Homer Simpson, the truth

As Homer Simpson once cried: "OH NO, THE TRUTH!" Quite. Who needs it?

tempest quotes

Bob Dylan's new album 'Tempest' resulted in my stumbling across a few The Tempest quotes....

• “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” 
• “What's past is prologue.” 
• “Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone.”

Organic food study | Science | guardian.co.uk

Organic food no better for you, suggests US study | Science | guardian.co.uk

Don't fully agree with the headline 'no better than you' since the main point is " Organic produce and meat typically is no better for you than conventional food when it comes to vitamin and nutrient content, although it does generally reduce exposure to pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to a US study."  I personally was always skeptical about the nutrition argument, but would think reducing exposure to pesticides, and especially antibiotic and horomone treated meat, were anyway the best reasons for organic. Furthermore it could be argued that even though both non-organic and organic are within safety levels, one would hope the safety margin might be greater for organic, and even the farms themselves might be more scrutinized, even perhaps more reliable, since generally smaller, and having to meet a higher standard.

The original study is referenced here , and the exact conclusion is perhaps more open than the newspaper articles suggest:
Conclusion: The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

random quote - woody allen

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon

thought : happiness writes white

Encountered in latest Martin Amis, book, but not from him....but a poignant thought - "Happiness writes white"....there is no need, nor tools, to record the good times properly...

Though, if writing is a drive for immortality, to 'remember the me that was' - then how crushingly tragic if the very moments worth living for, are the ones that aren't written down...

And they lived happily ever after....  what more do we really need to know?

random poem : Ambulences, Philip Larkin

Ambulances


Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

exposing rhetoric...when the going gets tough

Since they definitely work to some extent, it's probably a good thing to be aware of, and alert for, rhetorical devices.

Such perfect sounding phrases are very persuasive...but perhaps a useful counter action, to lay their actual logic bare, would be to swap the terms used, and to see if it is the content or the form which is swayin gus.

So, for example with the well known 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going' (using antimetabole - the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order), one could change it to produce a similar sound bite, but with the opposite moral  "when going on is stupid, the stupid go on".

It is perhaps understandable why Aristotle once suggested story tellers should be expelled from Athens, since manipulation via the telling, is the most insidious danger of all.

Amis on mortality

• "Your wonder of life increases towards the end because it is tinged with a leave-taking feeling that it's not going to be there for very much longer."
• [past becomes like an Empire....when there's more happened then to come] (paraphrase)
• Bullet train of midlife : "days drag by, and years fall away like leaves"

Martin Amis 

Seneca on this vale of tears

"What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears."

Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone unveiled

Samsung has unveiled its latest flagship smartphone - the Galaxy S3.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17935684

Another shiny-shiny new piece of gadgetry on the market, with the Galaxy S3 marking the next round of smartphone generations - quad-cores, super displays, mega megapixels etc.

Despite my fawning interest in the latest gadgets, I admit I do think that when it comes to smartphones I'm nearing 'feature-saturation'; while for years always had a personal wishlist of things I'd like to see on my phone, being honest currently in my tablet and phone I think I have pretty much all the things I'd really use (tho not of course all the things that would be nice to have). This is not to say all the generations have just been pointless gimickry, things like wifi tethering, good multitasking, media streaming and copious memory were all in my view valueable new elements, but overall I've suspected that the latest range of was due to include mere improvements on such existing funcitons, rather than additions of new really useful ones.  In particular I thought quad-cores weren't something I really needed on a phone. However, having looked at the latest S3 features, I think I might actually be proved wrong:

The most notable (to me) features :

• 4.8 screen with 309ppi Super AMOLED display. Probably about as large and detailed as need get in my view (maybe too large, will have to hold to decide)
• 1.4 GHz quad-core with 1GB of RAM
• smart power system whereby front camera tracks eyes and dims screen if detects you're not looking at it. Could be a nice feature if works seamlessly.
• video-in-corner to allow do other tasks in parallel. While might seem pretty useless, personally have often been watching a documentary or something and want to scribble a note, thought etc. in parallel.
• streaming to TV, streaming from PC
• 50 GB of dropbox space
• mirror function : send screen output to another device. Very cool for gaming (and reminds me of the main reason I broke with Apple: because on my IPOD touch the TV out was disabled by fiat - but supported by hardware as evidenced by jailbreaked versions -  from outputting games to TV)
• 8MP camera with flash. Probably nearing as good as one can get with the squashed optics on a phone (at least without some new step change in technology)
• voice control seems to be the big new thing, and Samsung has it's own version S voice (to rival Apple's Siri) but I'm still not convinced this will really work out - tho admittedly have yet to try the latest systems
• some deal with renting movies via the phone (good when coupled with stream to tv option)
  

