Sporadic Dorado Implosions

Oh doesn't he look grainy over there? Anywhere somewhere in this audio you will find RD talking to David Attenborough about all sorts of things. What is it that makes Dawkins so divisive compared to David Attenborough - they both seem equally calm so I suppose it is just the militant atheism isn't it. The fact is he doesn't advocate anything violent - and while I am sure he has remained silent on the recent Koranic Libricide, I am sure he thinks that the whole episode was just a provocative stand by a well-known idiot. I suppose there haven't yet been worldwide demonstrations against Dawkins but there are probably a few nutters out there who would happily kill him for peanuts judging by the anger that he receives via email.

Oh dear - I shouldn't be bothered by such idiocy should I? It should be filed and forgotten under "people are stupid".

Dawkins is Dead! Long Live Dawkins!

The Dawkins - it is finished! It ended unexpectedly, falling into nothing with no pithy statements, just a random rant about various polls about evolution across the world. Leave it Dawkins - they just aren't worth it. Though actually to see that 20% of people in the UK don't know what a year is astronomically speaking is quite worrying. Keep banging the rocks together guys.

That's your lot for today - I have an appointment for coffee in the "encounter area".

Napoleon Revolving Virtually in his Grave

Dawkins still unfinished but nearly there. Time was taken up watching The Virtual Revolution presented by Dr. Aleks Krotoski up there. This was meaty stuff - no whizzy little sideshows - just well-presented narration and opinion from the great and good of CyberVille, Terra. And straight into it my wife learned something - that www stood for World-Wide Web. She lost interest after that and started on the practical lessons before the end of the theory. A funny bit of prime-time for a Saturday night, much more suited to BBC4 but BBC2 does have occasional throwbacks to its high-brow glory years every so often.

In best novelistic time-shifting mode I now return to the programme we watched before this which has filled the BBC4 Monday brain-box slot (Mind Games etc) - Only Connect - a fiendish quiz of linking four, sometimes apparently random words/phrases/pictures/pieces of music/smells. Well maybe not smells but after 3D I am sure that odour transmission is next on the list of gimmicks. Last night was between a team of neuroscientists and one of rugby fans. The former only needed an extra geeky member to be the main cast of The Big Bang Theory and from the start it was obvious that they did not care whether they won or lost. They did of course win.

An example - what links :

Cream, Quote Marks, Tennis, Yellow Lines

Answers on a postcard - boiled sweet to first drawn - not valid outside Mozambique - offer expires July 1974.

Mmmmm. Doughnuts.

Nearly finished the Dawkins and he has saved the best until the end. The chapter on the fact that evolution is a terrible designer is very convincing. It goes into how part of the vagus nerve (a nerve that exits the brain directly rather than being a spur on the spinal cord) descends into the chest, loops under various arteries and veins and returns to the Larynx, an unnecessary detour that in Giraffes becomes a screaming extreme, looping all the way from the brain, down into the chest and back up to the throat. The reason for this is that evolution does not design from scratch, it makes heuristic adjustments with the raw material it starts with. Our descent is from fish where the body plan is quite neatly laid out with the various nerves serving the parts of the body closest to them. Mammals have evolved in a way that tinkers with this standard plan and moves the segments about to best fit what the pressure of natural selection forces on it. However, there is no pressure to tidy up the mess that results from the various cablings being stretched to link various body parts which have moved further apart. Internally the whole mammalian body plan has become a tangled mess only topologically related to the simple plan of earlier organisms. The mammal has almost literally tied its internal connection up in knots.

I am surprised that Dawkins didn't actually mention topology. The sudden looping of a nerve over instead of under a particular structure is a busting of topology, like suddenly having a hole through a sphere busts its topology and it becomes a doughnut.

The other wonderful example of how evolution takes the easy rather than the best course is the fact that the nerves exiting from the sensory cells in the retina do so on the side facing into the eyeball and hence towards the source of light, therefore blocking a portion of it and requiring that the nerves find somewhere to exit the eye. This means that the sensitivity of the retina is reduced because of the wires all over the place and there is a blind spot where all those wires are bundled up and fed through a hole where they form the optic nerve. We only see as well as we do because the software of the brain is able to carry our super-fast and super-accurate clean-up operations (Dawkins I think calls this a real-time version of photoshop). There is evolutionary pressure to right the initial mistake of routing the wires on the wrong side because it works and the fact that humans try to make high-quality optics to match that of the eye shows that our eyes are indeed better at seeing than artificial technology designed to do the same.

RD mentions quite a bit about why these mistakes have never been rectified but I like to think that, sometime, a human will be born with a mutation which makes the nerve ending come out of the back of the retina and gives then a level of sight suddenly many times better. The question then is will the brain be able to keep up? We only have clear and accurate vision in a small patch of the retina I think because the brain could not actually process sharp information from all the retina. What we lose in definition around the periphery of the field of view, we make up for with a sensitivity to movement which allows us to direct the centre of vision to that movement. Would a human with the mutation above be mentally capable of processing the higher definition information?

On a similar note, and I may have mentioned this before, I often wonder if a portion of human mental illness is caused by the fact that our brains have to process many more detailed images that all those years ago on the plains. I feel we have to process out much more irrelevance now with the result that brain capacity we used to use for thinking and contemplating is now taken over having to make decisions about what is important.

I did start thinking that quite a lot of software ends up like this. I can see almost a direct analogy between the routing of the vagus nerve and the flow of control through some programs. Whatever we like to think about the efficiency of our code, a lot of it does evolve from previous versions and as such sometimes uses routes which should really be removed. However as we are now looking at programming using a form of natural selection, should we be wary that such programming will produce valid, accurate, working code, code which does the job but is inefficient in the extreme because the equivalent of its vagus nerve gets routed in and out of unnecessary portions of the application?

Anyway, a very convincing chapter. Hopefully I will have finished by tomorrow so I will mention the next book which is a recommendation from Ed and is The Eyre Affair by Jasper FForde and comes physically courtesy of Sefton Library Services so sorry Jasper - it's just the Public Lending Right rather than a royalty.

Kaitei Shōnen Marin

Marine Boy is probably the first cartoon I remember so it's nice to hear that delightful theme tune once again. The animation looks quite good for a throwaway kids show but when you are six, the quality doesn't seem to matter. Avatar is basically an animation which has gone to extremes of reality and while I think it may be jaw-dropping at the start, it must just be more of the same after a while. I stand to be corrected as I know that it's a special sort of 3D as well so we might get to see it.

So what other nostalgia can I find out there. How about this B-side from OMD - Julia's Song which was on an earlier album but re-recorded I think for the flip of Talking Loud and Clear. And though I know it all came out of a single computer (maybe not the bass but you never know) - they even talked about being able to manipulate single notes of the playback - but it has a warm feel to it even if the lyrics are nonsense - thank you Julia. Turn it up loud and live back in the emotional eighties.

Back to Dawkins last night. I've read so much of it since last time that I cannot pick out a particular theme but all of it has been interesting enough to keep me going beyond RD's snide asides. I would prefer the book to be a straight run-through of the issues rather than having to put up with the mad staring eyes and "See! Do You SEE! Juts look! Go on! Tell me what you cannot see!" rants. Having said that there is great clarity in his descriptions, nothing of any obscure complexity and quite a lot unfamiliar to me. The mathematical transformation of the shells of crustaceans and mammal skeletons seems like something try in my enoesque quest.

Oh - and biomorphs.

Drystone Walls and Ovist Fireflies

God: Unavailable for comment.

Listening to Kristin Hersh downloads.

I was reading the follow-up comments article to the article I mentioned on Wednesday on why God allows natural disasters and while none of the comments have swung me away from my own beliefs (and I think you know what those are), the mention of the Devil by some responders raised an intellectual point and here is my note on it :

God is explained out if there is only a benevolent God but with a benevolent God and a Malevolent Devil it becomes a "two-body problem". However this is still additional complexity that increases entities. This two-body problem is much more fitted to eastern religions.

At this point I was interrupted and my closure on this thought is lost to me.

Dawkins is still in the middle of a rant about the existence of intermediate fossils of various hominids and while I am as frustrated as he is with those who he calls "history deniers" who stubbornly ask for physical evidence of intermediate fossils, the steam coming from his ears while ranting about it is slightly distracting. However it will have to be a lot worse before I give up on this. The bottom line is that the continuous requests for physical evidence are easily answered but are just ignored though narrow mindedness. It is frustrating that so many people have no real idea of the history and science that has had to go before in order for our supposedly enlightened society to exist. Certain sections of Western Civilization are desperately trying to drag the world back into the dim and uncertain era of superstition and anti-intellectualism. I would really like to put in a list of ten organisations here but I am such a wuss as to be worried about the replies I might receive. If you think you may be from one of these groups then boiled sweet to the first one of you who responds.

See RD's anger has rubbed off on me. A much more restrained scientific viewpoint was evident in the first part of Jim Al-Khalili's programme about the history of Chemistry on BBC4. Plenty of explosions and bright lights (all under the strict conditions demanded by Health and Safety of course) but not done as a Gee-Whizz-isn't-chemistry-brilliant? puff like some might have done. It presented the facts soberly but engagingly leaving me wanting more, knowing that next week will be Dalton. I tell you BBC4 is a jewel, a shining star in the heart of the media-ocrity that constitutes most of cultural life today. And Wallender. What has happened to the last few notes of his ringtone by the way?

Aristotle and the Axolotl Lose Their Bottle

BBC 4 seems to be going for a heavy science kick at the moment. Chaos Last week, Chemistry this week and Aristotle at the weekend. And with the Dawkins Evolution book as well I am feeling very improved at the moment. Daughter has obviously had too much of book-learning as she was reading Captain Underpants last night. Obviously she has finished all the various Doctor Who media purchased and received over the last few weeks.

Anyway, the Dawkins book is currently describing an experiment involving pure strains of cloned bacteria divided into 12 "tribes" and maintained over many thousands of generations in order to provide a basis and snapshots for evolution occurring over measurable timescales. readers were warned not to embark on the section late at night and indeed it was detailed but nothing we couldn't handle. Went to sleep happy and tired in mind. However, my last thought before going to sleep was that Dawkins mentioned all this to crow at how Creationists do not like this experiment because it disproves some basic tenets of their arguments (how new information arises in the genes I think is one of them). I think that the arguments against evolution are usually so facile and anti-intellectual (faith-based would be the riposte I am sure) that there seems little point in arguing this detail. The yah-boo-sucks style that occasionally surfaces in the book detracts from the subtle progression through the various arguments towards the inescapable hammering on the skull with a velvet-covered brick which is surely going to happen before the end. Let's just not bother arguing any of it. We are right and they are wrong. There is no centre ground really. Well maybe there is some but rather than a grey morass of mud laid out between the two factions, there is a rickety suspension bridge with enough room for two people to pass one another. The best we can hope for is a meeting at some point with a handshake and a mutual exchange of papers. Young Earth Creationism is without any scientific proof and ..... - there I go again - being bothered to argue the point. It is just wrong and obviously wrong.

Worrying Jedi Tendencies

The ground is broken here, twisted by cold and salt and all the general chaos that is concealed by snow. The sky looks like any grey midwinter day but still a lot of ground around us is white, almost pristine white, untouched saved for the occasional rabbit track or a flurry of mess and blood and feathers where some raptor has brought its dinner down to earth. It seems the snow will never go whatever happens to the temperature. Maybe it has been compressed into neutron star densities and will still be around at the heat-death of the universe.

And smoothly moving on, there was another cracker of a scientific programme on BBC4 last night - a doc called The Secret Life Of Chaos presented by Jim Al-Khalili who has a TV presence up there with Bronowski and Burke. I was expecting nothing new but a revelation came immediately with the discussion of the work of Alan Turing on Morphogenesis and pattern forming which started the understanding of how a single gamete can divide and split into a complex organism and which was also the first spark of chaos theory. It was mentioned that it is impossible to know how much was lost to science because of Turing's death but from this it is clear that our understanding of both the universe and computers has been limited to some degree as a result. How telling that the final to-camera piece of the programme mentioned that any event - from the most disastrous to the most beneficial - is possible and that the only thing for definite is that it will be exciting.

I am currently enjoying Dawkins's latest book though it seems slightly like a pulled punch at the moment. This maybe (and he has alluded to this in the book itself) his way of preparing the reader for the big stuff coming later. Obviously I am converted already though I gather I am still within the target audience.

The confluence of chaos and evolution is sparking ideas for programs in my head though at the moment I'm thinking of merging the Mandelbrot drawing program with the Gamelan Simulator. The Gamelan Simulator is currently picking up ambient background from the microphone via Direct X in order to provide the random numbers for the music which means that the output varies in melody and intensity with the level of noise going in. I now want to take the numbers from the Mandelbrot formula and use those to provide the input. I've said it before but having the ability to program music is the pinnacle of what I've wanted to do with sound since I first poked wires into the tape-in port of my Oric 1. Happy days.