ARCHIVE: 2011
To link to ideas associated with a posting, click on link under the topic.
Caveat: Inevitably, given the ever evolving state of the Internet, some of the links on past postings may be outdated.
2011-01-07—THEME: A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND NUMBERS
We live in what has been called the "Information Age”, and the associated syndrome is "data overload". The treatment for this syndrome is called statistics: i.e., methods of compressing data to make them more easily understandable. One of the most powerful of statistical methods is graphing, which allows us to visualize patterns in data. Seeing patterns is a good definition of intelligence. Statistics make us smarter.
200 COUNTRIES, 200 YEARS, 4 MINUTES
http://www.flixxy.com/200-countries-200-years-4-minutes.htm
2 EYES, 1 BRAIN
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html
50 GREAT EXAMPLES
http://richworks.in/2010/04/50-most-stunning-examples-of-data-visualization-and-infographics/
2011-01-14—THEME: USES, ABUSES, AND SCIENCE OF MUSIC
Forget making fire. Forget the wheel. Whoever came up with the idea of music did far more to enrich our lives. As Nietzsche said, "Without music life would be a mistake."
MUSIC AS MEDICINE
"Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?" (Michael Torke) This is a wonderful talk about the healing power of music, followed by a beautiful performance of a Bach suite.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/robert_gupta.html
MUSIC AS TORTURE
"Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the laws of the State always change with them." (Plato) This is an essay on the power of music being used by the state for evil ends.
http://www.newstatesman.com/200611060029
MUSIC IN THE BRAIN
"I Love Music and I Love Science--Why Would I Want To Mix The Two?" is the title of the introductory chapter of "This Is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitin, a musician and neuroscientist. The answer is given in the chapter's epigraph by Robert Sapolsky: "Science is not meant to cure us of mystery, but to reinvent and reinvigorate it." This link is to an hour-long lecture that is as interesting and informative as it is entertaining. It addresses two questions. What can music teach us about the brain? What can brain science teach us about music?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgKFeuzGEns&feature=related
2011-01-21—THEME: TRUST YOUR SPOUSE, NOT YOUR MEMORY
John Locke suggested we are our memories, that our self is the initially blank slate on which experience has written our very identity. We now know he was wrong, but that doesn’t mean our memories aren’t an important component of our individual natures. The ancient Greeks defined intelligence as having a huge and accessible memory store, a view most understandable before printing, not to mention the Internet. But now retrieving knowledge is not dependent on the vagaries of the filing system used in that 1.4 kilograms of wetware in our craniums. Nor is the storage capacity of our brains anything compared to that of even a small public library. But there are both advantages and disadvantages to the way we cross reference the information in our heads, and even for having less than huge and perfect memories. Human memory is a two-edged sword.
IF WE ARE OUR MEMORIES, WHAT IF THEY’RE SELECTIVE?
They can make us unhappy, but also sometimes happy.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
IF WE ARE OUR MEMORIES, WHAT IF THEY’RE WRONG?
Then they can hurt people. And often
have. And often they are wrong.
http://fora.tv/2009/07/14/Elizabeth_Loftus_Whats_the_Matter_with_Memory
IF, COMPUTER, YOUR MEMORY IS SO GOOD, HOW COME YOU LOSE AT JEOPARDY?
“Well, now only sometimes.” Computers
are being taught our tricks, and now they are beating us at our own games—even
ones in which we had the advantage of making up the rules.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1c7s7-3fXI
2011-01-28—THEME: ADJUSTING THE SCALE
It is very useful to be able to tare a scale. I've found it particularly useful for adjusting my bathroom scale to not add in the weight of my clothes—and, well admittedly, also a small correction factor of 20 pounds or so. Self-esteem is important! Students need it too, and grade inflation is very effective for that. In fact all of us need more self-esteem, which is handled nicely by the so-called Flynn effect, which reports that mean IQ scores have risen 30 points over the past century. Nice to know we are all so much smarter than our ancestors, such Neolithic dummies as Newton and Shakespeare! Don't pay attention to those curmudgeons trying to damage our self-esteem by such cherry-picking comparisons as U.S. president Jefferson with G.W. Bush—or with mere anecdotal evidence about how university students supposedly were once able to write a complete sentence with correct punctuation, capitalization and spelling. Every day, in every way, we get better and better—just as long we keeping taring the scale.
ADJUSTING THE TARE ON THE SAT
Because test scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (a common measure used in determining university admittance in the U.S.) were plummeting from 1975 levels, the SAT was “re-centered” in 1995. This added approximately 100 points to the average test score to bring the average back to around 500. So if you would like to upgrade your scholastic aptitude, here is a table to make it easy.
http://professionals.collegeboard.com/data-reports-research/sat/equivalence-tables
ADJUSTING THE TARE ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE
University funding is dependent on retention, and the best way to retain your customers is to make them happy. We all know that knowledge can be disturbing and studying to acquire it exhausting. On the other hand, good grades make students happy. And who doesn’t want happy customers!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGA11A340Ck&feature=related
ADJUSTING THE TARE ON HUMAN INTELLIGENCE
This link is only included out of fairness to those sceptical of what is obvious to most people: our parents were really stupid compared to us! Thus it is way too inexplicable that those morons of over a hundred years ago made writers like Dostoevsky and Dickens best-sellers, so that just has to be a myth. (Note: the “g” referred to in this piece is standard code for the psychometrician Charles Spearman’s hypothesized “general intelligence”, something he believed IQ tests measure.)
http://www.halfsigma.com/2008/11/flynn-effect-nonsense.html
Art makes our lives richer. The quality of our lives is greatly enhanced by aesthetic experience. However, the pleasures of art, in any medium, were once just available to a limited few. In Mozart’s time, only a small percentage of the population was fortunate enough to be exposed to his music. Development in recording technology changed all that for music in the Twentieth Century, as had the invention of movable type and printing in the Fifteenth Century for the literary arts. Historically, visual art may have had an even smaller audience, and while printing did do something to expand the audience, the ‘Gutenberg Revolution’ for visual art may be the Internet and the graphical web browser. I remember being blown away by the first online gallery I viewed (slowly) with the early graphical browser (Mosaic) on a dial-up modem connection. We’ve come a long way, baby.
GOOGLE ART PROJECT
This logical, but dramatic, extension of the many excellent online galleries developed by major museums may be equivalent to the way that for literature the paperback revolution further democratized the original Gutenberg Revolution.
http://www.googleartproject.com/
BEST ART GALLERIES IN THE WORLD
Of course, there will never be anything like the real thing. For those fortunate few that can move beyond the virtual, I have to agree with this ‘ten best’ list, based on my own (excuse the gloating) experience of visiting all but two of them. Nevertheless, this site has links to the galleries’ own extensive presentations of their treasures.
http://www.worldreviewer.com/travel-guides/museum/
MUSEUM OF COMPUTER ART
Computer, digital, art may deal the ultimate blow to the artwork as object, where inevitably the audience for direct experience must be limited. This is but one of many sites presenting artworks as they were intended to be experienced. No passports required and no admission fees.
2011-02-11—THEME: SEX, NOW THAT’S A GREAT IDEA!
Sex is a damn good idea—for a lot of reasons. From an evolutionary standpoint, the inconvenience is more than compensated for by the great survival value of diversity in one’s progeny. From a hedonistic standpoint, it is far more fun than any other way of passing on one’s genes. In fact it is so much fun that we engage in it even when passing on one’s genes is unlikely or even impossible. One tends to forget that pleasure and evolutionary value are often linked, but not necessarily rational. And why do we tend to find this somehow embarrassing?
WHY DO IT IF WE DON’T HAVE TO?
Ask the Red Queen. She knows we have to do it, or we’re likely doomed to extinction.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCgJL5p58jo
ITS HEDONISTIC VALUE HAS PRACTICAL VALUE.
Ten things you didn’t know about orgasm and the sex lives of pigs.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/mary_roach_10_things_you_didn_t_know_about_orgasm.html
BUT TRY TO EXPLAIN IT WITHOUT BLUSHING.
