JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

In this lovely review of a book about crows the author of the book, “Crow Planet”, says crows recognize human faces. I remember hearing a podcast with John Horgan, science writer, in which he described the behavior of the crows about the bird sanctuary on his property. Horgan’s kids would sometimes go into the cages, which housed injured and recovering birds, and the nearby crows would fly over, close the door and latch it. So who is the overseer now my lovely?

Crows are great. We see them on our runs. Such robust birds — you don’t think fragile little birdie when you see them. They are hypervigilant creatures; when approaching near to a group on the ground you find they hop away in a characteristic but “un-birdlike” move. This is in contrast to the little blackbirds that stay put and stare at you with irritation and some implied threat. Crows, for their formidable presence, are shy creatures. Nature did not give these black flying beauties much of a singing voice, but crows still rule.

The author fears anthropomorphizing. But why? In the world, we all live in a communal psychic space, no matter what the mechanics of science tell us.

The author saw her fledgling garden carrots uprooted, so,

She gently spritzed the young crows with a hose, hoping they’d flutter away and spare her crop. “Instead,” she writes, “all four of them gathered under the spray, flapped their wings and opened their bills, in what appeared to be absolute joy. I laughed, but in that slightly imbalanced way that could turn into crying if someone looked at me the wrong way.”

An “absolute joy”: of being in the same beautiful world, in a small nook of time, which we are given to briefly share; living, as we and the crows do, on a grain of sand, on an infinite beach.

Much as I like the show House I have to admit I grit my teeth until I get into the narrative. The formulaic characters, the quick-talk affectations, the fact that House is never wrong and the fawning sycophants are always wrong is a lot to navigate for the fun in their banter.

The show is at war with itself: It is supposed to be, according to its creator, a mystery, where the bad guy is the disease, but devolves to conventional “character” driven formulas, which then further deprecates into silliness — the cheap thrill of a good line — rather than revelation about the characters.

You never fully understand what the House characters are discussing medically and the final outcome where patient is saved and endearingly grateful to an indifferent Greg House (who cares only about solving mysteries) makes you want a site to go to where you can read about the medical premise and leave the ego laden crew behind.

Turns out the NYT has a more satisfying alternative, as a doctor recounts what are essentially medical short stories, which happen to be true. Informative. Provocative. Nutritive. No bloat.

These tales of medical sleuthing and the vagaries of diagnosis (often pure luck in that the right intern was there to see the presenting patient) leave you amazed at the cleverness — and feeling vulnerable that the successful outcomes hang by the frail thread of pure chance encounter.

From the moment Palomba first laid eyes on the wasted and febrile patient, she knew she had to do something fast. “It was clear he was dying,” she told me. Looking through his chart, Palomba concluded that he probably wasn’t having a recurrence of his cancer.She went back to the idea suggested by the medical student. Could he have HLH? In this disease, the balance between the body chemicals that suppress macrophages and those that turn them on is somehow lost, and as a result, these primitive fighter cells ramp up into a frenzy and consume everything in their path.

As it turns out, the doctor who writes this Diagnosis series for the NYT is a consultant for House. She should write the shows.

A great site describing the meaning of scientific symbols. You run across references to these concepts in general interest science articles but this helps give some background.

In this explanation of the Schwarzschild Radius a scientist provides answers to many questions about the concept of Black Holes. The scientist says that Schwarzschild applied Einstein’s theory to spherical objects and saw there were special properties if you reduced the radius. The special property is the Black Hole. Science has become non, or counter intuitive, even if it can be explained. The Earth at the size of a marble — if it were made to be a Black Hole.

Face recognition is one of those topics that seems to require so many specialties to even begin to understand the ability. In this article, “Thatcher face”, an experiment using Margaret’s Thatcher’s face as subject, found that face recognition is not Platonic.

We don’t compare an ideal face we carry around with individual faces and thereby derive recognition. Rather, it is configuration: proportions. The Greeks were right. even if Plato was wrong — proportion evolves to beauty — and recognition.

They found just turning the eyes and mouth on a photograph of a face upside down was enough to evoke a really disturbing image. We don’t recognize the individual, we are appalled by the proportional dissonance.

In a scienceblogs post Jessica Palmer notes a kerfuffle about Jared Diamond. He is being sued for his article in the New Yorker.

In a very well-done piece Palmer summarizes:

Here’s the story. Last April, Diamond wrote an article for the New Yorker on tribal feuding in New Guinea, entitled “Vengeance is Ours.” I read the article when it came out, and I can remember being shocked at the violence in it. Diamond’s main source, a New Guinean driver named Daniel Wemp, told unrepentant tales of rape, murder, and theft committed during his quest to revenge himself on another tribal leader, Henep Isum. The article says Wemp’s quest ended when Isum was paralyzed by an arrow. A troubling story – but it was in the New Yorker, under the heading “Annals of Anthropology,” and more important, it was by scientist Jared Diamond. Despite my shock, I figured it had to be fact-checked and accurate.