Apart from the ability to write a message without interrupting a video, the areas where I think such (and presumably other 2012) phones do stand out is in movies and gaming. As someone who often rents movies on itunes and connects my ipod to TV to play it back, the possibility to rent on the phone, and stream to the TV is very appealing. Furthermore as an occasional gamer, but not committed enough to buy the latest consoles, the play on screen with phone as controller, backed by high processing power, is indeed something that I woudl actually consider a bonus, and not just a gimmick.
And of course while happy enough with my current phone camera, 12MP plus flash,plus processing features while not a quantum step (and already probably in plenty of recent phones) does bring this area to perhaps it's final level.

So all in all surprisingly impressed by the latest Galaxy, and just hope that large screen fits in my Christmas stocking (and budget) :-)

news nibbling - think before you read

Throughout history information has been the driver of progress-  the more we knew, the more we could do. While in previous ages it was only a lucky elite who had the time and resources to be involved in this process , the impetus was always a common human drive, which is why the internet, perhaps the ultimate information gathering and disseminating technology, has been seized upon and spread into every area of modern life. We are hard wired by evolution, and encouraged by culture, to discover and learn, and the one hunger which is considered always 'good', is the hunger for knowledge.

But is it possible that we could have too much of a good thing? Reading an piece on concentration recently I identified all too well with the statistics on how much time is diverted into online distraction. While of course we all click occasionally on light and meaningless topics, funny youtube links etc. the real point is that most of this time is not necessarily spent on such frivolous 'junk' but on seemingly worthwhile matter, like news, comment or reports. But the article's description of 'the long tail of information porn' made me realise that ultimately there might be not too much difference between this supposedly worthy weighty stuff, and the lighter dross, since both tap into innate urges for the novel, the desire for new facts to tickle our fancy, even if an intellectual one. These cravings are now amply catered to via the internet, and it is perhaps worth considering if there are parallels between the way we satisfy, and satiate, ourselves informationally, and how modern advances allowed us to go from simply providing for, to pandering to, other urges. Our dispositions were shaped by our evolutionary history, and the problem arises when a drive matched to a scarce natural resource, is confronted with artificial plenty. The classic example of this is our taste for sugary and fat things, and how this healthy drive is driven unhealthily  haywire by the hyper-sources of these substances modern society has created: fast food to sweets. Even though we know too much is bad for us, we are driven to start, for evolutionary emotional reasons, and find it hard to stop for rational ones.

It is possible that a similar (if much weaker) story is now starting to play out with information. Last year I encountered for the first time the phrase 'psychological obesity' and it struck me as encapsulating the dangers perfectly. Could it be that we are getting so used to gorging ourselves on information, and over relying on the mechanisms which deliver it, that we are at risk of missing out on the real benefits that underlie it, and which made it an evolutionary goal? It seems ludicrous to suggest that more information is anything but a good thing, but maybe in harsher times and societies the same could be thought about food, and what would seem to be the insane possibility of eating too much. The point is what we learn is only in important in so far as it contributes to what we actually know, and what we can do with it. Just as food is only a resource to enable the production of energy, to be able to DO things, information and even knowledge itself is only a means to an end. Since it worked for most of our evolutionary history nature has used the shortcut of embedding in us the emotional drive for the means, but now that the normally required levels can be surpassed, we must use our rational self-control to focus on the meaning instead.  We need to realise that we cannot drift through the new oceans of information scooping up data like whales with plankton, since as in all areas, we can over consume and like the obese body disabled by too much resources, we won't be able to use even some of them properly.