Breaking the news about the birds and the bees in the age of the Internet.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/julia_sweeney_has_the_talk.html
2011-02-18—THEME: UNDERSTANDING THE QUESTION
“How do you know that?” “It’s elementary, my dear Watson.” Just recently another Watson has shown he does know a lot, even more than the best Jeopardy contestants. But given the incredible storage capacity of current computers, Watson having a huge store of knowledge isn’t surprising—or even that impressive. However, what definitely is impressive is his ability to retrieve the appropriate bits of knowledge from questions that are highly ambiguous and expressed in natural language. It doesn’t matter if you have a huge library if you can’t find the book you want because it is filed by author, and you only know the title. The most impressive developments in Artificial Intelligence are the ideas behind the algorithms that find the answers no matter how clumsy the question. “Where the hell is that book about cosmology by that guy from Harvard with that Slavic name? I know it has a red binding.”
WHEN THE ALGORITHM GOES WRONG.
IBM’s Watson kicked ass against the two best-ever Jeopardy winners, yet he gave a patently ridiculous answer to a question about U.S. airports by answering “Toronto.” Here is a brief explanation of how a very smart computer, just like a very smart human, can sometimes say really stupid things.
GOOGLE IT!
These days if I want to know something I open my Google app on my iPhone and say a few key words. Then usually I can pick the link most likely to be appropriate. If it’s Wikipedia, it’ll offer me disambiguation so I don’t end up getting information on Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes stories when I’m looking for information on IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy superstar. Here is a nice simple explanation of the fundamental algorithms behind one of the Internet’s most amazing search engines.
http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html
THE ULTIMATE TEST OF UNDERSTANDING
If you are corresponding with a computer and you can’t tell whether it is really a human, that computer has passed the famous Turing Test. So far none have passed when asked to explain a joke. But people have been fooled. A famous example is called Eliza, a Rogerian--“non-directional”--therapist that apparently fooled some folk. Weizenbaum programmed it in BASIC fifty years ago as a demonstration of the absurdity of attributing sentient intelligence to a set of algorithms that could pass a primitive Turing test. This is an updated, interactive Internet version. Tell it your problems and see if you feel better. (It doesn’t cost 100 bucks for a 50 minute hour.)
http://chayden.net/eliza/Eliza.html
2011-02-25—THEME:
MY SON IS A DOCTOR, HIS BROTHER IS IN JAIL
The ideas about how to parent abound. And proponents of different approaches are passionate, even fanatical, about the correctness of their views. It is understandable, this passion, for it is based on several fundamental human traits and one perhaps misguided implicit assumption. It is a noble trait to want the best for those we care about, and it is only human to take pride or feel shame in what becomes of our children. But the rarely acknowledged assumption underlying both these natural emotions is that we, in our behaviour as parents, are primarily responsible for what our children become as adults. It is indisputable that we have responsibility for our children’s welfare while in our care: for feeding them, sheltering them, and protecting them from immediate harm. However this isn’t unique to our species. What seems peculiar to humans is the egotistical belief that what happens to our offspring once they have left the nest is ultimately to our credit—or blame. In this we, as parents, just might be overestimating our own importance.
THE EGO DEFLATING DATA
Why do our sons and daughters turn out as they do? Genetics? Yes, definitely. Chance? Yes, of course. Overall environment? Yes, certainly. Parenting specifically? Well maybe a wee bit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcVu6fgN3-g
ONLY WHEN THEY’RE VERY YOUNG ARE WE THEIR WORLD
The home environment does matter, but it seems that it is only particularly important when kids are very young, their world is restricted to the home, and their interpersonal relationships are primarily with their parents.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/the-socioeconomics-of-parenting/
THE EVER HOVERING HELICOPTER PARENTS
If parents believe it’s all on their shoulders, it’s natural that they become control freaks—and their offspring inappropriately infantile.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1940395-1,00.html
2011-03-04—THEME: MESSY MATH SHAPES THE WORLD
We want things neat and orderly and predictable. For most of the ancient Greek philosophers, mathematics was the ultimate embodiment of this well-ordered ideal. The purity of Math was so worshipped by the Pythagoreans that they even shunned the idea of irrational numbers. But inevitably mathematicians have disillusioned the idealists by discovering that mathematics itself is not neat and orderly and predictable. However, one thing the Greeks were right about is that mathematics does underlie the nature of the real world. Unfortunately, it turns out that math may be exactly why the real world is anything but neat and orderly and predictable.
THE FRACTALS FRACTURE
An early crack in the idealistic view of mathematics was what, at the time, were called “monsters” by many mathematicians: fractals. Like the Pythagoreans saying there is just no way pi could not be represented by a knowable number, many said it was ridiculous to say that the distance of a shoreline could not be represented by one single number. What could be more absurd than something lying between two and three dimensions? Of course now it is known that this “monstrous” math describes everything from clouds and mountains to quantum events.
http://fractalfoundation.org/category/natural-fractals/
A TOUR OF TURING PATTERNS
Another related mathematical ‘cause’ of the shape of things in the real world has recently made the science news. Alan Turing is most remembered as one of the fathers of the modern computer generation, but his genius was wide-ranging.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/turing-patterns/?pid=978&viewall=true
CONFRONTING CHAOS
Perhaps the most disturbing mathematical insight of recent times is the one that strikes at the belief in the power of mathematics to predict. Watching this BBC special on Chaos Theory and its implications for the way we view the world is well worth an hour or so of viewing time. (The link is to the first of the nine segments. The others can be easily found in the sidebar.)
http://www.youtube.com/user/thedebtgeneration?feature=mhum#p/search/1/5pKrKdNclYs
2011-03-11—THEME: DELUSIONAL THINKING
It is certainly true that some people are just plain nuts, or extremely naïve, or very ignorant, or incapable of abstract reasoning. But there are many people (maybe all of us) who, while rational most of the time, hold some beliefs that are by any objective standard entirely irrational. Delusional thinking doesn’t necessarily mean the deluded individual is entirely irrational, although one is always tempted to make that assumption—unless, of course, we share the delusion. Clearly not everyone who embraces some conspiracy theory or quack medical practice or belief in some supernatural nonsense is irrational. A delusion is a false belief, a belief for which there is no real objective evidence and often plenty of objective evidence of its falsity. The most plausible reason for holding such a belief is that the subjective evidence, the emotional system in our brains, has functional priority. This, I suspect, applies to everything from phobias through post-traumatic stress syndrome and religious fanaticism to conspiracy theories—most of which are fear based. Here are three neuroscientists considering the relationship of the brain to delusions, as well as hallucinations—which may or may not result in delusions.
THE TEMPORAL LOBES AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF
Vilayanu Ramachandran, noted neurologist, presents some interesting findings on the relationship of temporal lobe brain damage and religious belief.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obaZz41jTms&feature=related
THE FRONTAL LOBES AND OTHER DELUSIONS
A molecular and developmental neurobiologist considers the role of frontal lobe dysfunction in delusional thinking.
http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2009/01/the_delusional_brain.php
HALLUCINATIONS VERSUS DELUSIONS
Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychiatry and author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, draws an important distinction by describing a fascinating example of the brain trying to delude us, but unsuccessfully.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgOTaXhbqPQ
My wife makes a curried meat and lima bean dish that looks disturbingly like dog vomit. It is delicious, and a family favourite, but this is a learned response to its other redeeming features. It is completely understandable that a dinner guest having this put in front of her might suddenly lose her appetite. Chefs and restaurateurs know the importance of plating to increase the pleasure of consuming what is on the plate, just as cookbook publishers and admen for restaurants know the importance of visual appearance in stimulating our hypothalamus into hungry mode. Scientists know that the taste of food has relatively little to do with those modest five specific taste receptors on our tongues. The ‘taste’ of anything is a percept compounded of those truly gustatory inputs plus, very importantly, the smell, texture, heat, and appearance of the food. It would be interesting to know when someone had the insight that food’s appearance so profoundly affects its appeal and taste. Certainly the culinary art is now partially a visual art.