Well, according to an expose by Rhonda Roland Shearer at stinkyjournalism.org, Diamond’s article is mostly false. Isum is perfectly healthy, not paralyzed. Wemp says he never committed the crimes attributed to him. Neither man is a tribal leader. And now both Wemp and Isum are suing Diamond and the New Yorker’s parent company for defamation, seeking $10 million in damages.

This interests me because Diamond, whom David Brooks calls a geographical determinist, is a currently fashionable representative of an aspect of theory-laden academic thinking that is toxic. Diamond thinks ecology and environment determined the success (“hegemony” in pc talk) of the West. Not culture, individual genius, or the advantages flexible societies have over traditional societies. Extrapolating overblown and often sophomoric ideas from facts is bad enough — but Diamond apparently is loose with the facts; he seems to me a conventional partisan using the aura of science, a great disservice to the objective voice the public expects in science and by extension science journalism. According to the piece, Diamond doesn’t adhere to either scientific or journalistic standards. Read the comments section — this is not the immature gang that have become familiar.

Palmer quotes someone at the Columbia Journalism Review about Diamond’s piece for the New Yorker:

‘”The problem in this situation is that you’ve got a principal named source, and it’s basically a one-source story… If you can’t find the original source, then what do you do when you’ve got somebody named as being involved in criminal behavior?”‘

Besides the cover thine ass enabling going on at the New Yorker, the real damage is to students who listen to Diamond without the critical intelligence to realize just how partisan he is.

Here is an extensive examination of the controversy. [via Palmer]

A great, fact-filled article about the Hubble repair mission.

… it appears that the low temperatures in space altered the grease in the tool used to tighten the bolt, and it wound up applying 44 to 50 foot-pounds of torque. None of the tools Feustel used to loosen the bolt was designed for that level of torque, so he had to manually apply precisely enough torque without shearing the bolt and trapping the old camera in the telescope.

Time had taken its toll:

“After seven years without having people around, Hubble has lost its accommodation to people. It’s gone wild again.”

A very dramatic story, well told.

The benefit of images over description made manifest in the Hubble Space Telescope; and now, possibly ten more years of amazing discovery and visual marvel from this wonderful telescope.

An article in Nature about a possible breakthrough in understanding how life began was described in the NYT by the excellent science writer Nicholas Wade.

It has long been suspected that RNA began the process — DNA was too complex as a beginning point. But RNA is itself incredibly complex. However,

The miracle seems now to have been explained. In [an] article in Nature [… the scientists report] that they have taken the same starting chemicals used by others but have caused them to react in a different order and in different combinations than in previous experiments…they discovered their recipe, which is far from intuitive, after 10 years of working through every possible combination of starting chemicals…
Instead of making the starting chemicals form a sugar and a base, they mixed them in a different order…

Sometimes it feels as though consciousness exists to provide an audience for the miracles that festoon existence.

You sorta knew what this NYT article asserts — you just hoped built-in skepticism might be wrong about a Brave New Genetic World. In this case, the hoped for ability to predict potential diseases via DNA analysis — knowing when the bad guys are coming — giving us a proactive edge:

The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected…“With only a few exceptions, what the genomics companies are doing right now is recreational genomics,” Dr. Goldstein said in an interview. “The information has little or in many cases no clinical relevance.”…many genetic variants, rather than few, “are responsible for the majority of the inherited risk of each common disease.”

And more serious than prediction — the potential for cures using DNA:

Yet the grim facts about cancer can be lost among the positive messages from the news media, advocacy groups and medical centers, and even labels on foods and supplements, hinting that they can fight or prevent cancer. The words tend to be carefully couched, but their impression is unmistakable and welcomed: cancer is preventable if you just eat right and exercise. If you are screened regularly, cancers can be caught early and almost certainly will be cured. If by some awful luck, your cancer is potentially deadly, miraculous new treatments and more in the pipeline could cure you or turn your cancer into a manageable disease…Unfortunately, as many with cancer have learned, the picture is not always so glowing.

The press seems to stir the pot with alacrity and then find themselves with the job of clarifying (often contradicting) the hype they conveyed.

I wondered at the outset if all the enthusiasm about learning the alphabet of evolution, the genetic code, would be enough to allow us to do anything more than marvel at the cleverness of nature; whether we would be capable of utilizing the knowledge and, as it were, write Shakespeare with the genetic alphabet.

Saying you understand this discussion is like saying you understand what a surgeon is doing at the operating table. These are specialists — the audience is privileged to listen in. Julian Barbour & Craig Callender are theoretical physicist and professor of philosophy respectively. They were discussing concepts of time; Callender focused on “the privileged now”, while Barbour spoke about the evolution of various concepts of time.

I’ll probably get this wrong, as much of it was hard to follow, but some interesting ideas were exchanged:

Barbour said that he leaned towards a view of time as not being about interval, but about position. Feynman was quoted as saying, “Time is what happens when nothing else does.” Barbour rejects this idea.

