This is the ultimate axiological democracy. All opinions are created equal. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, even if he is myopic. And so too with morality. If parents believe killing their child is the right thing to do, perhaps because the child was shamed by being raped or Yahweh demanded this sacrifice as proof of devotion, then who is to say the act is objectively evil? Not everyone agrees with this. In these links some people go out on a limb, specifically that fragile branch of philosophy called axiology.

CAN SCIENCE ANSWER MORAL QUESTIONS?

This TED lecture has resulted in a storm of controversy about scientists making value judgements.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html

MAYBE BEAUTY REALLY IS TRUTH

The largely unacknowledged criterion for evaluating a scientific theory is its aesthetic value.

http://www.ted.com/talks/murray_gell_mann_on_beauty_and_truth_in_physics.html

RELATIVITY THEORY IS IRRATIONAL

Are value judgements irrational? Are they absolute? Are they real? All of the above?

http://elephantintheroom.ca/IrrationalIsValue.pdf

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2010-05-21—THEME: ECCENTRICS, YA GOTTA LOVE ‘EM

On Saturday morning I go to the beach at Sunset Park, followed by grocery shopping at Metro. Last Saturday, as I opened the sliding door of my minivan to load in the bags of groceries, I said, louder than I intended, “Hi guys, how’re ya doin? I see you’ve finally caught your breath, but you’re still stinking wet.” A woman, who was getting out of her car near me, looked over at me—and at my apparently empty van—and frowned. I smiled at her. She looked very uncomfortable. “It’s okay, I’m not schizophrenic,” I said reassuringly, “just a little eccentric.” Then I got in the van and drove home with the groceries—and my two Labrador Retrievers lying in the back. It isn’t even really eccentric to talk to your dogs. Most dog owners do. Real eccentricity is having yourself embalmed and placed on display in the hall of the university where you taught, with the further request that your body be brought to all subsequent administration meetings. Now that is eccentric! Most would even say crazy. Hell, wanting to attend university administration meetings even when alive sounds crazy to me. But if the great philosopher Jeremy Bentham was crazy, it didn’t show in his prolific and ultra-rational writings that laid the foundation for the philosophy known as Utilitarianism. Before clinical psychology reared its ugly head, eccentricity was often respected in Academe, not ‘diagnosed’ as something such as “schizotypal personality disorder”. My wife visited Jeremy at University College London, where he still sits in the hall. He didn’t have much to say, but he didn’t object to having his picture taken. (http://www.kenstange.com/manfriday/Bentham.jpg)

MEET SOME NOTABLE ECCENTRICS

http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/List_of_notable_eccentrics/

JOIN THE ILLUSTRIOUS ECCENTRICS

http://www.eccentricclub.co.uk/

ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF ECCENTRICITY

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0876/is_n75/ai_18356303/

RECOMMENDED LINK RE BEAUTY AND DISASTER

Thanks to my better half for an even more stunning portfolio of urban decay in Detroit.

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2010-07-09—THEME: CANINE IDEAS AND IDEATION

The idea of having a wild animal live with you as a companion is certainly a strange one. But most of us don’t give it a second thought. I have two such beasts in my house, and this certainly isn’t unusual. The average number of dogs per household is 1.7 in The States, where a little more than 43 million households own dogs. I suspect it is even higher in Canada and not atypical worldwide. This strange relationship between humans and dogs dates back at very least 15,000 years, but some would put the date at 100,000 years ago. One has to wonder how this truly unique symbiotic relationship came about, and how it has become so important to both species—and clearly not just for survival. We love our dogs and our dogs certainly seem to love us. What survival value does that have for either species? I’d risk my life to save either of my ‘guys’ from harm, and dogs famously do the same for their owners--or even strangers.

DOG INTELLIGENCE

Your dog is probably smarter than a toddler, and, in terms of emotional intelligence, brighter than most of us adults when it comes to reading the emotions of others.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5994583/Dogs-as-intelligent-as-two-year-old-children.html

HOW DOGS THINK

An entertaining interview with a Psyc prof at UBC who is well known as a scientific authority on canines and cited in the above news article.

