Chaotic Stupidity

Mundane day is back. And joyously! No noise pollution courtesy of the city parents, and the gym was delightfully sparse. The podcast was another episode of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas” series on secularity and it was quite good, finally getting around to the advancements in society being directly the result of increasing secularity and the inherent controlling nature of organized religion. And the evil (?) of fundamentalism. There was even a bit of humor about the latter which is rather refreshing for one who lives in the religionist pig pen of the old Confederacy. They even talked about how the obsession with end times is a direct fallout of reconstruction.

On a more intriguing azimuth I ran across an article [Link] about the half-century anniversary of the beginnings of the study of chaotic behavior. Unlike James Glick and others I am not quite comfortable with calling it Chaos since the origin of the term is non-STEM. I also had to reflect that much of the original maths development, especially with the classic logistic differential equation, was simply bad maths. That was always a problem for me, on the one hand the finite difference maths types talking about error propagation and instabilities of too large a step size and the chaotic behavior folks talking about BOOM! behavior at step sizes far beyond the stable. Why, I wondered, couldn’t they get their stories straight?

Also intriguing is an article [Link] about an academic study that indicates human intelligence has decreased since the reign of Victoria. This is another brick in the wall that suggests that technology makes us stupid. Not that we didn’t know that, but it is nice to have it made sorta official.

Now we just have to wait for the politician to pass legislation that makes it illegal for us to not be stupid.

humans, maths, intelligence, civilization, technology

Shule Show

Two day, and the gum was relatively deserted. Must be getting close enough to summer for the denials to mount up. Science podcasts today and aside from a rather extended discussion of dark energy on one of the NPR ‘casts, not particularly sticky. So unsticky in fact that I find myself at a loss to offer comments on anything.

Except a rather naive segment on a road show aimed at exposing high shule students to climate change. The come-on is that climate change isn’t taught in public shules. Thud. Flat.

Why isn’t it taught? Probably for the same reason that evolution isn’t and mysticism is. Political pressure. It isn’t on the tests because politicians don’t want it on them. It’s one more symptom of what is wrong with the shules and our country.

But the question I want answered is why was the presentation permitted? Are there still rebels out there?

education, science, climate, politics, tyranny

Bog Amerika 1

Inversion layer this morning, and a bit of fog, just enough to bring out the lemming death rush in the Bogs of Marshall County. But the gym was sparse in population, especially educationalists, and while the podcast episodes were mediocre and unmemorable, it was a fair session.

On which azimuth, I noted this sundae that the Pew folks and the Smithsonian, the American national museum paid for by English monies, have done a test to assess the science knowledge of the Amerikan public. [Link] I will discuss the survey results in a later blot. For today I want to talk about my taking the test, not as a part of the sample population but as an insight seeking effort. And, as it turns out a rather disappointing journey. [Link]

The test consists of thirteen questions, either true-false (in the vernacular) or multiple-guess. The questions were not really science questions in that they didn’t have anything to do with the substance of science, but rather dealt with factoids like which gas is most common in the atmosphere of Tellus. But I suppose these are the things one would expect a bog to be exposed to and perhaps learn.

Even given that, the questions were all pretty innocuous and placid with one exception. That question asked whether an electron was larger/smaller than an atom. The problem with this question, to me at least, was that I had to assume what they meant by size.

As it turned out, my assumption must have not been too bad because I got a full score – thirteen out of thirteen – correct in their frame. I have to admit that the questions were not all that challenging other than having ill defined context. If bogs primarily learn their science for mediaists then this may be a fitting ill definition.

But what was depressing was the distribution of scores. The web site gave me this bar graph

Next: comments on the state of Amerikan knowledge as represented by this test.

humans, knowledge, America, science

Good Sex?

Yesterday was not the usual. And yes, I seem to have survived the medical procedures, at least thus far. Not sure my mental faculties are all that I should like them to be, but the aftereffects thus far are more the result of medications than procedure.

This leads me to contemplate an article [Link] I found about work from U Arizona. This work indicates that the success of modern homo sapiens is largely the result of miscegenation with other species of humans. And, yes, I know I have commented on this numerous times previously.

Anyway, what makes this cognitively attractive is not that it occurred, such is a matter of blatancy given recent efforts in genome mapping, but rather how it came about. The recorded history of humanity since around 500 BCE is replete with all sorts of proscription of miscegenation. In that paradigm, miscegenation is not reproductive activity between species, but between geographic and ethnic groups. When I was a bairn growing up in the old confederacy pink humans were not supposed to have reproductive relations with other shades of humans, or even with pink humans who were not denizens of the old confederacy.

