Confirmation Bias Illustrated
ARE THE SQUARES LABELLED A AND B THE SAME COLOUR?
One of the reasons I sometimes have trouble writing lately, and am less inclined to write about controversial subjects, is that it is clearer to me every day how so many people base their opinions on a combination of their personal observations and what others have told them. That is to say, they see what they have been taught, and most of them aren’t inclined to even discuss the possibility that their perceptions may be flawed. The case in point that inspired this post was something that just happened in a discussion group I belong to. Someone posted a story about how a hospital in Australia conducted a study that showed that psychiatric patients acted like werewolves far more often on full moon nights than other nights. And the media dutifully reported on this study and passed the word along. This theory, that crime, madness, etc. are more common on the full moon is called the lunar effect. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of my readers are familiar with the theory in one form or another. It’s been studied extensively by scientists over the past few decades.
So I felt inclined to post my response to the group. I pointed out that this was one small very poorly controlled study by a single hospital, and worse, it appears that the study was designed to get lots of publicity, judging from the amount of werewolf lore the study’s author was touting. And furthermore, that while little “studies” like this often demonstrated the lunar effect, large careful rigorous studies involving vast amounts of patients and data … show no such effect. In fact modern science has basically concluded that the lunar effect is at best folklore, since it can’t be demonstrated in anything resembling a rigorous controlled study.
And how did the other members of the group respond? So far they’ve all posted stories about how in “their nursing home” or “their emergency ward” or whatever … “everyone” noticed that there were more problems on the night of the full moon. Did I debate with these people, and try to point out to them that considerable scientific effort had been made to demonstrate the lunar effect,and that the empirical and scientific evidence strongly suggests that there is no such effect? Of course not, it would have gotten ugly. Few, if any, of them would have been persuaded that they have been fooling themselves into seeing something that wasn’t there.
So what is going on here? Are scientists just stupid, and refusing to see an obvious effect? Well, that’s an argument that is used so often on the fringes of science that I no longer cringe when I hear it. While scientists and science aren’t perfect, they have a remarkable track record: From exploring the furthest reaches of the Solar System and peering billions of light years into space, to understanding biology and medicine to the point where humans are routinely living to over 100 now, to developing the technology that made the computer (or cell phone!) that the gentle reader is using right now … science works! In fact it works a hell of a lot better than religion, prayer, wishful thinking, or “common sense” ever did. I digress, but for me science is about as empirical as it gets.
What I think is going on here was originally called “counting the hits and ignoring the misses” and is now called confirmation bias. People have a powerful tendency to both notice things that fit their preconceived views and not notice things that might contradict them. And, frankly, it’s been my observation that most people are so inclined to reinforce their beliefs this way that it’s a waste of time to debate them. However, to stop efforts at debating people based on this observation would make me guilty of the same bias, so I’m going to plough right along.
I am not however going to debate the validity of the lunar effect. I am more interested in what the confirmation bias means. It’s such a common and all encompassing bias that it seems to me it must say something about the way we perceive the world. And here there is some fertile ground for speculation. For what we all forget most (or all) of the time is that the reality we see is heavily filtered by our brains and sensory organs … as the below illustration shows:
I am pretty sure that the vast majority of people will say that it is “obvious” to them that the squares labelled A and B are two very different shades of grey. And yet when they are connected by same coloured bars on the right, it’s clear that they are the exact same colour. Are our eyes and brains that easy to fool? No, what is going on here is confirmation bias illustrated. IE from the various clues in the picture our eyes and brains construct the image we see, and our eyes and brains are designed to create a meaningful image we can interpret … not present us with an exact photographic reproduction of what we are seeing. Or as the description of the illusion puts it, our eyes and brains are designed to discern actual shapes and surfaces which are much more important than minor changes in shading. And they alter what we see to reinforce this interpretation!
So I’m suspecting that confirmation bias is probably simply a side effect of how our brains construct reality, and for the most part where it leads us astray in any evolutionary sense has been unimportant. IE the caveman that could spot the sabre toothed cat in the grass and wasn’t fooled by the subtle interplay of light and shadow has a much higher chance of survival than one who can’t make out the shape of the cat until it is leaping for his throat. The fly in the ointment though is that when we come to civilization and culture, a case can be made that this tendency could have negative consequences. In fact a case can be made that modern propaganda and advertising are increasingly able to utilize this (and other) biases to get people to believe stuff that just aint so!
That however is a topic for a future post. Next post … I review Gran Torino. Rent and watch it now gentle reader, unless spoilers are of no matter .
(The above image was put into public domain by the copyright holder, and may be reproduced and distributed freely. Copyright © Edward H. Adelson 1995. It’s really a pleasure that someone made and put something like this into the public domain, especially considering how copyright laws have been perverted by Congress the past few decades. My thanks to Mr Adelson, I’ll be reviewing more of his work.)
The End of Hope
Following up on the last post, I notice a common theme. Woven through a lot of conspiracy theories seems to be the idea that if the powers that be are shamelessly profiting from something, this is an indication that they caused it. This is what is referred to as inductive logic, one is going from a set of specifics and making a general case. And while inductive logic is a good way to brainstorm and generate theories, it isn’t proof in any way. No matter how shamefully, illegally, and comprehensively the USA government profits off of 9/11 or Global Warming … that isn’t proof that they caused either one.
Moving right along, the west showed its hand in the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program. They proposed that Iran send its Uranium abroad for processing into fuel rods for nuclear power plants, thus ensuring that none of it was used for making bombs. The Iranians rejected the plan, and the USA is calling for sanctions and further confrontation. I mean, it was a reasonable offer, right?