CAPTURING MODERNIST CUISINE
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/03/09/dining/20110309-MODERNIST-21.html
INCREDIBLE ART MADE FROM FOOD
http://weburbanist.com/2009/01/08/food-art-and-food-artists/
“FOOD PORN” (PHOTOGRAPHY)
2011-03-25—THEME: ENABLING THE ‘ARTISTICALLY’ INEPT
The idea that technology can augment creativity is met with outrage from diehard Luddites. The evidence, however, is that the Luddites are wrong, and the overall effect of science and technology on the arts is a positive one. Technology enables many creative individuals who otherwise wouldn’t be able to express their creativity. The Luddite’s objections taste of sour grapes: a resentment that some of the skills formerly prerequisite to creating literature or art or music are no longer needed, and only creative, conceptual skills are required. How dare a dyslexic write well, an inept draftsman create visual art, or an uncoordinated wannabe musician produce music! Of course, effective use of the technology is also a prerequisite skill. And no one seriously thinks that Microsoft Word will automatically result in another Shakespeare, Photoshop in another Michelangelo, or Garage Band in another Mozart. But, just maybe, some “mute inglorious Milton” will be given a voice.
LITERATURE
“I'm a successful adult with a learning disability (dyslexia); part of the reason for my success is that I use computers to organize and express my ideas.”
ART
“This new era of technology and creativity has launched a wave of pioneers who will define and surpass the boundaries of art like never before. The invention and continued improvement of programs, such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter have revolutionized the ways that art is produced by allowing artists to do entire works on the computer.”
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/245944/the_effects_of_modern_technology_on.html?cat=7
MUSIC
"…innovative entertainment applications are turning even the most musically moronic of us into musical geniuses. Or at least they’re giving it a real good try."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33227116/ns/technology_and_science-games/
2011-04-01—THEME: GULLIBILITY AND SKEPTICISM
Gullibility and skepticism seem a most appropriate theme for April Fool’s Day. We’re only too easy to fool. And I’m not kidding.
THE SKEPTIC BLUES
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OPs_j1EEplI
THE 100 BEST APRIL FOOL’S DAY HOAXES
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/aprilfool/
NOT SO FUNNY CONS: 11 EFFECTIVE SCAMS
http://www.essortment.com/fraud-warning-common-scam-examples-24673.html
2011-04-08—THEME: FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA
It is a strange idea that society is perfectible, for surely there is no shred of evidence to support this hypothesis. And it is paradoxical that this belief is at the root of some of the most dysfunctional of societies. The idea of the perfectibility of man is usually said to have originated in the Enlightenment where a central idea was individual freedom, especially the freedom of thought and expression. Yet it has led to the imposition of the most unenlightened, least free, of all societal systems: totalitarianism. Totalitarianism is distinguished from other authoritarian forms of government by controlling every aspect of a person’s life, and it makes every other form of dictatorship seem benign by comparison. Grounded in a belief in the possibility of a utopia, it has resulted in the unholy Twentieth Century dystopian trinity of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism.
ENLIGHTENMENT FAITH IN THE PERFECTIBILITY OF MAN
“The fundamental idea of Condorcet's Sketch is that of the continual progress of mankind toward perfection.”
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/sketch.html
QADDAFI’S UTOPIA
“…al-Qaddafi’s Libya was supposed to be a classless, socialist, direct democracy. Even the wage-earning system itself was to be abolished, and the people were supposed to govern themselves without a parliament or a central government. Foreign Policy calls it a totalitarian utopia.”
http://utopianist.com/2011/02/the-failed-utopia-of-gaddafis-libya-a-classless-stateless-democracy/
BUILDING A UTOPIAN PLAYGROUND
C’mon. All we really want to do is have fun! (He certainly is.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J48vuoO2PQY
We in the developed nations are far healthier and live far longer than ever before in the history of the human race, yet we are obsessed about our health. “Health Food” stores do a booming business selling vitamins and snake oil. Marketers know that labelling food “light”, “low fat”, “low calorie”, “enriched”, or “organic” increases sales. Every major media outlet has a very popular section devoted to “health” which features the latest food fads and popularized reports of tentative scientific findings suggesting some weak correlation between some food stuff and heart disease or cancer. It seems this obsession was given a name several decades ago: “healthism”. Now, one might think that an obsession with health is by definition a ‘healthy’ obsession, but this relentless pursuit of health is often irrational, interfering with quality of life. More and more things are labelled ‘unhealthy’. And ironically the ‘discovery’ and relentless labelling of new ‘illnesses’, that is part and parcel of healthism, has turned on itself with a new disorder called “orthorexia”, which is defined as excessive concern with one’s own health that is actually detrimental to one’s health.
HEALTH FASCISM
“We are exhorted to pursue an impossible and illiberal cult of perfection.”
IN PRAISE OF OLD-FASIONED BAD HABITS
“…pursuit of novel, narrow concepts of so-called 'health' and 'fitness' has led us to create new outcasts – those who fail to conform to the increasing catalogue of prescriptions for what is 'best for us'.”
http://www.sirc.org/publik/bad_habits.shtml
HEALTHISM IN THE MIDDLE CLASSES
“For the first time in history, modern medicine, which may well be ‘the greatest benefit to mankind’, as Roy Porter put it, raises the illusory prospect that people are entitled to a life not just free of disease, but also free of symptoms, with the social, psychological and physical all in harmony.”
http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/69/1/197.full
2011-04-22—THEME: MUSICAL INTELLIGENCE
"Intelligence is a verb, not a noun." (Hippokrites) It isn't the score on some test. It's a characteristic of somebody doing something intelligent. And it comes in many flavours. Wayne Gretsky is a genius on what psychologists call kinaesthetic intelligence. Who knows how he'd score on some conventional IQ test. Similarly, Beethoven and Miles Davis were clearly musical geniuses, but I doubt either of these disagreeable individuals would pass any test of emotional intelligence. Musical intelligence particularly intrigues me because I'm a musical moron. (I can't even begin to imagine what it is like to have a musical idea.) The invention of a radical new music form or genre is a monumental achievement: e.g., such innovations as opera, polyphony, absolute music, and program music. Here are three links to three contemporary musical geniuses working in radically new and innovative genres—and who are all obviously off the scale for musical intelligence.
MUSICAL GENIUS: JAZZ
Personally, I think the twentieth century’s most monumental, innovative musical achievement is jazz.
http://www.ted.com/talks/herbie_hancock_s_all_star_set.html
MUSICAL GENIUS: CONTEMPORARY 'CLASSICAL'
Contemporary 'classical" music seemed to have entered a dead end with arcane twelve-tone and serial music that decimated the audience for what is usually called ‘classical’ music. And then along came people like Philip Glass.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsOPR9659Ww&feature=related
MUSICAL GENIUS: ‘COLLABORATIVE’ MUSIC
Technology is making musical collaboration possible in a way never before possible. Here is but one variation showing the potential of this new approach, one utilizing the wonderful connectivity of the Internet.
http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_whitacre_a_virtual_choir_2_000_voices_strong.html
2011-04-29—THEME: SPORT AS ART?
This is a question that always stimulates animated discussion in my Psychology Of Art course. In ancient Greece it seemed to have the same elevated status as philosophy. Hell, even Socrates devoted time not spent being a philosophical gadfly by competing as a wrestler. And certainly now most people are far more passionate about sport than about art. Just compare attendance at a gallery opening to that of a sports event.
SPORT AS ART SUBJECT
There is no question that sport clearly inspires writers and visual artists, and so the name of this museum, The National Art Museum Of Sport, doesn't sound strange. (The link is just to the 'About' page; the whole site is worth exploring.)
http://www.namos.iupui.edu/why_sport_art.html
SPORT AS A DANGEROUS ART
In our nanny culture where it is even against the law to take what are only personal and minor risks, such as not wearing a seatbelt, there seems to be increased interest in 'extreme' sport. No-holds-barred martial arts fights are rising in popularity. Watching the Canuck National sport guarantees seeing big guys on skates brawling. Yanks love football, which is even more physically brutal than professional boxing. All these tough guys eventually pay the price for our vicarious delight in watching them damage their extremely fit bodies in combative sport.
SPORT AS AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE?
This somewhat academic, even philosophical, essay directly and thoughtfully addresses the complex issue of whether athletes are artists and whether watching sport is an aesthetic experience.
http://www.nipissingu.ca/faculty/stange/courses/P2267/SportAsArt.pdf
2011-05-06—THEME: DO WE NEED MEN IN SPACE?
