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The America’s Cup

There’s a competition going on in San Francisco to decide the winner of the America’s Cup. Those people who do not have an interest in yachting may not have heard of it, but it is the Superbowl of the yachting world. Currently it is being fought out between Oracle Team USA and Emirates Team New Zealand. The New Zealand team currently lead 6 wins to 1. [Update: The score is now 6 – 2.]

For spectators on the shore yacht racing normally happens a long way off and with few visual clues as to what is happening and it is often next to impossible to tell who is leading and even who won the race. The yachts are visible as small white dots although the deployment of a spinnaker will swell the dots and may introduce a bit of colour, but the to-ing and fro-ing of the yachts is still difficult to decipher.

The America’s Cup is different in that technology has come to the spectators’ assistance. A view can be shown on television of the yachts as seen from a helicopter or motorboat shadowing the yachts, but it will still not be obvious who is leading, since when going upwind the yachts travel at a significant angle to their target course. At each side of the course the yachts must change direction, a procedure known as a ‘tack’. If both yachts are travelling on parallel courses it is possible for the trailing boat to appear to be leading.

So to help spectators the live view is overlaid with graphics which show each yacht’s distance from the mark (the target for this leg) or from the finish line if the leg is the last one. The graphics also show the boundaries of the course if the yachts are approaching them. The distance between the lines for the two yachts shown who is in the lead and by how much.

Ac45 — A graphic from an earlier America’s Cup Regatta race featuring the smaller AC45 yachts.

The graphics also show the yacht speeds though I’m not sure if that is the speed towards the mark or finish line or merely the straight line speed. Another thing that the graphics can show is any ‘bad air’ that the leading yacht is casting over the trailing yacht. The leading yacht’s sail disturbs the the air as it flows over it, and this disturbed air is less efficient at providing the trailing yacht with energy and so it tends to travel a little slower. The leading yacht is said to cover the trailing yacht and the trailing yacht will endeavour to escape the cover.

The most interesting times in a yacht race are when the vessels are rounding a mark. The graphics for this are a circle round the mark and a series of dots or blobs representing the yacht’s course, as if the yacht were dropping a bucket of dye every second. There is also a countdown clock indicating the number of seconds that one yacht is behind the other.

So there’s plenty of information about the races and it makes for fascinating viewing. (There are some people who still don’t get it and who watch it for 5 minute or so and then go and do something else, but then again, Formula 1 leaves me yawning). The course in San Francisco is very close to the shore and this does allow spectators a good view of the yachts, though I suspect that most of them will be keeping up to date via cellphones. There’s an app for it!

Race six, won by Emirates Team New Zealand — The huge number of on course spectators can be seen in the bacground

[Update: I just watched latest race. Oracle Team USA won this after a near capsize by Emirates Team New Zealand.]

The class of yacht being used in the America’s Cup in San Francisco is designated as AC72. These are huge catamarans (dual-hulled yachts) with fixed sails and full of the latest technology, computers and hydraulics. A failed battery cost Emirates Team New Zealand one race!

The yachts are spectacular in action as they rise up out of the water on hydrofoils, which reduces hull drag to nothing and allows the yachts to reach speeds of up to 50mph (44 knots). This does not come without its dangers and several of the yachts have dipped their bows into the water leading to at least two incidents where yachts have “pole-pitched” and tipped over in one case killing one of the crew. In both cases the yachts were severely damaged. Emirates Team New Zealand dropped their bows into the water in one case but appeared in no danger of flipping over. Oracle Team USA were one of the teams whose yacht was almost destroyed in an incident.

Capsize — Oracle Team USA yacht capsizes

The yachts are filled with technology and are very technical to race, apparently, and have proved very popular in San Francisco with huge crowds turning out to watch action. Millions more are of course glued to their TV screens and cellphones. And this, below, is what it is all about.

Hey Noni No

It was a lover and his lass,
   With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o’er the green cornfield did pass,
   In springtime, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.

I haven’t written a poem for a long time and I was lacking a topic for today, so I started on a poem about the spring. However it didn’t work, wasn’t working, so I gave up and quoted the bard, above.