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/04-05/oct16.html

DOGS: ORGINS AND EVOLUTION

Brief and referenced history of when the wolf turned into Man’s Best Friend.

http://knol.google.com/k/the-dog-its-origins-evolution#

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2010-07-16—THEME: INQUIRING MINDS

Curiosity is a curious thing. Some people are so driven by it that it defines their lives: scientists, artists, scholars, explorers, and children being the obvious examples. Yet some people seem to lack even an iota of the stuff. But at least for the curious, this is clearly a golden age. You want to know something, just ask. No speculation and useless debate is required, thanks largely to the Internet. Of course the tricky part is, as in the rest of life, who do you trust? But be that as it may, finding out about stuff is delightfully easy these days, and it boggles my mind how very easy.

ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE—INFORMATION

“How many neurons does a fruitfly have?” I was in the kitchen with my wife discussing her homemade fruitfly trap when I asked this question. In less than minute I had the surprising answer: 100,000. No, my wife is not an expert on drosophila, not do we have a reference book on the little fellas mixed in with the cookbooks. I didn’t ask her. I asked my iPhone’s voice-recognition Google app. It pointed me to a list of links, of which the second was a direct and authoritative answer to my question. No wonder I sometimes feel like I’m on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise. (Watch the video. It ain’t just hype.)

http://www.google.com/mobile/google-mobile-app/

PUTTING OUR HEAD’S TOGETHER: THE COMMONS MIND

Curiosity is it own reward, but some few of us are lucky enough to also be extrinsically rewarded for it. Curiosity has been professionalized—not entirely a good thing. Many academics are made nervous by Wikipedia, which makes information easily available—and free. Their concern is understandable. Academics get paid for their scholarship, while the scholars contributing to Wikipedia are working for free. However, contrary to the common belief, just because it’s free, it isn’t necessarily worthless. An increasing number of scientists and scholars are using Wikipedia’s underlying principle of sharing knowledge to create special, highly authoritative databases of information. This is one such project. It serves the professionals themselves, but really serves everyone else as well.

http://sciencecommons.org/

TOOLS FOR SEPARATING THE WHEAT FROM THE CHAFF

A common criticism of the incredible access to information now available is that a lot of it is misinformation. This is undeniable, but it is also true of the old, pre-technology sources of information, although the ratio may (or may not) be worse now. A real education is largely about learning who to trust. But for those who have acquired that skill, there is still the problem of having to pick through a ton of garbage to find what is of value. One solution for scientific information is this cool search engine.

http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/aboutus/

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2010-07-23—THEME: LOOKING BEYOND MIDDLE WORLD

We are privileged to see so very much beauty, yet really our vision is extremely limited. Our place in the grand scheme of things is inside an extremely narrow band of spacetime--and our perceptual ability is just as restricted. However, thanks to scientific technology, it is now possible to vastly improve our vision. So it is strange and unfortunate that because this increased power of perception threatens our bloated self-esteem as human beings, it has been (and still is to some extent) met with hostility. When Galileo traveled to Rome to let the pious church authorities see with their own eyes the evidence he offered, many of them allegedly refused to even look through the heretical device. Even a more enlightened century later Van Leeuwenhoek’s use of his microscope to show the existence of marvelous single-celled organisms was met with hostility, and it was only accepted when a vicar dared look through the Dutchman’s magic lens and confirmed what he saw. Clearly some people feel threatened by any scientific knowledge that increases our ability to see deeper and farther. Perhaps this can be—and is being—offset by exposure to the beauty revealed, beauty invisible to our unaided eyes.

THE VIEW FROM THE MIDDLE WORLD

This wonderful talk brilliantly ‘puts us in our place’.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html

VIEWING THE VERY SMALL

Images of the beauty in very small. (Do explore the links as well.)

http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/11/joys-of-microscope-photography.html

VIEWING THE VERY LARGE

Images of the beauty in the very large. (Click on Archive for an amazing gallery of images.)