Most thoughtful people agree it is ridiculous to criticize spending on scientific research, but thoughtful people still disagree about the distribution of available resources and the efficacy of different emphases. This is very evident in the debate about space exploration. This debate is not about whether to do it or not, but rather how we do it. Putting a man in space captures our imagination and fuels funding for space exploration, but the fact remains that it is the unmanned exploratory probes that have yielded the most data—and for the least expense. Exploration is about what is explored, not who or what does it.
TO GO OR NOT TO GO, THAT IS THE QUESTION
The debate summarized in a piece written over five years ago, but still relevant as NASA retires the Space Shuttle and struggles with reduced funding and public interest.
http://www.physorg.com/news8442.html
GOING WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE
A video summary of the two great solar system explorers that have now (30 years after departing) voyaged out into the great beyond of intergalactic space.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFT68U4i-Xw
WHERE UNMANNED SPACE EXPLORERS HAVE GONE
A great database of the history and accomplishments of unmanned space exploration missions. http://www.astrophys-assist.com/educate/robot/index.htm
2011-05-13—THEME: DO ANIMALS HAVE EMOTIONS LIKE OURS?
The spectrum of opinion extends from Descartes’ view that animals are mere automatons to the extreme anthropomorphism of the fanatical animal rightist. At one extreme of these views entering your Fido in a dogfight is no different than entering your old Ford in a demolition derby, and at the other extreme swatting a fly is equivalent to swatting your mother. Since the study of emotion is a psychological discipline, and the mechanistic approach of behaviourism dominated psychology until relatively recently, surprisingly little research has been done on animal emotions. Scientists will concede that animals have emotions in the broadest sense of the term. For example, obviously animals show fear. But how similar are their emotional lives to ours? Most dog owners love their dogs and believe their dogs love them back. But is what your dog feels for you the same as what you feel for him?
ANIMAL EMOTIONS AND BEASTLY PASSIONS
“There are many lines of scientific support (what I call "science sense") about the nature of animal emotions that are rapidly accumulating from behavioral and neurobiological studies (from the emerging field called social neuroscience fMRIs and PET scans).”
WHAT IS AN ANIMAL EMOTION?
One of the leading experts on the study of the emotional lives of animals is the evolutionary biologist Frans B.M. Waal. This is a detailed, but not technical, review of the topic.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2010.05912.x/full
DOG EXPRESSING DISMAY
We could answer all these questions about animal emotions if only they could speak to us. And, lo, here is a dog who actually can talk!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGeKSiCQkPw&feature=aso
2011-05-20—THEME: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Ideas want to be free. Yet people want to own them. But isn’t it contrary to the common good to turn ideas into property? And is ‘owning’ an idea even possible?
STEALING THE INCORPOREAL
“Intellectual property, don’t fence me in!”
http://www.kenstange.com/Intellectual%20Property%20-%20Don't%20Fence%20Me%20In!.pdf
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS MERE MIRAGE
“There is no such unified thing as ‘intellectual property’—it is a mirage.”
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
SCIENCE AS PUBLIC PROPERTY
Sharing and collaboration is what advances science, but even scientists can be reluctant to share until they can personally benefit.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2011/04/08/open-science/
2011-05-27—THEME: THE COMFORT OF DELUSIONS
A “rapture” of sort did happen on May 21st, for ‘rapture’ simply means feeling intense joy, and I’m sure quite a number of people, especially satirists, certainly were extremely joyful at the comic material this End Of The World silliness offered them. But not so rapturous were all those true believers who blew their life savings by buying into this nonsense. But feeling any glee about their misfortune is more than a bit unsavoury. One doesn’t chuckle over the ignorance and naiveté of the cancer victim who refuses chemotherapy and dies because some charlatan sells them on megavitamin or homeopathic treatment instead. This raises a number of interesting questions.
WHAT’S THE HARM IN MOST IRRATIONAL BELIEFS?
Obviously some mild delusions may even be good for us. Your loved ones may not objectively be as attractive as you think they are, and you may not be quite as smart as you think you are. But as long as our delusions aren’t too far removed from objective reality, they can make our lives easier and happier. So where should one draw the line in dealing with irrational beliefs?
http://www.ukskeptics.com/do_irrational_beliefs_cause_harm.php
HOW TO DEAL WITH TRUE BELIEVERS?
George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with pigs, you get dirty, and besides the pig likes it.” Others believe one can change the beliefs of someone through reason. Sceptics are divided in their opinion on what to do when confronted with someone propounding nonsensical beliefs. For example, a scientist engaging in public debate with creationists may simply be giving the nut bars credibility. But isn’t it irresponsible to just leave absurd and harmful beliefs unchallenged? And what about when someone you care about is clearly about to do harm to themselves because of an irrational belief?
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4187
IS LAUGHTER THE BEST MEDICINE?
It is easy to make fun of naïve and ignorant beliefs. Parody and satire are delightful art forms, but true believers definitely are not amused. It seems that using humour to point out the absurdity of something just makes true believers more entrenched in their beliefs, and sometimes even violent, as evidenced by the mayhem that resulted from that Danish cartoon. Satire is inherently offensive, and it seems that being 'offended’ has somehow become justification for doing others real harm. Maybe there is no cure, and one should just adopt the motto, “If they can’t take a joke, fuck ‘em!” Anyway, here, on a lighter note, is something to offend both the religious and the deluded who still have faith in Microsoft Windows.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/rapture
Objectively it is hard to understand why we have such an exaggerated view of our importance in the grand scheme of things. It’s not like our planet is the centre of the universe or that we’ve really even have had dominion over it for any significant period of time—or for that matter, that even now we are actually the head honchos here on earth. Who is really the big guy here on our blue planet? He’s the fellow most of us love to eat, although he has virtually no nutritional or caloric value. He’s the guy who has been around here since before we had two neurons to rub together. But he does have admirers, such as the avant-garde composer and writer, John Cage, and other mycologists, as well as scientists who find that fungi don’t need neurons to do city transportation planning. And then, of course, there are all of us who always insist on mushrooms on our pizzas.
THE BIGGEST GUY
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus
THE OLDEST GUY
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/05/cryptomycota-fungus-discovery/#more-60061
THE CITY PLANNER
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/
2011-06-10—THEME: INFORMATION OVERLOAD
It is said that this is The Information Age, and our problem is not the one that has in the past been the cause of so many of humanity’s woes: lack of information. Instead, we rather perversely complain of having too much information. It is a strange idea, that. Too much information!? That seems like complaining we have too much money or too much free time. Well, admittedly, for some people even these can present problems, but really… Of course, the problem with all of the above is not having access to information, money, or time. Rather it is with lacking the skills to use these assets wisely.
IT'S NOT INFORMATION OVERLOAD: IT'S FILTER FAILURE.
Here a superlative video presentation on correctly defining and dealing with the problem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LabqeJEOQyI
WE NEED NEW LITERACY SKILLS
"Information literacy is a liberal arts graduation requirement at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College,"
http://www.utne.com/Media/Literacy-Information-Overload.aspx?page=2#ixzz1OoL9PT4l
FOR INFORMATION READ THE INFORMATION
Here a review of a new book about information by the eminent science writer who obviously knows how to deal with it and consistently filters it for us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/books/07book.html?_r=1
2011-06-17—THEME: ISN’T SPORT JUST FUN AND GAMES?
So whose idea is it to riot over a mere game? Who should we credit with that brilliant idea? I suppose because of the fans’ common interest, it is a collective intelligence that comes up with the idea. So then, is there an inverse correlation between the size of a crowd of sports fans and its collective IQ? Does this collective ‘intelligence’ lack a prefrontal cortex?