Spring seems to engender creativity to match the burgeoning growth and fecundity of nature. As the days get lighter in the mornings the birds seem to get louder and louder as well as earlier and earlier, so that you almost feel guilty when indulging in a lie in.

The birds are of course breeding, nest building, and raising young. Round here that seems to mean that the Tuis rattle through the air, crashing from tree to tree. Tuis are not clumsy flyers, but are noisy ones. This means that the smaller and quieter birds get on with their business less noticeably, though a fantail was curiously looking at me while he was hopping about in the bushes. Who knows what he was up to?

The feathered pommie immigrants are mostly songbirds, and so thrushes and blackbirds are evident in the dawn chorus. Oh, and there are plenty of chattering sparrows here. I may have mentioned this before but in the UK the sparrow population is still declining, and if the sparrows here continue to prosper, it could be that we could send some back to repopulate their original homelands.

We have had a really good spring so far and all the plants and animals are a week or two ahead of where they would normally be. In particular the grapevines are reported to be doing really well this year. The danger is that a wintery throwback may occur, nipping all the buds off the sprouting plants, including the vines, killing early insects and dooming some of the new chicks to starvation. I understand that early and luxurious growth is not necessarily good news for the wine industry either, since restricted growth concentrates the flavours or something.

Grape Vine (Photo credit: Fire Engine Red)

The wine industry use helicopters to reduce the effects of late frosts. Hiring a helicopter for a few hours is apparently a cost-effective way of fighting frosts. This has led to conflicts between wineries and their neighbours in some places – who wants to be woken by a helicopter at 2am?

Hmm, well, I started talking about spring and seems to have moved on to talking about wine. One more comment about wine before I move on. New Zealand has many wineries and most welcome visitors to taste and buy wines. Many are small and welcoming and others are large and welcoming.

One of the smaller ones is Salvare. We enjoyed a platter of food there on the deck overlooking the vineyards. We also sampled their wines and their olive oil in a very relaxed atmosphere.

One of the larger ones is Mission Estate. Mission Estate was set up by a religious order and is a luxurious place with an award-winning restaurant and is located on the outskirts of Napier. We had tea there in the grounds of the splendid house overlooking the vineyards and Napier. There was a wedding being hosted there in that lovely environment.

If you go there be sure to see the Quiet Room which reflects the religious nature of the founders of the Estate. While we were there I bought a very nice bottle of wine, ironically produced in Marlborough and not Hawkes Bay and I would have bought the t-shirt if there had been one in my size!

These two wineries are merely examples of ones that we have visited. There are many, many others and scattered amongst the vineries are artisan breweries, olive oil producers and similar enterprises most of whom welcome visitors, (though opening times vary).

Back to spring in Wellington. Apart from the deafening clamour of the birds and their to-ing and fro-ing, spring is evident in the foliage. The lawn, which I last cut a week or two is showing a green flush already and the bushes are all sprouting pale green leaves. There is a small bush by our front door which is home to stick insects later in the year. Being a northern hemisphere species it loses its leaves in the winter and becomes stick-like and dead-looking and is now bursting into leaf. No stick insects yet, though.

Water spheres on spring larch foliage (Photo credit: OpenEye)

The temperatures have been high for this time of year, mostly. Clear skies have meant the occasional nippy morning and cars left out have had films of ice on their windscreens, but generally spring this year has been very pleasant. However, we are currently heading for a reminder that winter is not long gone, since the forecast is for wild weather on Tuesday and Wednesday. Batten down the hatches!

Nothing

Nothing is an interesting concept with many different aspects. Maths, science, philosophy and many other fields of endeavour have their own overlapping concepts of nothing, zero, null or just the absence of anything.

Some computer languages have a concept of ‘null’. This is not the same as the concept of ‘zero’. To use the usual analogy of pigeonholes, numbers and other things in computers are conceptually stored like objects stored in pigeonholes. Each pigeonhole must have a location, sort of like ‘third row down, fourth hole in the row’. A pigeonhole could be empty or it could contain a number or a string of characters or more complicated objects that the computer recognizes. It could optionally have a label so that it can be found quickly.