That taboo is somewhat relaxed these days although not actually eradicated, hence the question of how did those ancient humans have the smarts to reproduce with different humans? Could it be that these attitudes towards miscegenation are an artifact of age and that it has only been since the invention of writing and civilization and such that enough people have lived long enough for these attitudes to emerge?

humans, behavior, anthropology, interreeding

Life before Creation

Two day is science podcast day at gym and I have to admit that once more I walked away with scant recollection. But that was probably because the gym was sparsely populated and hence enjoyable.

This did however, give me some spare attention span-time to devote to consideration of a trail begun by the biologist blogger P. Z. Myers. [Link] He is rather critical of some work [Link] that advances, based on the “genome size” that life originated about 9 BYA (billion years ago,) which is about twice the age of Tellus. Myers claims that the authors cherry picked their data., which based on the graph displayed does not seem too implausible since I should expect there to be tons of near term data.

I have to admit to being sucked in on this by a “validation” of the model by looking at number of nerd publications and projecting back to an origin during the lifetime of Newton – when nerd journals were started, at least according to the history I learned.

My problem with this is that the model used is essentially linear, at least after being transformed via a logarithmic plot. Nothing wrong with such, that’s how one got through undergraduate physical chemistry in my day back before we have computers that did graphing and were small enough not to be enshrined in tech temples.

But I am a bit concerned about that linearity. I should like to see a detailed model that makes sense and is testable. So I may have to read the paper.

science, life, maths, model, linearity

Dogs and Dads

Freya’s day. And since it is sleeping-in day, I slept in. Since I don’t have to go to gym. And FD SCP is off today. So I can churn away at all the exterior demands on my time. Like reviewing manuscripts for journals.

On which, I noted another cog tick on the date of dog domestication.[Link] Some researchers – the journalism in this source is notoriously shabby and lives up to its reputation, leaving out any mention of names or affiliations, dates a Siberian dog to 33 KYA, slightly later than a Belgian dog dated to 36 KYA. Long as that difference is, greater than the founding of Rome, it still seems small seen from the present, both in terms of population numbers and speed of progress. But the fact remains that dogs have been domesticated – isn’t that redundant, dogs were crafted by domestication – for 30+ KY and hence they have influenced us about as much as we have them. Although from what I have read of the attitudes of early peoples, even up to present, towards dogs, meat sources do not seem good partnership. But that is probably stupid Amerikan shining through.

On which note, boffins at U Rochester have conducted experiments – that I frankly do not fathom in terms of cause and effect – that indicate that when someone shuns or excludes another, both suffer distress and discomfort. [Link] This strikes me as one of those things that we – the cognate few, at least – already knew but for other good human reasons did not discuss and hence had no statistical affirmation. So while this is a bit more than an academic validation, the actual question that needs answering is not so much why we feel this way but why we don’t discuss this with others? Or is this one of those genderist things and the women just don’t tell the men they do it?

On which note, some other boffins at U Arizona have ticked back the male side of the species to about 336KYA. [Link] All because of a fellow in South Carolina whose DNA was different from most whose male divergence goes back only 140KYA. We have to wonder if before one of these splits in the family tree is men discussed their feelings?

In a sense this sort of thing isn’t all that surprising. We know that homo sapiens has been around for quite a while and ancestors somewhat arbitrarily called homo something-or-other for a longer time. The creationists can now screech in horror and suffer discomfort and distress, which they will not discuss but will likely shun the rationalists, if we are fortunate. If not, then they will express great abuse and rancor, all irrational, emotional, and perverse.

Given the existence of such, great distrust is cast on our labeling ourselves sapiens. The misfortune is that not only are the poor with us, but the stupid and irrational as well. Sometimes I think homo sapiens is nothing but junk DNA.

And since today portends to be a bit of a junk day. I close. Selah.

humans, behavior, biology, dogs, emotion, stupidity

Boring is more than hole making

Tuesday. I sometimes wonder if that is supposed to be Two’s Day? After all, in our modern work-outside-the-home norm, Tuesday is the second day of the week. And if so, then we can view the first day as Mundane day, shortened to Monday?

Anyway, second day is an off day at the gym, most people evidently doing the MWF thing, operating on the idea that one needs to exercise thrice a week? I admit to being tempted to going some Freya’s day to see if there are more or less folks about than on Thor’s day.

The podcasts today were science episodes. I can honestly say I don;t remember much about the SCIENCE episode other than the rather noxious commercial for audio-books. Not that I have anything against them, except the exorbitant price. After all, I do the podcast thing. But I do get sticker shock and focus on the reduced retention of heard over seen. Besides, if I did audio books I would be able to get rid of my television and then how could I demonstrate I am an Amerikan?

