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I've been reading Six Legged Soldiers recently, a book about the history and use of insects in warfare, either in of themselves or as a vector for diseases. Let me tell you, there is a LONG history, going way way back. Bee hive and scorpion (yes, not insects, still considered under entomology) bombing, torture via insects (most notably at Bukhara), and the initial cause of the bubonic plague spread through Europe (you can thank Batu Khan's siege of Kaffa for that). More recently, vector insects were used extensively in China during WWII, under the command of the Japanese mad scientist Shiro Ishii. I haven't even mentioned crop pests yet.

As for now, the author mentions that he would be dissapointed if any master's student of entomology couldn't devise any of the techniques in this book. This shows the real potential for entomological warfare today; many vectors are quite easy to cultivate in laboratory, and it wouldn't require many to invoke terror into a population. Imagine some Ageis aegypti with west nile virus being set loose in a subway station in NYC, and how much terror that would provoke. Or, even worse, imagine simultaneous releases of west nile mosquitoes in small communities throughout the US. This would remove all thought of "it can't happen to me, I live in podunk, nowhere".

I'm honestly surprised Al Quaeda hasn't exploited any entomological warfare as of yet; release of a plague into your home town is far scarier than a bomb going off in some city a thousand miles away.

Okay, lets see if I understand this right.

A vacuum is what is left over when all matter is removed, but technically its not a vacuum in the sense there's nothing there. The Void, or empty space time, is a sea of potential energy, coming and going out of existence in very short times and spaces but in great amounts. We can notice this by the effect it has on small particles such as electrons moving through the Void. Some believe quantum fluctuation in this way may have been the initial energy burst and inflation that started our universe.

How far off am I?

I've been observing atheists recently. Since reading Hedges' book about the shortcomings of those who seek utopia, I've seen Atheism, or more properly, Atheistic Materialism, as a religion in it's own right.

Today, this post reminded me. I don't mind Atheists, really. I don't find the evangelical mindset of Athiestic Materialism very attractive as a religion for /me/, but I don't mind other people practicing it, just as I don't mind Christians doing their rituals. I've read Atheist literature before, and while it often seems banal, boasting, and boring, so do any religions from an outsider perspective. I don't mind these things. As religions go, Atheism is relatively harmless.

What bothers me is that evangelical Atheistic Materialists are religious, yet refuse to admit it. They posit a strong believe (the disbelief of higher powers/deities/etc) without evidence to support or refute such a claim. At the same time they claim this belief is ultimate knowledge, and any person who doesn't follow their path is a fool. I find it my sacred duty to poke fun at their serious religion at every available moment. Non evangelical atheists are pardoned, as are Agnostic Materialists; neither annoy me as neither wish to show me the error of my ways.

When you meet a Evangelical AM who poses to show you the awesomeness of their beliefs, the following are suggested responses.

"I don't mind your religion, I just wish you'd keep it to yourself."

"Atheistic Materialism is an alright religion, I guess, but I prefer [insert religion of choice here]. The liturgy is better."

"Do you ever get tired of patting yourself on the back for how awesome your disbelief is?"

"Here's my phone number. Let me know when you've finished proselytizing."

"The "my lack of god is better than your god" talk is getting reeeealy old. Seriously."

"I didn't come to lunch to get preached at."

ad infinitum

Have ya'all noticed the trend of the title? Thoughts?

Not quite sure where to put this so I'll put it here for now. If it fits better elsewhere then please move it to the appropriate place.

Ever since I first wrote The Process of Sustaining in mid 2006, I've been working towards a cohesive and coherent personal religion that I could share with other people. It was and will never be meant as a joke or as a passtime. I mean to build this, practice it, and write and speak about it in the same way that other religious folks do so about their religions. This is a lifelong endevor, and will probably take that long to produce anything on the scale I'd like to create.

I don't have a name yet, so for now I'm calling this the Church of the Process of Sustaining, after the original document. The tradition so far draws heavily from Religious Naturalism and mystic traditions (in the sense that the sacred or spiritual is immediately available rather than somewhere apart from everyday experience). Since learning about emergence in late 2008, I've incoporated those ideas into my thinking. Most recently I've been reading about the tradition of the Great Story or Epic of Evolution (wikipedia) and incorporating these ideas as the central myth.

In his book Religion is not About God, Loyal Rue writes about the evolutionary reasons for religion as a source of social cohesion and personal fulfillment. In his deconstruction he lays out a religion as a central myth which is continued through ancillary experiential, aesthetic, ritual, intellectual and institutional strategies. This deconstruction from an anthropological standpoint is my starting place for construction.

Here is a bibliography of works I've read so far in relation to this project, either that I have drawn from directly or that have been helpful in this:

Tao Te Ching - Lao Tse (The style of writing in The Process of Sustaining was largely influence by english translations of this work)
Middle Ground - Tom Montag (A collection of poems from my favorite poet, somewhat of a farmer mystic)
Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia Symbiosis and Evolution - Margulis and Sagan (an book I read in highschool that influenced my ideas about global ecology and evolution)
A Sand County Almanac - A Leopold (my favorite book and possibly the most influential book as far as environmental ethic I have ever read)
Environmental Ethics: Duties and Values to the Natural World - H Rolston III (another book on environmental ethic I read in undergrad, similar to Leopold's ideas)
Reinventing the Sacred - S Kauffman (THE book that turned me on to Emergence)
The Sacred Depths of Nature - U Goodenough (Epic of Evolution with reflections and conclusions from a Religious Naturalist perspecitve)
Dancing with the Sacred - KE Peters (Another RN perspective; god as the interaction between creative emergence and selection)
Religion: The Basics - Numeroff (A textbook on religion and culture anthropology)
Angel Tech - A Alli (Consciousness demolition and reconstruction; Ratatosk suggested this to me and I'm loving it)

Its also good for me to recognize my influences of roman catholic ritual, Taoism, Buddhism, irreligions such as Discordianism, UUism, and religious naturalism perspectives in putting this all together.

If there are other books anyone would like to suggest to me, or you would like to talk with me about this project, OR if you are interested in working on this project with me, you can post her, PM me, contact me by email at xelnagan_1 at hotmail.com, contact me through IRC or through IM (MSM: through the above email). I welcome any perspectives and arguments on this, because I've thought enough about it that I feel quite confident in my experiences and am also constantly editing what I have worked out to make it as close to the ideal as possible.  Thanks be to the Progenitor from which all Life has continued, to the creative metaforce of Emergence, and to the Process of Sustaining, of which we all take part.

~Kai

This is a story about Minus, who appears to be a young deity. While she has enormous cosmic powers, she is in all other ways a child: curious, creative, mischievous, and somewhat morbid. Reminded me of Eris. Also, the art is very nice, simple and colorful. Just thought people here would appreciate it.

http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus1.html

Edit: retitled; original title was misleading.

This article was published in the Journal of Molecular Ecology Resources earlier this year, meant as a humorous counterarguement to the so called "Amalgamated Union of
Philosophers, Sages, Luminaries and other Professional Thinking Persons" that constitute the traditional taxonomist and their methods (a tip of the hat to Douglas Adams of course). It falls short. Not really that funny. I guess I can understand why you might get worked into a fervor to defend the poor defenseless (booming) biotech barcoding industry from the mean scary (dying breed, last of their kind, marginalized) taxonomy old men-monsters, who wish to kill all your dreams. Never mind that the barcoding movement is often touted as an end to traditional taxonomy, of morphological methods, of real sit down observational McClintock type science, an end for the need to have real first hand knowlege of what you're studying. I bet the ecologists would love that.

Just so. The whole thing reeks of marketing.  And while the church bells toll the death rattle of the naturalist, we bicker about which tool to throw out of the toolbox. When was the last time you got rid of your wrenches after buying a whole new set of screwdrivers? Likewise, what scientist that only uses one metric for a conclusion is taken seriously? I agree that strong inference is one of the keys to discovery, but in this war of whose toy/technique/dick is the bestest, any sense of synthesis and collaboration is lost in a polarizing dichotomy. And so, the sides are show to each other as dinosaurian/alien evils.

Its like religion, sometimes.

[So, friends, every day do somethingthat won't compute.]

The minister quoted this at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship today. I don't know if its been posted here before but it fits.

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Emphasis mine.

My learning process is based on the assumption that the unconscious processes of the mind do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to learning. To take advantage of this I have crafted a four phase cycle of learning. Those phases are saturate, incubate, systemize and apply. Ideally what you are learning is a skill or topic that is going to come up in your day to day life. This will allow you many opportunities to practice or review your knowledge without a great deal of conscious attention.

Saturation

When you have decided on a skill or subject you dive into it, read as many books or articles on it as possible, spend every available moment practicing or thinking about it. Engage all your senses in it. When I'm saturation a topic I'll even play related audio files while I sleep. The idea is to flood yourself with the topic from as many angles as possible.

It is a very good idea to take notes during this phase. Because this is an unconscious learning program it may be hard to tell where certain ideas came from down the road. Another reason to take notes is that you are increasing your saturation with the material if you are outputting it in addition to taking it in. The way I suggest you take notes is to cite the book, article or recording and to write down your own idea or comment about it. The literal content that you are referencing will be presupposed in your comment. You integrate material better that you use to form your own thoughts and you can always use the citation to look up the original material later. It is also goo dif you can relate the new material to the ideas of another author or a different subject. Associational richness will help you learn, remember and apply the material.

Incubation

When you just can't keep up the intensity of saturation, you can stop flooding yourself with the information and trust your unconscious to continue working on it. It helps if you have continued exposure to related ideas or situations in you day to day life but you don't need to go out of your way to get it. This phase can be very hard for some people because it seems to them that they are doing nothing or being lazy. Experience with this process will make it easier to trust that the unconscious is hard at work without you needing to look over its shoulder. You may notice bits of the material you were saturation slipping out at odd moments, this is a sign that your brain is integrating it for you.

Systemization

A good point to start this phase is if you start having startling new insights about the topic or skill. Alternately you can start when you feel like the matter has been left long enough. It may take some experience to learn the best times to switch phases. Systemizing is a review and polish activity. Write down what you understand about the topic and how its parts relate to each other and to other parts of your life. This is also a time to clean up and simplify your understanding. If you find you have gaps in your knowledge, you can directly study those missing pieces to fit them into the whole. Mind maps are very useful in this phase.