A computer moves things around and in the process it manipulates them. Given this analogy, what is ‘nothing’ to a computer? It could mean several things. It could mean the number zero, stored in a pigeonhole or it could refer to an ’empty string’ stored in a pigeonhole. (An ’empty string’ is like the object ‘where’ when the individual letters ‘w’, ‘h’, ‘r’, and the two ‘e’s have been removed. It is represented by two ). It can be a more complicated object that hasn’t been completely set up. Alternatively it could refer to an empty pigeonhole. It could even refer to a label which has not yet been allocated to a pigeonhole. Pity the poor programmer who has to keep all these ‘nothings’ separate in his or her mind (and a few others that I’ve not mentioned!).

In mathematics we have the concept of zero, but this is a fairly newly introduced concept. Some number systems, such the Roman Numeral system do not have a zero, and it was a big conceptual jump to add zero to the mathematical number systems. After all, what do you hold when you have two oranges and you give them away? Nothing! You can’t see zero oranges in your hands, unless you are a modern mathematician of course.

So mathematically ‘nothing’ is zero then? It could be, though ‘nothing’ could be integer zero, ‘0’, rational zero, ‘0/any number’, real number zero, ‘0.0’, complex zero, ‘0 + 0i’, or many many other versions of zero. Maths also has a concept of a set, which is just a collection of objects, which can be pretty much anything. An analogy often used is to liken a set to a bag which contains any sort of object. Statisticians are fond of sets which comprise a set of balls which can be of more than one colour but are usually otherwise identical. If all the balls are removed from the bag, what do you have? A bag with nothing in it! It is usually referred to as an ’empty set’. Note the similarity with the ’empty string’ mentioned above. There’s nothing coincidental there.

There are other sorts of ‘nothing’ in mathematics. A mathematical ‘function’ is a way of relating ‘variables’. The details don’t matter, just the fact that functions have ‘zeros’. They may have one or more zeros or they may have none. Having no zeroes could be considered a sort of ‘nothing’, in a way, though the functions in question are no less proper functions than any other. I’m sure that there are other more esoteric ‘nothings’ in maths.

In physics things should be clearer, right? In physics a vacuum is created is all matter is removed, leaving … nothing. Except that it appears to be impossible to actually remove everything from a container leaving nothing. Even the best pumps will leave a considerable numbers of atoms floating around inside the container. Other methods of emptying the container may reduce slightly the number of atoms in it, but we can’t even reach the very low densities found in the gas clouds visible to astronomers. Even in the depths of space between the galaxies we still find the occasional atom, usually of hydrogen.

Vacuum Pump (Photo credit: Sascha Grant)

Maybe we should look between the atoms for nothing? Most people have an image of an atom as a sort of miniature solar system with the nucleus standing in for the sun and the electrons standing in for the planets. Unfortunately the analogy breaks down if you look closely. Electrons are only found in certain orbits around an atom and even that is an over-simplification. Their location depends on a probability function and in some views this means that the electron is sort of smeared out in space and doesn’t have a strict location and you can’t say specifically that it is ‘there’ at a particular location, only that it has a particular possibility of being there.

One consequence of this is that you can’t say that is isn’t at a particular location, so it is impossible to declare that there is nothing at a particular point in space at any one time. If you consider all the particles in the universe, they all have a probability of being there, so you might be surprised not to find a particle there at a particular moment in time.

Vacuum polarization (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In addition to this, I have read article which describe ’empty space’ as a seething mass of pseudo particles or virtual particles. These come in pairs of particle and anti-particle which are continually coming into existence, mutually annihilating each other out of existence again. Viewed in this way it is difficult to describe ’empty space’ as containing nothing, so we still haven’t found ‘nothing’. Although physics has the concept it is hard to find a physical instance of it.

Cosmologists talk about the “Big Bang” when everything came into existence. Before the Big Bang, they say, there was nothing. Nothing! But what does this mean. I like to think of it by analogy. If you take a piece of paper and draw a circle on it, you can consider this circle to contain all space and time and everything that exists in space and time. If you draw a line horizontally through it you can label the big inside the circle as ‘time’. Note that the line should not extend beyond the circle.