There was a rather nice bit from Abe Flato and NPR on antibiotic resistant microbes. Made the best case I have heard yet for not using antispetics, especially ethanol based gels, outside of medicalist facilities. Undoubtedly this episode will be unpopular with educationalists who seem to use hand sanitizer more to promote auto-immune disorders and dispose of kids than to prevent disease? Or am I being too cynical? Clearly their teaching content indicates a counter-survival direction.

On a more positive aspect, I ran across an article [Link] with the wonderful title of “This Just in: Higgs Boson Still Boring”. I found this humorous although possibly not in the sense that the author intended. The title refers to the attitude of the general public – extrovert bogs in the main – towards the Higgs boson. Now that it has been observed, the boggerate is expecting great deed, like the generation of gravitational singularities that consume the planet, or flying cars. I am not sure which of those is the more frightening. The latter I think. The idea of the sky full of all those people who can’t drive cars competently, led by all the drivers of pickup trucks who are not only incompetent but homicidal as well, is enough to make one want to move to a third world country where there are no personal vehicles that are not propelled by muscle.

But this is one of the reasons I decided long ago to not pursue a path in particle physics. It’s a bit like astronomy. You have to live in some place that doesn’t like humans – not that Alibam is much better, mind you – and wheedle enormous amount of money from someone to build instruments and share those instruments with lots of other folks in a structure that is uncomfortable at best and dangerous at worst to conduct experiments that are exciting only if they generate surprise.

That’s one of the differences between scientists and engineers, incidentally. Scientists get excited when things go wrong in a surprising way; Engineers get excited when things go right in a surprising way.

The HIggs, incidentally, basically hasn’t been a surprise.

My favorite direction, dissipative systems, give me surprises every day, because dissipation is sneaky and perverse. But sometimes amenable to being beaten into submission with physics. Which counteracts, at least locally, the sneakiness and perversion.

And that’s one of the things science is about.

physics, science, scientists, particles, surprise

Brain Blat

Occasionally I come up with an idea for a thing that I don’t care to work on myself. Here’s one that just came to me courtesy of a chocolate croissant: A Stain Labeling Pen.

The idea is a marker pen that I can write the name of a stain on a piece of clothing, preferably while wearing them so moderate heat stable and non-bleeding, that can be seen until wash day for treatment with the appropriate cleaning regime and then washes out completely in the wash process.

All yours. No intellectual property claimed by SCP.

idea, invention

2 Pi over 5

Back to week in. SO far a good day. The educationalists were not especially obnoxious, nor noisy, this morning and the weight bouncers were conspicuously absent. And the podcast episode, one of the CBC’s “Best of Ideas”, was entertaining if not actually inspiring, mostly dealing with the insanity of aristocrats with a social conscience. All the while I was listening I kept asking myself how much better things would have been if they had simply disposed of all the aristocrats and adopted real democracy. But then we cant expect such smarts (or chutzpah) among the English.

The accumulator was fairly bare yesterday, so I am a bit at odds for some commentary this morning. The best I can come up with is this photo [Link]

whic is noteworthy for its five-fold symmetry.

This leads me to reflect on the whole thing of such. For many years there was all sorts of pronouncements by applied mathematicians and such that odd numbered symmetries above three were “impossible”. That got quashed a few years ago but examples have been few. So it is refreshing to observe this one.

I am not sure what the argument was. I was exposed to it a long time ago, my interest was a bit low, and so I chose to let the seemingly hokey argument pass unquestioned. I already had a reputation in those days of asking “why” too often and insistently.

The weather beavers say rain this afternoon. Observing the map I see that Birmingham, what was the flatulence orifice of Alibam in my youth before the iron industry died, is already wet. We are a few miles away but weather is seldom one’s friend in this state.

maths, symmetry, nature, weather

The Actual Rock

Ran across this cartoon [Link]

shortly ago. Was engaged.

First, there is the aspect of Rat being the brunt for a change. I support proper disrespect but not when it is not deserved.

Second, I agree with the implied assessment. The internet is not trustworthy. If anything it is less trustworthy than most “holy” books, like the bible, if not by much. And unlike them, it is fairly open. But that openness means that one cannot tell poo from pony. Hence the need for the encyclopedia.

I have numerous – annual – copies of the electronic Britannica. Every year I buy one or more copies, depending on the needs of the few educationalists who will talk to me, and I go through the pain of getting my copy – the one I keep – to run on WINE.

information, computers, internet, encuclopedia