I posted a while back about the divide between Shia and Sunni, and how many US policymakers have little understanding of the role sectarianism plays in regional politics. I'd never gotten a complete grasp on the geographical distribution of the two sects, myself . . . but here it is: A map of the geographical distribution of Islamic sects posted by Miles 12:33 PM
Essay question: (answer in 500 words or less, by "comment" or email)
Without defering to God, give a justification for caring about the fate of the world at a point in the future sufficiently distant (say, 500 years from now) that there is no chance you or anyone you know will be effected. No fair being simplistically humanist and just assigning "value" to human life.
(Yeah, I'm serious! Go ahead, give it a try.) posted by Miles 10:36 AM
Maybe the real administration plan, all along, has been to precipitate a broad, regional sectarian war in the Middle East. "If we just nudge this domino," they might have thought, "the Islamic world will implode in Sunni-Shiite civil war, turning the violence inward."
No, I don't really believe that was the plan. But it might be what happens, anyway.
I haven't found a betting site that lists odds for such a conflagration, but tradesports.com has odds on:
(1) U.S. military action against North Korea (Current market: 15-20% chance this will happen by December '07)
and
(2) U.S. or Israeli overt airstrike against Iran (Current market: 20-25% chance this will happen by December '07)
One more thing:
I wonder whether the U.S. has a long-term strategy regarding nuclear proliferation, where I'm talking on the order of 50-200 years. The bomb has only been around for 60 years - that's an eye-blink in historical terms. Given that information "wants to be free" and simply tends to leak and spread over time, and given the course of development around the world, there is little reason to believe there will be many nations incapable of developing nuclear arms in 2100. To date, many have declined to develop them; maybe this will continue, maybe it won't. I have trouble getting my head around the "cognitive processes" of states, given that they really exist only in the minds of individuals. In any case, it seems to me that achieving stability in the long-term is a very different challenge from, say, avoiding nuclear holocaust during the cold war. Then, there was essentially one "enemy" command structure, with one authority to negotiate with, and they were known quantities. In a future where 200 different states have neutron-bomb caliber WMDs, the dynamic is completely different. I don't think MAD works, and I don't think comprehensive monitoring works.
So I don't know . . . functional missile defense plus a nation-blanketing network of nanobots with geiger-counters to prevent attacks via smuggled bombs?
The 12th richest man in america has left his personal website un-updated since about 1998.
"Research on the Web seems to be fashionable these days and I guess I'm no exception. Recently I have been working on the Google search engine with Larry Page."
Not long ago an investment banker worth millions told me that he wasn't in his line of work for the money. "If I was doing this for the money," he said, with no trace of irony, "I'd be at a hedge fund." What to say? Only on a small plot of real estate in lower Manhattan at the dawn of the 21st century could such a statement be remotely fathomable. That it is suggests how debauched our ruling class has become.
Why is cool cool? Why is it hip to be jaded? Why are the hippies made fun of? Why is goodness considered passe? Why is it taboo amongst the cool to wear all of your heart on your sleeve?
Maybe it's all perspective; we all see the world through lenses that change in color as we age. If I listen with a jaded ear, I hear the cold twang of a music exec's market research, and miss the artist's original emotion. If I watch with a jaded eye, I see drama written to capture attention and breed compulsion, and miss the underlying, mediating emotional content.
One function that art can serve is to make the private public; to bridge the gap between our lives on the inside, and our constrained, socially purposeful behavior on the outside.
I think what we're to take from this NY Times article is that we'd all be better off if congress & the FBI joined us 20-somethings in getting all of our news from The Daily Show.
"Can you tell a Sunni from a Shiite?"
This reporter has made a habit of asking this simple question at the end of each interview he does with anyone in Washington, D.C. He tells them he's not asking for intricate details, just who's who and what they want now, basically. He describes how many in congress & the intelligence community are entirely unable to answer the question.
Can you? How about Iran: Sunni or Shiite? How about Al Qaida? Saddam Hussein? Hezbollah? Do you know the fundamentals of what they disagree on?