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FAN MAYHEM
Psychologists call it “de-individuation”. A group will do things any individual in the group wouldn’t do on his own. The concept applies to everything from military training to lynch mobs.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0620_050620_sportsriots.html
MAKING COMPUTERS SMART ENOUGH TO ACT LIKE STUPID CROWDS
Computers are being used to model crowd behaviour, everything from evacuation of a crowded area during a fire to studying how “agitated crowds turn into unruly mobs”.
http://www.livescience.com/1615-model-predicts-mob-behavior.html
AMONG THE THUGS
Another approach to understanding the insanity of sports fans is ‘anthropological’: go live among the natives. Here a review of a book by a writer who did just that.
http://wordpress.morningside.edu/rew001/2010/10/13/review-of-bill-bufords-among-the-thugs/
2011-07-24—THEME: FREE ADVICE WORTH EVERY CENT
It’s bad enough that university students have to put up with listening to advice from their profs for four years—and have their parents pay for it. But free advice is even worse, for being told what to do without having asked annoys everyone. Yet before graduates are let loose on the world with their certification as survivors of the educational system, they are made to listen to more unrequested advice on how to live their lives in the form of commencement addresses. This is obviously not a great idea. Surely, they thought that never again would they have to be lectured to. So it is refreshing when the recruited advisor doesn’t pompously assume the mantle of senior sage, and instead lightens up the stifling pomp and ceremony with an entertaining, self-deprecating, and ironic presentation. And any advice slipped in this way is probably more valuable and more likely to be both sound and taken seriously.
STEPHEN COLBERT
A video of the famous satirist speaking at Know College’s graduation ceremony. (It is in three segments, but the links are easy to follow.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOqpvsJJEmk
AMY POEHLER
Amy Poehler's address to graduates at Harvard, evidence that being a top Ivy League school doesn’t necessarily mean being stuffy.
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2011/05/26/amy_poehler_harvard_speech/index.html
KURT VONNEGUT
A nice video presentation of this commencement address at MIT, which was not actually ever delivered, nor even really written by Vonnegut, but was such a wonderful example of what students thought would be a great graduation address that it became a ‘viral’ Internet hoax.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfq_A8nXMsQ
2011-07-01—THEME: WHAT TIME IS IT?
We do live in a clockwork universe, but not the one envisioned by those of Newton’s time. Time is relative, as Einstein pointed out. Time is in our heads, as Kant pointed out. Everything takes time, but time flies when you’re having fun. Yet, sometimes, time crawls. (If you only have two weeks to live, move to North Bay: it’ll seem like an eternity.) How do you keep time? Most of us share Jim Croce’s wish: “If I could keep time in bottle/The first thing that I’d like to do/Is to save every day/Till eternity passes away…” Here are some exceptional timekeepers.
MONUMENTALLY IMPORTANT CLOCKS
Our best efforts up to the present time.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/historic-clocks/?pid=1447&viewall=true
BUILDING A TEN THOUSAND YEAR CLOCK
Will take a licking but keep on ticking.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/06/10000-year-clock/all/1
TIME MARCHES ON
Will take two hours of your time and worth every second.
2011-07-08—THEME: EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
Evolution has wired our brains to find connections. This is why often we imbue coincidence with significance. Conspiracy theories are made of this. But so is humour. These three TED presenters play at pretending to see connections. The humour is somewhat unusual in that it really isn’t at anyone’s expense.
THE SECRET BEHIND 4 A.M
http://www.ted.com/talks/rives_on_4_a_m.html
THE PROBING EVIDENCE FOR ALIENS
http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hodgman_s_brief_digression.html
THE INVISIBLE WORLD
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/john_lloyd_inventories_the_invisible.html
2011-07-15—THEME: MAPPING HUMAN HISTORY
We humans may be just a blink of the eye in terms of cosmological time, but an awful lot that matters to us happened in that blink. So much, in fact, that it was easier to just keep our eyes closed in history class than try to deal with it all. And yet any overview of human history to which we can relate has to be visual. So, what better tool for visualization of history than a map? While many may find history boring, with all its dates to memorize, almost everyone loves maps. These links are to incredible tools for converting the temporal to the spatial.
FLIP THROUGH THE CENTURIES
The changing face of Europe.
http://www.euratlas.net/history/europe/index.html
ANIMATING HISTORY
An amazing project to do just that: animate the ‘dead’, bring history to life!
http://www.the-map-as-history.com/
TIME TRAVEL FROM 3000 B.C. TO 2000 A.D.
A website put together by a man who obviously loves both history and maps.
http://www.atlasofworldhistory.com/ENGLISH/B2950.html
2011-07-22—THEME: SEX IS A GOOD IDEA
Sex is a good idea, at least from an evolutionary perspective. But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily good for any particular individual engaging in it. And the comic who remarked that ‘bad sex’ was an oxymoron obviously wasn’t thinking about praying mantises or flatworms.
WHY SEX?
http://www.reasonandspirit.com/2011-04-23-21-39-20/social-network/videos/video/42-evolution--why-sex-pbs?groupid=8
ROUGH SEX
http://www.spike.com/video-clips/53s3j6/flatworms-penis-fencing
SWEET SEX
http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_drori_the_beautiful_tricks_of_flowers.html
2011-07-29—THEME: THE SCIENCE BEHIND CULINARY ART
Food preparation is an art, but like all art, scientific understanding can augment it. Here are three guys who are exploring the science behind the culinary arts.
THE BRAIN IN YOUR BELLY
A talk by food scientist and chemist, Heribert Watzke, about how chemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary theory can be used to improve our diet.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/heribert_watzke_the_brain_in_your_gut.html
CROSS-SECTIONING COOKING
A talk by the author of Modernist Cuisine, a book that illustrates what is going on when you cook something.
http://www.ted.com/talks/nathan_myhrvold_cut_your_food_in_half.html
COOKING FOR GEEKS
The website of the author of Cooking For Geeks, with a funny video of making ice cream in 30 seconds using liquid nitrogen.
http://www.cookingforgeeks.com/
2011-08-05—THEME: MONSTER MASH
Advances in biotechnology are really bringing us into what once was only a science fiction world. Biological research is now the hot ticket, and the application of its discoveries a hot button for a lot of people. Scientific advances have always been seen as threatening to many people, largely because most people just really don’t have the education to understand them. But it is true that new knowledge always poses dangers. Once it was physics that was seen as threatening, and of course physicists’ discoveries did unleash access to atomic energy, which certainly is as dangerous as it is useful. Now it is biology that scares the bejesus out of people—but also promises the dawning of a new age of improved health and prosperity. The stem cell research, cloning, genetic modification, all can result in profound benefits for humankind, but all are also potentially just as dangerous as atomic energy. Here science and philosophy have to collaborate: knowledge has to be tempered with ethics.
STEM CELLS
A collection of pieces in Wired about the science of stem cells.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/stem-cell-research/
CLONING
A site rich with information and with many links to other resources about cloning.
http://www.skewsme.com/cloning.html
GENETIC MODIFICATION
An articulate news article on the bioethical issues raised by combining genetic characteristics of different species, especially when one of them is Homo sapiens.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/21/us-science-animal-human-idUSTRE76K7Q220110721
2011-08-12—THEME: DEFINING CRAZY
It seems that we’re all crazy and getting crazier. How do I know? Because the Bible told me so—the Bible of psychiatric diagnosis: the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Without really significantly changing my behaviour in any way, I personally developed two new disorders with the last DSM revision. And because I’m not gay, I didn’t even lose one, for it seems the APA committee has finally decided that homosexuality isn’t really a mental illness. But overall the trend isn’t to drop diagnostic categories, quite the opposite. The number of ways to be crazy has tripled since the first edition in 1952. Is this the result of an increase in our scientific knowledge, just as advances in biological sciences have increased the number of species recognized as distinct? Or is it pseudoscience and just the self-serving empire-building of mental health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry? How really scientific are these diagnostic categories? During the mid-nineteenth century ‘drapetomania’ was considered a mental illness; it is what allegedly caused black slaves to flee captivity!
THE DUBIOUS ‘EPIDEMIC’ OF MENTAL ILLNESS
A review in the New York Review of Books by Marcia Angell (former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine) of three books that question the reality of this ‘epidemic’.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jun/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/?pagination=false
A GRAIN OF TRUTH, A COMPLEX QUESTION
A review of the above review.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/angells-review-of-psychiatry/
AND NOW SPEAKING FOR THE DEFENSE
An academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine and noted skeptic surprisingly rising to the defense of the DSM.
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-dsm-v/
2011-08-19—THEME: WHICH IS THE WEAKER SEX?
