Your Man Friday's Ideas

“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are called “unalienable rights” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and the pursuit of happiness certainly seems to be the central concern of most Americans—and of most people where life and liberty aren’t immediately or obviously endangered.  But what exactly is happiness? And does it make sense to “pursue” it?  It has been suggested by many philosophers that happiness really isn’t that important when compared to other goals, such as doing the right thing.  And it has been repeatedly observed that we simply notice we’re happy (like something glimpsed out of the corner of one’s eye) when we are doing something meaningful.  We don’t attain it by striving for it. As Albert Camus observed, “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.”

IS HAPPINESS FALSE MEMORY?

IS HAPPINESS A BIOLOGICAL NEED?

IS HAPPINESS JUST SYNTHESIZED?

You have to love the term ‘counter-intuitive’.  What is more perversely pleasing than discovering that common sense is nonsense?  We trust our intuition, our common sense, and we do so usually out of laziness.  But it fails us often enough that we seem to take vengeful pleasure in it being found to be unfounded.  And that is one thing science is good at:  putting common sense to the test and watching it fail.

YOU’RE AT YOUR CREATIVE BEST WHEN YOU’RE NOT AT YOUR BEST

SMART PEOPLE ARE OFTEN IRRATIONAL

WHY COMMON SENSE OFTEN MAKES NO SENSE

Somewhere along the way ‘respect’ got conflated with courtesy.  Courtesy greases the social wheels, but it doesn’t trump honesty when honesty matters—and honesty often matters.  And just as some people feel they have a right not to be ‘offended’, some people feel they have an inalienable right to have their irrational beliefs ‘respected’. But certainly there is no reason for us to respect superstitious beliefs or those who hold those beliefs.  Respect is something earned, not something bestowed on everyone at birth. In fact, to give undue respect can be downright dangerous.

TOLERANCE YES, RESPECT NO
An excellent, thoughtful dissection of the idea of respect.

THE DANGERS OF RESPECT FOR IRRATIONALITY
Why should blind faith deserve any respect?

DISRESPECT FOR WHAT IS RESPECTABLE
This Nobel Laureate got a lot of respect, and he also had the sense to not care about it.

Playboy was the premier skin mag for the pubescent boys of my generation, but copies were hard to come by. So we boys often had to settle for certain pics to be found in National Geographic.  Times have changed, and now National Geographic has videos.  Viewer discretion advised.

SKIN GUN

SKIN DEEP

SKINNED

Well if not free yet, at least affordable!  Universities lure students with out-dated statistics that make the dubious claim that they’ll recoup the exorbitant cost of tuition somewhere down the road in the workplace. Then these students pay outrageous prices for textbooks that they can’t even sell second-hand afterwards, because a new edition is required for next year’s course. But there is a truly egalitarian movement to make a liberal education possible for everyone at the much smaller cost of a computer (or any digital device, including a smart phone or tablet) and Internet access. A truly liberal education no longer is an elitist privilege thanks to projects like the TED lectures, CBC’s podcasts of programs such as Ideas, and the availability of excellent online videos on almost any topic one might be interested in learning about.  And all this is available ‘on demand’.  You don’t have to pay big bucks for it or show up some place at a given date and time to get a real liberal education.  You may not get that over-valued piece of paper called a diploma, but even if that is what you want, that too is going to become less elitist and expensive. We may be witnessing a real revolution in education at least equivalent to what happened with the printing press and the gradual movement toward universal literacy.

TEXTBOOKS FOR 15 BUCKS RATHER THAN 150
Apple is obviously self-serving but it could certainly be called enlightened self-interest.

TEN TOOLS FOR A FREE ONLINE EDUCATION
Excellent list including ten universities with the best free online courses.

THE TEACHING COMPANY
Want to hear and watch lectures by the best university lecturers on any academic topic? You’ll pay something for these downloadable AV files, but far less than tuition at one of the prestigious universities where they are the premier lecturers in their field.

Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika is set in a country he never visited, but it still manages to somehow successfully satirize American ideals.  Someone really should write a novel entitled Akademe.  But of course there already are many satires about the Hollow (sic) Halls.  And they are often penned by writers who have been there—at least for a while.  I suspect many of these authors would say that while Akademe is a nice place to visit, you wouldn’t want to live there.  Good satire often is about the contrast between ideals and reality.

FIVE GOOD REASONS TO LOVE BEING AN AKADEMIC

THE JOY OF INTERACTING WITH COMMITTED STUDENTS

THE PLEASURE OF BEING APPRECIATED BY THE MORAL MAJORITY

Babies aren’t stupid.  Apparently they have less difficulty with Bayesian statistics than most university students whining to their Stats prof that they “just aren’t good at math”.  And they seem to have an intuitive grasp of research design and hypothesis testing that we naively assume is only to be found in trained scientists.  It is a frightening thought, but it seems we lose these natural born skills as our brains ‘mature’ by sacrificing flexibility for specialization.

BABIES ARE INTUTIVE SCIENTISTS
Gopnik’s research “explores the sophisticated intelligence-gathering and decision-making that babies are really doing when they play.”

BABIES AS NATURAL BORN MATHEMATICIANS
Butterworth’s research suggests that every baby is “born with a core sense of cardinal number… born with a ‘number module’… born a mathematician.”

BABIES LEARNING LANUAGE THROUGH STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
Kuhl’s presents her “astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another — by listening to the humans around them and ‘taking statistics’ on the sounds they need to know.”

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!?

TIME MAGAZINE
The American perspective, which includes a finding about how cats drink milk!?

WIRED MAGAZINE
The popular and respected science and technology news source, and with the most reasonable (in my judgment) list.

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.

IS OUR SENSE OF SELF JUST OUR BRAINS’ BAG OF TRICKS?
Daniel Dennett.

IS THE SENSE OF SELF MERELY AN ILLUSION?
Thomas Metzinger.

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

DON’T LET SUNLIGHT FRIGHTEN YOU

TO CHERISH THE ONLY HOME WE’VE EVER KNOWN

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

WHERE

HOW

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

FROM HERE AND NOW

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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

CREATING LIFE IN A COMPUTER

CREATING INORGANIC LIFE

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.

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.

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.”

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.

WHAT SCIENTIFIC FINDINGS AREN’T GETTING REPORTED?
Unfortunately, the scientific community is also guilty.  Who is interested in negative results?

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)?

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.

FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM
Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett.

FREE WILL AND EVIL
Author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil.

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…”

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.”