No, it wasn’t. What the main stream press isn’t mentioning, is that the Iranians raised an obvious objection, if they ship their valuable Uranium ore to another country, what assurance do they have that they will ever get fuel rods back? The answer of course is … none. And anyone being even remotely honest can see that this is a very powerful objection. Furthermore, and again the so called media is silent, the Iranians made a counter offer. They offered to trade their Uranium for the equivalent in fuel rods simultaneously. Um, the USA rejected this offer out of hand. If the purpose of the confrontation with Iran is to ensure they use their nuclear power for peaceful purposes, this was a perfectly reasonable suggestion. Sadly, American bullying is our foreign policy now. Has been for a long time actually. Even more sadly, most of our “educated” population falls for the propaganda spewing forth from the White House and the main stream media as if it were fact.
And while we are on the topic of the White House and propaganda, Obama’s performance when he was given the Nobel Peace Prize. The mind, formerly boggled, reels uncontrollably. I guess Mr Obama figured if he could convince the majority of American voters that he was some sort of progressive who would change Bush’s policies, it would be easy to convince the world that War is Peace? I mean, the sight of the president of the USA accepting a Peace Prize and then burbling about how his colonial wars are “moral” and “justified” was creepy to terrifying. Hate to say it, but comparisons to Hitler aren’t as off the wall as I once thought, at least in regards to Obama’s propensity for violence and the claim that somehow violence will lead to peace and prosperity. There’s no chance that Obama will become a dictator of course, but as a poster boy for the war machine that is running the USA, he’s found his calling.
It’s sad, but the USA seems to have become addicted to war. We’ve always been a war-like country, but under Bush and now Obama we seem to have morphed into a country where permanent war is the norm, and all international problems can be solved by the application of force. I mean, there was always a faction that believed that, it’s pretty much our legacy from World War Two. There used to be an opposition to that, but lately whatever voices for peace there are in the USA are muted and fractured. It’s been pointed out that Obama’s greatest accomplishment may have been to destroy any realistic chance of opposition to the policy of permanent war. Obama was a Trojan Horse, and the liberals enthusiastically hauled him into their camp … and have now been eviscerated from within. There is zero chance now that the Democratic party will move back toward being a true opposition party, for all practical purposes the Democrats are nowjust another wing of the Republican party.
And no, a third party won’t fix things. The system is so completely rigged to keep third party candidates from getting any real traction that the idea is absurd. And the Supreme Court is about to rule that corporations can donate to politicians any way they please, though granted it’s not like they have been seriously hampered by efforts to keep their money out of politics. If the Supreme Court rules as some people fear they will, any and all corporations will be able to donate money to political campaigns … including foreign corporations. Yes, we will be giving countries like China and Saudi Arabia the chance to participate in American politics the good old fashioned way, by buying American politicians.
I knew the Obama presidency was going to be interesting, I just had no idea how interesting. And not the good kind of interesting. Sigh. Have a great weekend everyone.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit, it is central to illustrating the post, and its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and Copyright: The Jerusalem Post. It’s a dove. It’s dead. It’s in a back man’s hands. I will leave the gentle reader to come to their own conclusions from there as to why I used this picture to illustrate this post.)
Climategate
Climategate. I haven’t written about climategate yet. In fact I haven’t written about global warming at all for awhile. There’s reasons for that, but it is an important topic, so it deserves the occasional glance. Important, but depressing. OK, climategate. In short, someone hacked into a major centre of climate research, stole a vast amount of stuff including email, and published it. Some of the emails are pretty embarrassing, careers may be hurt or ruined. And there’s certainly evidence that some scientists engaged in less than ethical conduct to prove the case that human caused global warming is a problem. People sceptical of AGW (anthropogenic global warming, the idea that human activity is warming the globe) are making this out to be a very important development, some have even gone so far as to claim that this is the final proof that AGW is a hoax.
Before I go further, I have a problem here. If I understand it correctly, the sceptics are claiming that essentially the entire field of climatology is conspiring to “hoax” the world about AGW, presumably in order to keep the research grants coming. This alone gives me pause, has there ever been a case in history where an entire scientific discipline conspired to mislead the planet? We’re talking tens of thousands of people in every country on Earth, and we are talking all of them. Climatologists, the scientists who have actually spent their entire lives studying climate, are essentially in 100 percent in agreement that AGW is a reality. I find it very difficult to swallow that an entire branch of science is so corrupt and/or ignorant that they would perpetrate and/or fall for a hoax on this scale. Finding even a handful of people to conspire with is a tricky business, but thousands of them? Now maybe I’m overstating my case, but for the sceptics to be right, the entire field of climatology has to be wrong. Right?
Back to Climategate. I have a problem here too. Climategate isn’t about the science. IE Even if we grant the worst case scenario, that a handful of scientists used unethical (and possibly illegal) means to promote their case, what does that have to do with the science? Well, nothing. The stolen and released emails do not show that any data was falsified or that any studies need to be withdrawn. So no matter how damaging they are to the authors of the emails, what the stolen emails don’t address is the data and science itself. So what, exactly, does Climategate tell us about AGW? Nothing. I’d go more into the nuts and bolts of the whole mess, but others have done it better. In fact as far as I can tell, the AGW sceptics are operating the same way that a lot of people who have “maverick” beliefs are operating. They latch onto anything that appears to support their case, and claim that it discredits everything that doesn’t support their case. Um, one can support any belief in this fashion.