This is, of course, an absurd question unless one gets more specific. Men are definitely superior when it comes to not succumbing to breast cancer, and not too many women die of prostate cancer! And men are on average physically stronger, but women seem to be emotionally more resilient—perhaps because they have had to deal with men. Women live longer—but perhaps because men have to deal with women. Women suffer more from clinical depression, while men suffer more from their far greater propensity to violence. Nevertheless, it is a fun question to bring up at a party attended by rabid feminists and redneck male chauvinists.
IT’S OFFICIAL: MEN ARE THE WEAKER SEX
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/its-official-men-really-are-the-weaker-sex-1055688.html
NO, IT’S OFFICIAL: WOMEN ARE THE WEAKER SEX
HEY, BUT WHO LIVES LONGER?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/why-males-die-young/
2011-08-26—THEME: SPINELESS BUT SMART
One of Natural Selection’s many really bizarre ideas is the octopus: a soft-bodied invertebrate with four pairs of arms, two eyes, and the intelligence to coordinate this complex sensori-motor equipment. The octopus also has some very highly honed specialized skills. Of all Mama Nature’s creatures he is the undisputed grandmaster of camouflage. Here are three amazing videos of this stealthy master of disguise.
SPOT THE OCTOPUS!
Where the hell is that guy?
http://www.sciencefriday.com/videos/watch/10397
HOW HE DOES IT!
The body is his brain.
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/octopus-camouflage.htm
NO FOOL, THAT OCTOPUS!
But he may be a thief.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5DyBkYKqnM
2011-09-02—THEME: LIFE IS A COMEDY…
..for those who think, but a tragedy for those who feel—according to Horace Walpole. But wait, doesn’t that depend on what you feel and what you think about? The optimist tends to feel cheerful, while the pessimist is usually dour. Never mind which attitude is more justified objectively. Which attitude is healthier, what really causes these attitudes, and to which attitude are we most inclined?
IS IT BETTER TO SEE THE GLASS AS BEING HALF FULL…
…rather than half empty? Is life better for the optimist?
http://www.futurevisions.org/Law_pessm_opt.htm
SHOULD YOU PUT ON A HAPPY FACE…
…because it’ll make you happy—or just indicate you’re a good actor? Are our feelings just a response to our bodily state?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=feeling-our-emotions
IS NO NEWS REALLY GOOD NEWS…
…or is most of what we read actually skewed toward the positive emotions? Are we generally more optimistic than we think?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/english-positivity/
2011-09-09—THEME: DANGERS THAT AREN’T AND THE DANGER THAT IS
The real danger is scientific ignorance, and one of its many dangerous effects is making people irrationally fearful of non-existent dangers. Frightened people are easily exploited for someone else’s financial or political gain. And, sadly, most often what people are made to fear is what has most benefited them: scientific and technological advances. Here are three clear, amusing, and informative refutations of some current bogeymen: wireless devices, the commercially grown food we eat, and the medical establishment. It is ironic that all of these alleged dangers have actually made our lives better in both minor and major ways.
CELL PHONES WILL ROT YOUR BRAIN
Buy your tinfoil hat from some huckster and lobby to get WiFi out of the classroom. Better safe than sorry, right? And what’s wrong with students using a twenty-year old reference book, if it saves their brains from being damaged as they do research on the Internet.
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4273
ONLY EAT ‘NATURAL’ FOODS
Pay a premium for ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ foods allegedly ‘free of chemicals’. It’s just nit-picking to point out that all food is technically ‘organic’ (carbon based) and ‘natural’ (not synthesized in a laboratory) and composed of chemicals (as is everything, including yourself).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhBKtjDtTVk
DOCTORS WANT YOU TO DIE
If you have cancer, forget chemotherapy. ‘Alternative medicine’ is easier. All you have to do is take a lot of vitamins or homeopathic snake oil, or go to a Mexican Naturopath Clinic and eat apricot pits. The fact that people treated their illnesses with ‘traditional medicine’ before science butted in gives it serious credibility based on seniority. Never mind what the life expectancy was back in those good old days.
http://www.skeptic.com/downloads/Alternative_Medicine_by_Harriet_Hall.pdf
2011-09-16—THEME: CHARITY IS PROBLEMATIC
If anything seems clear-cut, it is that charity is a good thing. Presumably it does something to improve the human condition, and it makes us feel good. But, like almost anything, a closer examination reveals it isn’t as simple or pure as that. Terrorist organizations use their charitable efforts in the community to recruit suicide bombers. Many charitable organizations spend more of the money they receive on empire building and paying themselves sumptuous salaries than ever actually gets out there to the intended recipients. Celebrities polish their image by their very publicized and often dubious charitable donations—which they can easily afford. Politicians and robber barons buy getting their names attached to public institutions with their ‘charity’. But then how many of us refuse that little poppy sticker, that public label of our generosity and patriotism, after tossing a few coins in that old guy’s collection box outside the liquor store?
GIVING LOUDLY AND STUPIDLY
“Then stop fucking clapping!” (…yourself on the back.) About the rise of the celebrity ‘humanitarians’.
GIVING QUIETLY AND GENEROUSLY
“…attempts were made to immortalize him by placing the museum in his name, Rosenwald refused.” About a great humanitarian whose name should not have been largely forgotten, despite his own reticience.
http://learningtogive.org/papers/paper121.html
GIVING INTELLIGENTLY
A website about which charitable organizations are open about how their money is spent and which ones actually funnel most of their donations to the intended recipients.
http://www.charitywatch.org/index.html
2011-09-23—THEME: BRAINS THAT WORK DIFFERENTLY
We are all both gifted and brain damaged to some extent, but usually there is a reasonable balancing of the accounts. But sometimes one or the other dominates our lives. And sometimes the special gifts are very much at the expense of ‘normal’ functioning, which may be the case with creativity. The prevalence of bipolar disorder is one example. Another notable example is people with autism who are not debilitated by the disorder.
DIFFERENT WAYS OF KNOWING
Here Daniel Tammet, a “high-functioning autistic savant”, describes the way he sees the world and how it contributes to his success as a writer and a visual artist.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_tammet_different_ways_of_knowing.html
THE WORLD NEEDS ALL KINDS OF MINDS
Here Temple Grandin, who was diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how she copes with her ‘deficit’ and how she has been successful in applying the special skills her different way of seeing the world has given her—and makes a good case for greater appreciation of those who think differently. (HBO did a good documentary about her life in 2010.)
http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html
WHAT ASPERGER'S SYNDROME HAS DONE FOR US
There is good reason to be sceptical about any individual’s deviation from the norm becoming a psychiatric diagnosis of a “disorder”, and especially so if the diagnosis is made of a person who has long passed from this earth. Nevertheless it’s interesting to note how many of the eminent and accomplished seem to share traits with those we now label as having a mental disorder.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/3766697.stm
2011-09-30—THEME: TEACHING TEACHING
You can lead an ass to water, but you can’t make him drink. That is one idea that doesn’t get much attention in the current educational system. Nor does the corollary that those who are really thirsty will go out of their way to quench their thirst. Instead, all the emphasis seems to be on leading or dragging, not on keeping the trough filled and accessible for those who are really thirsty. What makes a good teacher may not be teaching ‘technique’—although of course that is of some importance. Most people I know would say the best teachers they had were good because of their enthusiasm and knowledge, even if one could barely decipher their scrawls on the chalk board. Unfortunately, enthusiasm for the subject is too often minimal in those aspiring to that good secure job as a teacher. (I’ve had students planning to be English teachers tell me they don’t like to read!) And knowledge of the subject matter doesn’t seem to be a priority in many aspiring for that relatively cushy job. (My wife remembers students in her Faculty of Ed class on teaching history objecting to a test that included actual questions about history, instead of just ‘how’ to teach it.) As always, there is no shortage of criticisms and proffered solutions. But perhaps the problem has no solution; for perhaps the sad fact is that some people are simply not very thirsty for knowledge, including, alas, many of those who are being paid to deliver it.
PROPOSED SOLUTION: MAKE IT HARDER TO BECOME A TEACHER
One could make it harder to get that teaching credential by combating grade inflation. But does that really make a difference if the grades themselves reveal nothing about the person’s knowledge or enthusiasm?
http://www.aei.org/docLib/EduO-2011-08-07-g.pdf
PROPOSED SOLUTION: MOVE TO PRIVATE SCHOOL EDUCATION
Generally private schools hire more on the basis of subject expertise than formal ‘teaching credentials’, and they attract more thirsty students who have to compete to get in. But does that disenfranchise students whose parents don’t have the financial resources to opt out of public education—or are even aware of the option?