Here are some answers for ya' (and for you, Mr. Congressman):
About a month ago (according to stickers on the engine) my 1987 Volkswagen Scirocco turned 20. I was very proud. Then, a week later, she died. I heard some nasty rattles from under the hood, took it into the shop, and they told me to be safe on the road I needed to replace the front tie rods and ball joints on both sides, all of the brakes (entirely, not just pads), the A/C compressor clutch, the head gasket, and a couple of other things. The bill would have been around $2000. Fortunately, I found a great home for the car, selling it for $400 to a young mechanic & Volkswagen enthusiast in who had drooled over the car every time I'd brought it in for an oil change. He was very, very excited about the car, and is planning to fully restore it & probably make it a show car. Pretty cool.
Losing the Scirocco also made me accelerate my search for a new car. I'd already settled on the exact model & color, but I thought I'd have to order one and wait a few months. Instead, a dealer managed to find one - in Long Island, NY - secure it for me, and get it driven up here to MA. I took delivery this weekend. I love this car.
It's an Aurora Blue 2007 Mazda 3, completely loaded. It's fun to drive, with a 2.3 liter, 4 cylinder, 151 Horsepower engine, a very smooth manual transmission, and a sweet sport-tuned suspension. It's safe, with ABS, EBD, Traction Control, Dynamic Stability Control, front, side, & curtain airbags, and HID headlights. And it's luxurious, with a leather interior, heated seats, an 8-speaker Bose stereo system, a moonroof, and automatic climate control. All of this for a total price of under $22,000. I couldn't ask for anything more.
Oh, and I have a very cool, very nerdy customization coming soon. I'll post pics when it's done. :-) posted by Miles 12:57 PM
Another instance of me bugging Apple to add some feature. (no pun intended. see below.)
With the availability of video, it would be AWESOME if iTunes added an "advertisements" section where for free (for the consumer) you could download ads seen on TV. Like, I saw a Cingular ad yesterday with an awesome song in the background, that I'd love to buy. If that ad were available on iTunes, (1) I'd go watch it, and (2) I'd buy the song, and maybe an album, through iTunes. For Apple, this could be a cheap & easy revenue stream: Advertisers would pay for bandwidth, and toss a few cents Apple's way for every viewing or download, and Apple could get additional revenue from follow-up music purchases. If there were a list of "top 10 ads", I would even go and browse them on a regular basis, because I'd know they'd be fun to watch and have good music.
For the last few years, I've played in the Boston Men's Baseball League, for a team called the Mariners. This is a hardball league, mind you, not softball. I love it; I love the game, and just taking the field in a baseball uniform is one of the best feelings in the world. I only made it to about half the games, this year, mostly because I was traveling too much, but also in some part because my thesis & job apps have been staring me in the face. Anyway, the team actually got decent this year, and finished better than .500, good enough for a wildcard playoff berth. Because I missed so many games, I didn't end up being playoff eligible . . . which was a bummer, but in truth I would have missed the playoff games anyway, being away in NY & NJ visiting family.
So here's the good part: the team won their wildcard matchup, to advance to the next round. Unfortunately, they were matched up with the best team in the league, the Cutters, who finished 18-5 and have been at or near the top of the league for years. I figured, truthfully, that my guys were toast. They managed to split the first two games, though, over the weekend, and make it to a deciding third game.
Game three was last night. It went rough early on; the Mariners went down 3-0, picked up one, then gave up another three. The game went to the 7th (last) inning with the M's down 6-1. Then the unthinkable happened: with TWO OUTS in the last inning, the M's strung together SEVEN consecutive hits, the last one driving home the tying and go-ahead runs, and then held off the Cutters in the bottom of the inning to lock down the win. Here's the game summary on the league site.
Before I go on, I just want to say: HOLY SHIT!
Okay, now, in honor of this blog's name: the odds against a team with a .250 team average getting 7 straight hits at a particular moment (like with 2 outs in the last inning) are 4^7 to 1; that works out to 16384 to 1 against.
So here's a question: has there EVER been a more unlikely, more amazing comeback in a similar backs-against-the-wall situation, in the deciding game of a pro-sports playoff series? I can't think of one. In baseball, there are seven playoff series every year (since the advent of the wildcard, anyway), and it's safe to say that fewer than half of them go to a deciding final game. Before 1969 there was only ONE series per year. So over the 103 years since the first world series, you would get fewer than 160 deciding final games. So the odds are at least 100:1 against such a comeback ever having happened in the history of major league baseball.