Application

Now that you have reviewed and systemized your knowledge of the topic or skill, you can stop putting direct effort into learning. Instead you should find opportunities to make use of your skill. Ideally you should stay in the application phase until it does not take special effort or attention to make use of your knowledge. Only then should you consider a new saturation phase. Remember that you always have your notes and mind maps to refer back to if you need to.

Bringing it all together

This cycle is a process for lifelong learning and can be repeated and reused with any number of skills. You can even use it to learn more than one skill at the same time if you stagger them and if they are sufficiently different that saturating one skill will not interfere with incubating another. As you gain experience with this cycle you will find that the incubation phase, and sometimes the application phase, will grow longer and longer while the saturation and systemization phases become short intense spikes. The more information you can cram into your brain in the shorter amount to time the less you are able to consciously filter it and the more your unconscious can work with it.

There can be interesting results to this style of learning such as knowing something but not knowing where you learned it. Also, you may find yourself using a knowledge set in an area it isn't normally applied. Finally, you may become aware of implications that your sources were not aware of. Congratulations, these are new ideas that you can use.

http://edwardewilson.com/2009/04/06/four-phase-learning-process/

I don't know if anyone has mentioned it before, but this web application:

http://marumushi.com/apps/newsmap/newsmap.cfm

Is freaking cool. It tracks the most viewed news stories online and by size and color of the story, graphically shows each stories visibility and thus tracks the real current bias in reporting. Not only does it cover the united states world news, but also buisness, nation, health technology and entertainment, as well as the same categories for different countries. Furthermore, you can edit which categories and nations you view at any one time, and you can go back to a weekly archive  to check where the bias was several days ago at a particular time.

After knowing about this for several months I've finally set it as my homepage.

Earwig penises.

http://membracid.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/monday-morning-earwig-genital-cringe/

They've got an extra, just in case one breaks. They often do break.

I attended a UU service today. It was by far the most welcoming congregation I have ever attended. It truly felt like a community with open minds who were working together to help each other and their world. I was myself welcomed just as much, with no expectations than that I am willing to listen.

Sitting here now, I'm thinking about what the Discordia movement is moving towards, or what I feel like its moving towards. We have so much in common with Unitarian Universalists fellowships here, we're open minded, creative people, and I think, really, we're pretty good people too. At least, that's the impression I get from many people here, that we're all around generally good people that want to help each other and the world. But, I also think our bitterness, and anger, while constructive on many occasions, have turned us pessimistic and apathetic. Its easy to look at the world and say "everyone is so stupid, I'm all alone here, I'm isolated in my open mindedness and willingness to create and educate". Its easy to think that way. And when we think that way, there's yet another sort of law of fives confirmation bias going on. When we think we are so isolated in our open mindedness and creativity in a mire of stupidity, we see signs of that isolation everywhere and we fail to see the open minded, creative and intelligent people who are all around us, either in hiding as we are, or they are simply blind to us. We become even more bitter and apathetic in that isolation.

When I think about the stoner irreligion Discordia of the '60s, I like everyone else here can think of so many things wrong with it. A short burst of creativity was quickly replaced with sameness, apathy, and lots of repetitive drug addled spoutings. However, there was so much good about it then. Discordians had this feeling of "sacred nonsense", this spontaneous creative force of weirdness, of different-ness. It could shake people up, it could open their minds and make them laugh. "Bullshit makes the flowers grow, and that's beautiful." This idea of the worthiness of satire, of creative humor and spontaneous weirdness was good. It was  irreverent, but  that sort of irreverence is needed many times. The holy clown is such a wonderful avatar, because joy and sadness link us to our most base inner feelings about truth and reality. "If it makes you laugh, its true; if it makes you cry, its real." A joke is something that everyone needs.

But we hate that holy clown now; its become for so many of us an object of scorn and disdain, because we are bitter and apathetic in our isolation. Sacred nonsense, its been done, its all the same! Who would care anyway, what with all these stupid people, why would they appreciate it?

They're not all stupid, you know. In fact, there are more intelligent, creative people out there than you realize. Some of them even create communities together. Many are stuck just as we are. Many more have just a spot of dust on the mirror, to borrow a metaphor. I'm tired of my bitter apathy and anger and feelings of isolation. Maybe I'm going soft. I'm sitting here in tears thinking how wonderful it was to be part of a community. This mono no aware moment relates my inner feelings about truth and reality, cause just like everyone I want to be part of something. Maybe I'm a bad Discordian, a grey, a pink, or whatever black sheep that are still sheep are being called these days. I don't care about that.

So, I'm going back next week. And this summer, I'm gonna start putting stickers all over campus. I'll be bringing friends.

And other random arthropods I decide to photograph.

First one, Monomorium minimum:

And termites.

Out collecting, the proff suggested you could tell species of ants apart by taste. So we ate some. Acidity and weird flavors later, the class had torn a whole log up, and there were termites everywhere. They were so much tastier than the ants, less acidic, more chickeny.

High protein. Western culture is so weird about entomophagy.

Okay, so I need to start eating breakfast again regularly (and lunch as well). The thing is, most of the foods that people seem to eat for breakfast are A) Way way too filling for morning B) way too elaborate C) greasy (makes me sick in the mornings) or D) sugary (this includes fruit to an extent, and the sort of carbs you find in most breakfast foods). I've got rather hypoglycemic tendencies and too much simple sugars in the morning leads to crash thats worse and earlier than if I just skip breakfast all together. I already drink tea and a full bottle of water (from the tap) every morning.

What would you'all suggest?

Confirmation Bias.




I know, someone's already said it, but I was just reading something about it and it struck me as so right.

Full title: Alien Ocean: Anthropological voyages in microbial seas. Author: S Helmreich.

This book was an interesting look into human cultural and technological associations with marine microbiology. A large portion of the book was devoted to the bioinformatics people, those that are seeking out new genes for use in biotech industries. I was struck with both how little we know about the oceans and how much money is spent on trying to figure it all out; not only that, but just how CUTTHROAT these people are at getting their hands on the piece of the pie. The bioinformatics industry seems to me like the dotcom industry of the 21st century.

This was less a book about science and more a book about people. The most interesting thing to me was the whole dissolution and "depersonalization" of living things as little units that can be patented and sold like televisions and can openers. What sort of stupid arrogance is it on our part to patent LIFE. And then people like Venter....well, I just think its sorta crazy. Not only is life dissolving by human culture, but we really don't have a clue about the basal branches of the tree. All this lateral gene transfer and viral transfer of genes (especially in the oceans) screws this concept of phylogenetic descent up the wazoo.

There really was more to this book than just biotech, but its the big chunk in the middle. I really liked how the author laid out the cultural implications. In biology, we hardly ever talk about that stuff; I'm so glad to read an outside perspective.

Some other interesting tidbits:

"But I am not a priest for Gaia. Gaia doesn't need priests. Gaia needs scientists."

---Species n. a type of money (aka rebooting old definitions of species to meet the modern movement towards genes as capital)

---Heterotopia n. a very real place that is a mixture of utopia and dystopia. ie, life.

---Hawai'i makes a mess of introduced versus native species definitions due to the cultural significance of certain plants by the Hawaiian peoples.

http://amphidrome.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/acanthogammarus-aetosaurs-of-baikal/

Have I ever talked about Lake Baikal here before? I'm not sure I have.

Lake Baikal is the worlds largest and deepest freshwater lake, and also one of the world's oldest. Located in Siberia, Baikal hosts one of the most diverse endemic freshwater ecosystem in the world. This includes the only known species of freshwater seals, many endemic fishes, huge reefs of freshwater sponges that look like underwater saguaro cacti, and the feature of this article, 1/3 of all the worlds gammarid species.



Thats not CGI, folks. Thats a Lake Baikal reef.

Now, the critter in the picture is a gammarid, a sort of freshwater crustacean more commonly known as a scud, or freshwater shrimp. Its not really a shrimp, its a whole different group of crustaceans outside the Decapoda.

In other parts of the world, Gammarids are generally small, and are often called sideswimmers or scuds because of their tendency to scuddle around in the water on their sides. Heres a more common European specimen:

http://www.waterwereld.nu/images/vlokk.jpg

The Gammarids of Lake Baikal have diversified in isolation, leading to many strange adaptations and body forms, including some very large and prehistoric looking species.







The above is a Acanthogammarus sp.

Lake Baikal, it just keeps amazing me.

http://www.mbari.org/news/news_releases/2009/barreleye/barreleye.html

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently solved the half-century-old mystery of a fish with tubular eyes and a transparent head. Ever since the "barreleye" fish Macropinna microstoma was first described in 1939, marine biologists have known that its tubular eyes are very good at collecting light. However, the eyes were believed to be fixed in place and seemed to provide only a "tunnel-vision" view of whatever was directly above the fish's head. A new paper by Bruce Robison and Kim Reisenbichler shows that these unusual eyes can rotate within a transparent shield that covers the fish's head. This allows the barreleye to peer up at potential prey or focus forward to see what it is eating.

Deep-sea fish have adapted to their pitch-black environment in a variety of amazing ways. Several species of deep-water fishes in the family Opisthoproctidae are called "barreleyes" because their eyes are tubular in shape. Barreleyes typically live near the depth where sunlight from the surface fades to complete blackness. They use their ultra-sensitive tubular eyes to search for the faint silhouettes of prey overhead.

Although such tubular eyes are very good at collecting light, they have a very narrow field of view. Furthermore, until now, most marine biologists believed that barreleye's eyes were fixed in their heads, which would allow them to only look upward. This would make it impossible for the fishes to see what was directly in front of them, and very difficult for them to capture prey with their small, pointed mouths.

Those black dots are not eyes, they're olfactory organs. The eyes are the green objects in the transparent head.



This is a major WTF EVOLUTION moment for me.

Redstone Meadery's Traditional Mountain Honey Wine (12%; Boulder, CO).

This is one of the beverages I received from a friend for lending her my car for a day. Apparently its just water, two types of honey and yeast. I like that, in the same way I like my beers simple.

I'm starting a new thread because I couldn't find the old one and can't remember if faust deleted it.

http://www.paradise-engineering.com/

I just found this while searching for info on oxytocin. Who made this, who put it online? Any ideas?

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/02/informers-and-persuaders.html

Suppose we lived in this completely alternate universe where nothing in academia was about status, and no one had any concept of style.  A universe where people wrote journal articles, and editors approved them, without the tiniest shred of concern for what "impression" it gave - without trying to look serious or solemn or sophisticated, and without being afraid of looking silly or even stupid.  We shall even suppose that readers, correspondingly, have no such impressions.

In this simpler world, academics write papers from only two possible motives:

First, they may have some theory of which they desire to persuade others; this theory may or may not be true, and may or may not be believed for virtuous reasons or with very strong confidence, but the writer of the paper desires to gain adherents for it.

Second, there will be those who write with an utterly pure and virtuous love of the truthfinding process; they desire solely to give people more unfiltered evidence and to see evidence correctly added up, without a shred of attachment to their or anyone else's theory.

People in the first group may want to signal membership in the second group, but people in the second group only want their readers to be well-informed.  In any case, to first order we must suppose that none of this is about signaling - that all such motives are just blanked out.

What do journal articles in this world look like, and how do the Persuaders' articles differ from the Informers'?

First, I would argue that both groups write much less formal journal articles than our own.  I've read probably around a hundred books on writing (they're addictive); and they all treated formality as entropy to be fought - a state of disorder into which writing slides.  It is easier to use big words than small words, easier to be abstract than concrete, easier to use passive -ation words than their active counterparts.  Perhaps formality first became associated with Authority, back in the dawn of time, because Authorities put in less effort and forced their audience to read anyway.  Formality became associated with Wisdom by being hard to understand.  Why suppose that scientific formality was ever about preventing propaganda?

Both groups still use technical language, because they both care about being precise.  They even use big words or phrases for their technical concepts:  To carve out ever-finer slices through reality, you need new words, more words, hence bigger words (so you don't run out of namespace).

However, since neither group has a care for their image, they use the simplest words they can apart from that, and sentences as easy as possible apart from the big words.  From our standpoint, their style would seem inconsistent, discongruous.  A sentence might start with small words that just anyone could read, and then terminate in an exceptionally precise structure of technically sophisticated concepts accessible to only advanced audiences.

In this world it's not just eminent physicists who - secure in their reputation as Real Scientists - invent labels like "gluon", "quark", "black hole" and "Big Bang".

Other aspects of scientific taboo may still carry over.  A Persuader might use vicious insults and character assassination.  An Informer never would.  But an Informer might point out - evenhandedly, wherever it happened to be true - that a supposedly relevant paper came from a small unheard-of organization and hadn't yet been replicated, or that the author of an exciting new paper had previously retracted other results...

If Persuaders want to look like Informers, they will, of course, restrain their ad-hominem attacks to sounding like the sort of things an Informer might point out; but this is a second-order phenomenon.  First-order Persuaders would use all-out invective against their opponents.

What about emotions in general?

Suppose that there were only Informers and that they weren't concerned about preventing invasion by Persuaders.  The Informers might well make a value-laden remark or two in the conclusions of their papers - after balancing the probability that the conclusion would later need to be retracted and that the emotion might interfere, versus the importance of the values in question.  Even an Informer might say, in the conclusion of a paper on asteroid strikes, "We can probably breathe a sigh of relief about getting hit in the immediate future, but when you consider the sheer size of the catastrophe and the millions of dead and injured, we really ought to have a spacewatch program."

But Persuaders have an immensely stronger first-order drive to invoke powerful affective emotions and lade the reader's judgments with value.  To second order, Persuaders will try to disguise this method as much as possible - let the reader draw conclusions, so long as they're the desired conclusions - try to pretend to abstract dispassionate language so that they can look like Informers, while still lingering on the emotion-arousing facts.  Formality is a very easy disguise to wear, which is one reason I give it so little credit.

Informers, who have no desire to look like Informers, might go ahead and leave in a value judgment or two that seemed really unlikely to interfere with anyone's totting up the evidence.  If Informers trusted their own judgment about that sort of thing, that is.

(Persuaders and Informers writing about policy arguments or moral arguments would be a whole 'nother class of issue.  Then both types are offering value-laden arguments and dealing in facts that trigger emotions, and the question is who's collecting them evenhandedly versus lopsidedly.)

How about writing short stories?

Persuaders obviously have a motive to do it.  Do Informers ever do it, if they're not worried about looking like Persuaders?

If you try to blank out the conventions of our own world, and imagine what would really be useful...

Then I can well imagine that it would be de rigueur to write small stories - story fragments, rather - describing the elements of your experimental procedure.

"The subjects were admininistered Progenitorivox" actually gives you very little information, just the dull sensation of having been told an authoritative fact.

Compare:  "James is one of my typical subjects.  Every Wednesday, he would visit me in my lab at 2pm, and, grimacing, swallow down two yellow pills from his bottle, while I watched.  At the end of the study, I watched James and the other students file into the classroom, sit down, and fill out the surveys on each desk; as they left, I gave each of them a check for $50."

This, which conveys something of the experience of running the experiment and just begs you to go out and do your own... also gives you valuable information: that the Progenitorivox or placebo was taken at regular intervals with the investigator watching, and when and where and how the survey data was collected.

Maybe this is the most efficient way to communicate that information, and maybe not.  To me it actually does seem efficient, and I would guess that the only reason people don't do this more often is that they would look insufficiently Distant and Authoritative.  I have no trouble imagining an Informer writing a story fragment or two into their journal article.

Robin says:  "I thus tend to avoid emotion, color, flash, stories, vagueness, repetition, rambling, and even eloquence."

I would guess that, to first order and before all signaling:

Persuaders actively seek out emotion, color, flash, and eloquence.  They are vague when they have something to hide.  They rehearse their favored arguments, but not to where it becomes annoying.  They try to avoid rambling because no one wants to read that.  They use stories where they expect stories to be persuasive - which, by default, they are - and avoid stories where they don't want their readers visualizing things in too much detail.

Informers avoid emotions that they fear may bias their readers.  If they can't actually avoid the emotion - e.g., the paper is about slavery - they'll explicitly point it out, along with its potential biasing effect, and they'll go to whatever lengths they can to avoid provoking or inflaming the emotion further (short of actually obscuring the subject matter).  Informers may use color to highlight the most important parts of their article, but won't usually give extra color to a single piece of specific evidence.  Informers have no use for flash.  They won't avoid being eloquent when their discussion happens to have an elegant logical structure.  Informers use the appropriate level of abstraction or maybe a little lower; they are vague when details are unknowable or almost certainly irrelevant.  Informers don't rehearse evidence, but they might find it useful to repeat some details of the experimental procedure.  Informers use stories when they have an important experience to communicate, or when a set of details is most easily conveyed in story form.  In papers that are about judgments of simple fact, Informers never use a story to arouse emotion.

I finally note, with regret, that in a world containing Persuaders, it may make sense for a second-order Informer to be deliberately eloquent if the issue has already been obscured by an eloquent Persuader - just exactly as elegant as the previous Persuader, no more, no less.  It's a pity that this wonderful excuse exists, but in the real world, well...

I love this piece because it reiterates something I feel very strongly about, that science and journal writing has turned into dull and boring drivel when it accurate and useful. On the other hand you have resources that are so over the top hyped and innacurate (SciAm, I'm looking at YOU).

Why can't I be allowed a middle ground, like Gould walked, where I can be both informative and persuasive, where I can be both informational and tell a story. I'd love to be able to write science articles professionally that people would take seriously and ALSO enjoy reading.

Its so frustrating to me that you are either boring or inaccurate in this profession. Then you go read books by the greater scientists in your field, no hype needed, no boring standards of decorum to follow, and the writing is AMAZING, just so great to read and learn from.

I want to start a pention to ban third person passive language from science journals

something about protecting ourselves from scientifically illiterate people who will use our boring words against us

or  !

http://www.sonibyte.com/audio/7243.mp3

LISTEN.   NOW.

Alternatively: 6 minutes of his interview on video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiOwqDmacJo

Some writings on science and philosophy, and people who make discoveries.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~bio125/09.Root-Bernstein1989.pdf How scientists really think.

http://www.duke.edu/~trout/w20/scudder.html Learning to See. Scudder really groks taxonomy at the most base level.

And, excerpts from A Feeling for the Organism, a book by EF Keller about Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize winning geneticist and mystic that worked with corn.

"Her answer is simple. Over and over again, she tells us one must have the time to look, the patience to "hear what the material has to say to you," the openness to "let it come to you." Above all, one must have "a feeling for the organism""

One must understand "how it grows, understand its parts, understand when something is going wrong with it. [An organism] isn't just a piece of plastic, it's something that is constantly being affected by the environment, constantly showing attributes or disabilities in its growth. You have to be aware of all of that...You need to know those plants well enough so that if anything changes,..

"you can look at the plant and right away you know what this damage you see is from--something that scraped across it or something that bit it or something the wind did." You need to have a feeling for every individual plant

"No two plants are exactly alike. They're all different, and as a consequence, you have to know that difference." "I start with seedling, and I don't want to leave it. I don't feel I really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them."

"I have learned so much about the corn plant that when I see things, I can interpret them right away"

"what we label scientific truth is lots of fun. You get lots of correlations but you don't get the truth...Things are much more marvelous than the scientific method allows us to conceive."

"Why do you know? Why were you so sure of something when you couldn't tell anyone else? You weren't sure in a boastful way; you were sure in what I call a completely internal way....What you had to do was put it into their frame. Whereever it came into your frame, you had to work to put it into their frame. So you work with so-called scientific methods to put it into their frame after you know. Well the question is how you know it."

"What is ecstacy? I don't understand ecstasy, but I enjoy it. When I have it. Rare ecstasy."

"Basically, everything is one. There is no way in which you draw a line between things. What we normally do is to make these subdivisions, but they're not real. Our educational system is full of subdivisions that are artificial, that shouldn't be there. I think maybe poets-- although I don't read poetry--have some understanding of this"

"From the point of view of how [the world] worked, we knew how part of it worked....We didn't even inquire, didn't even see how the rest was going on. All these other things were happening and we didn't see it."

"if you really want to understand about a tumor, you've got to be a tumor. Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien...that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on its way to extinction."

"I can't wait [for the revolution]. Because I think it's going to be marvelous, simply marvelous. We're going to have a completely new realization of the relationship of things to each other."

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2009/01/another-case-of-mistaken-identity.html

It happens more often than you would think.

Just wondering if anyone would be interested in seeing some notes and things from my seminar. We're reading On the Origin of Species, probably one of the most central books to the biological sciences. I've got a number of links and things.

First, if you are gonna read Origin for more than just a passing interest, please read the first edition. The later editions have many changes, some of them good, but some of them were concessionary statements. Darwin had a number of mental breakdowns in his lifetime, especially after publishing this book. You can imagine, with such a revolutionary idea in such a non abreviated form (Wallace's paper was very short and overlooked by comparison, and failed to present as convincing of a mechanism as the Origin), he was ridiculed. There were many people who wrote on biological evolution between 1800 and 1850, but none of them addressed it so well as Darwin did, and most were creationists. Even Wallace could not be convinced that the human brain was a product of change over time. The prevailing thought before Darwin was that there are types, and that variation within these types occurs, but only within set boundaries. Darwin tore that idea appart by proposing that types (ie species) could become more and different types over time, and he used natural selection as the justification of this hypothesis. This shook the worldview of most scientists of the time, including his good friend and collegue Lyell. Since what happened to him was akin to scientific beatdown, he made several consessions in later editions (as I said above). One of the most memorable was the placement of the words "survival of the fittest", and "evolution". He hated both those terms, and only grudgingly placed them in the 6th and final edition. The first edition of On the Origin is therefore his raw ideas before they were assaulted, and because of this they are much more interesting than the later editions, and much more true to his original thoughts.

Here is a full fascimile of the First edition, in PDF: http://darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1859_Origin_F373.pdf

Also, some other interesting documents related to the history of evolutionary hypotheses:

The first chapter of Lyell's Principles of Geology, whereas he in depth covers the ideas of Lamarck. Most of what people learn about Lamarck is very cartoonish. People tend to forget he was a very intelligent person that had some very interesting ideas and remember only his idea that the neck of the giraffe became long from stretching. http://www.esp.org/books/lyell/principles/facsimile/contents/lyell-v2-ch01.pdf

Wallace's publication on "the tendency of varieties to depart indefinitely from their original type". You can see it is much shorter than Darwin's On the Origin, and the points have little supportive evidence. He was taken less seriously than Darwin mostly because of the short length. http://www.zoo.uib.no/classics/varieties.html

A short piece Darwin wrote about the history of "evolutionary theory". http://www.victorianweb.org/science/darwin/darwin_sketch.html

A very recent science mag article defending the originality of Darwin's work. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/323/5911/223

And, some quotes from notes the professor handed out:

Argument of Lamarck
P36: "The machinery of the Lamarckian system" (Lyell). Bring fixity of species into doubt, and then introduce a mechanism to explain transformation of species.
Step1. Argue against fixity of type.
P6: Old definition "...every collection of similar individuals, produced by other individuals like themselves." Cites Linnaeus that individuals from one stock "...have remained the same since the creation of each species."
and moreover that they are produced with a lineage derived from an unvarying "stock",
"...all the individuals propagated from one stock have certain distinguishing characters in common which never vary, and which have remained the same since the creation of each species."
BUT, Lamarck suggests that this definition is not an accurate picture of nature, because in many cases there is debate whether an individual is a species or a variety, because
P8: "...we see almost every void filled up..." & "...everything passes by insensible shades into something else..."
   Step 2: emphasize variation in nature
   P12: "...difference of situation and exposure causes individuals to vary..."
"...at the end of many successive generations, these individuals, which originally belonged to another species, are transformed into a new and distinct species." [transmutation]
P13: description of phenotypic plasticity and microselection
P15, 16: artificial selection yields products that vary widely from one another, and differences in 'circumstances' also yields some change
also, we are made aware of the changes in nature by consulting the geological record
The "Machinery"
P18: "...alteration in local circumstances...causes a change in their wants, and these new wants excite them to new actions and habits."
Use: "...greater development follows as a consequence of their more frequent use."
Disuse: "...organs no longer in use are impoverished and diminished."
[P19-21: Lyell interlude with an objection: no 'entirely new sense, faculty, or organ']
P22, 23: How does use and disuse work?
"...habits, its manner of living...have determined the form of its body...".
Examples:
water-fowl are web-footed because 'the wants' of ancestors drove them to the water where they were able to stretch their toes
giraffe has a long neck "...(not) because it was destined to live in Africa, but because it contracted the habit of stretching itself up to reach..."
   In sum, the repeated expression of a new want or habit eventually leads to that organ, sense, or faculty becoming hereditary (note mode of hereditary is not addressed, but presumably a form of Pangenesis, as it will be called by Darwin)
P24: Against the fixity of type continued and another mode of their creation hybridism.
"Hybrids have sometimes proved prolific...and varieties may be gradually created by near alliances..."
P25: Question- where did it all come from if modern animals and plants are descendants of 'single stocks'?
P27: Answer- "...series passes progressively from more simple to those more compound..."
& the  geological record attests to progression from 'simple to complex':
P30: In fact, the sequence goes: inert matter-vitality-(irrational) sensation-rational.
P31: But why are there still "...beings of the simplest structure."?
P32: Because Nature is lawful and "...is obliged to proceed gradually...(and) must always begin by the formation of the most simple kinds...", out of which more complex forms arise.
P33: This we would call spontaneous generation
P34: "...the higher and more perfect classes" arise due to the "...tendency to progressive advancement..." and "...the force of external circumstances...", broadly exposure to biotic and abiotic forces.
P35: How do these two actions conspire to create new kinds? The "progressive development" tends to produce a finely "graduated scale of being", but 'retarding' and 'accelerating' effects disrupt the progression, and "...chasms, into which whole genera or families might be inserted, are seen to separate the nearest portions of the series."

Discussion Points
So was Lamarck a crank or a deep and subtle thinker whose main errors were simply due to not having all the appropriate information, such as an accurate mechanism for heredity, and a willingness to rely on Natural Theology (or, occult metaphysics) to do some of the explaining. (spontaneous generation, interior force for complexification)
Inheritance of acquired characters? Nearly everyone believed in this because they needed a mechanism to explain the general phenomenon that like generates like? If a new variety produces a novel structure, then if bred true it will pass it on to the next generation- an acquired character has been inherited. Also, experiments like cutting off the tails of mice, or observations regarding circumcision, do little to address the mechanism envisioned by Lamarck. In neither case does an internal volition, or want, have any part of their new circumstances.
Overall, Lamarck does a service by advocating forcefully an evolutionary picture: a mechanism of replacement of forms over time, that bears some relation to selection and fitness (e.g., giraffes with shorter verses longer necks and their ability to survive). His peers and subsequent authors criticized him primarily for invoking occult explanations for the transmutation.

Wallace, 1858. On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely From the Original Type.
argument to show that the belief in the fixity of species is erroneous, and that there is a general principle that assures that varieties can in fact replace the parent form, and that this principle over time leads to a divergence of characters from the original type sufficiently large that the varieties formed would now be a new species. Which varieties survive is due to a struggle for existence
P1, 2: Call into question the stability of species based on observations of varieties, in particular their tendency to revert to the original type, which Wallace argues applies to domestic productions only
-BUT, 'permanent or true varieties' arise in nature and frequently there is an inability to determine whether something is the variety or the parent species (persisient problem of sibling, cryptic species, etc.)
Obviously these points are in conflict, which is resolved by assuming that there are strict limits to the variability.
P3- Thesis of the paper: the belief that varieties in nature are analagous to those of domestic productions is false, because there is a general principle assuring that in some cases the variety will outlive the parent species, which will then continue to depart ever more from the type.
P4- "Struggle for existence", primarily due to food constraint and predation. (In part, this is the thesis of Malthus)
Enters upon a discussion of population ecology
General conclusion is that fecundity not the issue for population limitation. Example of passenger pigeon (not overly fecund, small brood size):
"..that the procuring a constant supply of wholesome food is almost the sole condition requisite for ensuring the rapid increase of a given species, since neither limited fecundity, nor the unrestrained attacks of birds of prey and of man are here insufficient to check it.
So, Who survives and Who dies?
"..the individual existence of each animal depends upon itself, those that die must be weakest—the very young, the aged, and the diseased, —while those that prolong their existence can only be the most perfect in health and vigor—those who are best able to obtain food regularly, and avoid their numerous enemies."
Sounds a lot like "survival of the fittest" (coined by Herbert Spencer), Wallace uses "struggle for existence".
P5,6- Extension of thesis, from intraspecific to interspecific struggle, and recapitulation. That is, there is a struggle for existence for whole species, just as individuals of a species struggle for existence.
Establish two points: 1) checks to increase and 2) actual abundance of a species is due its 'merits'.
P7- Variation, Fitness and Selection.
"Most or perhaps all the variations from the typical form of a species must have some definite effect, however slight, on the habits or capacities of the individual."
"It is also evident that most changes (i.e., variations) would affect, either favorably or adversely, the powers of prolonging existence."
"...any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence, that variety must inevitably in time acquire superiority in numbers."
"Now, let some alteration of physical conditions occur in the district...those (individuals) forming the least numerous and most feebly organized variety would suffer first, and... soon become extinct."
"The superior variety would then alone remain, and...occupy the place of the extinct species and variety."
P18 "The variety would now have replaced the species..." & moreover, "...could not return to the original form." (Variation in a gene pool, selection, and statistical effects of 'sampling' alleles from the gene pool)
If this repeats, then there is a principle of "... progression and continues divergence." (Not an inevitable outcome in any particular case, because another change in circumstances may make the new variety less suitable)
Introduce the notion of 'deep time', that in nature there is almost unlimited time available for this process (Lyell).  "Now the scale on which nature works is so vast--the numbers of individuals and periods of time..."
P19: Return to arguments about domestic animals, and why the evidence of the fixity of type, by reversion of varieties to the type, is not a good analogy to what occurs in nature.
In general, there is lessened selection, except for that produced by humans, on domestic animals.
Among domestic animals "the healthy condition of all their senses and physical powers...are only partially exercised, and ins some cases are absolutely unused."
P10: variation in domestic animals, as long as in conformity with human selection, may in many cases be effectively 'unscrutinized' by nature, whereas "In the wild animal, all its faculties and powers" are being evaluated, and any increase (variation beneficial for the animal) will affect the "...whole economy of the race."
and thereby, "It (variation) creates as it were a new animal, one of superior powers..."
P11: In short, domestic productions would be a short lived joke is expected to survive in the wild. OR, they must rapidly "...return to something near the type of the original wild stock, or become altogether extinct."
P12: therefore, domestic animals offer no positive argument for the fixity of species.
P13: Lamarck's reasoning refuted and Wallace's reasoning employed in examples.
E.g. Giraffe. Lamarck would say that the giraffe acquired its long neck because its wants drove it to search out new food sources, and it then stretched its neck; Wallace would argue that
"...because any varieties which occurred among its antitypes with a longer neck than usual at once secured a fresh range of pasture over the same ground as their shorter-necked companion, and on the scarcity of food were thereby enabled to outlive them." [variation and selection]
Very Important:
"An origin such as here advocated will also agree with the peculiar character of the modifications of form and structure which obtain in organized beings..."
"...reason for that 'more specialized structure' which Professor Owen states to be characteristic of recent compared with extinct forms, and which would evidently be the result of the progressive modification of any organ applied to a special purpose in the animal economy."  This is esentially a reference to our concept of HOMOLOGY
P14. Recapitulation.
"...the continued progression of certain classes of varieties further and further from the original type—a progression to which there appears no reason to assign any definite limits..."