PROPOSED SOLUTION: EMBRACE HOME SCHOOLING
The teachers, being parents, are often more enthusiastic and committed and expect more independent learning—and the student-teacher ratio is hard to beat. But does that only work if the parents are well-educated enough to guide their kids to successful independent learning—and are not just using social isolation to prevent their kids from learning about things that might threaten their traditional religious beliefs?
http://kenstange.com/poa/Lauzon-HomeSchooling.pdf
2011-10-07—THEME: THE DANGER OF IDEAS
Freedom of expression is the cornerstone of all human rights, but it is dangerous to exercise that right. This is obviously so in a totalitarian regime, but even in a democracy the expression of ideas that challenge deeply-felt beliefs can actually put your life in danger. Ideology and religion are the commonest source of violence against those who publicly express disagreement with some dogma. Surely it is good to be passionate about your ideas and defend them, but passionate defence of one’s ideas seems only too often to lead to crimes of passion. So is passion about ideas not a good idea?!
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
“By ‘dangerous ideas’ … I have in mind statements of fact or policy that are defended with evidence and argument by serious scientists and thinkers but which are felt to challenge the collective decency of an age. … 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
DEATH THREATS FROM THE RELIGIOUS
The fatwa on Salmon Rushdie and the Danish cartoonist are well known and publicized. But those are just crazed Islamists, right? Well, it seems Christians can be just as lacking in brotherly love and tolerance. If you want every religious fanatic of any stripe to want you dead, speak out as an atheist.
DEATH THREATS FROM THE IDEOLOGUES
Here is an appalling account of how passionate patriotism affected the life of one public figure that used his celebrity to promote ideas that ‘offend’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/07/michael-moore-hated-man-america
2011-10-14—THEME: SCIENTISTS INVITE US ALL TO JOIN THE PARTY
Two blokes are each trying to solve the same problem. One says to the other: “Let’s put our heads together.” Scientists have been taking that advice. What was once usually a solitary exploratory adventure is now an expedition. And the expeditionary party does not only include the scientists. Anyone is welcome to come along and share the work—and the fun. And the Internet has made this inclusiveness possible.
SCIENCE IS A GAME
Here is an amazing example of how successful the inclusiveness inherent in citizen science can be. “Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.” (The great set of links at the end of the article point to many other examples as well as ways to get involved.)
DO YOU WANT TO PLAY?
Here is one recruiting office. “The Citizen Science Alliance's mission is to create online citizen science projects to involve the public in academic research. We believe that by doing this we can not only help everyone share in the excitement of discovery…”
http://www.citizensciencealliance.org/philosophy.html
THE ONLY REQUIREMENT IS A BRAIN
Problem solving is a game. Problem solving requires brains, with many neural connections. What if our individual neural networks can connect to create a huge meta-neural network, with the synapses being provided by the Internet? “The Internet is a brain.”
http://blogs.hbr.org/stibel/2008/06/the-internet-is-a-brain.html
2011-10-21—THEME: FREE TO DO EVIL
The earliest Greek philosophers were proto-scientists formulating hypotheses about the natural world. And often they weren’t that far off the mark. (Thales would be pleased to know that we have confirmed that water covers most of the earth and even human beings are composed mostly of water.) The debate about free will and evil and determinism also dates back at least to ancient Greece. But while modern, formalized science continues to hypothesize about the natural world, it has largely avoided—and left to the philosophers—the critical questions about ethics and responsibility. Lately, however, this is changing because of developments in neuroscience. Cognitive scientists are asking hard philosophical questions, the answers to which can profoundly change how we perceive and deal with what has traditionally been called ‘evil’. Without the support of the admittedly amorphous idea of free will, how can we view Hitler or serial killers as evil and thus accountable for their actions. It’s just the wiring in their brains that is to ‘blame’?
FREE WILL, CONSCIOUSNESS, AND THE BRAIN
Cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker and neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramanchandran.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YanhQCML-k4&feature=related
FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM
Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Utai74HjPJE&feature=related
FREE WILL AND EVIL
Author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.
2011-10-28—THEME: IT AIN’T WHAT YOU SAY; IT’S WHAT YOU DON’T
What we know is what we think is most important. However while what we know can be entirely true, what we don’t know can make that truth irrelevant. John tied for first in the 100-yard dash. Oh, forgot to tell you that there were only two competitors, and both stopped for a Big Mac break at the 50-yard point and took thirty minutes to finish the race. And note that it is also true that both tied for last place. Filtering what information gets to us doesn’t have to involve overt censorship. It can be extremely subtle. The squeaky wheel gets the most attention. If we’re smart we get our information from sources that have a reputation for accuracy. But what information gets front-page notice, and what gets ignored or relegated to a line of correction on page 79, is a judgment call of the ‘editors’—and often has more to do with expected appeal than with balance.
IS YOUR SEARCH ENGINE DECIDING WHAT YOU SHOULD READ OR VIEW?
It ain’t Father Who Know Best. Instead it may be a Big Brother algorithm that just aims to please and doesn’t want to rattle your cage.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOE1HFEL8XA&feature=youtube_gdata_player
WHAT SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS AREN’T GETTING REPORTED?
Unfortunately, the scientific community is also guilty. Who is interested in negative results?
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html
WHAT IS YOUR SOURCE OF INFORMATION AND ENTERTAINMENT?
Does it really matter if you read the The National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, or Vancouver Sun? The editorial policy and what gets reported is set by the political bias of the same controlling company. There are few truly independent newspapers left in Canada or the States. Is editorial bias culling virtually everything you read (be it books or newspapers), and what you watch (be it movies or news channels)?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/giants/
2011-11-04—THEME: THE IMPORTANCE OF BIOGRAPHY
Those interested in literature know who wrote The Old Man and The Sea, and almost certainly know something about the writer and his adventures, including the final one with the shotgun. Those who are interested in art know who painted “Bedroom In Arles”, and also surely know about that incident with his ear. The lives of the artists behind the art are usually known and of general interest. Biography is presented along with the art—on the back pages of the books, along with visual art exhibitions, and in classrooms. Art is given a human face. But not so with science. How many students taking a physics course know anything about Heisenberg, the great physicist who worked on nuclear research under the Nazi regime? How many taking a statistics course have even heard of Galton, the polymath who invented correlation when not off on some exploratory expedition or preoccupied with contributing insights into human psychology? What ultimately matters, of course, is the actual work of art or scientific discovery, not the biography of the person responsible for it. But knowing about the lives of these eminently creative individuals is valuable for interesting students in pursuing some creative endeavour. Yet to many people science, unlike the arts, seems impersonal, even disembodied. People say, “scientists tell us…”—or even “Science tells us…”—but no one ever says, “Writers or artists tell us…”! Of course this is because there is a much greater consensus in what is being told to us by scientists. But an unfortunate side effect of this is the tendency to think of science as a cold, impersonal, and even mechanical endeavour. A course in the history of science with stories about the great—and often fascinatingly eccentric—scientists would seem a worthwhile addition to any liberal education.
STRANGE TALES FROM THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ‘AMATEUR’ SCIENTISTS
“The world's oldest scientific academy, the Royal Society, has made its historical journal, which includes about 60,000 scientific papers, permanently free to access online.” A glimpse into science before it was professionalized.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15445507
ABOUT THE HEROES OF THE EARLY DAYS OF MODERN SCIENCE
A great catalogue of links to detailed biographies from the early days of systematic science. http://galileo.rice.edu/lib/catalog.html
ONE EXAMPLE OF A BRILLIANT, MAD (BIPOLAR) SCIENTIST
Biographical info on a “Victorian polymath: geographer, meteorologist, tropical explorer, founder of differential psychology, inventor of fingerprint identification, pioneer of statistical correlation and regression, convinced hereditarian, eugenicist, proto-geneticist, half-cousin of Charles Darwin and best-selling author.”