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

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2010-07-30—THEME: BIRD BRAINS

Through careful observation we have come to more fully appreciate the intelligence of certain mammals, such as the other primates, dogs, and dolphins. This seems understandable in terms of what we know about brains, for there seems to be a reasonable correlation with the number of neurons and neural connections, and the observable evidence of intelligence. It fits nicely with current theories about brain function. But who would’ve thought a tiny ‘birdbrain’ capable of the kind of intelligence that is now being discovered.

CROWS HAVE REASON…

…to crow about their intelligence.

NEVERMORE SHALL WE CALL THE RAVEN…

…a bird brain.

YOU CAN’T EASILY ROOK…

…a rook out of a treat with just a little water.

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2010-08

Your Man Friday will be out of touch the month of August. The silence is not due to any dearth of interesting ideas out there in the virtual world, but rather because he’ll be travelling in the real world. If he survives reality, he will return to his virtual island early in September.

Seems a good time to give belated acknowledgements to everyone who may have pointed me to a link I’ve then suggested, and I haven’t credited. My lame excuse is that I get so many emails saying ‘Ya gotta look at this’ (especially, but far from exclusively, from family) that I lose track of whom to thank.

Also I’d like to thank all those who have told me in person or by email that they’ve especially appreciated some Friday offering. Appreciation is always appreciated.

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2010-09-10—THEME: MATH AS ART

Your Man Friday is back on his virtual island, and these ideas are obviously influenced by his real world journeys, which included presenting a paper on the divorce of "The Two Cultures" of art and science and attending the wedding of two mathematicians.

A MATHEMATICIAN’S LAMENT

"The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art."

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

THE TWO CULTURES OF MATHEMATICS

"If it is true that pure mathematics can be divided into two broad cultures with not a great deal of communication between them, one can still ask whether this matters. In my opinion it does."

http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf

MOEBIUS TRANSFORMATIONS REVEALED

Is this not art and math?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY

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2010-09-17—THEME: THE FATE OF USED BOOKS

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…" (Sir Francis Bacon) Then––if one continues with the metaphor––what happens to them?

THE OBSOLESCENCE OF USED TEXT BOOKS

Textbooks are a lucrative racket. A publisher 'sells' a book by giving it away––to a prof. Those of us teaching introductory courses (which usually have large enrolments) are constantly being given free textbooks in the hope we'll choose to act as voluntary vendors to our many students. And then a variation of "bait and switch" is used: a new edition is brought out making the old text virtually worthless. And these textbooks originally were sold at over a hundred bucks a pop. But now the rise of e-books is changing the game.

http://ca.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idCATRE68E6AV20100915

THE DEMISE OF THE USED BOOK SELLER

Used books, other than textbooks, were once still valuable. The marketplace for them was busy. That too is changing. The bookseller featured in this piece attributes it to decreasing literacy, but the data do not support that contention. Again it probably has more to do with the digital revolution.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/nyregion/15about.html?_r=1

THE RISE OF THE USED BOOK SHARER

And interesting development, probably also at least partially a result of computer technology, is that people no longer need to horde their books, which, being used, have no significant monetary value and can be easily retrieved in digital format. But it seems a crime to throw away a treasured book. So why not give it away? This is one such interesting project where you send your beloved book on a peripatetic goodwill mission.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/about

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2010-09-24—THEME: DANGEROUS IDEAS

Your Man Friday's Ideas are based on the idea that having ideas is our species' best idea. But like some of our other far less admirable ideas, like suppressing ideas, having ideas does have its dangers. Here are some ideas about dangerous ideas.