Barbour traced early concepts of time, seeking a definition of duration, which used the celestial realm to accurately determine interval, but finally scientists of the time realized that was not as reliable as they would like so they built an “ephemeris” — a table of celestial position from which to derive accurate time.

The fact that time is a mystery in the sciences is itself fascinating. Why does it travel in only one direction — the arrow of time?

What is it? Newton saw it as outside, like a great clock ticking away irrespective of the physical world his genius described. Einstein corrected him, weaving time and space. A brilliant insight into nature.

Barbour spoke about the “problem with Relativity”, relating to length. Relativity allows for the universe to double in size and no one would notice, because everything would double, every cell in your body.

Callender described an almost literary conceit: how we conceive of the past as being of fixed events, the present as being a small window of free will, and the future as open. Is that true?

It’s worth a shot — listen in.

In this NYT piece about Freeman Dyson you can read about a man who doesn’t like received notions. He doesn’t like them at all. This makes him a despised figure, a person who invites ridicule and ostracism by merely thinking out loud.

I remember watching Al Gore speak about his favorite topic and realized the poor soul really wanted to be a parson. Like some ponderous boat lurching into port, he rallies the converted and reassures them of their superior character. If what he is saying is sometimes open to debate, or more interpretative than knock down Law of Nature, or has aspects of demagogic fraudulence, well…

Global pollution exists in a chaos system, where only recently have we any useful data — more is unknown than known. Thankfully, that data is getting better. But you wonder if the people who cluck to one another in self-congratulation of their knowing civic virtue get any of the ambiguous complexity hidden by Gore’s lectures, movies, books — the whole Franchise Al Gore.

A recent discussion between science journalists online had one saying, “Well, Gore doesn’t always say things that are exactly accurate.” Science writers, who are often deeply conventional, try to be careful around the pitchfork brigade — even though they know as a principle of their profession that objectivity is better than partisanship.

Scientists are derided for questioning global warming — any form of questioning. It’s a creationism redux by cracky — it is those Luddites, those anti-science nuts. (These are the same people who want to appease societies which seek to live in the 14th century and treat women like chattel — to the point of groveling self-deprecation. In self-parody, this militant cabal of appeasers are called “realists”.) It doesn’t matter if a scientist is offering a caveat only, it is unacceptable to received notions, and that is enough to elicit derision. This sort of bullying is applauded — it feeds an opportunity for condescension at the cost of objectivity.

Dyson’s questions and speculations are actually worthy of consideration. That is all he is offering really. He wonders about the data, about the seriousness of the issue, and about the possibilities for repair without panic. He points out the large unknown: the quantification of biomass; of pollution being more a land management issue than one of atmosphere; of the mystery of oceans rising long before global warming was an issue; of many things. Dyson says,

…climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

The very science writers I mentioned earlier, that were most decorous in criticizing Gore’s demagoguery and inaccuracies, were involved in a discussion which questioned Dyson’s expertise and knowledge of the subject, but it was clear they didn’t know what Dyson’s ideas were. Criticizing someone for not knowing what they are talking about, when they themselves are personifications?

Dyson is an exploratory thinker. He dislikes herd thinking. He is original and offers alternatives. He is modest in proposal but says things with conviction — he doesn’t back down to be politically correct. He is a brilliant man with an admirable track record. Surely this is a person worthy of derogation by the mob.

Dyson is probably as big a nut as Alfred Wegener, derided for his theory of plate tectonics, and other nutcase scientists who thought the universe began in what was derisively characterized as a “Big Bang” by the establishment science of the time.

Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.” This also happens to be a fine description of Dyson’s own relationship to science. In the words of Avishai Margalit, a philosopher at the Institute for Advanced Study, “He’s a consistent reminder of another possibility.”

It’s fine to “do something” about even the possibility of global warming when not acting might be catastrophic. But it’s the way such remedies are approached intellectually and socially that can also raise questions about the character of the do-gooder, distracting from the issue really, even if the advocacy is reasonable.

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Denis Dutton’s site attempts to be reasonable.

This article suggests an answer to a question I’ve wondered about myself: Why do chimpanzees appear to be so much stronger than human beings? It says in the article they can be up to four times stronger.

The answer seems to be that a trade-off is made: we gain control for precise and delicate actions at the expense of crude power.

Our finely-tuned motor system makes a wide variety of human tasks possible. Without it we couldn’t manipulate small objects, make complex tools or throw accurately. And because we can conserve energy by using muscle gradually, we have more physical endurance—making us great distance runners.

Great apes, with their all-or-nothing muscle usage, are explosive sprinters, climbers and fighters, but not nearly as good at complex motor tasks. In other words, chimps make lousy guests in china shops.

For apes muscle usage is all or nothing. Human beings can use muscles selectively and with exquisite control. Since physical action often is considered a manifestation of the quality of our mental activity, our physical skill-set might have helped, in evolutionary terms, with a further refinement of our thought processes — or vice versa?