So I say again: HOLY SHIT! posted by Miles 11:44 AM
I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning And go to work each day And when the evening rolls around I'll go on home and lay my body down And when the morning light comes streaming in I'll get up and do it again
I've been aware of the time going by They say in the end its the wink of an eye
So I'm going to find myself a girl And learn what laughter means And we'll fill in the missing colors In each others paint-by-number dreams And when the morning light comes streaming in We'll get up and do it all again
- Jackson Browne, "The Pretender" (~) posted by Miles 12:25 AM
Jess & I are on a little road-trip vacation, 'clock-wise' around Lake Ontario. We started out West from Albany, went swimming in the lake, toured the summer-home mansion of the founder of Citibank, visited the site where Joseph Smith claimed to have unearthed the Book of Mormon, took an awesome Jet Boat tour on the Niagara River, went to Niagara Falls (Wow!), scooted up to Toronto for a visit with Dave & Julie (great city! great folks!), and just today drove all the way up to Montreal.
So:
Wow, is it weird to just be driving along, and then all of a sudden have everything not be in English! We're actually much closer to home (geographically) here than we were in Toronto, but it feels like we're on a different continent. While it may be true that Quebecois has a unique and different culture, above and beyond the language, you don't get any meaningful sense of it, crossing the border from Ontario; nonetheless, language is enough - when you don't speak the language, everything instantly becomes strange and mysterious and different. It's one thing when you expect it; when you book a flight, and fly to some far-away country. It's another when you stay in the same country, and you're only a 5-hour drive away from home. Honestly, it's kind of a world-shaking revelation, to realize that this essentially fully Francophone 'country' is about as close to Boston as Philadelphia is.
And . . . I feel like some kind of subversive, carrying around the copy of Infinite Jest that I'm reading. posted by Miles 12:18 AM
I bought a nice guitar as a birthday present to myself, and I've been having a great time beginning to learn to play. I can just about play the four power-chord intro to the White Stripes "Fell In Love With A Girl", now. :-p On the whole, my chord repertoire now includes A, Am, B, C, D, Dm, E, Em, and G . . . and in my next on-line lesson I'm going to learn the blues scale, which I'm psyched about.
Anyways, Jess being a pretty expert musician (she's played piano, french horn, cello, bass, and she sings) I asked her what the deal was, exactly, with chords; what makes some consonant and some dissonant, physically. She told me not to worry about it, and that it would just get in the way - that I should just focus on learning to play. This illustrates a deep difference between us that we have trouble with, sometimes: I value understanding itself, regardless of whether it's practical or useful; she doesn't, really. Or maybe, to be fair, she just values and prioritizes productivity and efficacy more than the merely theoretical or abstract.
In any case, unsatisfied, I went out on my own into the wilds of the www to try to find how how physical wave "harmonics" relate to musical scales, chords, etc.
If the (physical) frequency of a note is x (like, 440 Hz is an "A"), doubling the frequency (say, by vibrating a string exactly half as long) produces the same (letter) note, an octave higher.
If "x" is the frequency of a "C", then:
2x = "C" 4x = "C" 8x = "C"
etc.
The chromatic scale used in most modern western music is "twelve-tone equal temperament", meaning that an octave is divided into a series of 12 equal "steps" - which is to say, equal frequency ratios.
So regardless of what octave you're in, or what notes you're playing, x * y^12 = 2x, where y is the frequency ratio that defines the steps (if you go up 12 steps, you're up an octave, meaning the frequency has doubled.) We can actually solve for y in this equation, and it comes out to about 1.059, though that's not really too important.
What's cool, though, is that chords "sound nice" because they minimize dissonance.
The ratio of a "major third" is y^4 (~5/4), and that of a "minor third" y^3 (~6:5) . So a "major" chord has fundamental frequencies approximately equal to:
x, 5/4x, (6/5)(5/4)x
or more simply:
x, 5/4 x, 3/2 x
Each of these notes has overtones, since when you pluck a string with length L, the fundamental frequency is f = 1/L, but you also create waves of lengths L/2, L/3, L/4, L/5, etc: these have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, 5f, etc.