Moving right along, I’m actually not even going to address AGW, because it doesn’t matter. that’s right, it doesn’t matter if AGW is proved beyond any doubt. This is because whether or not one believes that humans are changing the climate, there isn’t any doubt whatsoever that the climate is changing. Even worse, the changes are much worse than the models predicted just a few years ago. The ice caps are melting, the glaciers are melting, and sea ice is disappearing at a much greater rate than anyone predicted. The evidence for this is documented in hundreds of studies world wide, by scientists from every country. Sea levels have risen an inch and a half in the last decade alone, and the rate of change is actually accelerating. These two links both address the actual science and its relevance to Climategate. I highly recommend them: What happened to the evidence? and The Reality of Climategate. I also find it interesting that the global warming sceptic’s position could have been written by the PR department of any major oil company. Interesting company to keep.
Another point that rarely gets mentioned, is that the people who think that human produced CO2 is part of the problem aren’t advocating “doing something” about it. They are advocating that the people who are doing something, slow down what they are doing. IE the sceptics who claim that CO2 isn’t part of the problem need to demonstrate that what is being done is perfectly safe. By dumping CO2 into the atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, we are conducting the greatest scientific experiment in history using our own planet as a guinea pig! Um, if there is even a 1% chance that AGW is a reality, isn’t this a terrible risk to take? I wish some of the sceptics would explain just why they think we should conduct this sort of planetary experiment, what, exactly, is the point?
Which leads us to my last point, what, exactly, is so wrong about cutting CO2 emissions? Making things less polluting is going to create plenty of jobs, it’s not like the environmental movement of the 60s and 70s shut down the planet’s industries. Eating less meat, relying more on walking and public transit, recycling, buying locally produced products, growing a vegetable garden … this is not exactly waterboarding now, is it? In fact I would venture to say that most people either wouldn’t notice the difference, or would actually be healthier and happier if these changes were to take place. Even if the oil companies and car companies make fewer profits, it’s not like the money is vanishing, it just means it’s circulating somewhere else in the economy. And pretty much has to be circulating somewhere lower down by definition, nu?
Lastly, the final point, and the reason I don’t write about this very often. (Well, aside from the fact that I don’t think any of the remaining AGW sceptics are particularly interested in debate, but I digress.) The reason I don’t write about AGW much is that we aren’t going to do anything until it is way too late. The governments of China, the USA, and Canada are completely suborned by corporate/business interests, and their is zero chance they will do anything to inconvenience their masters. The rich and the powerful have historically always pursued their own interests at the expense of everyone else, that’s how you get to be rich and powerful in the first place. Global warming may be the second greatest threat the human race has ever faced, but as long as the planet’s wealth is ever flowing upwards, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for change.
And anyhow, at this rate I’ll be living in a beach front apartment soon enough. I can live with that. Coming soon, why I hate Al-Jazeera.
(I believe the above image originated with NASA and is thus public domain under US copyright law. In any event it’s not being used for profit and its use here is central to illustrating the post. It’s an illustration of just one of the many dramatic changes that have taken place on Earth in juts the past few years. Yes folks, the canary in the coal mine is stone cold dead.)
2009 Movies, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
I rented and watched a movie that was so bad, I can’t get the taste out of my mind. (And no, I’m not talking about Gran Torino.) It was so bad that I kept watching it in morbid fascination, surely it can’t get worse? It did. By the end I had decided there must have been some terrible mistake in the editing room, and all the good scenes got thrown out by mistake, so they cobbled the movie together out of the rejects laying on the floor. And upon further reflection, I’ve seen a number of movies this year that, well, sucked. So in the spirit of making the world a better place, here are five movies to avoid. I mean if even one person is spared spending a few bucks renting a godawful movie, that’s a good deed? Right. Santa take note.
Terminator Salvation. I waited years for this? When I said there was no way they could make a worse movie than Terminator 3, it wasn’t meant as a challenge! Well, they did. The plot was muddy, the terminators were muddy, and just in general the whole thing lacked any of the edginess of the original two movies. Or originality for that matter, what the hell is it with all these movies that are filled with “tributes” to older better movies? Remaking a scene isn’t a tribute, it’s boring and says “We couldn’t think of anything better.” Why Arnold allowed the producers to use his image in this movie is beyond me.
Doomsday. Never heard of this movie? Good. This movie is made entirely of tributes. Basically it’s “Escape from New York” crossed with “The Road Warrior.” Without the originality, charm, and dialogue of either. This movie was such a dog that even though it’s one of the biggest films to be made in Scotland in living memory, the Scots took great pains not to invite them to the BAFTA Scotland Awards, let alone consider them for an award. Ouch.
Transformers II. Yes, there is a theme here. So I should have titled the blog post “bad Sci-Fi movies of 2009.” It was bad year for Sci-Fi, what can I say. The non Sci-Fi movies I saw were all at least passable. Moving right along, if you’re a rabid Transformers fan … that can be cured now: Watch this movie. OK, it’s not quite that bad, but the first movie was fun without being painful and awkward and stupid. On the plus side, if you fast forward through all scenes with the protagonist’s family and girlfriend, what remains is good Transformers fun. If, you know, watching giant CGI robots beat each other up is your idea of entertainment.