So, is anyone interested?

[TIRED]

You probably wouldn't expect this from me. No, usually I'm the calm centered one about scientific inquiry (provided creationists aren't involved).

But I've had it up to here with going to the earth science news on CNN.com, and EVERY LAST FUCKING ARTICLE is on climate change.

FUCK, people. Isn't there something in biology or geology or any of the other so called "earth sciences" that you could draw on and make an interesting article out of besides this continuous log of fearmongering BULLSHIT?!?

I don't see anything useful in any of this. Sure, I believe the climatologists with their current observations of the planet, and there is change and variation in the climate. I think they are smart people doing good science. I think they are probably right about global warming and cooling events, and I think they are probably right that human population has had some effect upon these events.

I am just so FUCKING TIRED of hearing everyone and their DOG'S opinions on this. Everyone is suddenly a scientist with a degree in toxicology, sociology, anthropology, paleogeography, geology, biology, ecology and climatology when it comes to CLIMATE CHANGE. I've only got a degree in one of those things and I STILL don't consider myself qualified to draft an opinion for or against it. I've studied hydrology and limnology and geology and I still don't have a clue how the climatologist's model's work, and these JOURNALISTS with degrees in COMMUNICATION, think they have a fucking clue?

This isn't a game of "whoever talks about it the most makes it the case". Climatology isn't politics, it isn't morality, it certainly isn't based upon some opinions of some NUMBNUTS reporter from hugatreefucktheman.org. This is real science, with real observations and real models, not some pony ride you can drive so you feel good about yourself and so you can say over and over and over "NOT IN MY FUCKING BACKYARD". This isn't a game of WHO CAN WE BLAME NEXT? This isn't a game at all.

And whats worse than people turning opinions into "science", is people spamming news articles about "science" into more fearmongering bullshit. I won't have it, not anymore. Next dipshit that walks up to me and starts talking about the melting of the polar icecaps and the rising of the oceans and the increase in storms and ALL KINDS OF THIS FEARFUL SHIT I am going to punch them in the face, folks. I'll stick with scientists for science.

Or fucking bump me off.

Does anyone watch them? Ever since I saw Sir Ken Robinson do his talk on creativity in education I've realized what an awesome resource TED talks are.

One I just watched now: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paula_scher_gets_serious.html

Paula Scher on Serious versus Solemn design and creativity.

Two recent developments in biological sciences and technology have lead me to believe the Tricorder of Star Trek fame is not so distant.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0002075

The first is a hand held medical scanner/communication device. Granot, Ivorra and Rubinsky published their creation through the online PLoS ONE journal on April 30th of this year. The technology uses a very similar setup to the newer cellular phones, and detects voltage differences to produce images. From the pictures you can see it is pretty much a modified cell phone, connected to an electrode setup.

http://www.barcoding.si.edu/BackgroundPublications/Hebert_et_al_2003_DNABarcodes.pdf

The second article was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 2003. Hebert et al provide a complete system to taxonomic identification through the Cytochrome Oxidase I gene of mitochondrial DNA. This gene is found in all animals, and varies quite a bit between species, however, its intraspecific variation is low. The mutation rate of the gene is just right for acting as a species barcode, whereas the DNA sequence identifies the species by its closeness to a record of known gene sequences. The aim is to sequence this gene in all animal species and use it as a universal identifier. There are several worldwide barcoding initiatives going on for most of the major taxonomic groupings. I really don't see it as that far off before we have a good record for all described vertebrate species, although it will probably take much longer for the invertebrates. The practical uses for this is immense. Already, barcoding has been used to uncover fish market fraud. http://amphidrome.wordpress.com/2008/08/27/fishmonger-fraud/

Now, wouldn't it be cool if you could combine the two of these? You would have a cell phone that could do biological scanning, as well as sequence COI genes and compare them to the online database. You would have a combination communicator, biological scanner, and species identification device, in essence, a tricorder.

Its not that far off.

http://www.barcodinglife.org/views/login.php - The heart of the barcoding initiative. Note the search engine of over 160 thousand barcodes. You can simply type your sequence in and it will give you the closest matches.

1. CSPI writes an alarmist press release about cochineal, which suggests not only are there insects in your food, but dangerous insects!  They call for a ban, and as a bonus make a rather huge taxonomic error with a scarab beetle photo.

2. A New York Times writer picks up on the press release, and uses it in her NYT wellness blog.  And repeats the taxonomic mistakes and general tone of OMGBUGZ.  She does at least correct the taxonomic error when it's pointed out, and removes the beetle photo.

3. Scientific American prints the CSPI news release (with offending photo) almost verbatim, and even ADDS several alarmist comments about OMGBUGZ-IN-URFOODS. As a garnish, they called cochineal "beetle juice" and the scale insects "cochineal beetles."

4. A whole bunch of other media outlets screw it up with even new and different photos.

More fail in the rest of the article: http://membracid.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/breaking-fail-news-scientific-american/

...is going to suck as much now as it did the first time 5 years ago.

Discuss.

This book written by Aldo Leopold and published first in 1948 is probably my most favorite. My own paperback copy is riddled with notes, worn and dogeared. I can read it over and over. Its a book in two parts, the first with short essays on events set in the stage of the seasons. The second part is describing Leopold's Land Ethic, and his environmental philosophy that is often quoted today. Because I am from Wisconsin, where Leopold worked and wrote, and especially because I am from the sand counties area, I read this book when I was in grade school for the first time, and it was very profound for me then, as it is now. In any other part of the world, only philosophers read Leopold, so I consider myself lucky.

To give you all an idea of the writing, here are some quotes.

Within a few weeks now Draba, the smallest flower that blows, will sprinkle every sandy place with small blooms.
He who hopes for spring with upturned eye never sees so small a thing as Draba. He who despairs of spring with downcast eye steps on it, unkowing. He who searches for spring with his knees in the mud finds it, in abundance. 
Draba asks, and gets, but scant allowance of warmth and comfort; it subsists on the leavings of unwanted time and space. Botany books give it two or three lines, but never a plate or portrait. Sand too poor and sun too weak for bigger, better blooms are good enough for Draba.  After all it is no spring flower, but only a postscript to a hope.
Draba plucks no heartstrings. Its perfume, if there is any, is lost in the gusty winds, Its color is plain white. Its leaves wear a sensible woolly coat. Nothing eats it; it is too small. No poets sing of it. Some botanist once gave it a Latin name and then forgot it.  Altogether it is of no importance--just a small creature that does a small job quickly and well.

The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is not television, or radio, but rather the complexity of the land organism. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little is known about it.
The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the land. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

More quote here: http://gargravarr.cc.utexas.edu/chrisj/leopold-quotes.html

Consider our bodies. Consider what blueprint stands for the manufacture of our bodies, the DNA. Its a highly stable molecule, replicable, and very emergent in its creativity. There are more possible combinations for the base pairs in a chromosome of human DNA than there are atoms in the universe.

This simple mutable structure ties me to a lineage. This isn't just the human lineage, but rather a lineage much longer. Somewhere in the matrix are combinations stretching back in time unto the begining of life on this planet, 3.5, maybe 4 billion years, going to the first replicating molecules. There is pride and glory in this lineage, that through this unbroken chain through your parents and their parents and on and on, back through the chain, we are connected to the begining and the seat of life in its creativity. We are at some point connected to every living thing that ever was and ever will be on this planet through this lineage. If we continue back further, past life, past the explosion of a long dead star, going back even further to where everything was energy, if you believe that idea, we then connect to everything everywhere that ever was and ever will be.

Thats power. Thats not just the power of four billion years but of 14 billion years, or longer. Thats the power of universal emergence, from energy to matter to molecules to life to consciousness. When people cast aside the "hippy" notion that we are all one they fail to realize that sometime, at some point IT WAS. Somewhere beyond this emergent nature IT STILL IS.

(Ready to be posted to the PD.com blog, whoever wants to)


This line of thought started from a blog post about algae-animal endosymbiosis.

http://www.seaslugforum.net/showall.cfm?base=solarpow

ProTIP: Most corals are "solar powered" too. All lichens are.

Its algae living inside other organisms, and its awesome. It doesn't surprise me that some nudibranchs (marine flatworms) are doing it. What surprises me is the storage, not of the whole algae, but just of the plastids, the cell organelles that convert solar energy into simple sugars. The reason it surprises and excites me is because this is the way plants evolved, through ingesting photosynthetic bacteria. Thats how algae came about, and then other types of animals ate that type of algae and made a NEW type. Srsly, there are some algae that came about from eating another algae that ate another algae that ate photosynthetic bacteria. Anyway, the nudibranchs in the blog post may eventually keep the plastids and  transfer them during reproduction. Its pretty incredible.

There are some microorganisms that still do exactly what those nudibranchs do.  There is so much weird stuff out there.

I mean, think of diatoms here for a second. First of all, they're photosynthetic by secondary endosymbiosis, so a photosynthetic bacteria was eaten by a brown algae was eaten by some organism that became a yellow-green algae which later led to diatoms. Diatoms then evolved this hard exterior frustule which is composed of glass. The frustule is in two parts, a bottom layer and a top layer. The two parts overlap each other like a petri dish. And you start thinking about how these things move, they actually excrete a fluid that pushes them along, a sort of microscopic slime trail like a slug almost. And THEN you start looking at all the amazing shapes and surface structures of these frustules, pits, ridges, grooves, pores. Its so completely beyond weird, its bizarre, yet most people never consider it.

Do I need to talk about lichens? Do I need to go into the fact that a fungus is basically a mat of hair like cells that dissolves dead or decaying material, and then creates these elaborate reproductive structures which we then eat (mushrooms)? Do I have to talk about catepilars that build underwater nets to filter food, or snakes that can flatten their bodies to glide through the air? Should I even consider mentioning fungus that feeds off of radioactive decay, tubeworms that live around thermal vents several kilometers down in the ocean, or tardigrades, tiny mite like organisms that enter a seed like state, alowing them to survive without food, water or even in outer space?