THINKING RADICAL THOUGHTS

"Brace yourself: these ideas may at first seem shocking or counter-intuitive—but they are worth our attention, even if we end up rejecting them."

http://bigthink.com/blogs/dangerous-ideas

THE DANGER IN THINKING DANGEROUS THOUGHTS

"When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt… Writers who have raised ideas like these have been vilified, censored, fired, threatened, and in some cases physically assaulted."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dangerous07/dangerous07_index.html

YEAH, JUST TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT

"Just as thinking burns energy, stopping a thought burns energy -- like stopping a truck on a downhill slope."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100920172736.htm

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2010-10-01—THEME: TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION

The first––and to-date most important––technological innovation for education was the invention of movable type; i.e., the Gutenberg Revolution. Now we are developing radically new tools, some of which may be as valuable as the printed book has been. Here are three ideas about using these tools, ideas that range from redefining how to educate through how to share knowledge and on to a simple practical physical tool for students.

TAPPING INNATE CURIOSITY THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Kids are naturally curious and love a challenge. "Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be." (Arthur C. Clarke) Seems many teachers should consider job retraining.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html

BUILDING A 'COMMONS' FOR KNOWLEDGE

Richard Baraniuk presents on an ongoing project for going beyond Wikipedia to building an even more educational network that could replace the printed textbook. Information wants to be free. It shouldn't be used to line the pockets of textbook publishers.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html

USING A MEMORY PEN

Here is a practical classroom tool based on a simple idea, an idea with sound learning and memory theory to justify its usefulness––although that remains to be tested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19Livescribe-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

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2010-10-08—THEME: GETTING A HANDLE ON HOOKING

Any self-respecting libertarian (and that is not a typo for libertine) will support the legalization of prostitution. Ontario (of all places!) now has taken a step in that direction with the decriminalization of prostitution––or technically speaking, just aspects of it. It is no surprise that this isn’t met with glee from the “Real Women” organization or the “Family Values” crowd or the “Religious Right” politicos or even a faction of militant feminists. Nor is it any surprise that the “sex trade workers” (as they prefer to be called) applaud it. It just seems more reasonable to listen to the prostitutes than to all those who claim to know what’s best for them––or for that mythical beast “society”. Typically those who know what is best for other people don’t really know a damn thing––except their own prejudices and fears.

FIVE MTYHS ABOUT PROSTITUTION

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/10/AR2010091002670.html

HAPPY HOOKERS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqfCE40DfQo

A THOUGHTFUL ANALYSIS

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1374/is_1_63/ai_96417149/?tag=content;col1

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2010-10-15—THEME: THE MYSTERY OF MUSIC

It's certainly not a novel idea or observation that music can affect our emotions. What deserves thinking about are the paradoxes associated with this. Music is the most abstract of the art forms, yet seems to have a direct line to our emotions that no other art form has. Music can almost instantly change our mood, yet genres such as the 'blues' cheer us up. People fear the power of music and try to censor it, yet it permeates every known culture––no matter how repressive. It has a profound effect on even newborn humans, but most other species don't seem to have any response to it. The following links don't directly address these paradoxes, but they celebrate them--and celebrate being alive.

LET US REJOICE AND BE HAPPY!

"There are ten levels of prayer, and above them is music."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJqXjvlKa2w&feature=email

OH HAPPY DAY!

"Oh what a glorious day! What a glorious way. Oh happy day, happy day! I'll never be the same. Forever I am changed."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a37bBm8pXSk&feature=related

HALLEULUJAH!

"I'll stand before the Lord of Song / With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE&feature=related

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2010-10-22—THEME: THE IDEA THAT MUSIC IS DANGEROUS

Music has always been seen as a threat to totalitarians. Plato saw it, like poetry, as a potential threat to his 'ideal' totalitarian Republic. Confucius and Mao both shared Plato's conviction that only music that did not threaten the established order should be permitted. The Soviet and Nazi and Fascist governments are notorious for their extreme and self-destructive censorship. Even in democracies, fundamentalist Christians have had success in restricting access to music they find threatening. The Islamic religion's intolerance of music is even more extreme. Of course censors don't limit their targets to any one art form, but, even more than the printed word, music has been seen as threatening. The reason may be that its effect is more both more immediate and more widespread. Music seems to have the most direct channel to our emotions. And it reaches a far larger audience than the printed word. And words delivered on the vehicle of music, rather than the page, have more impact.