9. I got tricked into seeing this movie, how else can I explain paying to see two hours of CGI animated socks whining as a giant robot sucks the starch out of them? The giant robot red eye from Hal in 2001 plays himself in the strongest supporting role of the film. On the other hand, if you’re someone who thinks a movie is only a platform for stringing together a series of oh-so-really-cool CGI fight scenes with a different monster each time, this movie was made for you!
Land of the Lost. OK, this is it, one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Yes, this is the movie that inspired this post. I don’t watch very many contemporary comedies, they aren’t really my style. When I do though, I usually enjoy myself and even get a few laughs. And I expected no different this time, I even brought the movie to a Thanksgiving Dinner. Fortunately we didn’t get around to watching it, so I will be invited back next year. What can I say, if you think that dinosaur bodily fluids are the ultimate humour prop, this movie was made for you. Who wouldn’t pay to see Will Ferrel pour dinosaur piss on his head? Yes, 4 year olds will find this movie terribly funny, but don’t bring them unless you want to explain the weird pointless gay themed adult “jokes,” like where one guy was trying to get two other guys to kiss? What the hell was that about? I rest my case. Shudder.
Last but not least, Gran Torino. I really enjoyed this movie and highly recommend it. I’ve seen it three times already, which for me is almost unprecedented. At some point I will be discussing it at length because it makes a number of points about racism , assimilation, and what it means to be an American that are worth going over. I only mention it here because I needed a pic to illustrate the post, and decided that using an image from a movie that I’m panning wouldn’t be appreciated. I may stretch the limits of Fair Use at times, but obviously using a movie image to discourage people from going to a movie clearly is outside the scope of Fair Use.
So have a great weekend everyone. Rent and watch Gran Torino if you haven’t already done so. You will be tested on this. Next week, climategate … brace yourselves.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s a low resolution copy of a movie poster, it’s not being used for profit, and it’s use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. Credit and copyright: Warner Brothers. And yes, I am a big Clint Eastwood fan, and no, this isn’t is typical Dirty Harry shoot-em-up movie. He gets off one shot in the movie, int0 the ceiling of his garage. Enjoy.)
Crazy Times, Crazy World
Damn shame about that guy shooting those cops near Seattle. The incident itself doesn’t bear thinking about. The media coverage of same is pretty pathetic too. Some mention that Huckabee pardoned him, little mention that Huckabee’s faith played a role in the pardon. I have already seen attacks on liberals based on this terrible crime, but very little about the idiotic idea that if someone has “accepted Christ as their saviour” that somehow that makes him eligible for a pardon. No, it’s makes him a lying monster. At best it makes him a monster who has accepted Christ. Great, but let’s keep such monsters locked up and eventually Christ can deal with them as he sees fit. Personally I think people who have committed violent crimes should be locked up forever, and people who haven’t for the most part shouldn’t be locked up at all. The justice system should be more about protecting us that punishing people. I’d much rather feel there were no rapists and murderers walking the streets than be safe from embezzlers and drug users. Priorities people, priorities. Lastly I just wish there was more analysis of the situational forces at play here. Does the media coverage of the event influence more unstable people to do the same? If the shooter did have help from friends, what’s going on there? There’s a lot of hostility toward and mistrust of police in some quarters, can’t we at least talk about it?
Casting judgment rather than analyzing the situation is the American way though. Moving right along, I read something about North Korea that made a lot of sense to me. An article pointed out that neither the USA, Russia, China, or Japan wants a unified Korea. Even a lot of the South Koreans don’t want unification, it would be insanely expensive. A unified (nuclear armed!) Korea would be a much more powerful regional player, which is why the other players in the region are perfectly happy with the current situation. My point of course here is that propaganda and the media make it out like North Korea is to blame for the status quo, and while the North may or may not be happy with the current situation … other powers in the region are working hard to keep it just the way it is. If you look at the situation it’s easier to see why nothing has changed for decades, we like to bluster about the “problem” of North Korea, but we’re actually well served by the current situation.
Moving over to Afghanistan, President Obama is going to send 30,000 more troops … but start pulling them out in 18 months. Sort of maybe toward getting out by 2017. Used to be we had presidents who promised us peace, now we get endless war or endless war with vague promises of future less endless war. OK then. It took like 18 years before the Israelis to get tired of their pointless occupation of parts of Lebanon, so we have a few years to go I suppose. In some cases the absurdity of political discourse in the USA is hysterical … I mean we are going to earnestly discuss whether or not giving millions of Americans health insurance is something we can afford, something that will immeasurably improve the lives of millions of Americans and by extension all of us … but the staggering sums of money for our overseas adventures simply isn’t in the equation? What, exactly, are we expected to get for the trillion dollars and rising that the Afghanistan adventure is costing us?
The last point I will make about Obama’s adventures in Afghanistan is that he is demonstrating an all-to-common human failing, the sunk cost fallacy. Loss aversion, putting good money after bad, whatever you want to call it. People, and that includes everyone from gambling addicts to the most powerful CEOs have a powerful aversion to losses and will suspend judgment and pursue ventures much longer than they should have in an effort to recoup their losses. And political and war leaders will do the same thing, as Obama is now demonstrating in Afghanistan. We’ve been there for eight years, spent a pile of money, made zero progress … by any rational analysis it’s long past time to cut our losses and let the Afghans resume their civil war. Especially considering that our government is so far in debt now that the Hubble Telescope couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. In any event, this article covers the psychology behind loss aversion and is an interesting read.
Coming next, the Hubble Telescope and the most important picture in history.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and is central to illustrating the post. And its use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image, arguably the opposite. Credit and copyright: The Weekly Standard. And yeah, I suppose it’a bit of a stretch claiming this as Fair Use, but hey, it’s in the spirit of the times.)
World’s First Colour Photograph
In a continuation of my world’s first photograph series, reproduced above is one of the world’s first known colour photographs. It is titled “Landscape in Southern France” and is a photograph of Agen and the St. Caprais Cathedral. It was taken in 1877 by Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837-1920,) one of the pioneers of colour photography and colour printing. And a pioneer he was, it wouldn’t be until 30 years later that colour photography became practical. The above isn’t even strictly a photograph, it was a combination of three different photographic plates that were inked and printed onto the same piece of paper. And that’s about all I can find out on the web, it’s becoming clear just how limited the web is as any sort of serious reference. However, I digress.
So where the hell is Agen, France? It’s a town of 30,000 in Aquitaine, in south-central France. Agen was founded in the fourth century. It spent the next five centuries being raided, first by Germanic tribes from the East, then by Arabs from Spain, lastly by Norse invaders sailing up the river from the coast. So Agen didn’t grow much until after the ninth century, in fact one wonders why they stayed. Then they got smart and built the town’s main buildings on a handful of little fortified hills. Why it took five centuries of raiders before they took defencive measures isn’t clear to me, maybe they are just a stubborn unimaginative lot. And from the 9th to the 13th century Agen was peaceful and prosperous.
Then came the Hundred Years’ War in 1324, and Agen spent the next hundred years being fought over by France and England, and being periodically raided by mercenary robber armies all the while. In 1453 Agen became French once and for all, just in time for the Renaissance. So instead of French and English fighting, Agen became the scene of fights between Protestant and Catholic armies until 1598. And again, peace arrived just in time for a century of floods, famine, economic collapse, and brain drain. Dear God, I’m not making this up, how this town is even still around is amazing. In the late 1700s things finally improved, in fact Agen prospered as the middle class grew in wealth and power throughout France. Yes, the late eighteenth century was a Golden Age for Agen!
And that’s that, since then Agen has slowly and steadily declined as a centre of agriculture and industry, not even getting a modern bank until the late 19th century. How does one spell “backwater” in French? In other words, Agen probably looks about the same today as it did when the above image was taken, it’s not exactly a booming region. In fact it’s known as the “prune capital” of France, having a prune festival every fall where candied and liqueured prunes are sold and celebrated. Hey, I like prunes, I’d attend. Still, not really what one would describe as a world class event. And that’s about it for Agen’s history. The cathedral in the image has been there since the 12th century. Agen is also the site of the long forgotten Agen meteorite fall of 1814.
Still, as always with old photographs, I’m fascinated by this picture. While Agen looks idyllic and peaceful, this was an interesting time in France. In 1870-1871 France had fought a war with Germany, and lost badly. The emperor Napoleon III and the entire French army being captured at the disastrous Battle of Sedan, followed by a four month bloody siege of Paris. The French government fell, and there was an “abortive workers revolution” in Paris. The Paris Commune as it was called was soon crushed by the French army, some 30,000 to 50,000 people being killed, most of them extra-judicially. Still, while France was going through crisis, the Germans didn’t reach Agen.
So this is a photo of a tranquil town in a troubled time. And we still have some connection to it. People born in 1867 or so saw the above scene during their lifetimes. Some of them lived to the 1940s at least. So there are people alive today who knew someone who saw the above scene with their own eyes. And because of the wonder of photography, their memories can be seen today, even if the eyes that saw them are long gone. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
(The above image is Public Domain under US copyright law, as it was produced before 1923. True, some may claim that the image of the “Tartan Ribbon” made in 1861 is the world’s first colour photo. No, not quite. It was three different photographs taken through different colour filters, when the glass photographic plates were combined and a light shone through them, a colored image was indeed projected onto the wall. However, it wasn’t till decades later that people learnt how to combine different images into one image … like our image above. Maybe I’m quibbling over details, but it is certain that the above image is the oldest surviving colour photographic image of a real world scene, not just a laboratory image of a ribbon. Coming soon, more early photography. Yes, we are moving into an era where the earliest photos were from two centuries ago!)
Doug sticks to his guns: aliens don’t exist!
My last post ended with this paragraph:
“Sooner or later the world always gets a war though. This, this is why the aliens haven’t contacted us yet. Well, and the fact that they don’t exist. Details.”
An esteemed reader commented:
“Again, I will point out this isn’t accurate. I agree with you that aliens are NOT visiting earth in flying saucers, but to say “they don’t exist” is to VERY much overstate the case. We don’t know, one way or the other, and we don’t have enough info to even REALLY assess the likelihood that they exist in a scientific way.
BUT, and this is the key … given that earth supports life, and is one planet orbiting a relatively non-special star in a non-special galaxy, what are the odds that in all the trillions and trillions of stars out there, our sun is the ONLY one to have developed a planet with life around it? Strikes me, that would make us amazingly, unbelievably unique in the universe, and that sort o claim MUST have some backing to it.
Sagan said it best IMO. “If we are alone in the universe, what a tremendous waste of space.” Aliens aren’t visiting us in flying saucers, but I really don’t think it’s appropriate to say NO aliens exist. Given what we know today, if we ARE the only life in the universe, then we occupy a special position that needs to be explained. Until someone shows why earth is the only planet among TRILLIONS of stars to develop life, the logical assumption SHOULD be that life occurs anywhere that conditions allow it.”