This world is bizarre and wonderful and wild and evolution is a beautiful game that shows the best that the emergent creativity in the universe has to offer. I don't know how ANYONE can fail to be entertained, amazed, intrigued, engrossed, or amused with this planet. I don't know how anyone can be bored with living things. Every time I LOOK I hear about Acacia trees that have sugar glands and hollow horns so that ants will nest and protect, or colossal squid 8 meters long with huge claws on their suckers, or orangutans fishing with spears, or FUCK even bacteria or turfgrass or CORN is interesting if you look hard enough. Barbara McClintock pretty much put the period on that idea. I could go on and on for hours about these things.

I don't know how anyone can't.


No no no, I'll go on. I'm inspired now. Theres this caddisfly larva in the family Polycentropodidae. It makes this tube like web and lines of silk running outward from the edges. It senses when its prey is near, feels the vibrations on the threads and darts out to grab its prey, and this is all going on underwater.

Dragonfly young have a hinged and fanged lower jaw that shoots out alien style to catch food, sometimes fish sized organisms.

Back to the algae again, there are these organisms called Euglenoids. They are photosynthetic but get some of their food by feeding from the environment, just like the nudibranchs above. They can make food  and they can eat stuff. Plus, they have this weird exoskeleton that can change shape from a sphere to almost any sort of spheroid.

Or maybe to grasses. Grasses have some of the most amazing and complex flowers you will ever see, and include everything from woody bamboo to kentucky blue. They are almost all wind pollinated too.

And speaking of pollination, no really. Think of all the species of insects and plants that are made possible by the pollination symbiosis. First just consider directly all the plants that have flowers that are pollinated in some way by insects, and the insects that directly pollinate them. So, this includes most flowering plants excluding those that are wind pollinated, as well as thousands of species of insects.

Now consider all those organisms that live on and around those plants.

Now consider all those organisms that feed on those plants.

Now consider all those organisms that feed on the organisms that are feeding on those plants, or are feeding on the pollinators of those plants, or are feeding on the organisms that live and feed on those plants, etc etc etc, ad infinitum.

Ecology is fucking amazing and wild and FUCK.

YOU start thinking of all the connections begining with one species and increase the bounds outwards until it includes everything living on this planet and all the interactions with the environment RIGHT NOW, and then extend that forward and backward in time and see if you don't start sobbing like a little child at the immensity of it like I am right now, like I am whenever I consider it, like people do when they stare at the stars and consider the distance. YOU start looking at the connections, and maybe the reason I wrote The Process will become clear and obvious, because when you reach that threshold, when you consider the cell to the biosphere, a single organism to world ecology, bacteria to all the complexity, the past workings of creativity, the future workings of creativity, the innate capacity for creativity and tie it all together you are standing at the door of infinity, and you glimpse the Process that overlies it all and it destroys you and rebuilds you from the inside out until you are whole. Once you start considering THIS immensity, the stars seem close, and the distances small, because the innate emergent creativity here, on this planet, is greater than anything we have found out there, or daresay will ever find.

You want amazement, you want awe, you want eternal excitement? Do you want to see GOD every day in every single drop of water, every single dust mote or grain of soil?


Go into Biology. Srsly.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/12/complex-novelty.html

From Greg Egan's Permutation City:
    The workshop abutted a warehouse full of table legs - one hundred and sixty-two thousand, three hundred and twenty-nine, so far.  Peer could imagine nothing more satisfying than reaching the two hundred thousand mark - although he knew it was likely that he'd change his mind and abandon the workshop before that happened; new vocations were imposed by his exoself at random intervals, but statistically, the next one was overdue.  Immediately before taking up woodwork, he'd passionately devoured all the higher mathematics texts in the central library, run all the tutorial software, and then personally contributed several important new results to group theory - untroubled by the fact that none of the Elysian mathematicians would ever be aware of his work.  Before that, he'd written over three hundred comic operas, with librettos in Italian, French and English - and staged most of them, with puppet performers and audience.  Before that, he'd patiently studied the structure and biochemistry of the human brain for sixty-seven years; towards the end he had fully grasped, to his own satisfaction, the nature of the process of consciousness.  Every one of these pursuits had been utterly engrossing, and satisfying, at the time.  He'd even been interested in the Elysians, once.
    No longer.  He preferred to think about table legs.

Among science fiction authors, Greg Egan is my favorite; of Greg Egan's books, Permutation City is my favorite; and this particular passage in Permutation City, more than any of the others, I find utterly horrifying.

If this were all the hope the future held, I don't know if I could bring myself to try.  Small wonder that people don't sign up for cryonics, if even SF writers think this is the best we can do.

You could think of this whole series on Fun Theory as my reply to Greg Egan - a list of the ways that his human-level uploaded civilizations Fail At Fun.  (And yes, this series will also explain what's wrong with the Culture and how to fix it.)

We won't get to all of Peer's problems today - but really.  Table legs?

I could see myself carving one table leg, maybe, if there was something non-obvious to learn from the experience.  But not 162,329.

In Permutation City, Peer modified himself to find table-leg-carving fascinating and worthwhile and pleasurable.  But really, at that point, you might as well modify yourself to get pleasure from playing Tic-Tac-Toe, or lie motionless on a pillow as a limbless eyeless blob having fantastic orgasms.  It's not a worthy use of a human-level intelligence.

Worse, carving the 162,329th table leg doesn't teach you anything that you didn't already know from carving 162,328 previous table legs.  A mind that changes so little in life's course is scarcely experiencing time.

But apparently, once you do a little group theory, write a few operas, and solve the mystery of consciousness, there isn't much else worth doing in life: you've exhausted the entirety of Fun Space down to the level of table legs.

Is this plausible?  How large is Fun Space?

Let's say you were a human-level intelligence who'd never seen a Rubik's Cube, or anything remotely like it.  As Hofstadter describes in two whole chapters of Metamagical Themas, there's a lot that intelligent human novices can learn from the Cube - like the whole notion of an "operator" or "macro", a sequence of moves that accomplishes a limited swap with few side effects.  Parity, search, impossibility -

So you learn these things in the long, difficult course of solving the first scrambled Rubik's Cube you encounter.  The second scrambled Cube - solving it might still be difficult, still be enough fun to be worth doing.  But you won't have quite the same pleasurable shock of encountering something as new, and strange, and interesting as the first Cube was unto you.

Even if you encounter a variant of the Rubik's Cube - like a 4x4x4 Cube instead of a 3x3x3 Cube - or even a Rubik's Tesseract (a 3x3x3x3 Cube in four dimensions) - it still won't contain quite as much fun as the first Cube you ever saw.  I haven't tried mastering the Rubik's Tesseract myself, so I don't know if there are added secrets in four dimensions - but it doesn't seem likely to teach me anything as fundamental as "operators", "side effects", or "parity".

(I was quite young when I encountered a Rubik's Cube in a toy cache, and so that actually is where I discovered such concepts.  I tried that Cube on and off for months, without solving it.  Finally I took out a book from the library on Cubes, applied the macros there, and discovered that this particular Cube was unsolvable - it had been disassembled and reassembled into an impossible position.  I think I was faintly annoyed.)

Learning is fun, but it uses up fun: you can't have the same stroke of genius twice.  Insight is insight because it makes future problems less difficult, and "deep" because it applies to many such problems.

And the smarter you are, the faster you learn - so the smarter you are, the less total fun you can have.  Chimpanzees can occupy themselves for a lifetime at tasks that would bore you or I to tears.  Clearly, the solution to Peer's difficulty is to become stupid enough that carving table legs is difficult again - and so lousy at generalizing that every table leg is a new and exciting challenge -

Well, but hold on:  If you're a chimpanzee, you can't understand the Rubik's Cube at all.  At least I'm willing to bet against anyone training a chimpanzee to solve one - let alone a chimpanzee solving it spontaneously - let alone a chimpanzee understanding the deep concepts like "operators", "side effects", and "parity".

I could be wrong here, but it seems to me, on the whole, that when you look at the number of ways that chimpanzees have fun, and the number of ways that humans have fun, that Human Fun Space is larger than Chimpanzee Fun Space.

And not in a way that increases just linearly with brain size, either.

The space of problems that are Fun to a given brain, will definitely be smaller than the exponentially increasing space of all possible problems that brain can represent.  We are interested only in the borderland between triviality and impossibility - problems difficult enough to worthily occupy our minds, yet tractable enough to be worth challenging.  (What looks "impossible" is not always impossible, but the border is still somewhere even if we can't see it at a glance - there are some problems so difficult you can't even learn much from failing.)

An even stronger constraint is that if you do something many times, you ought to learn from the experience and get better - many problems of the same difficulty will have the same "learnable lessons" embedded in them, so that doing one consumes some of the fun of others.

As you learn new things, and your skills improve, problems will get easier.  Some will move off the border of the possible and the impossible, and become too easy to be interesting.

But others will move from the territory of impossibility into the borderlands of mere extreme difficulty.  It's easier to invent group theory if you've solved the Rubik's Cube first.  There are insights you can't have without prerequisite insights.

If you get smarter over time (larger brains, improved mind designs) that's a still higher octave of the same phenomenon.  (As best I can grasp the Law, there are insights you can't understand at all without having a brain of sufficient size and sufficient design.  Humans are not maximal in this sense, and I don't think there should be any maximum - but that's a rather deep topic, which I shall not explore further in this blog post.  Note that Greg Egan seems to explicitly believe the reverse - that humans can understand anything understandable - which explains a lot.)

One suspects that in a better-designed existence, the eudaimonic rate of intelligence increase would be bounded below by the need to integrate the loot of your adventures - to incorporate new knowledge and new skills efficiently, without swamping your mind in a sea of disconnected memories and associations - to manipulate larger, more powerful concepts that generalize more of your accumulated life-knowledge at once.

And one also suspects that part of the poignancy of transhuman existence will be having to move on from your current level - get smarter, leaving old challenges behind - before you've explored more than an infinitesimal fraction of the Fun Space for a mind of your level.  If, like me, you play through computer games trying to slay every single monster so you can collect every single experience point, this is as much tragedy as an improved existence could possibly need.

Fun Space can increase much more slowly than the space of representable problems, and still overwhelmingly swamp the amount of time you could bear to spend as a mind of a fixed level.  Even if Fun Space grows at some ridiculously tiny rate like N-squared - bearing in mind that the actual raw space of representable problems goes as 2N - we're still talking about "way more fun than you can handle".

If you consider the loot of every human adventure - everything that was ever learned about science, and everything that was ever learned about people, and all the original stories ever told, and all the original games ever invented, and all the plots and conspiracies that were ever launched, and all the personal relationships ever raveled, and all the ways of existing that were ever tried, and all the glorious epiphanies of wisdom that were ever minted -

- and you deleted all the duplicates, keeping only one of every lesson that had the same moral -

- how long would you have to stay human, to collect every gold coin in the dungeons of history?

Would it all fit into a single human brain, without that mind completely disintegrating under the weight of unrelated associations?  And even then, would you have come close to exhausting the space of human possibility, which we've surely not finished exploring?

This is all sounding like suspiciously good news.  So let's turn it around. Is there any way that Fun Space could fail to grow, and instead collapse?

Suppose there's only so many deep insights you can have on the order of "parity", and that you collect them all, and then math is never again as exciting as it was in the beginning.  And that you then exhaust the shallower insights, and the trivial insights, until finally you're left with the delightful shock of "Gosh wowie gee willickers, the product of 845 and 109 is 92105, I didn't know that logical truth before."

Well - obviously, if you sit around and catalogue all the deep insights known to you to exist, you're going to end up with a bounded list.  And equally obviously, if you declared, "This is all there is, and all that will ever be," you'd be taking an unjustified step.  (Though I fully expect some people out there to step up and say how it seems to them that they've already started to run out of available insights that are as deep as the ones they remember from their childhood.  And I fully expect that - compared to the sort of person who makes such a pronouncement - I personally will have collected more additional insights than they believe exist in the whole remaining realm of possibility.)

Can we say anything more on this subject of fun insights that might exist, but that we haven't yet found?

The obvious thing to do is start appealing to Godel, but Godelian arguments are dangerous tools to employ in debate.  It does seem to me that Godelian arguments weigh in the general direction of "inexhaustible deep insights", but inconclusively and only by loose analogies.

For example, the Busy-Beaver(N) problem asks for the longest running time of a Turing machine with no more than N states.  The Busy Beaver problem is uncomputable - there is no fixed Turing machine that computes it for all N - because if you knew all the Busy Beaver numbers, you would have an infallible way of telling whether a Turing machine halts; just run it up for as long as the longest-running Turing machine of that size.

The human species has managed to figure out and prove the Busy Beaver numbers up to 4, and they are:

BB(1):  1
BB(2):  6
BB(3):  21
BB(4):  107

Busy-Beaver 5 is believed to be 47,176,870.

The current lower bound on Busy-Beaver(6) is ~2.5 × 102879.

This function provably grows faster than any compact specification you can imagine.  Which would seem to argue that each new Turing machine is exhibiting a new and interesting kind of behavior.  Given infinite time, you would even be able to notice this behavior.  You won't ever know for certain that you've discovered the Busy-Beaver champion for any given N, after finite time; but conversely, you will notice the Busy Beaver champion for any N after some finite time.

Yes, this is an unimaginably long time - one of the few occasions where the word "unimaginable" is literally correct.  We can't actually do this unless reality works the way it does in Greg Egan novels.  But the point is that in the limit of infinite time we can point to something sorta like "an infinite sequence of learnable deep insights not reducible to any of their predecessors or to any learnable abstract summary".  It's not conclusive, but it's at least suggestive.

Now you could still look at that and say, "I don't think my life would be an adventure of neverending excitement if I spent until the end of time trying to figure out the weird behaviors of slightly larger Tuing machines."

Well - as I said before, Peer is doing more than one thing wrong.  Here I've dealt with only one sort of dimension of Fun Space - the dimension of how much novelty we can expect to find available to introduce into our fun.

But even on the arguments given so far... I don't call it conclusive, but it seems like sufficient reason to hope and expect that our descendants and future selves won't exhaust Fun Space to the point that there is literally nothing left to do but carve the 162,329th table leg.

Posted without formal comment, because I don't know what to make of it really.

Okay, I do. You all know how I think the universe, especially this planet, is an endless pile of fun, and with all the weirdness out there anyone who is bored is doing it wrong. For whatever reason, instead of discussing bias on this blog, most of the time the posts come off as transhumanist, utopianist, and holier-than-thou. Its only ocassionally I see something interesting on there. Even if the author is flawed completely in his thought process, its something to think about.

In systematics, a popular method of determining the right tree and the state of a common ancestor is parsimony.

in the absence of any reason to think otherwise, favour the explanation that is the most straightforward, and (in the case of inferring evolutionary history) requires the least number of changes. Parsimony is a popular tool because it's straightforward, relatively easy to apply, and it makes a great deal of intuitive sense - if a red animal occupies a deeply nested position in a clade of blue animals, then it seems fairly obvious that the ancestral animal was blue. However, like all analytical tools, the principle of parsimony is based on certain assumptions, and can be misleading if those assumptions are violated. Parsimony assumes that when comparing changes in a character between two states, change in either direction is equally likely. If, for whatever reason, a change is more likely to happen in one direction than another, then a parsimony analysis might be mislead about the ancestral condition.

Stick insect wings are an excellent example of when parsimony can go wrong.  The rest of the article is below.

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2008/12/when-parsimony-goes-wrong-wings-of.html

There are some fine moments in the remade The Day the Earth Stood Still--Keanu telling Jennifer that his true form would "only frighten you"--and a wagon-load of howlers from John Cleese's Nobel for "biological altruism" on down to the giant Play-doh robot (my buddy D. sez, "Gumby, it coulda been you!"). I know that hashing out the spectacular science-and-technology fuck-ups in blockbusters is what the internet was originally designed for, but instead I'm going to talk about our hilariously backward pop-cultural ideas about science as demonstrated in this movie.

All right. One mathematical malapropism, just to wet your whistle. Dear Hollywood, exponential does not mean what you think it means. If fetus-Keanu was really growing exponentially, then he would not have fit into that 42 Long, kay? That said.

The central conceit of the film is that the leaders of Earth are not it's machinating politicians and generals, but the scientists, in their noble, apolitical, altruistic quest for the core truths that give meaning to life and . . . Now this, emphatically, is not what science is. There is very little narrative romance in a system of inquiry, experimentation, and verification through which we can discover and describe natural phenomena. And even if scientists were, each and ever' one of 'em, a little metaphysician, it's still a stretch to say that they represent the leadership of the human race: moral, political, spiritual, or otherwise. Robert Oppenheimer was a cosmopolitan and Renaissance man, as concerned as any scientists with questions of philosophy and morality, but he still built the damn bomb when the generals told him to, and when he later expressed reservations about its use, Harry Truman did not give a flying fuck. We could also engage in a digression here about how the military drives technological innovation.

So there's that. The saintly scientist in his cardigan writing equations on the chalkboard of his lovely home is no more a representative of the human race than the flagellant beating himself bloody with repentance while cloistered in some monastery.

These sorts of misconceptions and miscues aside, the more glaring error, one that is relentlessly perpetuated, is that science is an equivalent religion, that it represents not a regularized system of inquiry but a moral philosophy. Scientists in film are always believing in things. John Cleese tells Jennifer Connelly that she must convince Klaatu to spare the earth "not with your science, but with yourself." I mean, why? Cause that pussy is tight, yo? You can't convince aliens to save the earth because of its brilliant minds struggling to understand the nature of their universe. What convinces them is the love of a white chick for her black stepson and her repeated, teary avowals that we can change--because, apparently, of science, which is a sort of new-agey, pacifistic, high-tech, mutualistic Quakerism. This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine. That sort of junk. The important thing about Jennifer Connelly is not that she knows what sort of bacteria grow on Europa, or whatever, but that she drives a Prius and loves her little black son. The important thing about John Cleese is that he's hospitable, and plays Bach. But if we've been under observation since we started blowing up the Earth circa the Industrial Revolution, wouldn't the aliens have known about Bach already? Couldn't they have just assassinated Thomas Newcomen and and James Watt? Or just popped down back when the whole destroying the Earth thing was getting underway and said, whoa, like, hold up guys. Or do they have a policy of non-interference except when they opt for total destruction?

I said I wouldn't do this. Look, I am a big fan of science, but the perception of a lack of spirito-cultural unity in the West today cannot be remedied by proposing that sexy-chick scientists and ol' perfessers with Brit accents represent the moral core of humanity as priests once did, or whomever. If narrative exigency required that mankind be saved by a weeping woman, they could've kept her a housewife.

I agree with all the above. The whole quote is chock full of one liners.

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2008/12/whats-in-name.html

In lieu of the Purdue species, I thought this was an excellent article because it talks in depth about the problems associated with formal nomenclature, the ICZN,  and the fact that the code and council are very hands off when it comes to upper level taxonomy. This is essentially like scientific anarchy, with the only thing keeping back "taxonomic terrorism" is the peer review process, and sometimes things slip through the cracks (see Olah and Johansen. 2008. Generic review of Hydropsychinae, with description of Schmidopsyche, new genus, 3 new genus clusters, 8 new species groups, 4 new species clades, 12 new species clusters and 62 new species from the Oriental and Afrotropical regions (Trichoptera : Hydropsychidae). Zootaxa 1802.). Theres also the difficulty between evolutionary phylogenetics and phylogenetic systematics (cladistics).

Definitions of taxa are a matter of taxonomy, not of nomenclature. Different taxonomic "schools" use different kinds of definitions of taxa. Nowadays, no taxonomic school claims to be "Linnaean", i.e., to use "Linnaean" definitions of taxa. There exist no such things as "ICZN-taxa" (Joyce et al. 2004) because the Code does not provide any guideline for defining taxa, being theory-free regarding taxonomy. In current taxonomy, only two kinds of definitions of taxa are widely used: phenetic definitions or diagnoses; and cladistic or "phylogenetic" definitions, or cladognoses (Dubois 2007a: 43).