The point where the line reaches the left hand side of the circle is the Big Bang. The point where the line reaches the right hand side of the circle is the point where everything collapses on itself and space and time cease to exist.

Some cosmologists think that there will not be a collapse, so the curve is not a circle but a curve open to the right. This doesn’t affect my argument – everything and every time is included inside the curve.

If you now draw a line vertically, not extending beyond the curve, and label it ‘space’. If you move the line to the left, the graphical distance between the top point and the bottom shrinks. Moving the line to the left moves it back along the time axis and represents an earlier state of everything. When the line just touches the curve the point of intersection of the two lines represents the Big Bang.

What about the points outside of the curve? This is where the analogy breaks down. Since we have included all space and time inside the curve the points outside the curve do not represent real points in space and time at all. In short, they do not exist. We could loosely say that nothing exists outside the curve of space and time, but that is not true. ‘Nothing’ is a concept based on space and time, being the opposite of ‘something’ or the potentiality for ‘something’ and as such needs a space-time framework to mean anything. If there is no space and time, there can be no ‘something’ and therefore ‘nothing’ is meaningless. Beginners in science and astronomy might ask what is beyond the boundary of the universe, but the question doesn’t mean anything. The universe contains everything.

If there were other universes, with their own space and time, they would have to be right alongside our universe (that is an analogy of course – language fails us in this situation) as there is nothing to be between the two universes. If you were able to travel from one universe to the other, a concept which I don’t believe stands up to examination, you probably wouldn’t notice the difference. Maybe nothing is a sort of inability to be. But that language implies an intent, which implies a lot of other things and maybe leads to pantheism and I don’t wish to go there.

Absolutely Nothing is Allowed Here (Photo credit: Vicki & Chuck Rogers)

Well, I’ve used over 1300 words to talk about ‘nothing’, so I will stop here. What comes after the end of this post? Why, nothing, of course!

Why does cancer spread?

The Human Body -- Cancer — The Human Body — Cancer (Photo credit: n0cturbulous)

Everyone, I’m sure, knows of someone who has died of cancer. It’s a disease that is wide-spread and seems to be more common now that other diseases are coming under control. It may be that cancer is certain to appear in the human body if it lives long enough. There’s a cheery thought.

Wikipedia describes cancer as follows: “known medically as a malignant neoplasm, (it) is a broad group of diseases involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumours, and invade nearby parts of the body”.

There’s two parts of this definition. Firstly there is the unregulated cell growth and secondly there is the spread of the growth to other parts of the body. The unregulated cell growth is usually attributed to a number of causes, but the mechanism is usually given as damage to the genetic material. The causative agent whatever it might be, damages the genetic material and this results in a huge proliferation of cells.

I write computer programs as tools for doing my job. Each program ends up as a string of data which a human has a hard time decoding, though of course the computer hardware has no problems. The effect of changing a single bit (actually, a byte) of a program would almost certainly cause it to crash. In so far as the analogy that the genetic code resembles a computer program holds, this indicates that a random change to the genetic code would most likely result in the death of the cell. It would require a specific hit, to say a piece of code that control the termination of a loop that would let the program “grow out of control”.

Out of memory ATM (Photo credit: RuiPereira)

I’d guess, from a position of almost total ignorance, that changes to the cells in the body occur all the time. Changes happen to the genetic code in a cell, and it almost certainly dies. (A side question is : what exactly happens to a cell when it dies? Presumably some process or other ‘detects’ the death and breaks it up? Or does the first failure cause other processes to fail until the integrity of the cell is lost? Lots of questions). However, unless the failure is dramatic, explosion-like rather than simple deflation, it should not affect its neighbouring cells, should it? So in general the death of a single cell is probably not noticeable.

Going back to the computer program analogy, in a computer there are dozens, if not hundreds of programs running all the time, but the user is not aware of any other than the one he is interacting with. Equating cells with computer programs, it is most likely that a random change would cause a program or a cell to die, with little effect on the computer or body as a whole.

Facit computer memory (Photo credit: liftarn)

All the programs running in a computer need ‘memory’ to run in, and there is a limited supply of memory, so (conceptually at least) one program is given the task of managing the memory allocations. Damaging the memory manager program could theoretically lead to it repeatedly allocating memory until there was none free for allocation. The computer would, once again, crash. If a program is damaged in a particular way it could ask repeatedly for memory and again cause itself or other programs. or even the whole computer to crash.

In a living organism there does not seem to be a single equivalent of the ‘memory manager’ or ‘resource manager’. In a living organism everything seems to be done by consensus between cells. (That is both anthropomorphic and probably naive, but it will do, I think).

So, although I’d estimate that the vast majority of changes to the genetic code would result in cell death and nothing else, a very, very small number of changes could result in the cell soaking up as much of the cell-level resources as it can and damaging the cell itself, its neighbouring cells or the whole organism.

That, however, is not cancer. For damage to result in a cancer it has to damage the cell in a particular way. In a computer, cancer would be analogous to a program continually creating copies of itself and using up all the system resources, which would result in the system crashing. Almost all cells have the ability to duplicate themselves, but whether or not they do replicate is, so far as I know, determined by the conditions in the cell itself and conditions in its environment, ie the surrounding cells, possibly signalled by chemicals or chemical gradients.

For a cell to become cancerous, it first of all must be inclined to duplicate itself and it would also have to be able to ignore any signals from its environment. The damage to the genetic structure to achieve this seems to me to be remarkably specific. Its like damaging a computer program in such a way as to destroy a control loop. Possible, but not very likely.

Then there is the issue of metastasis. This is how cancer spreads. It first of all attacks the boundary of the organ it is embedded in, then some cancer cells migrate into other organs. Interestingly, when they start to form a cancerous tumour in the new organ, they are still identifiable as cells from the original organ.

Think for a moment about what that means. A cancer which metastasizes has to have its genetic material damaged in such a way that it can do all of the following :

divide in an uncontrolled manner
attack the walls of the organ it is contained in
migrate to other organs (and it can be very specific about the organs it migrates to)
settle there and start to divide again

That’s a remarkably specific set of actions to occur as the result of damage. Damage usually results in less efficient operation, both of computer programs and bodies. Of course the damage doesn’t have to create these action ‘programs’ in the genetic material. They may be already there. All that the damage needs to do is somehow kick off those actions in sequence to cause the cancer to form and metastasize. To a programmer it would look like a small chunk of code to call those routines which I’ve called ‘actions’. The only other time in one’s life that one’s body experiences explosive growth and cell migration is in the womb and as a young child. One can imagine that damage could somehow kick off the genes or part of the genetic code that was used when one was a developing foetus.

This is easier to contemplate than damage which somehow creates the whole process from scratch. It does imply that the damaging agent somehow attacks a specific part of the genetic material and replaces it with some very specific other material that has the specific effect of kicking off explosive growth and metastasis.

I’m not geneticist or cancer specialist of course, so my musings above may be way, way off beam. They could be and probably are complete rubbish. I can’t and won’t defend them if anyone were to attack them. My main thesis is that it seems incredibly unlikely that damage to the genetic material could cause the specific effects of cancer, which are uncontrolled growth and metastasis.

Yet cancer happens and happens frequently and in varied ways. There are many sorts of cancer and they appear to be often triggered by specific stimuli. All my arguments above founder on that logical rock.

Earthquakes

This week’s subject pretty much suggested itself. There I was, sitting at my desk, and suddenly I felt this rolling, shaking sensation. Well, I feel it every time a truck goes past, but this time the shaking continued and it became apparent that this was an earthquake. It measured 6.6 on the earthquake scale and was the biggest one I can remember for a long time. Fortunately we were not at the epicentre and no one was killed. Those living close to the epicentre had a rougher time than we did and many houses were damaged, though only one appears to have been severely damaged.

(Note: Images in this post are not from the Wellington earthquakes that I am talking about in this post).