There is however probably a psychological side to this problem, since apart from the drive for gain, their is our powerful aversion to loss. Faced with a deluge of data we need to choose what is most important and relevant to us, but to choose somethings is to discard others, and this we hate doing. In the material domain we (mostly) have grown to appreciate we can't actually have it all, at the same time, but we are less used to such limitations in our mental worlds. Furthermore this involves one of the more personal and poignant kinds of loss, since to choose to know is to choose what to be, and we are particularly reluctant to close off possible futures, possible selves. Choice is hard, which is why we find it easier to surf endlessly on the tsunami of information, rather than swim in any particular direction. We feel like we're doing valid travelling, but really we're going nowhere.

To really move forward we not only need to obtain information, we need to process it, and apart from the requirement of manageable amounts, we also need to develop the mental mechanisms and habits to do so properly. Again the internet and other technology are a double-edged sword, since while they provide us with valid and valuable tools and shortcuts, they do not (yet, and for the foreseeable future) provide the complete answer. To use data we need to know more than just how to access it, which webpage or search tool will find it for us, but how to interpret it, and how it relates. While I may not need to know the exact dates of events leading up to say the first world war, knowing where to find them will never allow me apply this information in another area. Only if I have analyzed the history, thought about the chronology, recognize the patterns, will I actually UNDERSTAND what is otherwise simply a sequence of events, and be able, for example, to spot parallels and resonances in current situations. Wikipedia means I do not need to clutter my mind with the minutiae, but I can only use it do to help me once I have already understood the meaning.

Unfortunately this takes time, and effort. We must choose what we want to know, and then educate ourselves, and there is no taskbar which can speed this process up for us, since we need to allow our minds to mull and manipulate the data, and bring its unparalleled pattern matching powers to bear. But in this too the mood of the internet is against us, because the constant drive for the new, means constant changeover, and little time for such consideration. I was struck once by a comment a travel blogger made to me about how even when writing about places and societies that were hundreds or even thousands of years old, in the blogosphere there was a mentality that if it was not immediate, not in real time, it somehow was less relevant. When writing about a trip along the ancient route of the silk road, he felt like there was a demand for him to post while on the move,, from phone or netcafe, even though the thing being written about had not changed for centuries. The web audience feels that anything written in the past or retrospect, is somehow already dated, and this is not just removed from what is needed for proper knowledge, but anathema to it.  I admit I succumb to this prejudice myself often enough, for example if choosing a new psychology book to read anything more than 10 years old feels somehow outdated and less worthwhile than a newer text. While of course theories develop, a classic remains a classic just because it achieves an insight that lasts, and it could be argued that a decade old book that is still around, has proved its worth by its endurance against something new which might be a flash in the pan. Ironically the effect of the modern zeitgeist is to trap us in the now, while the point of deep knowledge is to allow us to escape to the past and future as well.

So, the upshot of this is I feel that it wouldn't be a bad thing to impose on myself a bit of a 'digital diet'. Just as one can count calories to manage one's weight, I think one needs to become an information connoisseur. To know anything I need to accept I cannot know everything.

Terror Management Theory and God shaped holes

How awareness of our mortality may be a major driver of civilization
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climbing-mount-immortality&print=true
I particularly like the concept of "Terror Management Theory - awareness of one's mortality focuses the mind to create and produce to avoid the terror that comes from confronting the mortality paradox that would otherwise, in the words of the theory's proponents psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, reduce people to 'twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to the demands of their immediate surroundings.'"

This reminds me of the quote from Salmon Rushdie  about us all having a God shaped hole inside us which we are constantly trying to fill, and that art, creation, suggests itself to us for this purpose : "I, too, possess the same God-shaped hole. Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature"
 
When googling this, I found a follow up quote from Rushdie which is also worth repeating : "I used to say: "there is a God-shaped hole in me." For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important."

Samsung slogan : "Happy forever"

Like that one (seen on billboard in documentary in Seoul). Something forced smile asian about it, but still with an admirable optimism it would be wrong to scorn. Reminds me a bit of the "danger cliff" sign I  saw in china, with its cheery "nice to live!" accompanying exhortation. Happy forever, in fairy tale gadget land...

billboard philosopy : you're not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic

nice little quote which captures how easy it is to ignore our own role in problems, and blame other people.

Aristotle, actions speak louder than reasons

From Story, by Robin McKie :
"As Aristotle observed, why a man does a thing is of little interest once we see the thing he does. A character is the choices he makes to take the actions he takes. Once the deed is done his reasons why begin to dissolve into irrelevancy."

