Don't You Touch My Lorna Doones

For years I have been confused by the lyrics of You're Moving Out Today a strange record that my sister played over and over until both the needle and the record were worn out. I always wondered what sort of weird guy this bloke was and why an obviously intelligent woman had taken up with him in the first place. However yesterday, I was reading the Daily WTF, a place populated by many stories of geeks, nerds and other (probably self-declared) associated sociopaths when it clarified that Lorna Doones are actually biscuits which made the line in the song about leaving the narrator's Lorna Doones a lot more understandable. Unless of course she was a collector of rare editions of said book. All this is of course just wibbling and I have to say that the discussion currently in progress on this office is about the teaching of evolution - we are all for it I have to add.

Pain is Our Best Friend or My Polarised World View

After my argument yesterday that we should not engage creationists because they do not accept scientific method, I read this article with the rather stark title of "Why does God allow natural disasters?" which made for an interesting few minutes without actually answering the question but of course that is what philosophy is for - providing us with the intellectual background to make up our own minds. This sparked the idea that a Creationist would have the same idea as me and refuse to debate with evolutionists because the have no truck with faith. Faith trumps all for a creationist and anything else is just noise as is anything else other than scientific method and logical analysis to an evolutionist. We are as usual talking about spherical chickens in a vacuum and leaving to room for the muddied battlefield between the two trenches.

And back to Dawkins who seemed like an excited child quoting this from Peter Medawar :

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheapdailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

... which seems perfectly true to me though a little dismissive as a general statement. I've not been educated to any level comparative to a lot of hallowed humanities celebrities but I can put together a few logical facts to get a picture of the world and also to get an idea of its size. This is an old theme of mine but so much disagreement is to do with the perception amongst a great deal of people that the world is distorted in favour of their own local experience like our field of vision is only sharp in a tiny part of our retina in order not to overload the brain.

Back to the actual meaningful content of the book. We seem to be in proper zoological investigation mode at the moment with the snarky comments at a minimum and proper reference to experiment and fossil evidence. The current chapter is to do with so-called missing links, a phrase which has now been spun into "gaps in the fossil record". Dawkins states that Evolution could be disproved by a single fossil of a classification at odds with the rock layer in which it is found and that this has never occurred. This seems like a challenge issued in extreme belligerence. He also says that we should surprised that we actually have so many fossils to demonstrate the progression of changes over geological time and that we do not need what he likens to video evidence to back up the forensic evidence of experiment and intellectual progress in describing evolution. We should not get hung-up about the lack of links.

...

Delay for some anger-dispersion after stumbling accidentally on this.

And finally if your phone is equipped to handle more complex ring tones than the soundtrack to pong, you might like to consider this.

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.

The Dream of Bee Maps

We thought a lot of the garden at the end of summer. It buzzed with activity just as much as it had in June, but now, with grumblings of how autumnal it had suddenly got, the din was different. It comes down to anthropomorphism - how can the bees sense that they need to work harder to get ready for the cold weather? The seasons have been around for millions of years, plenty of time for the slow workings of evolution to drum ideas into the tiny heads of any insect. We are just as susceptible to the suggestions of the environment, the gradual, unconscious awareness of the gently curving waves that mark the climate and the weather (for they are different things whatever anyone says).

I thought this morning, of making a continuous graph of the temperature and realised that such a thing would almost always be smooth, sinuous and without discontinuities. The temperature rarely changes at a speed that is noticeable to us. It climbs or falls slowly until suddenly someone wonders out loud how it got so hot or cold and the cusp of catastrophe throws everyone into the same thought. The seasons flow like this, like the hands of a clock which when watched seem not to move but always do, moving at the same angular velocity regardless of the observer effect or other more esoteric theories of time. The bees, living so much less time than we do, may have some mechanism that shows them the motion of time in a much more obvious manner. Maybe they 'see' everything, each individual moment as they bumble and blunder from flower to flower, through the slow march of the seasons, sped up in their vision depending on which setting they choose, to the endless variation of climate bringing sense and division to the entire existence of this planet.

We do not have this same intensity in our connections with the world. Many of us don't seem to have it at all. One minute we are racing around the playground, arms outstretched like the heroes we think we are and the next we are slumped in a chair wondering where everything went, the events in between invisible and forgotten. We must commit every moment to memory, be able to recall every second as if we were making internal maps of the three dimensional world to allow us to pretend that we live in four. Apply this trick of space to time and you will step outside of the linear flow, into the hyper-time that links the beginning and the end of the universe, the curve of time analogous to the curve of space. Imagine your house in space, not just the bits you can see at any one time, but the whole thing, hanging in front of you, semi-transparent and able to be rotated with just a thought. You are living now in the next dimension, existing like a four-dimensional god, able to see everything that exists without having to look round corners.

And now, think of how to do this with time, imagine you life to now, possibly like a line with marker posts for significant events. What do you see where it crosses the millennium? Is it any different for that year when compared to the others? Next imagine it compressed like a line turns into a circle and circle turns into a sphere. You have all the time you have experienced in your vision. You can recall any event just by spinning this globe of your life in front of you. I think this is how the bees see time, possibly passing it from generation to generation in junk DNA. The greater part of our identity as defined by our genes, is apparently meaningless; just long lists of seemingly random codes, holding no information that we can decipher, the ultimate in security by obscurity or possible by absurdity. Sometimes I wonder if the secrets to everything about life are encoded in these strands and then I realise that this is a truism, because of course, all life is descended from a single common ancestor. Our DNA is just a version of that original string, with each life experience adding more to the code. There are the pieces we can see and manipulate but mixed in are the mysterious extra links, the pieces we strive to understand.

Is the secret of consciousness held in there? It must be. We are conscious beings and all the construction of the machines which are our bodies is defined in the DNA. All secrets of life are in there - the entire blueprint and history of life on this planet, encoded in each and every tiny cell. The skin cells which fall of my fingers as I type this each contain more information than has entered my brain since I first cast eyes on the dim lights of the hospital where I was born. All the things I have done and all the dreams of things I want to do are nothing compared to those sequences of letters that define the jelly that is us. Each bacterium, washed away at the sink, has information that remains inside us now despite the millions or perhaps billions of years which have passed since the existence of our common ancestor. The earth cannot be young; it needs to be old for all this wondrous mechanism to have developed from nothing, to have been brought about by the random mixing of chemicals, that one day created an accidental self-replicating machine that in its fuzziness has produced all the hatred, joy and delight at existence which humans possess today. The ultimate free lunch. All that you enjoy is the result of random accident and I know that that is true no matter how much you argue with me.