The more the overtones of a set of notes tend to match, the more "harmonic" (and the less "dissonant") the set sounds. For the major chord, we get:
But keep in mind that any pair of frequencies {f,2f} are heard as the "same" note - so, e.g., 15/4 x is the same note as 15/2 x, just an octave lower. With that in mind, you can see that only the 6th overtones of the fundamentals (7x, 35/4x, 21/2x) and the 8th overtones of the second and third notes lack harmony with the other notes in the chord, within the first nine overtones; all the other overtones comprise only 6 notes, in a range of different octaves. The 11x row admittedly gets a little messy, but the 12x row is again perfectly harmonious.
The overtone structure of a minor chord (a minor third first, and a major third second) is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)
One other interesting note: the "perfect fifth" interval corresponds to a ratio of 3:2, which is the smallest integer ratio next to the 2:1 octave ratio. What does playing a just a note and its perfect fifth give you? A "power chord":
This is dominated by just two notes: the fundamentals and their octaves comprise 5/6 of the first three overtones, and aside from the 6th and 8th (again), there are only 4 notes represented in all the overtones through 10x. This is why power chords sound so "pure" and, well, powerful.
Which in part, to bring us full circle, explains why the White Stripes rock. posted by Miles 2:11 PM
(This post written but unposted on Sunday, May 28th)
Jess is in Boston now, studying for The Boards, and I've been enjoying playing a supporting role - grocery shopping, cooking dinners, that kind of thing. It's great, actually. Yesterday I convinced Jess to take a study break and go see a movie, so we went and saw Over the Hedge. Hilarious movie, I highly recommend it. But I digress. On the way home, we passed this fish market in a portuguese neighborhood, and a light went on in my head - so after dropping Jess at home (to study more - she was getting antsy) I circled back and visited the market. Here's dinner:
That's a whole Tilapia, marinated in rosemary-basil olive oil, stuffed with lemon, fresh herbs, scallions and sun-dried tomatos, wrapped in bacon, and then roasted. It was pretty damn good.
Thursday night I made Tangine Chicken (the Joy of Cooking recipe), which was even tastier than the fish (though not as pretty) . . . and made a salad with the first produce from my garden! Fresh spinach, straight out of the ground, is amazing. posted by Miles 2:03 PM
As scientists, we're taught to think in dichotomies; the scientific method requires testable hypotheses, and hypotheses are testable in that they're 'supported' or 'unsupported' by data - we use these terms to be prudent and cautious, since no dataset is complete, but the underlying conceptual framework is that hypotheses are true or false. So: We think about the world in terms of (binary) truth values of poseable hypotheses.
Is this the way the world actually is? Or maybe, less dichotomously: how well does this let us describe the world in its infinite complexity?
Dumb example: There are some flowers in a vase on my desk, that I got for Jess. It's obvious enough, to a casual observer, that the flowers are purple. And a bit yellow - okay, so already a bit of complexity. Ah, and green, too: don't forget the stems. As a scientist, though, I can't just make these wild claims (about the color of the flowers) - instead, I need to come up with some testable hypotheses, and empirically test them. Hypothesis 1 might be: one component of the flowers absorbs EM radiation in the frequency ranges {X} and reflects EM radiation in the frequency ranges {Y} (where X & Y would have actual values if I had a textbook in front of me; I'm lazy). I could then obtain a spectrometer of some kind, isolate a flower in an appropriately controlled environment, and measure the frequencies absorbed & emitted, to test hypothesis 1. Simple enough, right? Okay, but what if I find that according to my spec data, the picture is a little more complicated; absorption and reflection aren't 100% within the ranges X & Y that I specified; they're actually some (relatively) smooth and complicated function - according to my data, at least. Knowing that my data is a little noisy, however, I know I can't make any strong claims about the precise absorption function of the flower, how much it would vary from flower to flower, etc. And even if I could, such a description of the absorption function wouldn't be easily translatable into a linguistic description like "the flowers are purple, yellow, and green."
