Tabula Rasa lj

It's been an odd day for the New York Times website. At the moment it features a large piccie of a platypus top and centre (for Platypus Looks Strange on the Inside, Too), and earlier they had Steampunk fashion.

I don't think there is any particular correspondence between those two subjects, but it did lead me circuitously to this.

New game gizmo uses mind control

Freaky dude. I am amused that this sort of thing is being brought in as game technology, which is undoubtedly much more commercial than, for example, disabled support services. I can certainly see it heading in that direction soon after. Paranoia may also point out that training a machine to basically read your mind might lead to all sorts of uncomfortable to scary lie-detector-type scenarios.

(Assuming it is not yet another over-hyped and under-researched article, but it looks more or less legit from this end.)

I bought an Xbox 360 recently, my first ever console. Assassin's Creed came as a freebie, and it's a beautiful thing -- how the story goes, we shall have to see. I've also played round with a couple of other game demos, and picked up Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic cheap (having familiarised myself with the backward compatibility list).

One very neat thing is that it streams avi video from my PC. Now, to try and stop Windows Media Centre updating itself halfway through an episode of something...

This guy protests too much, but he has some good points: Is Technology Killing Movies?

We've just seen Primer. Freaky, man.

But I'm suspicious. It is the tenth anniversary of google being registered (more or less). A couple of guys in a garage take over the world... Did they really use a search engine?

Also, I read the chapter on time travel in The Science of Stephen King today. Mere coincidence, of course. But in any sane world, would I have wandered into a video shop this week to see Steve's wacky time travel romp, The Langoliers, being played?

I think not.

If nothing else, somebody should go back in time and tell the editor to make it half the length, and perhaps make a decent movie. (The Langoliers. I don't think cutting Primer in half would help.)

The Science of Stephen King isn't much good, alas. It manages to improve after the first disastrous chapter (on ESP), but still doesn't provide a particular coherent look at either science or Steve's work. A shame because, now I think about it, there could be potential in such an odd idea.

It did manage to equate two branes colliding with a certain Buick, which was a good trick. Made me regret yet again I couldn't get any brane-eaters in All Tomorrow's Zombies.

I read David Pogue's stuff at the NY Times on a semi-regular basis (see pogueposts), and this morning he references an article on the Ansto site Blink-free photos, guaranteed. Cute.

In the meantime, I'm waiting for my latest contribution to global culture to appear. No, not All Tomorrow's Zombies or even the interview we did with the local paper two weeks ago. On TripleJ this morning they asked a lettuce farmer if there was anywhere in the Bible where God was smiting lettuce. I texted off the obvious reply and am now waiting for my mention. I may be waiting a long time.

ETA: Obviously my regular stint in the (ahem) 80s was enough radio glory for me. But I did get one of my suggestions listed in Not on DVD Corner (down the bottom). And am I the only person who is somewhat tempted by (another) revised version of Alexander? It was a mess — and an extra 40 minutes probably won't help — but it was an interesting mess.

According to Triple J news, Ethiopia is coming up to the Millennium because it is still under the Julian calendar. According to Wikipedia this is a gross simplification.

Either way, I'm mainly wondering how their computers cope.

In other news, Alice goes to court.

There is a great article in the NY Times, Unhappy Meals (rego probably required). It's all about how all the solutions to western dietary problems are just making us sicker by, surprise, pandering to big business.

In recent months I have been trying to get my health back into shape, the result being a whole lot of extra supplements — the sort of stuff the article points out (in general terms) are rather useless. But since the great majority of what my great-great-grandmother would recognise as food is liable to make me ill, I'm not sure there's a way off immediately.

I guess this is just a bit of a whinge then, but it maybe be useful to others.

I was thinking someone should make this design into an icon last week, and today I stumbled across it. I remember creating one of these things way back when, but these days it's all online: The Magic Sierpinski Triangle.

It seems New Scientist can write catchy headlines. I got an email from this this morning saying First official death from chronic fatigue syndrome, which admittedly I am mainly interested in because I have suffered it myself (um, CFS, not death). But it was the one earlier this week that really gave me pause. The email subject was 'Why people should get flu jabs now'.

I'm sure if the pandemic had actually started it would be more strident, but still...

(Not that the situation is good.)

Zero gravity fashion

(even if us geeks like to say micro-gravity instead)

Last week I read Martin Rees' Our Final Century, cheerfully subtitled Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century. This was prep for my panel In the Year of the Plague, which went pretty well.

One of the chapters in Rees' book is called The Doomsday Philosophers, about those who apply arguments such as: since we've only been around for a relatively short time, it's likely we won't be around for much longer.

Right. Even with the rather longer explanation in the book, it seems like crap to me. As suspected, we didn't get to talk about this at the panel, but Chris Lawson (of Written in Blood) managed to cover it in his Year in Science panel instead, and pretty much demolished it. I'll have to admit I think he could have used some tighter arguments, since he was going for effect over rigour, but it was cheering nonetheless.

There have been many responses to plague and pestilence including, it could be argued, horror itself (or Prismatic, at the very least). But are any of them as catchy as the elbow bump?

It has been discovered the so-called tenth planet has a moon, and they have been nick-named Xena and Gabrielle. Isn't that cute?

(You really don't have to answer that if you don't want to)

SETI@home: 10,000 work units.

Spent the morning listening to IBM natter about software development, which was quite interesting. I also finally got to the Australian Museum forensics exhibition which, taking into account the 9+ age range, was very detailed and cool. (No, I didn't solve the murder, tending to let the crowd of kiddies first go at the exhibits, including the hands-on autopsy.) They also do Death on-line, I've suddenly noticed.

I suspect I am giving an over-optimistic impression of my preparedness for this forensics panel on the weekend, but I'm afraid things have been rather more chaotic than may be apparent -- perhaps summarised best by the DVD of Anatomie dying half-way through (and it was going so well). At least it has been better than what might be called my prep for the RPG panel, which could also be described as crashing and burning.

But I'm sure interesting things will be said.

The other panel I'm doing is on Underground Comics (now moved opposite Stephen King), and I think my recent reviews will have helped that somewhat.

Speaking of comics, how do you choose which bits to get Neil Gaiman to sign? We went for Black Orchid#1, Books of Magic#1 and Violent Cases over Sandman#2, Hellblazer #27 and others. But does it matter? The original appearance of my interview definately goes in the pile, however.

And a final bit of outrage. Today I saw Keith Topping describe Angel: The Girl in Question as the "Best. Episode. Ever."

Outrage!

I was vaguely thinking about following up stephen_dedman's note in my previous entry (something about the distribution of pamphlets claiming the Grand Canyon proves a big flood, no doubt), when I came across this site, completely by accident: Australia's Burning Mountain.

I was there because I was interested in the mountain, and being a modern web user, I didn't pay much attention to the site I was on, or the pretty graphics at the top. It was only near the bottom I started getting suspicious. The point of the piece seems to be that a burning seam of coal proves (or at least indicates the possibility of) a vast misunderstanding in modern dating techniques, leading to the conclusion that all the fossils and stuff are about 6,000 years old as opposed to, say, 260 million. There's a flood in there too, and creatio ex nihilo no doubt.

OK. Well, at least he's using the scientific method to argue against the current understanding of the world -- a long and noble pursuit.

Not that I think it's very good science. For example, the author says the probability of the current theories espoused by researchers -- lightning bolt or spontaneous combustion -- is diminished for the reasons he states. That is different from saying either is impossible, and considering that such burning coal seams are pretty rare (I know of one in the US too, although I can't remember if it started recently or not), you'd expect that the factors that lead to their ignition would be less commonplace than volcanic activity.

He also says that spontaneous combustion is caused by a rapid exposure of the coal to the elements, which is why it happens in modern mines. But what about an earthquake?, thinks I. That seems a possibility.

The point is that I don't really know if an earthquake is possible or not, since I don't know enough about geology. I can't argue this case on the facts.

I happen to believe that the Earth is a lot older than 6,000 years, but not with any particularly deep conviction. And science is so full of arguments and seemingly crazy postulates that it's not hard to be disillusioned sometimes. Bill Bryson talks about so-called scientific certainties that aren't in A Short History of Almost Everything, and there was a recent list of unknowns in New Scientist as well (Dark Matter is always mystery number one, it seems). A recent book review in NS quotes a reputable physicist who says that making predictions about the first moments of the Big Bang, as happens to infinitesimal precision on a regular basis, with our current evidence is like deducing the behaviour of subatomic particles by watching a hurricane out the window.

(If there was a Big Bang at all. What do I know?)

Still, I don't think we can despair, or give up when told "it's only a theory". Damien Broderick has a great discussion on this in The Last Mortal Generation, and I'll try to paraphrase from memory. He points out that whilst scientists are continuously arguing the facts, what they are really arguing about is theories that fit our current data, and the size of that data is huge. If you argue against the theory of evolution, your alternative must encompass all that research into genetics and biology and whatnot, that hundreds of thousands of people are going over with a fine tooth comb, looking for oddities and exceptions (because that's how they get their grants). If you argue that relativity and quantum physics are mystical hocus pocus, you still have to provide an alternative to all those experiments, and the fact that Newtonian physics can't describe how your mobile phone works.

On a more psychological level, we can quote Yeats too, which seems relevant to me:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.

Of course, you can't argue that you're right, just because you're insecure in that belief. But you could might find somebody to have a productive argument with.

I don't read Scientific American, but their editorial of last week has percolated through to my consciousness. Since I haven't seen anyone talk about it on LJ, here it is (in the great internet tradition).

Scientific American -- April 1, 2005

"There's no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don't mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there's no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine's coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that's a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That's what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn't get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can't work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers' dollars and imperil national security, you won't hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration's antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that's not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either. So what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools' Day. "

Okay, We Give Up

MATT COLLINS

I love intelligent error messages:

loadgr.pl did not compile, which can't happen

In which Brazilian scientists try to teach a rhea about the dangers of jaguars. Or possibly Wes Craven:

http://www1.uol.com.br/cienciahoje/chdia/n966.htm

(From New Scientist)

Who says physicists can't have fun?:

What do fireworks and the universe have in common? Big bangs, of course.

Hence the pyrotechnic display that launched the summer festival in Geneva, Switzerland, on 30 July. CERN, the European centre for particle physics, is guest of honour on account of its 50th birthday. The fireworks told the story of the universe from its birth 13.7 billion years ago to the present day. The display began with a really big bang. Then came inflation, fundamental forces, matter, stars and, finally, planets like our own.

Inflation, with its faster-than-light expansion of space-time, was a struggle to recreate with fireworks, says Rolf Landua, a CERN physicist, who worked with firework company Pyrostar to create the spectacle. Landua fears the public may have got lost at the part where the four forces of nature diverge. But he says the battle between matter and antimatter, represented by two colours of fireworks, turned out a treat.
--Transcribed from the 7 August New Scientist (since it doesn't appear to be online).

Too cool -- if probably more pretty than enlightening.

And modern physics remains as weird as ever (people trying to remove hidden dimensions from string theory notwithstanding. The spoilsports. Next they'll tell us that spider venom doesn't dissolve flesh).