OK, for starters I’m not saying that it’s impossible for a a language using, tool using, intelligent alien race to exist somewhere else in the Universe, in fact it’s entirely possible that a UFO will land on the White House lawn tomorrow. In the same sense that it’s possible for a chimp at a typewriter to randomly type Hamlet. And with the size of the Universe, and you put a chimp on every planet, it’s practically guaranteed, right? Well, no, it’s not, but I’ll get back to the chimps in a second. What I arguing is that “There’s no such thing as aliens” is the logical equivalent of saying “There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” And please note that I am not talking about life, I think the Universe is permeated with life, I’m talking about other civilization-creating beings that would get most of our jokes, understand the concept of taxes, and probably blow each other up for equally inane reasons as we do. Yes, our brothers among the stars.
Well, first, let’s look at the evidence. (I have a theory that evidence is a good place to start.) And here we have a problem. The evidence for aliens is exactly the same as the evidence for ghosts, angels, fairies, God, Sherlock Holmes, Superman, etc. IE there may be people out there convinced they have met any and all of the above, and a whole host of imaginary beings that humans have conjured up throughout history, but none of them passes the first bar when looked at scientifically, because there’s nothing to look at. In fact the ubiquity of fictional beings throughout human history and across human culture argues pretty strongly that these fantasies fulfil powerful human needs. And whatever need they fulfil, no matter how much or how many people believe in them, from God to Santa Claus to aliens, there is no empirical evidence that they exist. In fact sociologists and historians have already noted how quickly belief in aliens is morphing into religion, there were UFO cults in the fifties for God’s sake. For all practical purposes, aliens are demonstrably no more real than Santa Claus.
So I think I’m pretty safe in putting aliens in the category of myth, since at the current time, that’s all the only category they fit in. Now what about arguments that with all that space out there, there have to be aliens? I mean, there’s 30 billion trillion (3×10²²) stars in the observable Universe, surely the odds say there have to be aliens? Well, let’s look at some long odds. Going back to our monkeys, what are the odds that a monkey will type Hamlet by typing at random? The probability is one in 3.4 × 10183,946 that the monkey will type Hamlet on his first try. Note that this number dwarfs the number of stars in the Universe, so it doesn’t help to have a monkey on each planet typing away. In fact, if the entire Universe were converted into typing monkeys, the odds of them typing Hamlet in the expected lifetime of the Universe are still less than less than one in 10183,800.
My point here is that there’s no reason to believe that humans are anything other than a really unlikely fluke. Life in fact seems to evolve into virtually infinite variability, it’s only our narcissism and conceit that we think it’s “natural” it evolve into something like us. Let me repeat that, just on Earth there are near infinite possibilities for life to evolve into, and no matter how many stars there are, they don’t approach infinity. Or another example, no two snowflakes are alike (well, maybe a few are,) but snowflakes seem to have an almost infinite number of very organized shapes they can form in. Well, snowflakes are simple compared to the evolution of DNA, there’s every reason the believe that life may exist in near infinite variety … with creatures like us just being one of endless possibilities. In fact I make the argument that the mere existence of us means that arguing there are going to be be others like us is like arguing that the monkeys are going to type Hamlet twice!
In any event, no disrespect is meant to Mr Bateman or anyone else who believes in the possibility of aliens. I also believe in the possibility of aliens, I’m just saying it’s the people who claim aliens are likely to exist are the ones making the unsupported claim. As another person put it, the chance of there being aliens in space is the same as the chance we will find a MacDonald’s® on Mars. Well, there’s basically no chance of that, right? My point here is that aliens are just as much a creation of the (limited) human imagination as Macdonald’s … so expecting to find them out there in the stars is about as likely.
I don’t know what we will find when we start to explore the stars, but I’m willing to bet that whatever it is … it won’t be what we expected in any way, shape, or form.
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
Sir Arthur Eddington, English astronomer (1882 – 1944)
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It is not being used for profit, it is central to illustrating the post, and it’s use here in no way interferes with the copyright holder’s commercial use of the image. I’m a little unclear on who holds the copyright, but I got it from this fine Slovak web site, here is the picture’s caption translated into English: “UFOs may collide with Santa Klaus only at a single location. The PF channel Sci-Fi TV by agency BETC euroRSCG.” Yes, there really is an infinite monkey theorem. And coming soon, my idea for SETI, since I seem to be lost in space these days.)
Reticulating Splines
OK, I’m getting real close to making some changes in Doug’s Darkworld. Basically this is going to turn into a more or less pure blog where all I write about is current events, politics, and whatever random weirdness inspires me as I chronicle our civilization’s slide into war, denial, insanity, and chaos as the plague of infantile thinking corrodes our social structures at their very core. Yes, lots of fun to be had there.
At the same time, a lot of the menu bar above is going to disappear as I launch a companion site where I will post my single topic articles on science, war, and history. And, tadaa, some of it is starting to take shape. My first post over there is ready for visitors: Earth’s Place in the Universe: Where the heck are we anyhow? Enjoy, comments can be left either there or here.
On the local front, not much happening. Oakland has made it to number three when it comes to crime ridden American cities. It’s a shame, but not surprising. The last few mayors have been pretty corrupt or ineffective, and the recession hasn’t helped. The only thing I would add for the out-of-towners to understand, is that most of Oakland is just a typical American city, the crime is taking place primarily in west and south Oakland. As long as one avoids those areas, Oakland is just another city. And if you do go to West Oakland or the bad parts of the Fruitvale district, go during the day, wear a white T-shirt, and don’t piss anyone off.