FREEMUSE

Visit at your own risk, especially if you click to listen!

http://www.freemuse.org/sw305.asp

BANNED LYRICS

An 'entertaining' list of what has been targeted.

http://www.musiclyricsfyi.com/banned-lyrics.html

ZAPPA ZAPPING A PMRC SENATE COMMITTEE

"Don't eat the yellow snow."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxB-ZePpS7E

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2010-10-29—THEME: EXPLETIVE DELETED

A now-retired English prof once came into my office grinning sheepishly. A student had submitted a paper about one of Shakespeare’s plays where she had tried to politely discuss the various sexual imbroglios in one of the Bard’s comedies by referring to “fornification”(sic). My colleague was slightly concerned that he had over-stepped the bounds of academic propriety when, in marking her paper, he had written in the margin of this student’s paper that “the fucking word is fornication.” After I stopping laughing, I said that was one of the most amusing corrections I’d ever heard and that he shouldn’t worry because “if they can’t take a joke, fuck ‘em!” It is interesting, and amusing, that even individual words can be seen as threatening to so many people. This Friday is devoted to the memory of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin who clearly saw what a bad joke censorship is and how funny our relationship to taboo words is.

STRONG LANGUAGE IS UNIVERSAL

Thou shalt not use the name of…

http://articles.sfgate.com/2005-09-25/news/17390497_1_linguistic-language-dialect

ABOUT HUMBUG AND BULLSHIT

Penn and Teller tell it as it is.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xrq1z_210-profainity_videogames

IT REALLY IS A LAUGHING MATTER

The classic Carlin bit on the "Seven Dirty Words".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_Nrp7cj_tM

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2010-11-05—THEME: THAT MIRACULOUS SACK OF CHEMICALS

Each of us are defined by three pounds of “wetware” packaged in our cranium: a hundred billion neuronal cells with up to ten thousand synaptic connections each, all poured into a bony container that wouldn’t hold more than 3 pints of beer. (And, furthermore, what it contains is almost 80% water—but then so is beer.) Every thought we have, every move we make, changes this congealed, convoluted, and soggy mess in profound ways. How easy it is to change the flavour of this neural stew is called the study of neuroplasticity. What has been discovered about this plasticity is mind-blowing.

EXPLORING BRAIN PLASTICITY

http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/The_Nature_of_Things/1242300217/ID=1233752028

REWIRING THE BRAIN

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/michael_merzenich_on_the_elastic_brain.html

SUCCESSFUL MIND MELDING

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101024/hogan-conjoined-twins-birthday-101024/

(Acknowledgements: the first link thanks to one of my students: Curtis Cooper; and the third link thanks to two students of my colleague Matti Saari.)

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2010-11-12—THEME: CROSS-CULTURAL FERTILIZATION

Every major advance in art and science and human culture has been a case of cross-cultural fertilization. Civilizations flourish when they are not isolationist but instead welcome and interact with each other. As complexity increases there is, of course, a need for some compartmentalizing and specialization. But it is the interaction of people with different ideas, values, and expertise that is essential for advancement in any area of human endeavour. Inbreeding is unhealthy. Miscegenation is healthy. Here are some interesting matings of diverse fields of human endeavour.

MUSIC AND SCIENCE

The symphony of science.

http://www.symphonyofscience.com/

POETRY AND MATH

The intersection of math and poetry.

http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com/2010/10/length-of-coastline.html

KINETIC ART AND ENGINEERING

An amazing art installation at the BMW Museum.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/5XXGch/www.artcom.de/kinetik/

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2010-11-19—THEME: UNUSUAL OUTLETS FOR CREATIVITY

Creativity is a word, like intelligence, that has many different meanings. Some would reserve it for an attribute of those who create worthwhile contributions to civilization: innovative scientists and artists. But in its broadest definition it simply means creating something new. The urge to do this is not universal, but it is very common. The outlets for this urge may be insignificant -- and sometimes the opposite of a contribution to civilization -- but they are, like anything new, surprising and amusing.