Since we are prone to earthquakes here the children in school are drilled in what to do when an earthquake strikes. I particularly like the idea expressed by one child that “earthquakes cause salamis”. (See the second video on the page that is linked to above.)

Earthquake Drill (Photo credit: Benjamin Chun)

The previous earthquake happened when I was at home. Instinctively my wife ran for the door. I equally instinctively rushed to stop the TV from toppling! It’s funny what you do in an emergency.

Luckily no one was seriously hurt in the earthquakes though people in lifts (elevators) and at the top of high buildings were shaken about a bit. Apparently lifts (elevators) are designed to stop moving if there is a big quake.

In the city nothing much was damaged, although a lift (elevator) shaft which was damaged in an earlier quake is scheduled to be removed and one ‘lane’ (pedestrian access between buildings) in the city centre was taped off by authorities. Last time there was a certain amount of damage but nothing significant, though people were sent home so that the buildings could be checked. A rugby test match between New Zealand and Australia may be cancelled. That’s classified as a Big Thing round here.

All in all, people have taken the earthquake in their stride, though news pictures showed some people who appeared to be in shock. The one injury that I heard of was one woman who tried to dive under her desk and missed cracking her head against it. I saw a picture of two girls hiding under a desk with a bottle of wine. That’s apparently what they had been doing all afternoon. One guy texted from the airport and said that he would be glad to get up into the air. (As it happens the airport stopped flights in and out for a while, but they soon caught up with the backlog).

Naturally people wanted to go home to be with their families and to check that their houses had not been damaged. This led to the roads out of and around the city becoming gridlocked. I didn’t want to get caught up in that so I hung around until just before the time that rush hour usually happens and my trip home was in fact easier than usual. I did wonder what would happen if a significant earthquake or after shock happened while I was travelling at 100kph on the motorway! Also, there is a part of my route that lies under a motorway bridge, and there was a chance that I’d get stuck at the traffic lights. Fortunately they were showing green so I did not have to stop under the heavy concrete spans of the motorway. That would have been scary.

The thing about earthquakes is that you don’t know how powerful they are going to be. You don’t know if it is going to be a jiggle and a roll or whether it is going to rip the building apart underneath you. I find them scary and exhilarating. After one is over people are often more relaxed than before it, and gather to exchange news and ‘war stories’. At least, that is so in the earthquakes that I have so far experienced. But they have been relatively benign.

Unfortunately this was not true nearer the epicentre where almost all the houses had some damage, though no serious injuries have been suffered and no fatalities have happened.

Wellington office after earthquake.

Why do things make sense?

Make it make sense (Photo credit: edmittance)

Things pretty much make sense. If they don’t we feel that there is a reason that they don’t. We laughingly make up goblins and poltergeist to explain how the keys came to be in the location in which they are finally found, but we, mostly, have an underlying belief that there are good, physical reasons why they ended up there.

Things appear to get a little murkier at the level of the quantum, the incredibly small, but even there, I believe that scientists are looking for an explanation of the behaviour of things, no matter how bizarre. One of the concepts that appears to have to be abandoned is that of every day causality, although scientists appear to be replacing that concept with a more probabilistic version of the concept of causality. But I’m not going to go there, as quantum physics has to be spelled out in mathematics or explained inaccurately using analogies. I note that there is still discussion about what quantum physics means.

English: Schrödinger equation of quantum mecha... — English: Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics (1927). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We strive for meaning when we consider why things happen. When a stone is dropped it accelerates towards the earth. This is observation. We also observe the way in which it accelerates and Sir Isaac Newton, who would have known from his mathematics the equation which governed this acceleration, had the genius to realise that the mutual attraction of the earth and the stone followed an inverse square law and, even more importantly, that this applied to any two objects which have mass in the entire universe.

So, that’s done. We know why stones fall and why the earth unmeasurably and unnoticeably jumps to meet it. It is all explained, or is it? Why should any two massy objects experience this attraction? Let’s call it ‘gravity’, shall we? How can we explain gravity?