Nothing much else new. Health care reform is still a joke, by the time it passes, assuming it even passes, it’s going to be so filled with special caveats for industry and the like that it will be little more than symbolic. In fact there’s every chance it will actually make the situation worse, since there’s one thing our modern leaders in politics and industry seem to have in common: unlimited greed to matter what the cost to the country.
Israel is threatening to bomb Iran again, Iran is making a big deal out of wargames to practice defending against an Israeli attack. Both governments are equally cynical, Israel is always playing up “threats” to Israel to bolster its militaristic government and occupation policies, while Iran wants to dispel social unease at home by rallying folks around the flag. Both sides benefit from this, so I don’t think there’s much chance of real war breaking it, this is political theatre. Hope not at least, the world doesn’t need another war.
Sooner or later the world always gets a war though. This, this is why the aliens haven’t contacted us yet. Well, and the fact that they don’t exist. Details.
(The above image is public domain under US copyright law, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. It’s captioned: With her brother on her back a war weary Korean girl tiredly trudges by a stalled M-26 tank, at Haengju, Korea. (June 9, 1951) I just chose it because I thought it was an interesting picture, and to remind people that America’s overseas adventures have a human cost, something that seems to be overlooked frequently in our “debates” about foreign policy.)
Answers to the Space Exploration Quiz
Well, unfortunately real life got in the way of my writing, but I’m back. First order of business, the overdue answers to the Space Exploration Quiz. It apparently didn’t stump people too long, since the correct answers were posted in the first few comments. C’est la vie. Still, for the record, these images are each the first image sent back by the first lander on their respective planetary bodies: The Moon, Venus, Mars, and Titan.
The top image was taken on the Moon by the Russian Luna 9 lander on 3 February 1966:
This achievement was the very first time images had been sent back from the surface of another planetary body. While the USA would beat Russia to the Moon some three years later, this was another first for the Russian Space Program. As a curious note, for some reason the Soviets decided not to release the images that Luna 9 sent back. However, British astronomers who had recorded the craft’s transmissions from the Moon realized that the file format (so to speak) the Russians had used was a standard format used by newspapers to transmit images. So they decoded the images and they were published in papers world wide despite the Russian’s unwillingness to share them. It’s even been speculated that someone in the Russian Space Program did this deliberately hoping the images would be intercepted and published.
Next we come to another Russian first in space, the Venera 9 lander:
The Venera 9 mission was the first mission to put a probe in orbit around another planet, and the first mission to return photographs from the surface of another planet. On 20 October 1975 the lander set down, only operating for 53 minutes, but it was long enough to do the job. Pretty impressive really, considering the incredible pressure and heat on the surface, 90 times the Earth’s air pressure and 450 °C (842 °F.) .
The third image is the first American entry, the first picture sent back from Mars by the Viking 1 lander on July 20 1976. This was the USA’s first attempt to put a lander on another planet, and it was a successful mission:
That’s Carl Sagan in the picture, a much younger Carl Sagan, and a model of the Viking landers. The Viking missions were the first missions specifically designed to look for life. And to this day, scientists are arguing about just what the results indicated, though most think they indicated weird soil chemistry but no life. As a historical note, the original plan had been to land Viking 1 on July 4 1976, as part of the nation’s bicentennial celebration. Unfortunately the originally chosen landing site was too rocky, so another had to be substituted. These two Viking landers were the landers I mentioned in a previous post, if they had just dug a few inches deeper they most likely would have found ice, and changed the course of space exploration.
Lastly, and in some ways, my favourite, the Huygens lander on Titan:
Titan is a moon of Saturn, so this landing took place considerably further from Earth than the previous images. Nearly three decades later too, aside from the Moon and Mars, there aren’t any other obvious or easy locations to send a lander. And Huygens didn’t have an easy time of it either, in the extreme cold the lander only functioned for 90 minutes. Still, that’s longer than mission scientists had hoped. Huygens sent back its images on January 14 2005. The “rocks” (probably ice) are only a few inches wide.
And there is an enduring mystery about Huygens. While other evidence seems to strongly indicated that Titan has lakes and seas of liquid hydrocarbons, there is a complication to that idea. The latest calculations seem to show that Huygens landed right in the middle of one of these lakes. Let’s review, here is the image sent back by Huygens:
Does it look like the lander is floating on a lake? While there is evidence of some liquid flow on the surface around some of the “rocks,” this clearly isn’t the surface of a body of fluid. The debate will continue no doubt, there’s more room for debate in science than most people realize.
Coming soon, the most comprehensive map ever made, “There are no adults,” 2012, God and tiny pebbles, and the usual ramblings about current events and politics.
(The above images are all public domain under US copyright law. Well, I’m not sure about the images sent by the Russian landers, but I think it can safely be claimed that these are historical images if there ever was such a thing. Coming soon, I think I’ll do a post on exotic space exploration proposals. I think that will be fun.)
“It doesn’t matter if the cast changes when the script remains the same.”
Not sure where I read my post headline, but it struck me as an apt description of the Obama administration. Or as I like to put it recently, the only difference between Bush and Obama is their skin tone. A concept the (possibly imginary) fellow above apparently doesn’t endorse. Apparently he was in a coma during the entire Bush Administration when all of Obama’s current policies were put into practice. Good thing he’s retired Navy, because if he was active Navy, the bottom line is clearly insubordination if not worse. But hey, hypocrisy is the hallmark of all hard core conservatives … and liberals! I think if a person is unable to come up with opinions of their own and just regurgitates what they saw on Fox News or read in Mother Jones, they’re pretty much doomed to hypocrisy.