So where would I have gotten? posted by Miles 11:08 AM
And for more comedy, check out Steven Colbert, endorsing George Bush (in person, to his face) as only he can, as a guest speaker at the Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner:
For all the Bill James, Billy Beane, Moneyball talk about optimally predictive baseball statistics, I've still never heard of this conceptually simple, but computationally intensive statistic:
First, consider all the at-bats in all the major league games ever played: at the time of a given at-bat, there's a game condition, which can be neatly summarized by 3 simple measures: Current difference in score, current inning & number of outs, and current positioning of runners on base (e.g. leading by 2, 4th inning with 1 out, a runner on second.) You can add more variables if you want (also increasing degrees-of-freedom) but I think this is a good minimal set of measures. Okay, now let's call these measures D (difference), O (outs), and R (runners). For each triple {D,O,R}, there's an associated probability that the team will win the game, in the end; we'll call this p(W|{D,O,R}). To create a 'look-up table' for this stat, we need to crunch through every at-bat in MLB history (or the last 50 years, or whatever) and calculate the probabilities.
Okay, so: When the batter comes up to the plate, the team's chance of winning is p(W|{D,O,R}i), with 'i' denoting the fact that this is the 'initial' state. We can look the value up in our table. The result of the player's at-bat is p(W|{D,O,R}f); the team's chance of winning has changed, and taken on some new value. The player's contribution to the team, therefore, has been p(W|{D,O,R}f)-p(W|{D,O,R}i). Simple!
The two best things about this stat are:
(1) It measures 'clutch peformance' in a really meaningful, and nicely continuous way. If A-Rod hits lots of HRs, but really does actually tend to hit them in the late innings of blowouts, he will get a lower 'score' than you'd expect from the stats we usually look at; if a guy is an awesome situational hitter, drawing walks when he should (to best help the team), getting down the sacrifice bunt, etc, he'll get a higher score.
(2) It's directly interpretable in terms of a player's expected impact on his team, in terms of wins & losses. Really, what more could you want from a stat?
The way I described it is really a slight over-simplification. Players should get 'points' for anything attributable to them as an 'action'; if a guy steals a base, he's changed the {D,O,R} state, and should get credit for it. Like, Dave Roberts would have gotten a massive p(W|DOR) jolt for stealing that base off of Rivera & Posada in game 4 a few years ago, even though he didn't even have an AB in the game. Better yet, you can apply the stat equally well to pitchers: each batter a guy faces results in a change in p(W|DOR). Using this stat, in fact, might be a cool way to resolve the debate about how important closers are relative to starters, and who the best closers are; it would be ideal, since it provides such a direct measure of 'clutch' performance, and closer is the position where that matters most consistently.
One cool potential addition: add measures for 'games left in the season' and 'number of games in or out of the playoffs', to get a handle on clutch performance on a longer timescale. You wouldn't build these factors into the main look-up table; instead you'd just use them to weight the player's d(p(W|DOR)): if you hit a game-winning HR for a team 25 games out, in August, that's less meaningful than bunting a guy over to third for the first out in the 9th when you're down by one, for a team just a half game up in the wildcard race, in mid-september.
The only disadvantage of this stat, that I see, is the fact that it gives so much weight to clutch performance. If you think psychology has no impact on the game at all, and situational hitting ability is homogeneous across the leage, then you'd take an A-Rod HR late in a blow-out as just as predictive of his chances of helping the team in a close game, regardless of the situation. Turned around, you don't want to make the Type 1 error of thinking apparently 'clutch' contributions are more predictive than they actually are. However, players have so many ABs in a season, and in a career, than with a continuous stat like this, I don't think 'spurious' clutch performances will affect things too much: there's not enough noise.
I'd love to actually compute this stat. I wonder who has the necessary database, coded the right way. I figure it's got to exist. posted by Miles 3:34 PM
Why, you ask, should you be concerned with the question 'who would ask the question "how many words, at minimum, are required to ask 'what is the maximum number of sequential question marks you can grammatically place at the end of a hierarchically structured query like this?'?"?'?
(To my knowledge no one has previously pondered this. If you'd like to try setting a new world record (5 ?s, at the time of posting) just click that "comments" link below.) posted by Miles 3:24 PM
I've walked the same route to work at least 500 times. Somehow, it wasn't until this morning that I realized: if I walk on the right side of street on my way in, in the morning, I can be in the sun the whole way. I'm walking basically due South, so when the sun is rising, in the East, the houses on the left side of the street cast a shadow over the sidewalk on that side, but the right side of the street is in direct sunlight.