2011-11-11—THEME: THE MEANING OF LIFE
What is the meaning of life? Before we can even begin to answer that as a deep, philosophical question involving presumed purpose, we need to answer it in the ordinary sense of asking for the meaning of the word. What is the definition of life? Science usually begins with taxonomy. In fact, abstract thinking begins with taxonomy, with making distinctions and so forming clear definitions. Well, it seems that life isn’t really that easy to define, and many of the newly proposed definitions would include things as living that aren’t what we usually think of as being alive. Here are three TED speakers who are proposing radically new, and quite precise, definitions of life—and are actually working on creating life.
CREATING PROTOCELLS
http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_hanczyc_the_line_between_life_and_not_life.html
CREATING LIFE IN A COMPUTER
http://www.ted.com/talks/christophe_adami_finding_life_we_can_t_imagine.html
CREATING INORGANIC LIFE
http://www.ted.com/talks/lee_cronin_making_matter_come_alive.html
2011-11-18—THEME: APPLYING OUR BRAINS TO BRAINS
The ancient Egyptians threw away the brain when they mummified a person, while keeping most of the other organs such as the liver, for they thought brains of no importance. And Aristotle believed that thought and the self was located in the heart. We now know better, but we still know less about the workings of the brain than we do about the heart or the liver. And there is good reason for that: The brain is incredibly complex. Here are some mind-blowing examples of recent advances in understanding the brain—and even controlling it from the outside. Talk about changing our minds!
MAPPING THE BRAIN
“How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan_jones_a_map_of_the_brain.html
SHINING SOME LIGHT ON THE BRAIN
“Ed Boyden shows how, by inserting genes for light-sensitive proteins into brain cells, he can selectively activate or de-activate specific neurons with fiber-optic implants. With this unprecedented level of control, he's managed to cure mice of analogs of PTSD and certain forms of blindness. On the horizon: neural prosthetics.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/ed_boyden.html
REENGINEERING THE BRAIN
“In the quest to map the brain, many scientists have attempted the incredibly daunting task of recording the activity of each neuron. Gero Miesenboeck works backward -- manipulating specific neurons to figure out exactly what they do, through a series of stunning experiments that reengineer the way fruit flies perceive light.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/gero_miesenboeck.html
When I hear a health food nut and vegetarian say that you are what you eat, I’m always tempted to reply, “Guess that makes you a vegetable.” I bite my tongue, however, because—well—I happen to love turkey. But while we may not be what we eat, one might say we eat what we are—culturally. Scots eat sheep entrails served up in the animal’s stomach, and the Japanese eat raw fish. Mexicans eat Iguana tacos, while Filipinos dine on sundried lizards. Americans eat hot dogs, and the Chinese eat dogs. Adventuresome foodies (and Mikey) will eat anything—at least once. You do have to wonder whose idea it was to first risk consuming some of the stuff with which we stuff ourselves.
FOOD TIMELINE
“Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it's impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve.” But this site makes a noble attempt to describe and date the origins of everything from bread to Kool-aid pickles.
FOOD IN EVERY COUNTRY
Here is an encyclopaedia of traditional cuisines for almost a hundred different countries—and even includes recipes.
ORIGINS OF AMERICAN FOOD PREFERENCES
“America is a country originally settled by scoundrels and religious zealots — thieves, embezzlers, prostitutes, arsonists; English Puritans, French Huguenots, German Amish, Czech Moravians and Russian Mennonites. The screwed-over Scotch-Irish, the shanghaied London street punk, the peace-loving, slave-owning Quaker, the enslaved Gullah. It is also the native land of the Ojibwa, the Zuni, the Makah, the Miwok and the Seneca. This alchemy of sinner and saint, “savage” and sophisticate is the source of our original cuisine: a stolen, borrowed, distorted culinaria that can pique the tongue, clog the arteries, fire the belly, or mellow the soul.”
http://www.salon.com/2011/06/11/hot_dog_history/
2011-12-02—THEME: THE BEAUTY ONLY NOW WE CAN SEE
Richard Dawkins points out that we live in a "Middle World" where our sense of space and time is limited to the middle ground perceivable by our senses. Evolution by natural selection was such a radical insight because it required understanding that it operates on a time scale that is incredibly remote from our experience. Now time lapse photography allows us to view the world from a larger temporal perspective. Here are some stunning views of the world our limited sense of time and space has not previously allowed us to see.
FROM ABOVE
FROM IN CLOSE
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/louie_schwartzberg_the_hidden_beauty_of_pollination.html
FROM HERE AND NOW
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2011/11/winter-looms-the-webs-best-snowfall-time-lapse-videos/
2011-12-09—THEME: WHO DOMESTICATED WHOM?
We often consider the domestication of animals as a characteristic of early man when he gave up the peripatetic lifestyle of the hunter/gatherer to settle down to an agrarian existence. But the general consensus seems to be that this shift to an agrarian lifestyle occurred 10,000 years ago, while the evidence of domesticated wolves (read dogs) as man's companion has been firmly dated to almost 15,000 years ago, and apparently dogs really weren’t much help to these early hunters. Moreover, the research seems to indicate that the domestication of man's best friend was his doing, not ours.
WHEN
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/history/taming-the-wolf-domesticating-the-dog-2090768.html
WHERE
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2498669.stm
HOW
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/taming-wild-animals/ratliff-text/1
2011-12-16—THEME: THANKS GIVING AS A REWARD IN ITSELF
It’s gift-giving season. I tell my students that both art and science give us gifts. This is also true of life itself. So we should respond to these gifts in the way we should respond to all gifts: by appreciation and reciprocation. Appreciate life and try to give something back, whether it is a contribution to our scientific knowledge or an artistic creation—or simply by actions that benefit our fellow creatures sharing this planet. And while we may vary in how much we can give back, there is no limit set as to how deeply we can appreciate. And failing to do so diminishes us.
NATURE, BEAUTY, GRATITUDE
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/louie_schwartzberg_nature_beauty_gratitude.html
DON’T LET SUNLIGHT FRIGHTEN YOU
http://www.kenstange.com/A-DocsBox/DontLetSunlight.pdf
TO CHERISH THE ONLY HOME WE’VE EVER KNOWN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
2011-12-23—THEME: ME, MYSELF AND I! WHO?
Know thyself, we are advised. Sure, but it’s not that easy. We don’t even understand what our sense of self actually is—or how it comes to exist and survive just as long we do. The philosopher John Locke thought our selves were defined by our memories of our experiences. But those unfortunate enough to suffer from retrograde amnesia lose all episodic memories of their past, yet don’t lose their sense of self—nor do they seem different to their friends and loved ones. Like consciousness, it is an area of research where psychologists in the behaviourist-dominated past have feared to tread. It was a domain they left to philosophers. But with advances in neuroscience, scientists and philosophers are now collaborating in trying to understand our—self.
DOES THE SELF RESIDE IN THE PRIMITIVE HINDBRAIN?
Antonio Damasio.
http://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_damasio_the_quest_to_understand_consciousness.html
IS OUR SENSE OF SELF JUST OUR BRAINS’ BAG OF TRICKS?
Daniel Dennett.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjbWr3ODbAo&feature=related
IS THE SENSE OF SELF MERELY AN ILLUSION?
Thomas Metzinger.
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=9181
2011-12-30—THEME: THE BEST, ACCORDING TO…
Everyone has played the list game: name the ten best of—whatever. And at end of year, it is usually about the ten best for that year. It is interesting to sample a variety of sources and compare their lists. If the list is of movies or books or music or any art form, one expects the lists to be wildly incongruent, for aesthetic judgments are assumed to be somewhat subjective. But one expects more consensus regarding science. Certainly most scientists would agree as to the greatest scientific achievements of the past. For example who would disagree with putting Newton, Darwin, and Einstein on the list? So it is an interesting experiment to compare the lists that journalists have put together of the Big Ten scientific stories of 2011. The following three are just a sample. Virtually every news source is playing the game. It would be interesting to do a statistical analysis of the degree of congruence with a large sample.
THE GUARDIAN
The British perspective, which includes a finding about female orgasm!?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/18/science-discoveries-review-2011
TIME MAGAZINE
The American perspective, which includes a finding about how cats drink milk!?
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2035319_2034840,00.html
WIRED MAGAZINE
The popular and respected science and technology news source, and with the most reasonable (in my judgment) list.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/top-discoveries-2011/?pid=2732&viewall=true