caterpillar

thieves beware

vote for carlo

Mars One plans to establish a permanent settlement on Mars, funded through a reality show about the training process and the one way trip to get there. Potential settlers are posting videos on the Mars One homepage which can be rated by anyone who visits it. The team to be trained will be picked from amongst the top rated videos.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, response is quite diverse, ranging from obvious nutjobs, through undergrads with no prospects, to young career entrepreneurs with science or tech backgrounds. Included amongst applicants appears to be Carlo Rovelli, one of the most philosophically subtle theoretical physicists alive today. Rovelli works on "Loop Quantum Gravity," the prime competitor against the more widely known String Theory for reconciling the apparent contradictions between General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The motivation for his endorsement of Loop Quantum Gravity over the sexier String Theory is the philosophical position that scientific progress is made by building upon previous insights rather than making sharp and radical breaks with past theory.

In his Mars One video, Rovelli is self effacing and does not play up his importance in the field. Nevertheless, the frontier for humanity deserves to have intellects like his paving the way. See him here, and Vote for Carlo!

step backward for uncertainty

Reuters reports that six Italian earthquake scientists have been jailed for manslaughter for "failing to give adequate warning of the 2009 earthquake in the city of L'Aquila."

Prediction of events with some component of randomness is necessarily uncertain—to think otherwise is to misunderstand the whole endeavor. The fault here is not with the scientists, for predicting incorrectly, but with the public for believing this prediction came with certainty. To suppress predictors of random events for predicting incorrectly is to court ignorance and block progress, as it discourages the very research which will one day improve our ability to predict such events.

science and conduct

To primitive man each thing says what it is and what he ought to do with it: a fruit says "Eat me"; water says, "Drink me"; thunder says, "Fear me," and woman says, "Love me." . . . [but] man slowly discovered the errors in his original world. . . [H]e developed a new activity which he called thinking. . . By thinking he created knowledge in the sense of scientific knowledge, knowledge which was no longer a knowledge of individual things, but of universals. Knowledge thereby becomes more and more indirect, and action, to the extent that it loses its direct guidance by the world of things, more and more intellectualized . . . Thought had developed categories or classes . . . Concrete situations which demand decisions and prompt actions do not, however, fall into only one such class. And so action, if it were to be directed by scientific knowledge, had to be subjected to a complex thought process, and often enough such a process failed to give a clear decision.

In other words, whereas the world of primitive man had directly determined his conduct, had told him what was good, what bad, the scientific world proved all too often a failure when it came to answering such questions. Reason seemed to reveal truth, but a truth that would give no guidance to conduct; but the demand for such guidance remained and had to be filled. Thus arose eventually the dualism of science and religion, with its various phases of double-truth theory, bitter enmity, and sentimentalization of science, one as unsatisfactory as the other.

~ Kurt Koffka (1935) Principles of Gestalt Psychology

discovery of photosynthesis

Flowchart of the history of developments in our understanding of the relationship between plants and the atmosphere from 1600 to 1804, from case 5 of the Harvard Case Histories in Experimental Science, 1952, by Leonard K. Nash.

boring on hara-kiri

At this point the unpopular teleological argument usually slips in to increase assurance about the thermal insensitivity of the intestines. The esophagus and stomach can easily be stimulated thermally and might therefore be endowed with means for thermal perception; but why should the intestines have thermal receptors, when from birth to death they meet with almost no thermal change except from enemas, surgery, accidents or conceivably hara-kiri?

E. G. Boring (1942) Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology, remarking on the lack of adequate experimental investigation of the ability of the intestine to sense heat.

tickle

Tickle may thus be finally defined as an intensely vivid complex of unsteady, ill-localized and ill-analyzed sensation, with attention distributed over the immediate sensory contents and the concomitant sensations reflexly evoked. Its immediate sensory contents is not qualitatively different from contact, but in actual experience tickle is distinguishable from the ordinary contact complex in its character of a 'feeling' rather than a perception.

~ Elsie Murray (1908) A Qualitative Analysis of Tickling: Its Relation to Cutaneous and Organic Sensation

the modern city

A modern city is an almost incredibly helpless and delicate organism. It has lost its power to produce the actual essentials of life. In spite of its transportation systems, it cannot move as they found out in the evacuation of London. It is like an overgrown idiot baby in an incubator. It is completely helpless without the aid of the many servants that succor it. It cannot even think except in a slow ponderous collective fashion and it cannot think at all in an emergency. Its individuals can think, but a city is an organism in itself and must have a directing brain and nervous system. Destroy its waterworks, it dies. Stop its food supply. It dies. Remove its directing intelligence, it commits suicide.

~ Robert A. Heinlein (1939) For Us, The Living

color in black and white

The experience of color television doesn't require a special TV. This is because of the Benham effect, which occurs when the experience of color is produced by rapidly oscillating patterns of white and black. Differences in the phase of this oscillation produce different color experiences.

You can experience the Benham effect for yourself here.

Although we don't know exactly what causes the Benham effect, we do know what relationship between phase and oscillation speed produces which color experience. In 1968, James Butterfield employed this knowledge to broadcast color information from a black and white TV camera to black and white TV sets. The idea is to use a rotating disk, half of which is black, the other half comprising a sequence of filters (in primary colors, red, green, and blue). The filters are placed to ensure that only the relevant color signal (whatever makes it through the filter) is phased appropriately with respect to the rotating disk. The end result is a flickering image which reproduces the sensation of color in the viewer, even though it is projected on a regular black and white television.