An amazingly simple fact, but one that had never entered my mind; I just always optimize my path to be the absolute shortest distance.
I only thought of it today, I think, because yesterday afternooon I was thinking about how to optimize the placement of my garden to maximize sunlight.
An unexpected side-benefit of gardening . . .
And speaking of which, can I just say how amazing it is to get out of bed, in the early morning of a beautiful spring day, and go out to work in my garden? It's a great way to start a day. posted by Miles 11:21 AM
It came to me, a couple of weeks ago, that I really wanted a garden. I haven't gardened since I can't remember when; maybe when I was 9 or 10 years old. The idea just came out of nowhere, but once the seed was planted, so to speak, I couldn't get it out of my mind. I spend most of my time in front of a computer; it gets old. There's something about getting your hands dirty, doing something physical. Then too, there's something about fresh vegetables, right off the vine or out of the ground.
So this weekend Jess helped me get everything I needed, at Home Depot, and today I "built" my garden:
Here's the plot, before I started:
. . . and after I tilled it:
I wanted a raised garden, so I built this enclosure out of pressure-treated 12x2's, 4 feet to a side:
Then I dug a shallow trench around the perimeter of the plot, set the 'box' in place, and added 8 cubic feet of Miracle Grow Garden Soil. Voila! A garden!
I've left the fun of planting for another day. :-) More updates later . . . posted by Miles 8:50 PM
There's a pretty cool article on an experimental surgical treatment for severe, medication-resistant depression in this week's New York Times Magazine:
Now Lozano threaded a guide tube — "It's a straight shot," he said later, "really quite easy" — down between crevices and seams to one side of Area 25, which is in two small lobes at the midline of the brain. He slid the first electrode and its lead down the tube, then repeated this for the other side. All this took nearly two hours. After he double-checked his locations, he wired the leads to a pacemaker and gave Mayberg a nod. They could turn it on anytime now.
Mayberg had squeezed into a spot at Deanna's side some time before. She had told Deanna that if anything felt different, she should say so. Mayberg wasn't going to tell her when the device was activated. "Don't try to decide what's important," Mayberg told her. "If your nose itches, I want to know." Now and then the two would chat. But so far Deanna hadn't said much.
So we turn it on," Mayberg told me later, "and all of a sudden she says to me, 'It's very strange,' she says, 'I know you've been with me in the operating room this whole time. I know you care about me. But it's not that. I don't know what you just did. But I'm looking at you, and it's like I just feel suddenly more connected to you.' "
Mayberg, stunned, signaled with her hand to the others, out of Deanna's view, to turn the stimulator off.
"And they turn it off," Mayberg said, "and she goes: 'God, it's just so odd. You just went away again. I guess it wasn't really anything.'
"It was subtle like a brick," Mayberg told me. "There's no reason for her to say that. Zero. And all through those tapes I have of her, every time she's in the clinic beforehand, she always talks about this disconnect, this closeness and sense of affiliation she misses, that was so agonizingly painful for her to lose. And there it was. It was back in an instant."
Deanna later described it in similar terms. "It was literally like a switch being turned on that had been held down for years," she said. "All of a sudden they hit the spot, and I feel so calm and so peaceful. It was overwhelming to be able to process emotion on somebody's face. I'd been numb to that for so long."
There's just one problem; it's not sold in the US. Yet. But Daaaammn.
You should explore the site linked above, even though it's heavily flash & beaming to you direct from Japan, meaning it's pretty slow to load. Go into the site, and try the "Experience" link. :-) posted by Miles 11:05 AM
One thing I've never understood is why Apple doesn't offer a subscription service as an option in iTunes. It could just be a DRM issue, where the changes to the protected AAC format, and potentially the iPod software, would be too much of a hassle. I doubt it, though - I think Apple has the technological savvy to get it done if they want to.