Well, we could say that it is a consequence of the object having mass, or in other words, it is an intrinsic property of massy objects, which if you think about it, explains nothing, or we can talk about curvature of space, which is interesting, but again explains nothing.

Curved Spaces (Photo credit: Digitalnative)

Can you see where I am going with this? Every concept that we consider is either ‘just the way things are’ or requires explanation. Every explanation that we can think up either has to be taken as axiomatic or has to be explained further. Nevertheless most people act as if they believe that there is a logical explanation for things and that things ultimately make sense.

It is possible that there is no logical explanation of things, and that the apparent relationships between things is an illusion. I once read a science fiction story where someone invented a time machine. Everywhere the machine stopped there was chaos, because there were no laws of nature and our little sliver of time was a mere statistical fluke. When they tried to return to the present they could not find it. This little story demonstrates that although we appear to live in a universe that is logical and there appears to be a structure to it, this may just be an illusion.

If we do live in a logical universe we not be able to access and understand the basis and structure of it. We may see things “through a glass darkly”. We may be like the inhabitants of Plato’s Cave. Everything we experience we experience through our senses, so our experience of the world is already second-hand and for many purposes we use tools and instruments to view the world around us. Also, our sense impressions are filtered, modified and processed by our brains in the process of experiencing something. We can take prescribed or non-prescribed drugs which alter our view of the world. So how can we know anything about the universe.

Alternatively there may be order to the universe. There may be ‘laws of nature’ and we may be slowly discovering them. I like the analogy of the blanket – a blanket is held between us and the universe but we are able to poke holes in it. Each hole reveals a metaphoric pixel of information about what lies behind the blanket. Over the years, decades, centuries and millennia we have poked an astronomical number of holes in the blanket, so we have a good idea of the shape of what lies behind it.

Cámara estenopéica / Pinhole camera (Photo credit: RubioBuitrago)

So why do things make sense? Is it because there is a structure to the universe that we are either discovering or fooling ourselves into believing that we are discovering, or is there no structure whatsoever and any beliefs that there are illusions. Maybe there’s another possibility. Maybe the universe does have the structure but it is an ‘ad hoc’ structure with no inherent logic to it all!

Highly Illogical (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Banding together

Flag ~ Romania, Roumanie — Flag ~ Romania, also by chance the Tawa colours.

Our local rugby team has made it to the final of a competition (they won!) and naturally supporters are getting ready for the final match. They are organising coaches to take people to the match and no doubt there will be a good turn out. This got me thinking about how humans like to form bands and groups and supporter groups.

I think that banding together is at heart a self-protection thing. A human who belongs to a group gets supported by the group and reciprocally supports the group himself. In many cases the group is in competition against other groups of humans for a scarce resource such as food or territory, or in the case of sport points on the board of the elusive trophy. There is a synergy when people work together.

It’s not always humans versus humans though. A group may be formed to overcome some physical difficulty or to provide something that an individual can’t provide or achieve by themselves. That’s why travellers form caravans to cross deserts and a group of individuals might be able to buy a bigger boat together than they could have bought alone and take turns using it. Musicians of all genres usually form groups, at least to get started.

Forming a group allows individuals to specialise – in a hamlet or village one person becomes the smith, another the baker, another the mayor and another the constable, each person his or her particular skills in the role.

The role of supporters is to encourage and assist but not to actually take part in the contest or enterprise, but sometimes the line is blurred. For example the coach and trainer might not take part in a game, but in some ways they are part of the team. The supporters on the sidelines, yelling encouragement and advice, are even less part of the team, but they can certainly help out, and they form a larger group surrounding the team.

Sometimes, of course, two groups of supporters clash. This is generally agreed to be a bad thing, but if you take a step back and think about it, it is to be expected, but not encouraged. It is an unwritten but basic rule of sport that the conflict, physically at least, stay on the field of play. Non-physical conflict, such as chants, banners and team regalia, is permitted between opposing spectators and even encouraged. “Get behind the team” is a rousing call for supporters. No wonder the non-physical conflict fairly often becomes physical.

