He Was Great.

"I know what’s coming. I know no one beats these odds. It’s a matter of getting used to that and growing up and realizing that you are expelled from your mother’s uterus as if shot from a cannon toward a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It’s a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way and try not to do anything nasty to your fellow creatures." 


Rest in peace, Christopher Hitchens.

One degree Kevin.

This blog is about Kevin Martin. Kevin fronted Candlebox and is now in a band called the Gracious Few with former members of Live.

Kevin is the best rock star. For starters, his name is Kevin. He also wrote amazing songs like Far Behind, You, Don't You and The Rest of You. You, anyone?

It's been 20-odd years since my favourite rock stars kicked-off. They've found, how you say, unique ways to battle attrition: Chris Cornell collaborated with Timbaland (blecch), Eddie Vedder plays the ukulele, Kurt Cobain shot himself in the face.   

Kevin Martin, however, still rocks. There's not many industries where, in order to avoid cliché, one continues to do the same thing. If you could find a job where you were consistent AND not boring, then you've won. Kev is it. 

No charge.

What is free will?


Courtesy of kin, our brain is front-loaded with a billion terabytes of information. Then, as babies we're the subject of uncountable experiences that effect future brain states: All this before we have a single conscious thought. 


As adults we're constantly exposed to inputs over which we have no direct control but are formative of our worldview. 


Where is the truly independent thought, then? Every time I think I'm making a Choice it seems like I could, in theory, reverse engineer my stream of consciousness back to one or more contingent neurological events that just 'happened' to me.


The free will myth is the source of retributive justice. It's an essential part of the Just World fallacy. It's harmful.

Astronomical.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.


-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Can't get paragraphs to paragraph so just running all this together. Also, nice beard.

All this talk of Life-pixels as rational agents might strike you as an outrageous overstatement... It's time for a sanity check: Just how much, in principle, can a designed constellation of life-pixels do? The answer is staggering. [Mathematician John Horton Conway] was able to prove that there are Life-worlds - they sketched one of them - within which there is a Universal Turing Machine, a two-dimensional computer that in principle could compute any computable function ... proving you could build a working computer out of simpler Life-forms.

This quote from Daniel Dennett's book, Freedom Evolves. The 'Life' he refers to is a computational game developed by Conway to test the interactions of differing, player-generated algorithms. Nerd alert. Reading it reminded me of Stephen Wolfram's TED Talk on computation: set apparently simple constraints on a repetitive formulae and, after enough iterations, some will produce unpredictable, unintuitive results. Why? How? Of all the confounding ideas, complexity from simplicity is the least intuitive and, perhaps, the least edifying. Maybe we just flatter ourselves when talking about magnificence of conscious life.

On the Origins of Tenuous Simile

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

These words from Robert Beverley MacKenzie in 1868 in response to a public reading of The Origin of Species. How right he was; there's nothing intuitive to the idea that biological complexity bootstrapped itself from a grabbag of chemicals. And yet, that appears to be precisely what happened.

Good logical arguments are like the Chicago Bulls in 1994; it's almost certain they're not going to be beaten. But good evidence is like the Harlem Globetrotters; it/they cannot be beaten - however counter-intuitive it seems, and however much you want the other team to open a can.

Of mice and men etc.

I've just finished Joan Dunayer's Sepciesism. I picked up a copy at the library because it had a cute mouse nibbling cheese on the cover.

Dunayer says the thrust of her book is "... that there is no good reason to give sentient, nonhuman animals greater moral consideration than humans"; I'd distil the theme of her book down to "overrun with bad ideas".

The problem with an absolute rights-based approach to animal ethics is that it's all rights, and no obligations. If your typical dolphin is as sophisticated a moral philosopher as she makes out, then they should not only be entitled to freedom of expression, but should also be accountable for, say, their penchant for torturing otter's to death. Shark's (if they're not starving) let their prey bleed out after an initial killshot, saving them energy but greatly increasing the prey's suffering. Jane Goddall showed us how some chimp mothers are completely lacking maternal empathy, keeping food for themselves and letting their offspring freeze in colder weather.

I don't want chimps visited by CYFS. I don't want dolphins in the dock. Animal liberation can come without an egregious conflation of human and nonhuman consciousness. More on this later.

Helps me work, rest and play RB.

