Small Thoughts

2006-03-12T04:17:00.000-05:00

No-one around.

2002-11-30T22:49:00.000-05:00

Hey there is NO color out there. Red green blue - no such stuff. Its all in invented in my head.
Did they forget to tell me? Or did I just sleep throught that bit?
Unlike quarks which come in a variety of gaudy descriptions, there are no such things as red/green/blue photons. Photons come with varying intensity in one parameter only, our sensory apparatus essentially uses 3 different filters to drape the qualia over our objective world...

We then reverse these filters when making pretty colored pictures. So that question again. What does my cat see when I play the aquarium video?

2002-11-30T22:33:00.000-05:00

Smart - pre- programmed - nervous system
Intelligent - re-programmable - brain
Conscious - self programming - mind

Smart and intelligent are easy to accept as evolution universals - along with stuff like legs, eyes etc. Hence my longheld delight in intelligent dinosaurs.

Simon XXXX in latest New Scientist adds a twist. Suppose Man forfeits his place at the table, and the temperature keeps on rising. To what level of reason might bees/insects ascend? He suggests and I agree this is another reason to hold in deep regard the artifices of evolution...

In fact lets recognise that on some suitable timescale Man's history will be limited. Then or before then will there be other minds emerging directly or indirectly from the stuff that is around us now...

2002-10-24T15:12:00.000-04:00

Of course Mind is evolution's way of getting access to more memory and services - off-line storage, distributed processing - by spreading stuff redundantly over the local community - instead of each problem and its solution having to be discovered afresh (or most usually not discovered intime to avoid being eaten) by each individual - more usually known as culture or common sense or what have you. Again, this makes language a deep part of mind.

The fact that we use mind for other things is fairly typical of evolution's curlicues...

2002-10-24T15:06:00.000-04:00

Ooooof... Long time. Musta fallen asleep. Where was I?

2002-05-02T16:50:00.000-04:00

I have just been reading an entertainng review by Jerry Fodor of E.O Wilson's Consilience in the LRB (29 Oct 98), dripping with disdain! My heart is with Wilson, but I fear the logic is with Fodor. The disconnect between levels of scientific explanation just is so, however much it is regretted by nostalgic scientists. Even worse, we cannot predict where the disconnect will come. A detailed understanding at the quantum level (not yet the fabled TOE) does well mounting the scales of complexity all the way to black holes, big bangs and so forth. But it cannot model a specific path through evolution's sieves, nor arrive at the ethics of Druids... But its not even a problem due to the pernicious infection that is Life - not even the course of rivers nor the movements of comets can be known with any certainty. Until they have happened. We want more of science than credible Just So stories. Some predictive modelling would be nice. Well, no , not just some, we want it all! But is taht really all we can get - some solid explanations and a few pretty bits of clockwork?

2002-02-21T23:11:00.000-05:00

Is sex SO very expensive? There are plenty of species in which the male makes no contribution to the upbringing of the offspring. Why do so few species avail themselves of all individuals in both roles? Presumably at the very beginning, it was thus? Is it not an obvious evolution accelerator?

2002-02-21T23:01:00.000-05:00

Reading Dennet's DDI. He mentions an old problem from classical programming days. Can you, even in theory, decompile a compiled program. Thing is, the answer has some resonance in AI, or at least in explanations of natural intelligence. There is weak decompilation and strong decompilation. Weak decompilation describes what it does. Strong decompilation discovers what it is for. My answer used to be no, at least in theory, because contents of memory does not reveal whether it is instruction or data. This becomes a problem when you cannot be sure that the code is bug-free. Right answer, wrong reason. More serious is the problem of the unknown constraints on the input data provided implicitly by context. Even more serious, in theory, are the problems of strong decompilation. ... yadda yada yadda... But in practice the more difficult problem can often be solved by an inspired guess. Kind of like science, and hardly surprising.

2002-02-21T11:07:00.000-05:00

Not been around for a while. Other priorities, or just low interest. Which prompts the following obvious thought. Institutions survive because they are the collaborative effort of a number of individuals. Why? Not because there are necessarily individuals for whom the institution is the number one priority. Over time, something else always takes a higher priority, at least for a while. But there must be enough individuals so that at any given moment a necessary minimum of them have enough spare time from their higher priorities to maintain the continuity of the institution.
Well it seemed signifcant a few minutes ago...

