onemonkey.org

I've been exceptionally hectic writing up my thesis but when i've wanted light relief from the thought processes of babies, I spent a few idle moments thinking about the transcendental aspects of the question of existence of an objective external world. (And as many if not more surfing the internet, getting drunk or sleeping.. sometimes all three at once.) In fact these idle speculations were prompted by a question from an intimidatingly bright young spark from the cybersphere.

As for reality- I'm pretty sure that I live in the real world but I'll just swing this idea past you:

I know reality as I see it but I am never sure if there is one objective reality- does a hypothetically objective reality exist if there is no one to see it? Does it exist to us at all if we can only internalise and experience things from our own subjective viewpoints? And if there is one objective reality would that be argument enough for the existence of a god?

Being a firm atheist I think not. I think there is a world in which we interact but that world doesn't constitute an objective reality because all the time we are experiencing that so called objective world subjectively. Or Maybe there is an objective reality but no god? There is definitely a 'world' which we all inhabit but that's different from a reality.

My answer is mercifully brief but also fairly short on actual answers

And my answer is fairly dissatisfying. In this question and in keeping with my day job as a science-dude I am a fully paid-up empiricist when it comes to questions about the universe.

At work and in general i think i make the wager with the world that it is not malicious in it's actions and appearance. Things that we see are as them seem to be. We start with this assumption and carry on as if it were the case.. as if for some reason or another it does seem to be 'true'.. the world does behave in an orderly way and as if was real and objective. We carry on from there and we get an incredibly long way, the cumulative successes of science all rest on that assumption and from an equally essential assumption of a system with interal consistency. and one that matches the existence of objective reality at each step of the way.

All of which boils down to the less impressive sounding "Look, it just seems to work allright? So we're sticking with it, if that's allright with you guv'nor"

At which point the professional philosophers are laughing up their sleeves at us crude scientists and keen amateur philosophers will think there's half an idea attempting to get out there.

I petered out there not wishing to take that train of thought any further.. we'd all suffered enough by that stage. Best or worst of all we've still got the original question to be answered.

A day or so later I stumbled across a real philosopher summarizing the position i was barely articulating before. It's rockstar-like philosopher Simon Blackburn and he explains it better but comes to an equally dissatisfying impasse regarding the inescapeably empiricist nature of the conclusion..

The questions of truth, faith, and evidence loom large in the more philosophical of these essays. On the first, Sokal accepts a version of what has become known as the "no miracles" argument for science's claim to depict reality truly. This starts with some uncontested fact about the success of a science, such as its accuracy of prediction, or its technological application. Our lasers and our cell phones work, our materials have their calculated strengths, our predictions are borne out to extraordinary numbers of decimal places: what can explain this, except that we are getting things right, or very nearly right? Or in other words, that we are on the track of the truth? If we were not, it would be an inexplicable coincidence -- a miracle -- that we are so often so successful.

The argument is powerful, and I accept it. But it is not the end of the story. For we need also to wonder what it is about truth that makes it compelling. Consider any instance of scientific success. A GPS receiver tells you where you are with astonishing accuracy, based on its distance from four or more satellites orbiting the earth. How does it know those distances? It uses a time differential and the speed of light. For simplicity's sake, let us consider only the speed of light. What, then, explains the instrument's accuracy? Science says that the speed of light is so many meters per second, and that is the correct, or the true, value. It is the truth of the estimate that is vital to the working. If we had gotten it wrong, and not by much, the instrument would be useless.

Here truth is in the shop window, as it were. But the curious thing is that we can suggest the identical explanation without mentioning truth at all. Pick up the story right at the end. What explains the instrument's accuracy? Science says that the speed of light is so many meters per second, and that is true, or science says that the speed of light is so many meters per second and the speed of light is so many meters per second. The second makes no mention of truth, but it works just as well to explain our success. Indeed, it has some title to being science's own explanation of it, and that it is the best that there is. Science does not typically mention the concept of truth in describing how GPS devices work.

It is a queer thing about truth that it has this self-effacing quality. And it is not as if we have to choose which of the explanations should be preferred, the one with truth in the shop window or the one without it. They come to exactly the same thing. Many philosophers, myself included, think that this implies that the notion has a logical, rather than a metaphysical, function. A large claim such as "science gives us the truth" would be a summary way of collecting together a lot of examples such as "science says that cholera is due to a virus, and it is" and "science says that the earth circles the sun, and it does." Since we all assent to many such examples, we can summarize our confidence by assenting to the generalization as well.

If truth retires into the shadows as an interesting topic, so do its detractors. Rorty's campaign careens off the rails, because whether there were once dinosaurs is one thing, and whether our peers let us get away with saying so is patently something else. But evidence can occupy some of the vacuum left by any more substantive conception of truth. The problem with flat-earthers, creationists, homeopaths, and the rest is not so much that they have a duff conception of truth as that they have duff attitudes toward evidence. The problem with creationists, for example, is that they either know nothing about stratigraphical or radiometric dating of geological time, or they misunderstand them, or at the worst they have some fanciful notion that uniformities in nature are not the things to rely upon, in which case they might as well believe that they themselves and their sacred books were all created at the same time, say a couple of minutes ago.

If we cannot take what is uniformly the case within our experience as our guide for hypotheses about regions of the world beyond it, then reasons dissolve and all bets are off. Reliance on such regularity, as Hume saw, is necessary if we are to move one step beyond the immediately given; and in fact, as Kant added, it is necessary in order to think of ourselves as inhabiting a world at all. It is a necessary presupposition of thought itself. So when the creationist arbitrarily strays from relying on regularities, he must be betraying the very reasoning that he himself constantly uses.

The word "faith" raises its annoying head at this point. Is the human reliance on uniformities just as much a matter of faith as the creationist's reliance on whatever message tells him that the earth is six thousand years old? A lot of modern writing in the theory of knowledge more or less throws in the towel and supposes that it is. Wittgenstein summed it up in his last book, On Certainty, arguing that what we would like are rock-solid foundations for our beliefs, but what we find are things that simply "stand fast" for us -- and this raises the disturbing possibility of others for whom different and in our eyes deplorable things equally stand fast.

This is really only a rediscovery of Hume's own results. But "faith" is the wrong word here, if it implies cousinship with arbitrary stabs of confidence in things for which there is no evidence. Those can, and must, be avoided, because a modest confidence in the wonderful stabilities of the world goes with our capacity to think at all."

original to be found here..
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_08_14.html

I have always hated SPSS, the statistics program unaccountably popular in British Psychology departments. It is badly designed, it has very slow and very clunky interface. It has a very unintuitive set of menus with an untransparent way of operating. The results are shown in a very primitive and buggy viewer and you have to buy a new licence each year for the privilege of using this abysmal piece of rubbish. It wins the award as the most annoying application on my computer. I am guaranteed to shout at it at least once every time I am foolish enough to use it. And if I am not shouting I am despairing that something so widely used could get away with being so poorly implemented.

I thought it was bad enough that you can't paste data in directly from Excel. WTF??? Even a child could manage to make that work. And it's hardly a 'nice to have' feature. In anyone else's world that would be a showstopper. Not for these cunts, they obviously want to piss us off. I didn't think so at first but now I have proof.

It turns out that SPSS 16 can't open output files created by earlier versions! They call them "Legacy files" but any sane person would just call them output files and not being able to open your own proprietary file types because you've 'improved' your product is madness and profoundly insulting to customers who because of the year by year licence are dragooned into upgrading.

Here's the 'answer' from their tech 'support'

Resolution number: 73752 Created on: Oct 15 2007

There is no Legacy Viewer for old output (.spo) files for SPSS 16.0 for
Macintosh. There are no plans for one to be created. We must ask that
you regenerate your old output in the upgraded version. If you feel
strongly about having this for SPSS for Macintosh, please contact
product marketing at suggest@spss.com. We apologize for the inconvenience.

I'll say it again, they are a useless and possibly even evil bunch of CUNTS.

For new data, I have already stopped using SPSS in favour of The R Project for Statistical Computing and rather than re-running everything as they helpfully suggest. I think it is time to switch for good. So long, you bastards.

In our back yard a boy keeps his little dog Sharik chained up, a ball of fluff shackled since he was a puppy.

One day I took him some chicken bones that were still warm and smelled delicious. The boy had just let the poor dog off his lead to have a run round the yard. The snow there was deep and feathery; Sharik was bounding about like a hare, first on his hind legs, then on his front ones, from one corner of the yard to the other, back and forth, burying his muzzle in the snow.

He ran toward me, his coat all shaggy, jumped up at me, sniffed the bones—then off he went again, belly-deep in the snow.

I don’t need your bones, he said. Just give me my freedom. . . .

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918 - 2008

One of the first bits of writing that ever made me cry.

Have you ever wondered how easy is it to nail jelly to a wall? Some practical minded chap tried to find out. And as he point's out, this is cheating.

Go here for the properly controlled experiment:

http://graeme.woaf.net/otherbits/jelly.html

My gorilla suit has arrived, I've purchased a pair of plimsoles, I may even start training any day now. Please sponsor me to help make it impossible for me to back out. Thanks

i never thought i'd say this but i am taking up jogging. since the first time they made us do cross county aged 8, i've known i am a dreadful runner, even when i was incredibly fit from 6 days a week swimming training i couldn't run more than half a mile without coughing and spluttering for days afterwards (my theory is that my jogging style caused my lungs travelled out of phase with the rest of me.) whatever the reason, i was happy to accept it and walk or bus it everywhere

at least until today.. for the second year in a row, i've been challenged to do the london gorilla run. I can't really think of any excuse this year i've signed up and so by end of september I have to be able to run 7k dressed in a gorilla costume..

assuming that i am not congentially incapable of running further than 800yards then this gradual program seems to be the way to go.

i'll let you know.

and I will shortly be going around to take donations.

I've just taken the longevity test at Blue Zones.. this is the longest i've ever been predicted to live. Apparently the algorithm behind their calculation is enormous and very well researched but I can't help wondering if they didn't ask me all the right questions. Living in London has got to take it's toll on the body and all these non-prescription medicines probably should count against me in some way.

After something like 50 years the British Blasphemy laws have been repealed. Link

Seems like a good time to repost one of my own attempt at blasphemy

Operation Clone Jesus

Click for more..

Either the silly season started early or they've finally run out of things to write about Diana & Maddie because for some strange reason the News of the World are now calling me. I just got a call from some guy asking about my cocaine order form on my website, claimed he was from the News of the World.

I started to explain that it's been there for nearly 10 years and as anyone with half a brain could tell it's obviously a joke.

Obviously, he had less than half a brain because at that point he hung up on me

Mind you a NoTW hack is one of the few people who probably would order a kilo for personal consumption.

My sister's first book was published a few weeks ago but I only got hold of it last monday when Amazon finally sent me the copies I'd ordered. (Hopefully this means they are selling it so fast they didn't have enough of them.) Although I had been awaiting the arrival of her book for several years, it was surprising to be finally holding an actual genuine real-life book in my hands (well, three books in fact, you wouldn't just buy one would you?). Almost as a consequence of following the long process of research, writing, re-writing and editing that went into it, I have trouble believing that it is really here and that it looks just like a real book right through from ISBN to index, and having all the features one would expect from book published by Simon & Schuster. From the colourful and elegant flysheet with it's equally elegant author's photo, it took a little getting used to the fact that this tangible hardback in my hands was the final version, the first edition. Ishbel had succeeded, you could tell because her name was there in gold lettering along its spine (but not thankfully embossed in gold on the cover!) It even managed to strike the right balance between accessible and academic, it had pictures and jokes, a bibliography and plenty of precise little footnotes. Seeing all of that I was very impressed, very proud and of course very slightly jealous.

Well, then I started reading it and it's even better than in looks. I'll need another whole post to review it properly and even then I warn you that you can't easily summarize the highlights of such a meticulously planned and researched book. But in case you hadn't heard of C d B, he was a gay atheist sword-fighting sci-fi poet living in Paris in the mid seventeenth century. He was a freethinker who feared nothing and laughed at everything, and largely got away with it, perhaps in part due to his fearsome reputation as a duellist. To say he did not take himself seriously would be an understatement and yet he was scrupulous in avoiding taking patronage or conforming to the expectations of social advancement.

It must be difficult to write the biography of someone who is liberal (and libertine) with his own history and who's work was generally too controversial to be published in his lifetime. The problem that is doubled by the large shadow cast by the fictionalized Cyrano de Bergerac familiar from Edmumd Rostand's phenomenally successful play. Ishbel manages to tell all the versions of his life and legend of clearly and objectively and makes a very strong case that the real Cyrano was a much more interesting character. Especially given the time he was living in when heretics and freethinkers faced a very real threat from the Inquisition and the State.

I'm not really doing it justice but here are a couple of proper reviews from the Spectator and the Literary Review.

Inspired by the book, I just tried to rent the Oscar-winning Jose Ferrer film version from 1950 but lovefilm actually sent me the Cannes Grand Prix winning Gerard Depardieu version. I guess I'll get to see both. But like book says remember that the real Cyrano is better than the imagined.

Get your copy now, only £8.49 at Amazon.

Oh and yes, he really did fight off a hundred men single handedly.

Ponca City, We Love You writes "Researchers at Monash University, in Australia, have found a process to coat natural fibers such as wool, silk, and hemp that will automatically remove food, grime, and even red-wine stains by coating their fibers with titanium dioxide nanocrystals, which break down food and dirt in sunlight. Titanium dioxide is a strong photocatalyst and in the presence of ultraviolet light and water vapor, it forms hydroxyl radicals, which oxidize, or decompose, organic matter. "These nanocrystals cannot decompose wool and are harmless to skin," says organic chemist and nanomaterials researcher Walid Daoud. Titanium dioxide can also destroy pathogens such as bacteria in the presence of sunlight by breaking down the cell walls of the microorganisms making self-cleaning fabrics especially useful in hospitals and other medical settings."

from Slashdot

Meanwhile, I bet I am one of thousands of lazy and unimaginative people who use this image with this story.

That's the whole thing, right here. Life on Earth, in a nutshell. We are hard-wired to have a drastic double standard for the people inside and out of our Monkeysphere and those outside make up 99.999% of the world's population.

Have you ever gotten pissed off in traffic? Like, really pissed off? I think we all have. We've thrown finger gestures and wedged our heads out of the window and screamed "LEARN TO FUCKING DRIVE, FUCKER!!" We've all pulled the gun out of the glove compartment and let a few fly at the offending car. Not firing at their head or anything. Just, you know, at their tires.

Now imagine yourself standing in an elevator with three other people, two friends and a coworker. A friend goes to hit a button and accidentally punches the wrong one. Would you lean over, your mouth two inches from her ear, and scream "LEARN TO OPERATE THE FUCKING ELEVATOR BUTTONS, SHITCAMEL!!"

They'd think you'd gone insane. We all go a little insane, though, when we get in a group larger than the Monkeysphere. You know the feeling, that invincibility of being an anonymous head in a crowd, screaming curses at a football player you'd never dare say to his face.
- David Wong

This is an entertaining and diverting rant about the size of our monkeysphere. The oft quoted research that our social group size ought to be around 150 because if you correlate monkey brain volume with size of their social grouping then that's how big humans troops should be.

The original research was done by Robin Dunbar who when not whoring himself to the BBC or defending evol psyc (sic) against the hordes of shrieking critics comes up with some interesting (if untestable *shriek* *shriek* ) hypotheses about primate social and linguistic evolution.

I haven't read much of his original work so (by the Mixing Memory criterion) I am no position to criticise but as I am not a professional it matters not.

One thought occurs to me is that extrapolating any supposed relationship between brain size and group size is doubly difficult..

theoretically the justification is that the bigger the social grouping the more c

Dunbar, a babboon expert, is no buffoon and he is aware of these limitations.