Esentially there is this split between people who want to modernize and continue using what used to be Linnaean taxonomy in evolutionary phylogenetics, or they want to scrap that system and go to nameless clades in cladistics. They both have uses, though honestly in the insects we are much closer to the truth than the vertebratologists when we use the modified linnaean system. My adviser said this may just be a consequence of insects being around longer, with more of the pieces in the descent chain preserved, while in vertebrates you are missing a massive piece of that chain, the Dinosauria, which gave rise to mammals and birds.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/07/AR2008120702830.html?sub=AR

Nations tend to focus far more time, money and attention on tragedies caused by human actions than on the tragedies that cause the greatest amount of human suffering or take the greatest toll in terms of lives. ... In recent years, a large number of psychological experiments have found that when confronted by tragedy, people fall back on certain mental rules of thumb, or heuristics, to guide their moral reasoning. When a tragedy occurs, we instantly ask who or what caused it. When we find a human hand behind the tragedy -- such as terrorists, in the case of the Mumbai attacks -- something clicks in our minds that makes the tragedy seem worse than if it had been caused by an act of nature, disease or even human apathy. ...

    Tragedies, in other words, cause individuals and nations to behave a little like the detectives who populate television murder mystery shows: We spend nearly all our time on the victims of killers and rapists and very little on the victims of car accidents and smoking-related lung cancer. "We think harms of actions are much worse than harms of omission," said Jonathan Baron, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "We want to punish those who act and cause harm much more than those who do nothing and cause harm. We have more sympathy for the victims of acts rather than the victims of omission. If you ask how much should victims be compensated, [we feel] victims harmed through actions deserve higher compensation."

Via Overcoming Bias.

Also known as the incertae sedis phenomenon. Incertae sedis is latin for "of unknown placement". When biologists don't know where a particular group or species of organisms should go taxonomically, they label it incertae sedis. Of course, the taxa cant just sit NOWHERE until we figure out where it goes. This leads to the wastebasket taxa, groups where organisms of unknown placement are all thrown together until the phylogeny is a huge mess (and the taxonomy is even WORSE) that needs to be sorted through and cleaned up.

The below blog posts courtesy of Catalogue of Organisms look at two different wastebasket taxa, the Amaurobioidea superfamily of spiders, and the huge order of fishes, Perciformes. I don't know if this would be of interest to anybody here, but I thought I would note it for its taxonomic and systematic relevance.

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2008/08/amaurobioidea-rummaging-through.html (NSFF&S)

http://catalogue-of-organisms.blogspot.com/2008/12/bush-at-top-of-tree.html

So, I was talking on IRC with Burns and a couple other people last night, and we came around to the topic of things I have written. The Reverse Brainwashing essay was mentioned, and I put in a word for the Unintelligent Design rant I wrote years ago. Both of those things can be found if you search my old B_M_W account.

One thing that people here have not seen is The Process of Sustaining, and upon hearing about it and reading it, several people urged me to post it on the forums, as well as write a new chapter to address emergence.

The Process was written 2 years ago, in June 2006. I was at a Natural Resources camp in Wisconsin, doing some coursework that needed to be finished before heading off to Europe for 6 weeks later that summer. Here I was in a forest setting, sleeping in cabins near a beautiful clear lake, learning about forestry, wildlife biology, ecology and other topics. It was the perfect setting for some transcendent thinking. I can still clearly remember the SMELL of those cabins, and when I do it makes me shiver, makes me want to go back, the memory is so comfortable.

One night I was sitting on the computer in the main lodge, talking to LHX and procrastinating on sleep. The doors were open, and a cool breeze was drifting in from the lake. I could hear a loon calling, and if you have ever heard a loon you know just how soul reaching and haunting its song can be. I can't remember what X and I were talking about, but suddenly I was in a moment of perfect clarity, and I just started....well, talking perfect truth. I was talking about Taking and Giving and energy transfer from feeding and sustenance and....I was in the zone. X lead me on till I was exausted and crying with joy.

The next morning I woke up and wrote this in one sitting. It is the closest thing I have to religion, and with the additions I am soon going to make it is the closest thing I know of to divinity in this universe.

~Kai

So, since I had no where to go yesterday, I made a thanksgiving stew. Its simple. Also, just increase the veggies and meat if you want more, but this meal is for one.

A package of precut stewing beef. Perfect sized for this.
Clove or two of garlic, minced
A smallish sweet onion, minced
two carrots, peeled and cubed
Celery (to your liking) cubed
mushrooms cubed
some salsa (tomato salsa, not verde)
water
olive oil

spices
basil
rosemary
parsley
sage
1 bay leaf
thyme
black pepper
cayenne pepper
kosher salt

Brown the meat in the saucepan with the olive oil, onions and garlic. Add the vegetables and spices with water. I put in some leftover salsa and it turned out awesome. Simmer the SOAB for 2 hours. The broth should be rich and flavorful. Make sure to remove the bayleaf before eating.

It serves well in a bowl, because the broth is like a soup. You could probably add cubed potatoes too, or peas.

Chris Hedges is also the author of American Fascists: Christian Right and the War on America. In this book, he is arguing something that I have thought for a while now, that the new athiests are religions fundamentalists in many ways. I'm reminded of Dawkins' "Brights". In the introduction he asks the reader to reject the 'utopian' visions that fundamentalists of all types share, and face the coming reality.

I find myself deeply interested in the works of a person who can argue against both Christian and atheist fundamentalism. It shows deeper intelligence than most people display, and mirrors many of my own beliefs.

I need to read it now, after I finish The Selfish Gene, of course.

The contents make me feel both wise and dirty.

For a long time I put off reading this book because I hate HATE Dawkins' "Brights", I despise them as much as I do fundies of any religion. However, the book has some good ideas in it.

The main premise of the book is that biology, and organisms, are protective structures for modern forms of the original replicators, now DNA. The whole reason for everything extra to that replication process is facilitation of the replication, all the way up to human behavior.

Now, I'm not sure I agree completely with his main premise, mostly because I'm so tired of how far some athiest idiots take this. However, Dawkins makes it clear that the selfishness of our genes should NOT be any basis for morality. It is important to be aware of the latent selfishness so you can correct for it.

Thats about all I've gotten out of it so far but I am only a 4th of the way through.

http://www.mapress.com/zootaxa/2008/f/zt01908p067.pdf

I just received this from my professor. Its pretty exciting for taxonomists, because this revision of the International Code of Zoologic Nomenclature (ICZN) will allow for names published in electronic formats to be recognized.

Meaning: Low cost, paperless publication of new species descriptions. This is especially important in invertebratology, and entomology, where new species are being described all the time. Making it easier to publish new species descriptions by allowing electronic format will hopefully mean that more new species descriptions will be published. Many times, its a matter of cost, time, and effort for someone to publish a new species, especially for third world areas of the globe. As you know, I had been working on a new species till I realized how little time I have and how much work it is.

Furthermore, the electronic publishing of new species means A) instantaneous knowlege of the new species across the world and B) easy dissemination of the new species information. If you look at the nomenclatural background information of many older species, they have a long long list of synonyms after the currently recognized name. Those are all previous descriptions and changes in taxonomy, often because people working on the same organism across the world were unable to communicate. Since the onset of the internet, this confusion does not happen much anymore (thank fuck).

This is all good stuff for taxonomists, and no, it doesn't remove the peer review process, just makes the actual publishing process easier. Journals like Zootaxa are trying to go almost completely electronic (for good reason), and this will help.

I don't know if we've ever had a thread about this on here, but I thought I might bring it up because of the very different filters that other people have around here, different perspectives and different ideas.

So what is Chi? Is it actual manipulation of internal energy? Is it some sort of psychosomatic effect? Something is going on when I visualize chi manipulation and while I'm going with psychosomatic right now, I would like to hear other peoples opinions about it. There also seems to be some deep health benefits of the sustained practice of Chi Gung, what is that from? I hear stories about older people, well into their 70s, who were once in poor health and after several months of chi gung practice have recovered from intense arthritis, and so on.

(Formerly Known as "I just discovered a new species today.")


ASK ME ANYTHING!!1

[the biggest incentive for someone to buy a latrine in Benin was to feel royal, because the royal family had one. It was a question of pride and status, it wasn't about health. Health messages never work, because nobody wants to be nagged, even when they've got the evidence in front of them.]

From a conversation with the author of The Big Necessity: the unmentionable world of human waste and why it matters (bolding for emphasis)

 

You found in your research there's no single solution. Why not?

    The answer is not that everybody should have a sewer or everyone should have a toilet. That is simply impractical, and most countries can't afford it. Culturally, in sanitation, we're very different around the world. People have different attitudes to hygiene and toilets. Some countries are fecal-phobic and some countries are not. China is quite at home with excrement, and uses it as fertilizer, whereas Indians are not. They're quite averse to any use of human waste.

    In Benin, Africa, some very interesting research was done into what would make people buy a latrine. Mothers, who didn't have a latrine, could see that their kids were getting sick every week with diarrhea. They were spending money on medicine, and their kids weren't going to school, but they still wouldn't buy a latrine.

    An academic named Mimi Jenkins discovered that the biggest incentive for someone to buy a latrine in Benin was to feel royal, because the royal family had one. It was a question of pride and status, it wasn't about health. Health messages never work, because nobody wants to be nagged, even when they've got the evidence in front of them.

    So telling people, "This is where the cholera is coming from," doesn't have as much impact as appealing to their pride?

    Exactly. It's what I call the "doctors who smoke" understanding of people. Doctors who smoke know it's bad for them, yet they still do it. What a lot of sanitation activists are saying is that we have to make people want toilets. It has to be something they aspire to and desire.

    Isn't part of that incentive making defecating in the outdoors unappealing?

    Yeah, and there's a very interesting movement going on in many developing countries, including India, Cambodia and Bangladesh, called Community Led Total Sanitation. It appeals to people's sense of disgust.

    A few visitors will go to a village, and the villagers will want to show off their village to the guests. They'll take them around the village, and then at the end of the tour, the visitors will say, "Well, yes, that's nice, but can we see your open defecation grounds?"

    Because they're polite, the villagers will take them there. The technique is to make people stand there and confront it, to not be able to turn away from the fact that they're shitting in the open, and that their kids are tramping it back into the village, and that they're all eating it. Someone calculated that people in villages who are doing open defecation are probably ingesting 10 grams of shit a day. That's pretty disgusting.

    People will run off and dig latrines. Once the whole village is cleaned up, nobody will want to be the dirty person in the village. And once the village is cleaned up, the clean village will be in competition with the next village, and that village will want to clean up. It's a chain reaction.

Found via Overcoming Bias

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/the-dark-side.html

Just an interesting blog article from Overcoming Bias on lying and scales of lying.

AKA a pot of crock. My parents keep sending these kitchen appliances. I think it is a hint I need to eat more. I am grateful, its a rather cool beast.

However, I don't have the slightest clue what I should cook in it. I know the general stuff that can be cooked in it, but I don't know what to make.

Ideas?