I wish they would. I'd love, for instance, to pay $15 a month and be able to listen to anything in the iTunes music store . . . as long as I'd be able to download & keep a song for every dollar spent, if I wanted to cancel the subscription. As I see it, everybody wins - Apple gets the steady revenue stream of knowing I'll "buy" at least $15 of music a month, and I get to explore the entire catalog, and more easily find new music. posted by Miles 10:30 AM
Sometimes I could swear there's a pattern in my data. Not in any one experiment, but across all of them. You know how, in an ideal world, every experiment is done double-blind to guard against experimenter bias creeping into the data? Well, it's like that, except the exact opposite: it feels like every experiment I run produces the result I least expected. That's not the reality, of course; if I step back and examine this one series of studies that's confounding me at the moment, I'm about 3 for 6. In part, it's just that the unexpected results hit me harder. Still, 3 for 6 feels kind of lousy. Fundamentally, (theoretically?) all data is good data, and when the data tells you to modify your theory, you modify your theory, and get closer to the truth. But if you go 3 for 6, that means you've modified your theory 3 times, and you start questioning whether you're making progress, or just stupidly meandering around in theoretical circles.
Much of the time, I love science.
Today, science has stamped "return to sender" on my metaphorical valentine.
A friend of mine went to Mexico for a few weeks over winter break. "What good are third-hand photos?" you ask. "Why should I care?" Because of the COLOR that screams out of these images, and the life. These are not the pale reflections of concepts or ideas; not the images of life buried in industry or efficiency. These are faith, and flavor, and memory, and action, and being.
I wanted to see Rize when it hit the theaters, but it didn't happen. I watched it last night, and . . . damn. If you have a chance to rent it, do. There's not that much that can be said about it; you've just got to see it.
Here's the trailer, to give you a taste, though a small screen and compressed, choppy video can't do justice to the dancing.
Wolfe writes (from a somewhat quaint, 1996 perspective) about the nativist revolution in science, and how neuroimaging will inevitably lead to the "death of the soul" - a poetic expression (referencing Nietzsche's "God is dead") referring to the annihilation of our belief in the concepts of free-will and the autonomous self. I call his perspective quaint not because I think he's wrong, but because it seems so passe, and obvious. To me. Because I think I came to the same conclusion in around 1991, when I was 13 years old, and not on the basis of any proof from neuroimaging, but simply inferential reasoning from a materialist, determinist starting point. That sounds kind of like bragging, and ok, yeah, it is to some extent a point of pride. The larger point is simply that I probably have an atypical perspective; probably a reasonable approximation to 100% of people on earth believe that they "have free will" in a fundamental sense, or would if they stopped to think about it for a minute.
I think there's still obviously some confusion surrounding this issue, even at the highest levels of academe. For instance, I think nativism is almost entirely beside the point, when it comes to the question of psychological determinism; from an external perspective, "whether" your life is determined by your genes or your social interactions (the quotes meant to express my disdain for this obviously idiotic dichotomy) isn't much relevant to the question of whether it's determined. And yet, though lip service is paid universally to the falsity of this dichotomy, the debate rages on. (Some) scientists frame their results in essentially nativist terms, and portray themselves as leading a righteous army in search of truth against the enemies of political correctness and behaviorism. Others still take the other side, and persist in portraying the nativists as a band of destructive, corruptive -ists. It's all bunk.
Look, I'll break it down for you:
No, you don't fundamentally have any such thing as free will. The universe is deterministic, and materialistic, and your life is both entirely pre-determined and insignificant. But it won't do you much good to sit and dwell on it. More importantly, these truths only really hold - are only really relevant - from an external perspective. From your perspective - as you perceive the world - yes, you do have free will. Why? Because of the definition of YOU. YOU are this collection of atoms, molecules, and (at the most relevant level of analysis) neurons, and more importantly their connections & patterns of activity. So, from an external perspective, when you do something it's "because" of a certain pattern of activity in these neurons. But that pattern of activity IS YOU, so from your perspective, it's entirely reasonable to take the perspective that YOU have made a decision / executed some motor function / whatever. So if we go with this definition of "decision", yes, if YOU DECIDE to drink a bottle of robitussin and sit on the floor all day, you'll do just that (and probably feel lousy about yourself later on) and conversely if YOU DECIDE to read a book, have sex, start a business, etc, you'll do that (and feel pretty good about it, at one point or another. So, as Obi Wan Kenobi said in "Trainspotting", Choose Life.