2001-11-30T12:35:00.000-05:00

The Big Bang is followed by infinite expansion or eventual re-collapse and a repeating cycle. Far from collapse, consensus seems to be favoring an accelerating expansion. Kind of a shame in a way. Because Dave and I were wondering about a softly bouncing collapse that never quite attains the initial conditions of the previous cycle. It could be wiped clean each time but eventually some improvements could be held over form each cycle... Snag of course is that there is no way to dissipate energy outside the collapsing system. Pity! Is there any way one could do this in a (very large) subset of an expanding universe? Nope! (5 Ages of the Universse, Adams and Laughlin)

2001-11-30T12:19:00.000-05:00

Why is that we find substances in plants that have useful pharmacological properties? Is it just random, some are toxic, some are benign? Could be, of course. But Connie Barlow in Ghosts of Evolution talks about the dependence of some plants on certain animals for seed dispersal. We could go a stage further, and talk about plants evolving characteristcs (beyond color and taste) that promote the health of its dispersing species. But at least some of such substances would be of benefit to a wider market than just the target species itself. Some might work maybe for most mammals, say. Including us. Shades of Gaia, in a way!

2001-11-30T12:07:00.000-05:00

Colin Tudge in New Scientist 17Nov01 talks about the possible depth of nutraceuticals (edible stuff with more than energy value). I offer farmaceuticals, being the agricultural exploitation of nutraceuticals, GM enhanced or not.

2001-11-14T11:46:00.000-05:00

Here is a cute thought. Your name written in the stars? Sure.
pi, e, the square root of 2, etc. are non-terminating numbers. They run on for ever, effectively as random sequences of numbers. So each must contain all the others, to however much accuracy you fancy, embedded somewhere along its expression.
But much better yet, hunt along the digit stream of any non-terminating constant of the universe, say pi, and you will find your own name ASCII-encoded in pairs of decimal digits.

2001-11-14T11:30:00.000-05:00

Weeks back (Tuesday Aug 14), I was ranting on about the pipe dream of zero population growth. Quite good, worth looking for. Stephen Baxter, Multiplex Space (science fiction) has a new take on it, that we cant escape Malthus even by expanding into the Galaxy; the speed of light becomes the limit on our resources. Not sure of the maths, but the idea is intriguing BECAUSE he uses it to answer Fermi's question about aliens. "Where are they all?" Answer: They died back having exhausted the resources they could reach. So that even if life is a normal infestation of the universe, in general at any given place there wont be any of it.

2001-11-09T12:04:00.000-05:00

It is a convention that poetry is about the internal world, and maths/physics etc are about the external world.
But poetry is about our response to people, sunsets, events - external world, while the sciences are about our response to abstractions like order, logic and ideas - internal world.

2001-10-21T14:34:00.000-04:00

Old and obvious but I just need to say it again.
In a liberal democracy there should be NO restriction on free speech. There should however be strong limitations on freedom of expression. These are not the same thing at all.
We should be free to speak on any subject we like, and express opinions of any sort, no matter how repugnant they may be to our neighbours. The right that we do NOT have is to a free choice in the manner of that expression. . Terrorism, hatred, intolerance and incitement to violence are not spread by what you say, but by the way you say it.

2001-10-07T11:59:00.000-04:00

You can buy videos to entertain your pets. Or can you? Well, no, not if your pets are bees or snakes, for example. We have tweaked the RedGreenBue balance of the TV color to match what we see when we look around us. Is it obvious that these colors will also match what the cats see when they look around them?

2001-10-07T11:50:00.000-04:00

The testosterone solution syndrome. Here we go again.
Are better detectors, sky marshalls, and bullet proof bulkheads really the way to go? This spends a huge amount of money in the hope that it will not be necessary. Tell me again how this is good economics?
What about smaller planes and shorter hops . No extra money spent, of decreased interest to terrorists - and with reduced security checks (or maybe none!) journey times might decrease ....

2001-10-07T11:39:00.000-04:00

Been distracted for a month! Coming back down to earth. Does my Blog still exist?
I was thinking that choosing enemies might not be too easy, that my terrorist might not be your terrorist. The IRA for instance gets plenty of financial support from the Eastern USA. To me they are terrorists, but will you stop supporting them now?
Of course you will, right? Any gang that uses violence is a terrorist gang. Stop supporting them whoever they are.

2001-08-26T22:51:00.000-04:00

I have email dated as early as may 2001.
I have doc and txt files dated as early as feb 2000.
I have books, ordinary books, dated 1880, 1905, 1910...
Most of the stuff on the net is not worth keeping. but what are we doing about the stuff that is?

2001-08-14T09:48:00.000-04:00

Interesting thing about cloning of course, if you clone adults, is that you already know that the genetic mix is viable. Which you dont if you just let people marry each other..

2001-08-14T09:44:00.000-04:00

I wonder, which is more complicated, a national economy or a developing embryo? My guess would be the latter, or maybe they are of comparable complexity. And so, our understanding of the former is so wonderful?
Personally I dont have any problem with cloning human beings, if only we knew how to do it. They will be people like other people. Well, very like some other people! My problem is what do you do with the results while finding out how to do it right.

2001-08-14T09:17:00.000-04:00

A recent article in Nature declares that world population will peak in 2070. I wonder what they are smoking, maybe we should all join them! Shall I spell it out? World population will NOT be gently limited by the civilising diffusion of liberal trade and values. It will be drastically curtailed by harsh conflict with ecological limits through thirst, famine, disease, strife, and climate change. And likely way before 2070. Malthus was not wrong, he just didn't understand quite how ruthlessly First World could despoil Third World. Now Third World has no place to despoil but itself. Trouble is, it sounds to me as if many W3 countries are already beyond the support limits of their ecologies...

2001-08-09T14:13:00.000-04:00

Turns out cloning was not where I was trying to go. But I do get a bit further each time.
You cant grow a chicken in a camel.
Because the DNA is not enough to specify a being.
Nor is the DNA and its cellular chemical factory enough to specify a being.
The womb, the egg, whatever, supplies more than shelter and the needed chemicals. It also provides essential cues and clues for the development of the embryo. And it does this in response to the state of the embryo...Thats one heck of a feedback loop - evolved so slowly over millenia, the increments checked or discarded at every birth.
To copy living beings you need the DNA and one live copy, and the copying process depends on their interaction.
Aaaaahhhh gotit! Any live thing is a vast collection of emergent properties This is how you include emergent properties in a design spec, you use a very slow bootstrap design process! Now I know what it is I wanted to think more about!

2001-08-09T12:24:00.000-04:00

Farming again. "In the good old days" a farmer used horses and neighbours in addition to his own farm workers. His own people and his horses he fed off the farm produce. His neighbours fed themselves and he exchanged services with them when necessary - harvest time, barn building etc. In a pinch he was independent of the rest of the world.
Then they bought tractors. Now he needs cash money to buy and service his equipment. Can we link this to mega farms and monoculture - very probably? Anyway, now the farmer can't feed himself from his own farm anymore and he is at the mercy of a wider economy. When he has a bad harvest he doesn't net enough to stay in business, and when he has a bumper harvest guess what? So does everyone else and prices fall and he doesn't net enough to stay in business.
(Heck these are meant to be short notes...)

2001-08-09T12:07:00.000-04:00

Really didnt express that thought about cloning very well. Another perspective. DNA is the key to exactly what? This is a different kind of machine from any we have really had to think about before.
....You cant make a chicken in a camel....
Of course we know this to be true, but on the basis of present theory it is really not as obvious as you might wish.

2001-08-06T12:10:00.000-04:00

So cloning is a tad more difficult than we expected. We think of DNA as the instruction manual, and imagine that we can use it to make fresh copies of .. whatever. But its not like a food recipe that can be cooked up most anywhere. Its not a set of instructions FOR making copies, it is a set of instructions THAT makes the copy...And there are some interestingly weird things about the logic of a set of instructions that makes the machine that copies ONLY its own instructions...

