An interesting episode of the Australian radio series on science: All in the Mind, which deals with out-of-the-body experiences. I’ve only ever had one of those in my life, and it was both interesting initially and somewhat scary once I realised what I was experiencing.
Phil Plait, over at Bad Astronomy, draws our attention to this mesmerising visualisation of the magnetic fields that surround us all the time. Nicely done.
IEEE Spectrum has an interesting issue devoted to looking at the subject of the Singularity. An intriguing topic, but I definitely remain a skeptic about the wilder predictions of transhumanism. It seems to me that some of its proponents haven’t thought through some of the tricky issues which were dealt with back in The Mind’s I, first published in 1981. Indeed, I came across one of the principle stumbling blocks in Clifford Simak’s Way Station, first published in 1963. A copy is not the same thing as an original, no matter how identical it might be – and the image of the tanks of acid below Simak’s "farmhouse" haunted my teenage mind for some time.
I see that Charles Darwin is adapting remarkably well to modern life. He has discovered the modern phenomenon of television, but is dismayed to discover that there is a dearth of good programming devoted to the subject of science. I quite agree. I fear that the process of dumbing-down proceeds apace.
Physicist Brian Cox talks about his passion – physics – and the Large Hadron Collider in this engaging and informative talk at the recent TED conference. He still strikes me as a young whippersnapper, though; fresh out of school and still wet behind the ears. But I’m only jealous.
After his scaremongering over stem cell research a couple of weeks ago, I see that Cardinal Keith O’Brien has not learnt wisdom. His latest comments continue his farrago of misinterpretation and downright fraudulence. What a piece of work he is. It is of course perfectly possible for a representative of the Church to talk sense on this subject – here’s the Rev Dr Alan Billings doing just that – but sense is something that the Cardinal appears to have little of. Plenty of knee-jerk ignorance and duplicity, though.
I’m grateful to Twisty Faster for the link to this breakthrough in German medical science. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. When I read it I hear the voice of John Cleese speaking German, which I know that he can do after a visit to Movie Park in Germany, and experiencing Time Riders…
First, no-one is saying that the placebo effect does not exist. It’s just that when homeopathists claim that their treatments are valid against diseases such as AIDS, cancer and malaria, then I think a border has been crossed. Medicine is not "complementary", it either works or it doesn’t.
Second, with homeopaths such as Dr. Charlene Werner at large in the populace, I really do fear for society’s health.
(hat tip to Ben for the terrifying clip of Dr. Werner. Thankfully, he does also provide a clip of Richard Feynman to soothe the pain)
I do get very fed-up of prelates who wilfully, it seems to me, scaremonger and tell untruths. There appears to be a concentration of such people in Scotland at the moment. First we had the Bishop of Motherwell, Joseph Devine, with his charges of a "gay conspiracy" out to conspire against Christian traditions, and now we have Cardinal Keith O’Brien with his attack on the UK Government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill. As Ophelia and Joe point out here and here, the Archbishop is being very economical with the truth and simply scaremongering.
Update: Justin is also scratching his head in an attempt to find reason and morality in the pronouncements of those challenged by thought.
Here’s an absolutely fascinating talk given by Craig Venter at last month’s TED conference. This is important work offering great potential.
However, I felt that he ducked one of the implications during the discussion after his presentation. The analogy used by the questioner was to suggest that just as the introduction of Pagemaker in 1985 sparked the revolution in desktop publishing, so Venter’s technology would eventually end up as affordable and available to a wide group of people. Venter was somewhat dismissive of bio-hacking, and seemed to be claiming that what his company does is not something that will end up as DIY genetics. My bet is that he will be proven wrong.
Seed Magazine has an interesting article on the Blue Brain project, which is using supercomputer technology to model the activity of biological brains. So far, the project team has managed to model the activity of a clump of about 10,000 neurons. While, theoretically, this can all be scaled up, I can’t help feeling that the project director, Henry Markram, woefully underestimates the difficulty if he believes, as he appears to, that he’ll be able to model a complete human brain in a single machine in ten years or less. Moore’s Law states that computing power doubles about every two years. If that’s what Markram is putting his faith in, then it’s going to take a lot longer to go from modelling 10,000 neurons to one trillionat least 100 billion neurons than just ten years, more like 40 years…
Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the team will be able to model simpler brain structures. And it will be fascinating to see if they can demonstrate evidence of the emergence of some form of consciousness. A necessary pre-cursor of this, it seems to me, is that the brain model must be exposed to external stimuli. A brain sealed into its own prison, cut off from everything, is unlikely (I think) to exhibit the emergent property of consciousness.
And then there is the question of what happens if it does develop a consciousness, and then the team switches it off. Shades of "Daisy, daisy, give me your answer do…" (a reference to a scene from 2001 that I still find heartrending). Speaking of which, here’s another short extract from 2001 that also brought tears to my eyes, but for a different reason…
(hat tip to the Richard Dawkins Net for the link – and the comments thread there makes for interesting reading as well)
Here’s a nice little animation that explores some of the philosophical questions behind teleportation.
If you want to explore them further, then the philosopher Derek Parfit devotes six chapters of his book, Reasons and Persons, to questions of personal identity, and uses the teleportation thought-experiment, and others, in a variety of ways to illuminate and entertain.
I’ve only just stumbled across this series of videos by someone who calls himself Captain Disillusion. They are very well done. Here, for example is the debunking of the "Man on Mars" story from a couple of months ago. I particularly like the moment where he confounds our assumptions about his makeup.
I’ve complained about the falling standards of Horizon before. It appears that what was once the Beeb’s proud flagship of its science reporting has in recent years been dumbed down to a level more suited to the audience of the Teletubbies, if that wasn’t an insult to babies everywhere. I did entertain some faint hopes that the programme seemed to have improved somewhat in the latest series. The programme fronted by physicist Dr. Brian Cox was interesting and thought-provoking. Probably because it let him do the talking.
So I admit I had been lulled into a false sense of security when I started watching last night’s Horizon: How To Make Better Decisions. It began with the voiceover smugly stating: "You thought that deciding to watch this programme was a rational, logical decision made with free will" … "Congratulations about watching this programme, it might be the best decision you’ve ever made." On hearing this, my heart sank. This sounded like an ominous warning that the programme would prove to be a clunker. And so it came to pass; we were introduced to some irritating twit called Garth Sundem who fills pages with abstruse mathematical formulae in an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes about the decision-making process. I lasted about five minutes before I took a rational, logical decision of my own free will to turn the channel to something else. From Thomas Sutcliffe’s review of the programme in today’s Independent, I’d say that was the best decision I made last night. Tellingly, Sutcliffe ends his review with the damning observation that:
There was a time when you couldn’t check up on Horizon’s contributors on Google in this way. There was also a time when you didn’t need to.
Quite. Oh, and what did I end up watching in place of Horizon? Well it was the first episode of Phoo Action. Totally bizarre, but at least it didn’t take itself seriously, and had nice caricatures of the royal princes. It reminded me of an update for the Noughties of the old Sixties Batman TV series, and was none the worse for that.
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