So the ESA Mars500 project finished today, with six astronauts having endured 520 days of isolation, spaceship-like conditions and (judging by this pic) an interminable game of Rock Band. Dante could not have made this up.

The idea behind the project was simple: to examine how our species reacts to the kind of environment on Mars and during the lengthy return trip. Things look good so far.

Should humans go to Mars? A lot of smart people don't think so - most notably Stephen Weinberg: It'd cost zillions, is extremely risky, and it's likely robots could do just as good a job.

I love meaningless endeavour because, most likely, it's all we have. Let's hope people get there some day.

We pick up your gaubij.

When he spoke, Richard Feynman sounded a lot like this guy. Now, I derive actual physical pleasure from listening to any Jew-twang - let alone one attached to as many good ideas as this guy. Imagine my joy, then, when reading The Character of Physical Law, imagining him whispering it to me while he cradled my head and called me 'tiny dancer'. Etc etc.

Weird.

Feynman was the consummate scientific everyman. He helped develop the atomic bomb. He went to strip clubs. He balled-out the US Government for lying during the Challenger fuckup/inquiry. He drank like a Greek sailor. He was a pioneer in nanotech. He painted abstracts. He was a Nobel Laureate. He was a faithful husband.

He was, I think, a study in contrasts. Or, to put it another way, he lived the kind of double-life that made him and his ideas accessible. Science needs more of this.

Four Rhetorical Questions.

Mary Claire-King is a mother-flippin' beast. Who else can say they've,

a) Revealed the near-identity of the human and chimp genome,

b) Identified the congenital basis for some breast and ovarian cancers (and worked on relevant therapies), and

c) Been involved in seminal work on dental genetics that helped solve actual crimes in the actual 'non-scientific' world, and

d) other stuff.

Amazing. Why is she not famous? Why do I know the name of Beckham's parfum ('HOMME') but nothing of King's recent work? Why is #KimKardashian trending worldwide, but there's barely a chirp from those pricks in Geneva sending sub-atomic particles through Western Europe at faster than the speed of light? Though not sure why, I feel we need more popular science and less Armenian socialite booty-queens.

Nerd alert.

A short series on my three current scientist crushes, starting with Lawrence Krauss. He looks like Kermit but really knows his stuff.

He showed how the universe is expanding at a constantly increasing rate. And, how most (99%) of the universe is made of matter and energy that we can't even see. He extrapolated this from the work of theoretical physicists who confirmed the number of sub-atomic particles in the universe - there's just not enough protons and neutrons to make all the mass in the cosmos. Dark matter is real, and it's heavy, man.

The women and men who figure these things out are amazing. It'd be great if more people knew about their work.

Splishy splashy.

A great fun thing to do is drink alcohol, and one of the blessings of living where I do is sharing the company of good-natured beer snobs.

Here's what to do: buy 20 bucks-worth of craft piss - Tuatara or Emersons don't make bad beer so that's a good place to start. Drink the beer one bottle one at a time, dividing each by however many people are present.Talk about what you're drinking. Use words like 'hops', 'bouquet' and 'bubbly'.

Livin' in America.

Is it possible to become so superficial and disaffected - and so enabled by your peers to be this way - that you oscillate in and out of psychopathy without noticing? That's a rhetorical question, but what I do know is that Bret Easton Ellis was pretty clever to even conceive of this at 25. Full credit.

What the flux.

I don't understand a lot of things, but the thing I don't understand best is how to flux pin a superconductor.

Roger Highfield (current editor of New Scientist) was asked what his philosophy was at the magazine. He said; "...our philosophy here is 'science is interesting, and if you don't agree you can fuck off' ". Science is interesting - especially when it makes things float.

Beam it up, Jim Webb.

This is a picture of what will replace the Hubble telescope when it falls out of orbit in 2013. So far its development has cost ~$9b.

Formally shouting adults.

A good morning at home listening to Lawrence Krauss and Christopher Hitchens debate with William Lane Craig.

Some quotes:

"You think there's free will? I say 'of course there's free will; we don't have any choice in the matter', but at least when I say that I know I'm being philosophically ironic, and that some of that irony is at my expense. You, however, say 'of course we have free will; the Boss says so.' Ridiculous." - CH

"Rick Warren is a pompous asshole" - LK