Have I crossed the line into mocking yet? Is it OK to mock if you’re mocking everyone? Joking aside, ET had an interesting point the other day. It certainly does seem more fashionable these days to mock and name call. Of course it’s always been fashionable on a personal basis, but in recent decades more and more it seems like institutions are and other formerly august voices are doing it. Compare Walter Cronkite to Lou Dobbs or Rush Limbaugh. One of the things that’s cool about growing older, eventually you get a bit of perspective and can see that indeed, the “natural order of things” is in fact constantly evolving.
An example is gay marriage. I keep hearing people say that we need to preserve “traditional marriage” and thus can’t make any changes in laws about who can marry who. And apparently the folks who maintain this stance are unaware that if we are going to talk about “traditional marriage” in any historic sense … we need to make miscegenation illegal again. Because traditionally (until the 1960s!) it was widely considered a crime against God and nature for blacks to marry whites. And was illegal in many states. Yet I don’t hear any calls from the anti-gay marriage crowd to reinstate miscegenation laws. Yet if they are truly standing for “traditional” marriage, that’s what they should be doing. Curious, nu?
It’s Friday, so I’m allowed to wander all over the place. And while I agree with ET that mocking is a bad thing, and I do in fact try to avoid using labels, I could do more. I was thinking for example of writing an extremely sarcastic and mocking post about the people who are worried about the 2012 doomsday predictions. Then I thought about ETs comment and reconsidered. And it was also pointed out, again something I forget sometimes, even if logically the prediction is unfounded … the anxiety some people are deriving from it is very real indeed. Read an article the other day where an astronomer said he gets some very disturbing emails from people about 2012, IE they are contemplating suicide or even killing their kids and committing suicide so that they are spared the 2012 apocalypse. I’m pretty sure mocking someone like that isn’t particularly helpful.
On the other hand, while I agree we shouldn’t mock, it doesn’t necessarily follow that all difference of opinion are debatable. IE if one person says 2+2=4 and the other person says 2+2=5 … there’s no room for debate. If someone actually believes that 2+2=5, they’re wrong. I’m not going to mock someone who believes that, but I’m not going to debate them either. And I’m not going to hire them to do my accounting or build my house either. I’d make an Enron joke here, but then I wondered at what point does “poking fun at” turn into “mocking?” That’s the big problem, how does one determine what is a debatable difference of opinion, and what isn’t worth debating?
And as I get older, it’s getting even harder to tell. As someone once said about Martin Gardner, “I wish I could be as sure about anything as he is about everything.” Sigh. Oh well, that’s what this blog is for, to explore the boundary lines between what is real and what is memorex. And in that vein, I’ll conclude by “debating” a few of the claims in the above image:
GET READY TO LOSE:
PEACE: Well, we lost that when we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, in fact Bush promised us a war that would last a generation at least. So peace is already lost, Obama can’t lose it anymore.
SECURITY: This concept is so nebulous as to be meaningless, but I don’t see Obama dismantling Homeland Security or cutting the defence budget.
DEFENCE SYSTEMS: Obama has raised the military’s budget, so even if some systems have been cut, they’ve been replaced with others. IE this claim assumes that all defence systems are equally valid … an unsupportable claim if their ever was one.
JOBS: Well, the economy was crashing just fine under Bush, predicting that it will continue its nose-dive is a no brainer. Blaming Obama when he hasn’t made any changes in Bush’s policies seems like a stretch to me.
GUN RIGHTS: Well, aside from the FACT that the Supreme court recently ruled that we do indeed have a constitutional right to bear arms, Obama’s position on the issue is hardly extremist. Well, unless one thinks there’s no debate possible on the issue.
LOW TAXES: Since the Reagan’s and Bush’s made sure our grandchildren will still be paying taxes to pay of the USA’s debts, so I’m a little unclear where the idea that there were any “low taxes” to lose to begin with came from. I do agree that Obama does seem amazingly willing to spend money we don’t have, but it’s not like Bush II had any problem with the concept.
SMALL BUSINESS: Again, Bush II was one of the most pro-big business presidents in history, it’s hard for me to understand how Obama following in his foosteps is now a problem?
SAVINGS: Honestly, not even sure what he means here. Americans have been losing their saving steadily since the mid/late 1970s, so it’s not like this is something new. And if he means that Obama plans to confiscate people’s savings, I haven’t heard any talk of that yet. (And it’s not like there’s a whole lot left to confiscate either.)
GOD IN PUBLIC: I been meaning to blog about this. God isn’t actually bound by human law, and he can be found anywhere and everywhere no matter how many laws are passed! So we’re talking about religious symbols and practises on public property … and people have been clogging the courts with that debate for decades, that’s hardly Obama’s fault.
FREE SPEECH Well, he’s still got his bumper stickers, doesn’t he? And again, it was Bush I who introduced the concept of “the privilege of freedom of speech,” and Bush II who declared he could strip Americans of their rights by labelling them “enemy combatants.” Obama can’t take away a right that was previously taken away from us.
Oh well, I still think Ron Paul was the best of a bad lot. Have a great weekend everyone.
(The above image is claimed as Fair Use under US copyright law. It’s not being used for profit and its use here is central to illustrating the post pretty much by definition. Credit and Copyright, who knows, but I found the pic here. The comments are especially fun, my favourite so far: “Ho hum, see what happens when there’s only two major parties =/ “)
