The Cheerful Insanity of Me

In case you were wondering...


Why do you get a hangover by FakeScience

...but then I remember I don't have a boat handy.

A necessity, according to the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), who calculate that if you slowly reduced the spin of the world to stationary removing the centrifugal force acting on the oceans, the world could look something more like this:



Definitely a bit wet this far from the equator.

Full article on the ESRI website

The geek group have big balls and this is what they do with them:



A giant Newton's Cradle.

Lots more photos and details of the project on their website

(via craziestgadgets)

Dana Centre plans for this month:

9 June - Move Me On - Curious idea getting a scientist and choreographer to work together. I'm fascinated to know what the result is and what they say about the reasoning behind it.
11 June - Season of Life - Seasons certainly seem to effect our general feelings,etc, but other than the obvious I don't know a lot about this.
17 June - Dinner@Dana: Deciphering the Cosmic Number - Must admit I don't find 137 anything special, but fascinated to find out why Pauli and Jung thought differently
18 June - Economy and Me - I'm not convinced capitalism is a good thing (but am failing to see what viable alternatives there are given the number of other systems which have been tried and failed).
30 June - Carole Dane is Sexually Selected - The science of sexual attraction seems an excellent subject for comedy.

If anyone fancies joining me at any of these, they are free, you just need to email tickets@danacentre.org.uk to book a place.

Also, there's this one a Gresham college, which I'll probably aim to go to:

22 June - London's Lost Rivers: The Hackney Brook and other North West Passages - I've posted about the lost rivers before, so it will be interesting to see what he has to say about them.

This evening I went to a talk about how the internet and computer games may be affecting how young people thing and the general consensus seemed to be, in spite of all the media hype, there's not enough evidence to come to any firm conclusions.

This has got me thinking about the whole violence and computer games thing. Thinking about it games like Doom (released in 1993) were around when I was a teenager, so saying that these types of games make children more violent is like saying my peers are more violent then previous generations, which I'm not entirely convinced about (especially when you look through the number of horrific things humans have done to each other throughout history).

OK, I never really got into Doom (much preferring to build cities or save lemmings instead), but I knew plenty of people who did and many of them I wouldn't have described as being particularly violent (or at least they kept it well hidden if they were), so I really don't see it.

There have always been toy guns and swords and things anyway, and although playing with them may not be so graphic in its violence the violence is still there when playing with them (not something I'm particularly comfortable with anyway, but children will play, it's an important part of how they learn about society), so are computer games really bringing in anything new.

OK, as computer games have developed the graphics, etc have improved and (I gather, as I don't actually play many computer games) the violence can now be much more realistically gory, but the fact remains that the violence was there back in 1993 and to be honest I can't see strong evidence to suggest that's what causes society's problems.

On the topic of the internet, it clearly does effect how we interact with each other and there have certainly been flame wars resulting from simple misunderstandings of what people have written. Although we try and get away from the fact that our discussions on here don't have the emotional backing that face-to-face conversations have even when we try to compensate using things like smilies, it's still not quite the same, but it's also a new channel of communication allowing children to interact when they otherwise wouldn't do and I think you do learn to accept the lack of emotion and try to accommodate for that when reading other opinions to an extent.

Also on the topic of the internet was the point about whether it makes our reading in general much shallower then it used to be. I would admit that a lot of the time when reading things on the internet I tend to skim them to get the general gist and just read more into them if necessary. I'm not sure how much that has affected my reading of books though, I certainly read them on a deeper level then I read most web-articles, but is it shallower then I used to? I really don't know.

One of those questions I've always wondered about:

AAWE Working Paper No. 36 Economics
Can People Distinguish Pâté from Dog Food?
John Bohannon, Robin Goldstein and Alexis Herschkowitsch

Abstract

Considering the similarity of its ingredients, canned dog food could be a suitable and inexpensive substitute for pâté or processed blended meat products such as Spam or liverwurst. However, the social stigma associated with the human consumption of pet food makes an unbiased comparison challenging. To prevent bias, Newman's Own dog food was prepared with a food processor to have the texture and appearance of a liver mousse. In a double-blind test, subjects were presented with five unlabeled blended meat products, one of which was the prepared dog food. After ranking the samples on the basis of taste, subjects were challenged to identify which of the five was dog food. Although 72% of subjects ranked the dog food as the worst of the five samples in terms of taste (Newell and MacFarlane multiple comparison, P<0.05), subjects were not better than random at correctly identifying the dog food.

So, it appears people don't like eating dog food. Now there's a surprise!

Not entirely sure what that's got to do with wine economics though?

So, a little over 2 weeks ago, I went to a talk by Bernard Carr on whether science can accommodate psychic experience.