That's what's important.
But what resonated most with me, in Wolfe's essay, was the final section, on how the skepticism that is the foundation of science may soon begin to destroy it; that science may eat itself. "When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other."
Now, in psychology we prefer to simply keep laying bricks on the ground, anywhere we spot a patch of bare earth, because (stretching the metaphor like laffy taffy) our bricks tend to be narrow and pointy and nearly impossible to balance anything on. So the process is simplified; we rarely even pretend to make progress. But still, the point holds, and it's something I've been reflecting upon a lot, lately. It's like I said a few entries ago, in reference to Huxley: "Truth lies in reality itself; words, measurements, statistics, publications do not add to the amount of truth in the universe; the universe just IS, and all the truth that there is, is." Science produces sparse data, and attempts to distill that down to an even sparser description of phenomona, in the form of concepts. What hope do we have, in the long run, of building a solid edifice of understanding, let alone truth, with such sparse representational building material?
Then again, what other cosmically insignificant persuit would I rather be engaged in? Right. Off to finish up an analysis and engage in some extremely unappealing (but probably necessary) academic diplomacy / politics. Or, rather, grab a coke & do nothing very productive for the next 20 minutes or so until my experimental subject arrives, since, you know, what the hell can you get done in 20 minutes? Maybe some crunches & push-ups. Because exercise feels good, god damn it. posted by Miles 9:34 AM
My "read of the day" is slashdot's original discussion of the iPod, the day it was first introduced. The one-line summary in the header? "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." Absolutely hilarious. I mean, I respect slashdot a lot; you see a lot of really sharp analysis, there. But people were just absolutely clueless about the impact the iPod would have. A few choice comments:
"I have to agree this is a let-down. For all the secrecy and even Steve Jobs promise of something "revolutionary", as an Apple fanatic I am unimpressed. I was expecting something quite a bit cooler then an MP3 player."
"Replace the 5 gig drive with a 20 gig drive, change Firewire to USB, keep the ability to use it as an external hard disk, drop the presumed heavy integration with iTunes, knock the battery life down to 8 hours from 10, knock $50 off the price, and you've got this [thinkgeek.com] [thinkgeek.com]. iPod is a good product, but nothing to get excited over. I'll stay with my RioVolt [thinkgeek.com] [thinkgeek.com]. Instead of a hard disk, it uses CD-R or CD-RW, and can play regular audio CDs."
"iPod is Apple testing the waters. There's more to come." posted by Miles 11:48 AM
In "The Doors of Perception" Aldous Huxley mentions how Thomas Aquinas, after a lifetime of scholarly work, had a "mystical" experience, which Huxley characterizes as one of simply unfiltered perception of reality, and stopped writing, never returning to scholarly work in the remaining two years of his life. Explaining why, he famously said: "I cannot go on...All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me."
As I walked in to work this brisk, overcast morning, I tried to leave all thought behind, and just see the world around me. It is a very different way to pass the time, and very nice. Being a novice, however, and an addict of the intellect, I couldn't help slipping back into the contemplative mode, and here's what I thought:
As I scientist, I'm devoted to the pursuit of discovering and revealing truth. At least, that's how I concieve of it. But as Huxley points out, the tool of our intellect is language, and language is capable only of crude, vague, awkward description. Scientists attempt to outrun the limitations of language by quantifying the world with numbers and statistics and equations, but these too allow only a reduction of reality to a representational shadow of itself.
What good is it, then, to "discover" truth? It's out there already, doing just fine on its own. Truth lies in reality itself; words, measurements, statistics, publications do not add to the amount of truth in the universe; the universe just IS, and all the truth that there is, is. All a scientist can do, then, is attempt to facilitate the revelation of truth to other people . . . and even then, the truths science is capable of revealing are generally (as Huxley also points out) merely the verbal, conceptual, abstract shadows of truth.
So what am I going to do today? Run 4 participants in my behavioral study, and scan another person's brain for my fMRI study. No use letting the futility of life get in the way of living it. posted by Miles 8:55 AM
Arrest This Man, He Talks In Maths 
Monday, December 18, 2006