BIKES

http://matadorlife.com/photo-essay-20-of-the-freakiest-bikes-on-the-road/

FOOD PRODUCTS

http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2010/08/04/weird-and-creative-food-products/

TOILETS

http://www.weirdpalace.com/toilet-art-creative/

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2010-11-26—THEME: WHY ART?

Why art? This is one of the most perplexing of philosophical—and scientific—questions. Is there some instinctual need for creating things that elicit that mysterious, intense thing we call the aesthetic experience? And why is that experience so valued and sought after? What possible value does it have in terms of natural selection and survival of our species? Darwin asked what conceivable value there is in that cumbersome, dysfunctional peacock’s tail—which makes him easy prey, but somehow seems to attract peahens, like groupies to a rock star, willing to get it on with him? Years after publication of The Origin of Species, Darwin started down the road to explaining it with his theory of sexual selection. But what conceivable value, in evolutionary terms, does a picture, a sculpture, a concerto, or a poem possess?

THE ART INSTINCT

Is there a reasonable Darwinian theory of beauty?

http://www.ted.com/talks/denis_dutton_a_darwinian_theory_of_beauty.html

VENUS: A GROTESQUE OBSESSION

Why is the Muse a woman? Why is the inspiration for art, even twenty-five thousand years ago, the archetypal female?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNP6XRLbYWo&feature=related

THE DAY PICTURES WERE BORN

Is art the reason we stopped being hunters and gathers and developed civilizations?

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HgIiUoKj6w&feature=related

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRHzhvjMTgY&feature=related

Part 3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AngFa_CYoVE&feature=related

Part 4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sA5IcgV39M&feature=related

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2010-12-03—THEME: IDEAS MAKE US FREE

Your Man Friday readily admits to being a curmudgeon, even a misanthrope. But he is also an optimist. Despite often feeling and behaving like just another old guy whining about how things are going to hell in a hand basket, he is also an empiricist—and so has to acknowledge the indisputable fact that globally things are actually getting better, much better. To say this is not a complacent justification for all the things humankind is doing wrong, making things worse, and fucking up our planet big time. Rather it is to point to the ‘right thing’ we have somehow managed to do often enough to still be here. As the speakers in these TED talks so eloquently elucidate, this ‘right thing’ is mutual exchange, a free market in ideas and skills. Our special nature lies not just in our individualism, but also in our connection to a communal ‘mind’, something only made possible by the collapse of the artificial barriers thrown up by ideology, religion, and so-called ‘professionalism’. Our special human gift, and our redemption, is our willingness to have and share ideas.

WHEN IDEAS HAVE SEX

http://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex.html

HOW IDEAS TEAR DOWN WALLS

http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_tabarrok_foresees_economic_growth.html

HOW IDEAS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY IS ALL ABOUT

http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_innovation.html

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2010-12-10—THEME: CONSCIOUSNESS

Sometimes Your Man Friday, when stumbling off to an early morning class, is met and greeted with the traditional “How are you?” He often then replies, “Conscious. It’s a start.” Actually it is the end—the end result of millions of years of evolution. And it allows us to wonder about what it is? Daring to wonder about this profound philosophical question was once considered inappropriate for the wannabe science of psychology, but that has changed. Understanding “qualia”, the subjective quality of conscious experience, is the ultimate hard problem in brain science. Scientists no longer fear to tread where before only philosophers dared to venture.

QUALIA, WHO ART THOU, QUALIA?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTWmTJALe1w&feature=related

QUALIA, WHAT ART THOU, QUALIA?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-theory-of-consciousness&print=true

QUALIA, WHERE ART THOU, QUALIA?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/science/21consciousness.html?_r=2&hpw=&pagewanted=all

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2010-12-17—THEME: POETRY IN MOTION

There are three components to poetry: the visual, the aural, and the cognitive. The successful merging of the last two has been the defining characteristic of great poetry from its beginnings: the perfect melding of sound with sense. With the advent of printing, the visual component (the look of the poem on the page) acquired importance, and poets who deviated from conventional forms, such as the Imagists, used it very effectively to enrich their poems. The Concrete Poetry movement over-emphasized the visual, and usually the works were little better than poems about trees with lines arranged to look like a child’s drawing of a tree. But a newer, animated, variation of this is more interesting. It is usually called “kinetic typography”. It’s an interesting idea and is cleverly executed in these kinetic interpretations of poems by good poets.

IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD

Rudyard Kipling

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tTeZNfwesg&feature=related

OF THREE YOU CAN HAVE TWO

Kenneth Koch

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjXHRUlKe_M&feature=related

DREAMS IN WHICH I'M DYING ARE THE BEST

Gary Jules

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4nqFL2o5Cw&feature=related

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2010-12-24—THEME: ‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE JOLLY, TIPSY

“Better Living Through Chemistry” is an old DuPont advertising slogan. It wouldn’t wash these days, where the word ‘chemical’ has taken on a pejorative connotation. Now it is better to advertise “no chemical additives” when selling a product for consumption. But of course quite literally everything is composed of chemicals, including us. And putting butter on your bread is applying a “chemical additive”. The fact is that we really do have better living through chemistry. Consider those chemicals that interact with the chemicals in our brains and make us feel good. The earliest, and still most popular one, is good, old-fashioned (and I mean old) alcohol. Most of us still enjoy a certain chemical additive in our eggnog.

BEER: THAT CIVILIZING RECREATIONAL DRUG

To begin to build a civilization, we had to settle down and give up that ridiculous lifestyle of always being on the move, hunting and gathering. And what better motivation to hang around some place than to wait for the fermentation to finish, so we could party hardy? Some scholars consider the claim that “beer is probably the reason for civilization” entirely plausible.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/04/0424_kurtbeer.html

PROHIBITION: YOU CAN’T WIN AGAINST HUMAN NATURE

There is a very strong correlation between cultures and subcultures that prohibit consumption of alcohol and general nastiness and ignorance. Just consider those friendly, fun-loving fundamentalists, whether Christian or Muslim. And also consider the busybody social engineers who did so much damage in enacting prohibition. (Now, of course, we have a new variation on the “Noble Experiment” called the “War on Drugs”, which in prohibiting a different chemical intoxicant is being just as ‘effective’ in supporting organized crime.)

http://harrybrowne.org/GLO/DrugWar.htm

BOOZE: INSPIRATION IN A BOTTLE

“Better a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy.” --Tom Waits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bbpqQXayMo&feature=related

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2010-12-31—THEME: NEWS MEDIA CAUGHT OFF BALANCE

NEWS MEDIA OFF BALANCE

There is a principle in journalism of clearly distinguishing reportage from editorializing, intended to clearly separate an objective presentation of facts from a writer’s opinion. The former is supposed to be ‘objective’ and ‘balanced’. Sometimes, however, being really objective is going to mean one can’t be ‘balanced’ in presenting information on some topic. When the media ‘reports’ on some issue where public opinion varies, they too often bend over backwards (and then fall over) in their misguided attempt at balance. All claims to objective truth are not created equal. Giving equal time to creationists, psychics, and other nutbars, is not being objective. It is giving demagogues and con artists credibility and publicity.

SCIENCE: A CHALLENGE TO TV ORTHODOXY

Here a charming and entertaining lecture by the scientist who, like the late Carl Sagan, is an eloquent spokesman for the scientific enterprise. Well worth the viewing time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPrdK4hWffo&feature=&p=C7F8740EA90180B2&index=0&playnext=1

HOW TO BE ‘BALANCED’ AND MISLEADING

Here a dead-on satire of the way the popular press reports on science.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/sep/24/1

PSYCHOLOGY: TOO OFTEN A REFUGE FOR CRANKS

Psychology Today once published an article on Uri Geller that treated this archetypal con artist seriously. Not entirely surprising. But when the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Social Psychology publishes a paper allegedly demonstrating “precognition”, it is easy to see why many in the ‘hard sciences’ tend to dismiss psychology as not really a science, and dismiss social scientists as exceptionally gullible.

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1154-i-knew-you-were-going-to-say-that.html

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