Taking a standard reductionist view of science that everything can reduce down to physics, although it is often more useful to view things on a larger scale through the other sciences, science becomes primarily focused on matter and how matter interacts. It doesn't really consider the mind/consciousness within this (ok, this is questionable for sciences such as psychology, as it's questionable whether this is entirely about the functioning of the brain or whether an individual consciousness plays a role. Some would even say consciousness is entirely about the functioning of the brain and so this whole train of thought falls apart, but that would be less interesting, so I'll put that thought to one side).

If you want to consider things like psi scientifically, particularly for things like telekinesis, where there is a clear interaction between mind and matter, you need to consider the more general question of whether science can accommodate consciousness, which to me sounds a far more interesting topic to think about.

As a cosmologist, Carr, asked the question about this drive for a theory of everything, where we keep extending the theories to take into account other forces to the point where cosmologists are now considering things like M-theory (and we're now going well beyond my knowledge of physics with things like that). What if this could be extended further to include notions of consciousness? Would it be useful? What would it predict?

I'm fairly skeptical about the whole psi thing, although being able to move bottle tops with my mind would be quite a fun thing to do and if someone claimed it were possible and wanted to show me how I'd certainly be open to giving it a go. However, Carr, came up with the valid point that although a lot of scientists rule out this sort of stuff, some of the results predicted by string theory are equally bizarre and equally unproven and yet far more acceptable.

So, taking that further, this got me thinking (a not entirely new thought) that although scientific models at their core have a proven evidence base to show this is a good model in the scope that we're looking at, when you go beyond that scope and start making predictions outside of this, you start going into the realm of belief. Admittedly, in terms of science you then experiment and prove this belief right or wrong and adapt your model accordingly and this is how we progress.

This then gets me thinking about belief in general (particularly religion, which seems to keep cropping up in conversation lately - probably due to the time of year and the people I've been talking to) and the thought that these are just personal models of reality based on our own experiential evidence and predictions about the nature of reality based on those. In fact, I've heard a lot of very religious people say that these sort of things are beyond our comprehension and religion is just our way of understanding it, which fits this quite well. Then again, I was a mathematician and not a very religious one, so I probably would view it this way.

Whereas much of the scientific models of reality are experimentally verifiable, but only cover a narrow focus of the materialistic stuff, religious models cover everything, but generally appear less easily verifiable (after all, even if there was a god and he were to strike me down with a thunderbolt, I might just put it down to a freak weather occurrence).

So, in a way we already have several models for this sort of stuff, they're just not expressed mathematically. This doesn't mean they can't be. After all, talking to Newton about string theory would probably have confused the socks off him, he didn't have the mathematics for this.

So, whether science can accommodate consciousness, seems to me more of a question of what science is. Is it purely about the materialistic world or can it include theories on other aspects of reality?

I must admit, this isn't the first thing that occurs to me to do when faced with a cup of tea and a doughnut, but it is very funny:

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(via uberreview)

On Thursday, I made another trip to the Dana Centre for a talk on Emotional Contagion.

The talk focused on The Chameleon Project, a project to produce a video art installation driven by the emotions of the audience.

The current stage of the project analyses the emotions of one member of the audience by following a set of points on that persons face to judge that persons emotional state ("mind reading technology" as they seem to like to call it). Based on the judgement of that persons emotional state the computer will choose an appropriate video response (single channel).

This is prototype 5 of 10. The final prototype they are aiming for multi-channel video of several different faces responding to the emotional states of the audience and is due to be completed in January 2010.

Will have to keep an eye on this to see the finished work.

So, last month I posted the talks I was planning to go to. In the end I never made it to the Science Museum one last week as I had to work on coursework instead and I failed to notice the talk on The Two Cultures was a daytime one rather than evening, so didn't make that one either.

Looking at this month's offering, these are the talks I'm planning on attending:

• Sinful Science - 3 Feb 2009 - This should be a good one considering the morals of science when it's used for less moral applications


• War of the Sexes - 4 Feb 2009 - This gets a lot of attention nowadays as we strive for sexual equality. A lot of people do argue that men and women are different, so it'll be interesting to see how much they think these differences needs to be taken into consideration in male and female roles and how much the division of roles is just antiquated tradition.


• Emotional Contagion - 5 Feb 2009 - I love the way it's difficult to be sad around happy people even if the opposite is less good. Never really considered how we are influenced by the emotions of others before though.


• Feel the Flavour - 11 Feb 2009 - I have an obvious interest in taste given what I do for a living, so this will be fascinating.


• Veggie Might - 17 Feb 2009 - Who am I to argue if they want to tell me I'm saving the planet?


• Science Museum Lates - 25 Feb 2009 - As I didn't make it last week, I'll make up for it this month instead (no prebooking required for this one apparently)

Very weighted towards next week, but should be an interesting selection.

Again, if anyone fancies joining me, tickets are free and you just need to email tickets@danacentre.org.uk to arrange a place.