Life maybe, but probably not as we know it

The perennial issue of the possibility of life on other planets was in the news again with the report that estimated there might be tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way with the right (i.e. earthlike) temperature to support life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/28/billions-habitable-exoplanets-milky-way

While it's always thrilling to think about alien life, and day dream about interplanetary communication, unfortunately any hope of such 'contact' effectively ruled out not by fancy and fascinating questions of whether life could evolve elsewhere, and how it might do so, but by the much more mundane and boring issue of scale.

As the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy said, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space". The problem to me is not that there might not be aliens, but if there are they are probably to far away to ever meaningfully interact with them. The Milky Way is up to 200,000 light years across, which means even if there is a distribution of life throughout the galaxy, the chances are the worlds would be several thousand light years away. This would mean even if we did get a signal from somewhere else, it would take many thousands of years for any signal of ours to get there, and the same time again to get a response. This would be a true intergenerational conversation, the only real-world example of which that I can think of is Julius Caeser finding a letter from an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, and his reply being delivered to Hosni Mubarak.  And of course even if we did hear, and could return a "message", the odds are the original civilization wouldn't be around long enough to hear it. It's impossible to extrapolate from our own history general rules for how long a species, let alone a civilization, might exist, but it is reasonable to assume, from previous extinctions due to catastrophic events, and even our own unsustainable consumption of natural resources, that there is a limited 'window' during which any species capable of broadcasting an inter-stellar communication would actually exist, and that window would need to be exactly offset to our own window by the amount of time it takes for any signals to get here.
This is illustrated by perhaps the most insightful and deep element in the Star Wars movies, setting the events 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away'. Apart from being the ultimate disclaimer, it illustrates how much more advanced civilizations than our own, might be a possibility, but only in the distant past.

Overall i think there are 4 main points to consider when talking about 'aliens'.

1) What are the chances there is life somewhere else
Given the size of the universe, and the fact the life is at basis repeating regularities arising from the existing regularities of the universe, then I would think that it is a near certainty that life exists in many places, even if we might not at first recognize it as such
2) What are the chances of lifeforms we would recognize - i.e. animals
Again given that evolution is a regular process, then while it might proceed in different directions, at different rates, in other environments, it is reasonable to assume that if the starting regularities are similar, than some basic features, tendency to size, movement etc. would be common. So again it is highly likely that at somestage, somewhere, there are alien 'animals'
3) What are the chances of conscious life
This is a harder problem, since we don't know how or why we have consciousness, so can't determine how evolutionarily inevitable or likely it is. Personally I would be of the view that it is likely there is , at least one if of many, evolutionary chain of progression of the form reaction-movement-'intelligent' reaction-consciousness since only as part of such a chain does consciousness make sense, since I consider it too ingrained in us to be merely epiphenomenal. So the chances of this are also high, though of course the incidence might be significantly less than (2) and (1).
4) Would we ever interact with alien intelligent life
Unless there are ways to communicate and travel which circumvent the limitation the speed of light seems to place on distances between stars, then I think this last point is vastly less likely than any other, in fact as close to zero as is imaginable.
But of course the travel limitation only seems unlikely based on our current understanding of physics, and it would be arrogant to think this is anything but wildly imcomplete. Even still, the window of opportunity restriction would still apply, so overall I think the odds are between incredibly unimaginably unlikely, and not very likely at all.

At the end of the day, apart from the sensationalism, would proof of any of these points really matter?  (1) would be groundbreaking, but would it be any different from finding bacteria in volcanoes? (2) would be impressive, but any different from (1)? (3) Would be illuminating, since would show consciousness must have some inevitability to it, and be an insight into understanding how it comes about, but apart from confirming what we already suspect, unless we could examine a similar but different consciousness, just knowing about  it wouldn't help so much. Of course (4) , if at the impossible level of scientific fiction, would make a difference, since it would provide just the kind of similar but different examples of intelligent life that could help us understand better our own instance of it. But unfortunately this last point, the only one that really would make a difference, is impossibly unlikely.
ET phone home? Maybe, but if he could make the call, there'd probably be no one left around to answer it.

Napoleon Quote : understand the world of man's youth, understand the man

Napoleon said that, to understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty