A lot of chatter about this article in Scientific American which discusses research that shows the area of the brain involved with prejudice and the success of focusing on similarity to reduce it.
This is a subject I am fascinated by, if I had to pick a single criterion to judge people by it wouldn't be how nice they are, but how nice they are to people who are not part of their tribe.
I have noticed, for example, that people who belong to very strong social or cultural groups are more friendly than average if you belong to that group, or if you accept the mores of that group. The same people are less friendly if you don't belong or go along, and most intransigent when it comes to personal compromise in order to eliminate personal differences between groups.
This can be anything from what team you support, skin color, religion, nationality or taste.
In other words, a civilized society depends not on the people who are currently the most civilized, but those who are most willing to accept change, as social or cultural groupings change, split or coalesce.
Inevitably this means reasonable people rather than faithful people.
Geneticist, Steve Jones interviewed in 1994 during the controversy over the book, The Bell Curve.
Something that is very relevant today, given that one of the most famous living scientists claimed that black people were less intelligent.
(as an aside - I've finally figured out how to embed videos so that they start at a specific timecode point - do a view source on the video linked to here, if you want to now how.)
Wojciech Zurek is onto something wonderful.
My dad is a physicist and runs and Internet startup. Since I am over 40 myself, this is fairly unusual. It also means that when we don't talk about physics, we talk about computers. For the last couple of years this has amounted to pretty much the same thing, since I have become immersed in the voguish idea that physics and information theory are essentially the same thing.
My hobbyist hunch is that information is relative (being measured in bit pairs) and that it doesn't flow so much as sync. I believe that the interpretation problems we have explaining the experimental results at the extremes of physics magnify the effects of us trying to explain the inevitable information syncing within system that we are part of by looking near the scale of the entire system or its individual bits, where the definition of the system itself or the bits themselves as something that exists outside of purely our relationship to it/them gets in the way
My second hunch is that the pattern of this inevitable trend towards information syncing (when you communicate you eliminate difference) has another name - Darwinism, and the meta-rule of life - Darwinism, seems much more fundamental than its qualitative use to describe things that poop.
Darwinism is simply the law of efficient elimination of difference, that drives the laws of physics. A true meta-physics that has nothing to do with spirituality and can be expressed quantitatively. I would put my money on the idea that the eventual constant that cancels out the multitude of physical constants will be a 'D' in an equation - or perhaps more likely, an algorithm of - Darwinism.
There are a few scientists that are currently most exciting in this area of info-physics/biology/chemistry, such as Lee Smolin and Stuart Kauffman, but Wojciech Zurek seems particularly close to a breakthrough in understanding.
In July he produced a paper that tickles my hunches, (although I have a further hunch that even his 'relativistic' view of information is not relativistic enough - that the 'environment' that he allows us to use as an indirect witness of some kind of branching quantum lightning bolt, in universal space - simply does not exist. The environment is information's ether).
That paper, linked to here, is much more technical than my paltry understanding of physics - but I found it somewhat life-changing, so don't be put off. It is written in the language of physics which is different from everyday English, and it also uses the excessive 3rd person language of technical papers, but it is much easier than it looks to get something out of as a non scientist, if you read it carefully, since, like all great ideas it is itself, elegantly simple.
How big is a photon?
When information is readily available, as it is with an Internet connection, finding it through means such as a search engine can often be about asking the right question.
How big is a photon, ends up being one of those rabbit hole questions that causes a computer screen to fill up with scads of information and no real answer.
Its a nice little info bomb to prove how inadequate the standard interpretations of physics' amazingly accurate Standard Model are. Have a read of some of the answers below:
How big is a photon and what does it look and behave like?
Nice simple explanation of Shannon Entropy.
Information, Uncertainty and Shannon Entropy - The Math Introduction at Nonoscience
The phrase 'Information Entropy' is one of the most confusing in science, since entropy is the lack of infomation. But the problem is not with the idea of equating information theory and entropy, just eth sloppy phrasing. Information Entropy means Entropy within the concept of information science (as opposed to thermodynamics, for example).
Make the electrodes in an ion trap cold and you can stop qubit decoherence.
science, engineering & technology news
New Yorker article on Lee Smolin's visceral attack on string theory.
'The paradoxical situation of string theory ”so much promise, so little fulfillment ”is exactly what you get when a lot of highly trained master craftspeople try to do the work of seers.'
The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large
Kathy Young for Capital News 9:
"By the end of the week, the universe could be expanding, with the addition of three new planets to our solar system."
Hilarious. Given the relative size of the known Universe to our solar system, this is the equivalent of saying: "By the end of the week, the earth could be expanding, with the addition of three grains of sand on a beach in Florida."
Capital News 9 | 24 Hour Local News | HEADLINES | A cosmic change
A quarter of everything that exists has just been found.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Team finds 'proof' of dark matter
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy - Advanced Physics Forums
"We can choose to look at thermodynamic entropy in two different ways. One approach would say that a high entropy state is information poor because there is so much disorder, and the disorder is essentially random. The other approach would say that a high entropy state is information rich because to truly describe the exact state of randomness in all its gory detail would require lots of information."
This outlines the confusion of the difference in the 'sign' between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy.
It is basically a confusion over the difference between a state which has meaning to a particular observer, and the notion of absolute meaning where bits of information are stored in the smallest possible moving (hence thermodynamic) particles. What if the latter case were subjective?
There is possibly no such thing as absolute entropy, or energy or information for that matter, merely the capacity to interact with a decoder or remote system. This is possibly explained in terms of entropy by comparing microstates to macrostates (think numbered balls vs a bunch of similar marbles).
(Sorry for the slightly random rant - I'm using this blog for public notes about entropy, in case anyone else is interested in this stuff)
Nice explanation of diff between Shannon and Boltzmann etropy.
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy - Advanced Physics Forums
The information entropy is the log of the number of accesible states, and is dimensionless.
The thermodynamic entropy is equal to the information entropy times the Boltzman (sic) constant. (kB = 1.38x10^-23 J/K) so the thermodynamic entropy has units of energy per degree kelvin.
It is worth noting that present day computers process so little information compared to the number of equivalent thermodynamic states accesible to them, that the information entropy of the device is insignificant compared to the thermal entropy. I believe this means that present day computers operate nowhere near the thermodynamic limits of computation, so in a certain sense the equivalence of the two forms of entropy is irrelevant except that it does allow one to place theoretical limits on the process of computation.
The Panda's Thumb: Entropy: Common pitfalls
Scientists Say They've Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA - New York Times
... sound of sporadic popping of blood vessels from Redstate.com readers, accompanied by light banjo music:
Summary of the argument against global warming from Redstate.com
Its not true.
Oh shit, it is true - then it has absolutely nothing to do with my fat-ass pickup truck. Paws off.
Like the nice guy who used to work for Exxon explained, there is no link between tobacco and global warming.
CO2 is not the problem because thats too complicated and requires math. Its gotten hotter because someone turned up the volume on the sun control.
Oh shit - 99% of scientists say they have evidence that my fat-ass pickup is partly to blame.
Scientists are all commies, so their views are political and therefore not scientific.
We should only take science advice from people who sell fat-ass pickups becuase they are not commies and are therefore unbiased.
Bush looks like the guy who sold me my pickup, I'll vote for him, not some nancy, preppy, Ivy League, cheerleader from a posh family.
Al Gore is only pretending he grew up on a farm - people who talk about science are all city liberals who drive girls cars. Only real men drive SUVs and pickups, not soccer mums.
I'd have to be six feet under water with $5 a gallon gas before I'd believe this crock.
etc. etc.
Richard Manning proposes that staples such as wheat, corn and rice are plants that thrive in the type of barren flooded landscape the were the result of the catastrophic melting following the last ice age. Farming, he proposes, is the 'nuking' of the landscape, the clearing of the forest.
"Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa's fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year."
Interesting article, however, the opening points which state that all our energy comes from plants capturing solar energy, ignore geothermal, gravitational and atmosperic energy. As can be demonstrated by the fact that we could theoretically grow plants underground under electric lights powered by the tidal energy from the moon.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Saturn's moon 'best bet for life'
"If the magma were to cool, he said, it would become more viscous, increasing friction from tidal churning and so producing more heat. But if temperatures veered higher, the magma would flow more easily, and tidal heat production would reduce accordingly."
New Dinosaur Resembles 7 foot tall brightly colored 25 mph Turkey
The Guardian reports on the case of a man who took 40,000 ecstasy tablets in 16 years, giving doctors a unique insight into the long term affects.
Given that:
1. this man is still alive.
2. he was clearly an idiot to start with.
3. he's a habitual user of several other narcotics.
4. taking that many aspirin would be very dangerous.
Surprisingly, ecstasy would seem to be relatively safe.
"Now, however, systems are being discovered and studied which are neither obviously living nor obviously dead, and it is necessary to define these words or else give up using them and coin others."
The role of viruses in the continuous evolution of life is further evidence of the fact that there is no finite line between what is alive and not.
Years from now people will be putting stickers in Kansas schoolbooks saying that viruses are just a theory.
Of 1000 children aged between 13 and 16, not a single one could name a living scientist. Some answers offered up included Madonna and Chemical Ali.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Only dead scientists are known to teens
Ancient rivers and sedimentary rocks on Mars.
A gravity warmed sea beneath Europa's crust.
Microbe like structures in a Martian meteorite.
Planets around distant stars.
And now: Cassini Finds Hydrocarbons on Titan
The last few years have dramatically changed the notion that life on Earth is unique. With a sample of one, there is way way to be sure, but each new discovery points in the same direction.
I would hazard a guess that the universe is indeed teeming with life, as a natural, emergent phenomenon.
That seems like a wonderful, awe inspiring thought, and yet we are still arguing as to how life evolved on our own planet. Arguing about evolution itself.
There are those who would have the universe be billions of times smaller, thousands of times younger, and with no diversity. Is that more wonderful, more spiritual?
On a day when the government is preaching the values of listening to the people are they listening to the people who know, when it comes to the environment?
There is an additional kind of democracy, the democracy of ideas, the principal by which superstition or ideology or agenda is avoided by considering evidence.
Current evidence points overwhelmingly to the notion that Global warming looks real, but the evidence is being ignored, like so many 'just a theory' stickers peppered out by brainwashed zealots.
Bryan Lawrence quotes Science magazine on climate change:
There were 982 peer reviewed papers indexed by ISI with keywords climate change in the last ten years, till 2003.
75% dealt with the immediate threat of climate change.
Of these, NONE refuted the idea that climate change is real.
[NB, I was under the impression that the term 'climate change', like 'death tax' instead of 'estate tax' was largely pushed by the Republican party to suit their own agenda. climate change sounds like a normal state of affairs, as if the potential extinction of humankind were like a rainshower.]
(Bryan's blog is the most interesting thing I've come accross in months, highly recommended).
Why does Nature magazine which is not one of the world's highest traffic websites have a pagerank of 10?
With 45,000 inbound links, perhaps the scientific community with its peer review process and history of open collaboration is more adept at mutual linking than webloggers?
Placing bets on ideas is illegal in the US but not in the UK. Based on this model, Betfair is one of the few Internet startups that is doing very well in the UK but won't be coming to the US any time soon.
To gauge the likelihood of whether there was life on Mars, look to the people that are trading futures on it.
MSNBC - Life on Mars? Don't bet against it
"Ladbrokes said it has closed the book on evidence emerging that Mars had ever harbored living organisms."
'Following the latest news from NASA, we think it is now likely that evidence of past life on Mars will be found in the coming years,'
The odds: 16-1 at close, down from 1000-1 when betting started.
Mars exploration rovers briefings
Oliver Morton on tomorrow's 2pm EST 'significant announcement' by NASA.
The announcement will no doubt concern water on mars, ice or open water. Open water could leave signs that apparently have greater significance:
"It's very hard to see how Mars could have been warm enough for open water without the benefit of significant amounts of methane in its atmosphere. Planetary atmosphere experts have told me that the only way they can imagine getting an adequate amount of methane into the atmosphere is by having methane-producing bacteria pump it out."
New Zealand Herald - Latest News:
"While five probes - including two robot rovers - explore Mars, a Sydney scientist's pet dingo-kelpie cross may have found the evidence so many have been seeking."
"Analysis of radiation left over from the dawn of creation, estimated to be some 14 billion years ago, found the sound generated from shifting matter made a noise like 'a large jet plane flying 100ft above your house in the middle of the night'... The professor had to scale the frequencies billions of times to make them audible - the frequency of sound waves at that time being too low to be heard."
"
1. Do jet planes sound different at night?
2. Do jet planes that have their frequency shrunk billions of times sound like jet planes?
3. Do jet planes that are flying in a vacuum or a medium other than air, sound like jet planes?
"'There are two figures you need to know. One is what our estimate of how many civilisations there are in the universe that are sending out signals into space [about 10,000] and the second is how long will it take to search through enough stars in the universe to statistically have a chance of picking up those signals.' Put these numbers together, she claims, and we will encounter aliens by 2025."
I'll put it in my diary.
EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Aliens are out there, say scientists
In 2001 the polar hole in the Ozone layer stopped growing
And in 2002 it actually reduced in size.
Normally rational people (heh! - I've waited a year for this) concluded that this was: "catastrophic news for environmental doomsayers".
The trouble is that the Ozone hole is now getting bigger again and this year is at record levels.
Opinions can be swayed by emotional criteria - I want to debunk all conspiracy theories because I don't like people whose judgements are based upon paranoia. There may be a certain irritating puritanism about some environmental issues - but to debunk any message because of the character of the messenger is dangerous.
Judgements are sound when they are based upon evidence - and there is overwhelming evidence that we are damaging our environment on a macro level.
New Scientist has some very nice Hubble pics of Mars.
We've seen pictures of Mars in similar detail before, however. In fact we've had photos of Mars from three feet away because NASA landed cameras on the surface.
Not that long ago, I seem to remember it being a shock for scientists to discover ice on Mars. Call me old-fashioned, but wouldn't the things which look just like large polar ice caps (which are in fact large polar ice caps and not cotton wool or marsh mallow) have been clearly visible from a telescope a century ago?
Clearly I am missing something.
In a paradoxical situation that is similar to some of the more bizarre quantum effects, 'Leap seconds' are needed because atomic clocks are more accurate than the motion of the earth, against which time needs to be calibrated.
"The problem arises because the Earth cannot keep time as accurately as modern atomic clocks, which count the steady shaking of atoms. These atomic clocks replaced the motion of the Earth as the world's official timekeeper in 1967. The pull of the moon is gradually slowing our planet down, so every now and then our clocks are halted for a second to let it catch up."
"GPS time is now running 13 seconds ahead of coordinated universal time - which includes all added leap seconds and to which most clocks on Earth are set - but is some 19 seconds behind international atomic time, which is based on atomic clocks and ignores leap seconds."
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | What time is it? Well, no one knows for sure
Scientists decoding the human genome have discovered that just 78 genes separate men from women. But what are they?
The BBC asks brits to guess:
"When faced with flat-pack furniture, men never read the manual. Yet they spend hours reading manuals for cars or bikes they will never own.
Linda, UK
Women could never invent weapons that kill, only ones that make you feel really bad and guilty until you surrender
Dan, UK
..."
Thanks Ceri
BBC NEWS | UK | What are the 78 differences between women and men?
"A recent study by Dr. Daphne Bavelier... just published in the journal Nature, adds enhanced attention skills, the ability to follow multiple objects, and split-second tracking skills to the list of benefits experienced by video game aficionados."
... er OK, so having autistic children that can catch flies is a good thing?
This month's Skeptic column in Scientific American elegantly debunks Bible Code claptrap.
One of the things that Shermer points out in the article is that a 'prediction' is a statement that something will happen in the future. To look at something written in the past and say that it could possibly be restated to fit something that has already happened is not a prediction. The Bible Code did not 'predict' anything, but with a suitably contrived descramber it can 'postdict' almost anything, true or false, sense or nonsense.
Following the success of Bible Code I comes Bible Code II, such is the power of the parasitic meme. This is bullshit that people want to believe, but no matter how hard they try to, it will always provably be bullshit.
Via Boing Boing: Scientific American: Codified Claptrap -- The Bible Code is numerological nonsense masquerading as science
"Whereas Dr Wildman's team find that chimps and humans are 99.4% similar, other researchers last year put the similarity at around 95%; the figure you get depends on precisely which genetic differences you look at."
DNA mechanisms for reproduction are not a blueprint but a recipe. This BBC article does not mention that the 95% figure for chimp vs. human comparison takes into account how the recipe is followed and therefore may make more sense. i.e. it does not merely look at the ingredients of the recipe, the DNA sequences, which have usually indicated more than 98% concordance.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps genetically close to humans via Kottke
"Contrary to popular myth, Walt Disney did not choose to be frozen, though Dick Clair, a writer for "The Carol Burnett Show," did."
In case anyone misinterprets the previous post defending Matt Ridley's attack on those (such as Bill Joy) who see absolute dangers in innovation such as nanotechnology and concludes somehow that I am against environmentalist causes.
1. It is scientists who are arguing, backed up by solid evidence that we need to cut back pollution.
2. It is politicians, particularly those with religious beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence, that refuse to believe evidence for issues such as global warming.
3. Although industry is the product of a technological society and is the cause for most pollution: a. there is a difference between science and the abuse of its innovation; b. contrary to popular opinion, non-industrial societies can be environmentally damaging; c. some scientific innovations would seem to be a very plausible way to reduce the environmentally damaging effect of industrialized society (for example, information technology increases opportunities for virtual communication and the need to burn fossil fuels for transportation).
Science means knowledge, and the opposite of knowledge is ignorance. A little or a lot of ignorance is a bad thing.
Matt Ridley very sensibly rebuffs the Bill Joy like hysteria in the latest doom mongering book, 'The Final Century':
"Consider what would have happened, for instance, if we had somehow waved a magic wand and prevented the invention of agriculture. Evidence suggests that increasingly efficient hunter-gatherers would have continued their extinction of prey species - they had already devastated the fauna of Australia, the Americas and many islands - stopping only when the last tree in the last rain forest was felled. Rees admits in passing that "the most dramatic engines of current economic growth - miniaturisation and information technology - are environmentally benign", but then fails to follow this thought."
Telegraph | Arts | Prophet or pessimist?
Back from the UK so the current hiatus here should be over. Despite the evidence from stocky hirsute Scotsmen like myself recent DNA analysis has all but proved that Human's did not interbreed with Neanderthals.
Blow to "human-Neanderthal inter-breeding" theory
Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson. They received international recognition and Nobel prizes. The discovery relied upon research by Rosalind Franklin who did not receive any such recognition and died at the age of 37. Use the power of the web and make this Remember Rosalind Franklin Day by posting about her.
HoustonChronicle.com - 'Photo 51' examines the unsung heroine of DNA
Doctors log on to fight SARS outbreak
"Crippen says SARS is the first Internet-age epidemic."
(Sorry, I just can't get over the fact that the physician quoted here is actually called Dr. Crippen, the name of one of Britain's most notorious murderers.)
"One of the most interesting things to me about this whole SARS episode is that with our current heightened awareness globally of potential bioterrorism, we have in place a surveillance system that is much more sensitive," he said. "My sense is that five to 10 years ago, these cases would have never hit our radar screen."
A boy's own stem cells are used to trigger re-growth of part of his heart.
Now if these cells were from someone else, some 'pro-lifers' would have a problem with it.
Is pro-choice non pro-liferation?
Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage
According to a journalist friend, the theory that the Amazon is human created (as quoted in this Atlantic Monthly piece from last year) is gaining support in scientific circles.
"In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. "I basically think it's all human-created," Clement told me in Brazil."
The Atlantic | March 2002 | 1491 | Mann
"The world's first truly artificial organism has been engineered by researchers in California. The bacterium makes an amino acid that no other organism uses to build proteins."
Stephen Wolfram is this years winner of Wired's tech renegade of the year award.
Wolfram spent the best part of ten years in a nocturnal existence working on 'A new kind of Science' which he self published because he didn't trust peer review. If he was a painter his garret existence would be a badge of honor, but in the world of science this isolationist approach draws suspicion.
connected.telegraph.co.uk - A revolution or self indulgent hype? How top scientists view Wolfram