2001-08-03T20:01:00.000-04:00

Back on my civics theme. Neighbours. The instinctive response to neighbours is so often antagonistic, unrespectful. We hardly meet except when one causes a problem for the other.
Which is of course the point. We dont meet in cooperative community activities anymore. I dont need his help to get the hay in next month. He doesn't need my help in raising a new barn. If we had to work together, we would approach mutual problems quite differently.
Or there wouldnt be any help.

2001-08-02T11:00:00.000-04:00

15% (or something) of us are left handed. There are no left handed pianos. What does that tell us about concert pianists, I wonder?
So why do we condemn kids to a lifetime of funny writing styles instead of spending a little effort encouraging them to write with their right hand.
Or maybe, since writing lefthanded is easier if you write from right to left, why not teach them from the start to write upside down...

2001-08-01T13:26:00.000-04:00

Damn! I had a theory that evolution probably developed intelligence more often than not. So since it got hominids there in under 5 million years, there must have been intelligent dinosaurs, who had a much longer time frame. Which is nice.
But then I realised - we seem to be demonstrating that environemental disaster is the necessary consequence of intelligence. I guess they werent intelligent after all. Nor any other animals before us. Nor any aliens elsewhere... We may be alone after all....

2001-07-31T10:34:00.000-04:00

I love language so there is another whole universe of things that get up my nose!! Amongst which are things like this one. I use the phrase "I couldn't care less". Meaning I really, really do not care, my degree of caring is less than minimal, zero, nada. Contrast this with "I could care less" which I hear often nowadays and is meant to mean the same thing. Yet one is the negation of the other, and the second one seems just wrong.
Duh, the penny drops so slowly - put a question mark at the end and "I could care less?" suddenly fixes itself up nicely! The kids arent so stupid after all!!
But I still have problems with "it's not so big of a deal"...??

2001-07-29T15:11:00.000-04:00

Until 150 years ago, maybe even more recently, it was still possible for one man to know all there was to know. Not anymore. But, while I may know less, I sure understand a whole lot more. Wow! (David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality)

2001-07-27T10:49:00.000-04:00

A defining characteristic of living things ( in addition to moving eating reproducing etc), maybe a better one, is self-maintenance. Until it dies it maintains a recognisable appearance, when it dies it falls apart. (Dyson?)

2001-07-26T11:43:00.000-04:00

I keep coming back to a kind of civics thread. If you read the following as a New Years resolution, it sounds pretty bland.
"I promise conversion of my manners and amendment of my life".
But look at it again, as one of the solemn lifetime vows of an order of monks. Doesnt it have a simplicity that is breathtaking?

2001-07-26T10:21:00.000-04:00

The universe is a pretty marvellous place. If there is intelligent life elsewhere, maybe it doesnt matter if we trash our planet. On the other hand, if we are really alone, should we not make ourselves responsible for protecting and celebrating the whole deal?

2001-07-26T09:34:00.000-04:00

I used to provoke the kids by suggesting that not all dinosaurs were dumb and the color of mud. Given the 100 million years they were around, compared with our 2 or 3 or 4 million, it surely seems likely that some were intelligent and others as brightly colored as tropical birds.
They tell me that Hollywood likes the idea too!

2001-07-25T22:06:00.000-04:00

duh!
I always thought that man's determination to destroy the ecosystem he lives in, and everything else within reach, was a side-effect of evolving intelligence.
Well, not exactly.
It was of course the reason why evolution accepted the experiment in the first place.

2001-07-20T18:13:00.000-04:00

From today's Globe and Mail : a book "Conflict as Property" by Nils Christie identifies conflict as a precious community resource and talks about the theft of this resource by lawyers, courts and others who take conflict out of the community, preventing ordinary people from behaving with courage generosity and ingenuity. When I started writing, this I was sold; but now do I begin to see the liberal fallacy all over again?

2001-07-20T18:11:00.000-04:00

Someone - Mayor/Librarian - claims Chicago has opened 3 dozen library branches over the last howoften and comments that the presence of a library maks valuable statements about the community in which it is embedded.

2001-07-20T18:09:00.000-04:00

The intention is a log of ideas, mine and other peoples', that for one reason or another I find interesting and want to think about some more but not now! The emphasis is small ideas, not vast philosophical themes, and will usually relate to what man may know and the ways he has of knowing it! Sometimes it will get out of its wrappings, as has happened already for the first 2 postings!!