Read more about the Butterfield Color Encoder here.

According to Arthur Winfree:

Its first public demonstration was a soft-drink advertisement over station KNXT in Los Angeles. Nothing was said about color, to the consternation of thousands of viewers who seemed suddenly to be hallucinating. Its last public demonstration was in Argentina during political advertisements by Eva Peron.

~ Winfree (1980 / 2001) The Geometry of Biological Time, 2nd ed.

the eye

Alhazen (1083) schematic of the visual system

shaken, not stirred?

Apparently, 007's request that his martinis be "shaken, not stirred" is not (or at least need not be) shear posturing. Rather, shaking eliminates many bartender-related variables which can affect the quality of a stirred drink. So, insisting on shaking ensures consistency (plus, of course, aeration). See the full explanation here.

more pro-smoking science

The most recent issue of Science reports on a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research concerning the relative public health risks of smoking and obesity:

In the past 15 years, smoking has decreased by 20%, but the number of fat Americans has increased by 48%. By 2020, the team calculates that obesity will rob an 18-year-old of 0.7 years of life on average and 0.9 years of "quality of life."

The average gain for an individual from not smoking—0.3 years—is more than offset by the loss of more than a year from weight gain, the authors reported last week in The New England Journal of Medicine. Even if obesity increases level off to as little as 0.15% per year, they'll swamp overall gains from nonsmoking by 2020.

Given the well known and documented power of nicotine as an appetite suppressant, this looks like yet another argument in favor of the public and personal health benefits of smoking. I can see the public service announcement now:

Add an average of .4 years to your life: smoke!

wisdom and superstition

. . . All times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifters the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known—cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honored of them all,—
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson recounts the travels and wisdom of Ulysses. The Norton Anthology of Poetry footnotes "Hyades" with this gloss:

A group of stars in the constellation Taurus, believed to foretell the coming of rain when they rose with the sun.

Now, what is the implication of "believed to foretell"? Suspicious connotations of superstition and mythological mumbo jumbo!

Yet the passage of the constellations through the skies bears a direct causal relation to the seasons—both are correlated with our yearly passage around the sun. Determinations of season and, correspondingly weather, can be made from our position in the cycle through the zodiac. As it happens, the rising and setting of the Hyades corresponds to the rainy seasons in spring and fall, in particular, the notorious rainy season in April.

So, the association between the Hyades and rain is not a mere mythological superstition but a demonstration of reliable calendrical knowledge.

the philosopher's oath

If you are a practicing philosopher, please consider taking this oath:

I, [insert name here], do hereby vow to never use, in speech or in print, the locution "X taught us that Y", where X is a famous philosopher and Y is a claim which they have defended. Furthermore, whenever I read or hear claims of the form "X taught us that Y" made by some other philosopher, I vow to remind myself that mentioning a claim in conjunction with its most famous defender does not constitute an argument for that claim, and that it is a defining feature of philosophy that it should have no dogmas, that all claims are open to question. Finally, I recognize that it is this feature of philosophy which distinguishes it from science, but also which prevents it from degenerating into hollow and dogmatic scholasticism, and I vow to maintain an open mind and protect philosophy from the descent into scholasticism until my dying day, or forfeit my right to practice philosophy.

sonnet ~ to science

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

~ Edgar Allen Poe

theory and measurement

How does theory infect scientific observations? When are observations "theory-laden"?

One answer, obviously, is in terms of the interpretation of data, even in the subjective assessment of data.

A second answer, however, comes from the practice of measurement itself. Many quantities of scientific interest are difficult to measure directly. As a consequence, we must instead measure a proxy. The relationship between this proxy and the quantity of interest is purely theoretical. For example, Galileo's experiments rolling balls down inclined planes were an attempt to use height as a proxy for velocity in order to measure the effects of gravity (anachronous, but that's how we would put it today) near the surface of the earth. There was simply no direct way to make appropriately exact measurements of velocity.

A modern example: measurements of brain activity. When an fMRI scan is performed flow of blood to an area of the brain is a proxy for "activity" (as very loosely construed), which is itself a proxy for the real topic of interest, the modular role of different areas of the brain in complex mental calculations.

j. f. a. k. van benthem (forthcoming)

"Monotheism is just a bad idea, also in science."

the statistician

The lowest of all liers, he lies with a straight face. He makes of science a mere pebble game and plays upon the folly of those who do not understand the rules. And truth? Like a televangelist, he manufactures "truth" on the fly, tailored to his audience's desires and expectations. Oh you who worship his gospel! ~ if you could but see inside the temple, behind the priestly trappings and solemn demeanor, the deformed, cancerous reality: these merchants of falsity, these whores of science, these builders of sandcastles, these two-faced spitters of venom, they of the forked-tongue, they without moral code or personal integrity, they without ethos, this army of Judases who seek to sell out the entire human race for a handful of silver ~ these are our new untouchables! We shun them, we fight their teargas and truncheons in the streets, with bricks, with twigs, with fingernails if need be. We will never relinquish our hope in humanity, we will never relinquish our optimism, we will never relinquish the fragility of knowledge to these coarse brutes, but guard it jealously and with great care. Oh, that there were more of us!

the near-sighted man

. . . drinks the kool aid because it is sweet.