Finally, I know where that joke in Space Balls comes from.

via Dinosaur Comics

if only the world was populated with things like these it would be much more interesting (and dangerous) place

via Wooster Collective

Always good at asking questions the Edge has started the year by asking a whole bunch of sciencetists to think again. More specifically, to describe what they had changed their mind about (and why). Here's Susan Blackmore:

I decided, with splendid, youthful over-confidence, to become a parapsychologist and prove all my closed-minded science lecturers wrong. I found a PhD place, funded myself by teaching, and began to test my memory theory of ESP. And this is where my change of mind — and heart, and everything else — came about.

I did the experiments. I tested telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance; I got only chance results. I trained fellow students in imagery techniques and tested them again; chance results. I tested twins in pairs; chance results. I worked in play groups and nursery schools with very young children (their naturally telepathic minds are not yet warped by education, you see); chance results. I trained as a Tarot reader and tested the readings; chance results.

Occasionally I got a significant result. Oh the excitement! I responded as I think any scientist should, by checking for errors, recalculating the statistics, and repeating the experiments. But every time I either found the error responsible, or failed to repeat the results. When my enthusiasm waned, or I began to doubt my original beliefs, there was always another corner to turn — always someone saying "But you must try xxx". It was probably three or four years before I ran out of xxxs.

And here are the rest.

UPDATE:
I've just read a few more and the disturbingly brilliant Antony Garrett Lisi is one of the best. Let's hope his Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything turns out to be more than just an exceptionally nice idea.

Science typically builds on the body of available knowledge - the more knowledge available the faster science goes. It's striking when you visit other labs in person; you see all of their unpublished work, and you know that most of their results and data won't be available to the bulk of the scientific community until a year after each particular scientific project is finished. By the time papers are in print, it's old news to the insiders. More striking is when you visit labs whose work you've thought about replicating and expanding on. It's not too uncommon to find that only one person in the entire lab is able to get the technique to work, and even for him the technique only works on Wednesdays. This type of information would be useful to know before you embark on a useless three months trying to adapt their method. But scientific publications are covered in a thick coat of high-gloss finish, making these unacknowledged difficulties hard to detect.

J's Blog

It's interesting observation that chimes with my own very limited experience. There is much larger number of things that can go wrong than can go right. All the experiments in our lab benefit from the experience of our senior scientific and RA staff. And then we almost always have several pilot phases. But even then, of course, the experiments don't always work. What's more the failures are often nearly as informative as the successes.

Perhaps what we need is a Journal of Articles in Support of the Null Hypothesis?

Let's start the year with this colourful and gory video of someone undergoing brain surgery. the bit that gets me is how the exposed brain pulsates in gentle protest at the poking and prodding. It's almost as if it is alive.

via retrospectacle

If somebody called RICHARD DAWKINS adds you to their facebook account DONT accept it because he is a cultural theorist. DONT tell everyone on your list because if somebody on your list adds them you get them on your list and he'll figure out how MEMES spread. So DONT copy and paste this message to anyone even if you hate them and hold fast because if he get's proved right about this, he will probably go on to disprove the existence of God and the very fabric of our universe could be threatened.

Yes, it's that time of the year again. Starting at midnight, thousands of people all around the world are racing to write a 50,000 word novel from beginning to end in the 30 days that November hath. Yes, it's (Inter)NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth time. This will be my fourth attempt and this year I am going to have to try something different.

The trouble is that in none of the previous years have a finished what I started. I did once make it to the 50,000 word target but the story was incomplete. There were large holes where I had skipped the difficult bits to come back to later.In the three years since then, I haven't really been back. The next two years were even more inconclusive. And again and again my good intentions of completing some or all of these outside of November came to naught very much. Which is frustrating (even if it be entirely my own fault.) I am sufficiently attached and proud of them all that i'd like to finish them, but outside of november it just doesn't seem to happen. So this is the plan, I have these:

2004 - 53,640 words - Help Yourself

2005 - 16,210 words - Bodhidharma's Eyelids

2006 - 32,385 words - Awake!

I start the month with three fractional novels of some 102,235 words. The aim will be to end the month with 152,235 words which may go someway to completing one or more of them.

Oh yes, and whilst I am doing that I will also be growing a moustache for the merry month of Movember. Though I feel will be less successful than my novel writing.