The biggest ‘teams’ are countries, which strike me as being somewhat artificial in this day and age. Can one supergroup really speak for people who might be thousands of miles away? There may be an aboriginal population in a country that has far more inhabitants of immigrant origins, and these people may not consider themselves to be truly part of the nation in which they reside. Some nomadic people may travel through several countries, and may not consider themselves to be a part of any of them. The sheer size of modern countries almost invites the formation of ethnically or geographically ‘seperatists’ groups.

Matthes -- Separatists at Coblenz (LOC) — Matthes — Separatists at Coblenz (LOC) (Photo credit: The Library of Congress)

Mankind probably started out as family groups, and were probably nomadic. When they settled down (perhaps as a result of developing agriculture) it would seem natural to settle down in larger groups, maybe two or three families to provide defence against those still travelling around. As mankind spread and became more numerous these little settlements would grow into towns, with inhabitants specialising into roles like the smith or baker mentioned above.

At some stage strong leaders became feudal lords. This appears to have been common, but was possibly not universal. Eventually the lords and barons gave their allegiance to a king or overlord and a number of small (by current standards) states were formed, sometimes based around a city as in Sparta in Greece or sometimes based in a geographical area. The debatably mythical Arthur around the 5th or 6th centuries in Britain was supposedly king of Britain, although at that time there were probably several kingdoms in what is now Britain, and Athelstan is usually considered the first true English king.

The nations of the world are these days largely static in shape and size, but they do still change now and then. Czechoslovakia split apart in 1993, and the Soviet Union (USSR) formed in 1922 and split up in 1991.

The next logical step in this process, one would have expected, would be the formation of a global entity, grouping the whole of mankind into one huge group, but this has not happened. There are a number of global entities, notably the United Nations, but they tend to concentrate on specific areas of endeavour rather than being the World Government that would have been expected. There are ‘blocs’ of similarly inclined countries but these also don’t have the spread of activities that would make them a ‘super-government’.

It may be that the only thing that would cause the formation of a super-group encompassing all of humanity would be an encounter with hostile and destructive aliens, but the chances of that would be very small.

Take me to your leader. iPhone 3GS (Photo credit: Kimb0lene)

Birthdays

Today (Sunday 28th July) is my birthday, which naturally had me pondering birthdays in general. In July I have my birthday, my son’s birthday is a few days earlier and my granddaughter’s is next month. It turns out that a friend of a Facebook friend also has her birthday today, on my birthday. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield was also born on my birthday. And finally, George, the latest addition to the royal family and third heir to the British throne was also born in July, the same month as me and my son.

The maths of birthdays is interesting. If you have 23 randomly selected people then the probability that at least two of them share a birthday is a shade greater than 50% (50.7297%). If you have 53 people the probability goes above 99%. This is known as the Birthday Problem or the Birthday Paradox, though it is not really a paradox, I believe. There are a number of simplification used in calculating the above. For instance, it assumes that all birth dates are equally probable, but they are not, and it also ignores leap days. Also mothers can sometimes, within bounds, select the day that their baby is born, especially for at risk babies and this potentially could cause a skew in the probabilities.

English: The birthday paradox: p(n) represents... — English: The birthday paradox: p(n) represents the probability that in a room with n people, some two (or more) will share the same birthday; q(n) represents the probability that in a room with n people, that at least one person will have the same birthday as a previously selected person. 中文: 生日悖论 2个人生日相同和跟某人生日形同的概率变化 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some people have two birthdays. Well, the Queen has a real birthday and an official one, so that celebrations of her birthday would not fall too early in the year, but later, when the weather would hopefully be better. Unfortunately that means that in the Southern Hemisphere her birthday falls in the depths of winter!

2013 VividSydney on Queen's Birthday 10 Jun 2013 — 2013 VividSydney on Queen’s Birthday 10 Jun 2013 (Photo credit: hto2008)

Our years these days are defined in terms of “CE” or “Common Era” and “BCE” or “Before Common Era”. Older people can remember when it was “Before Christian Era” or even “BC” for “Before Christ” and “AD” for “Anno Domini” or “Year of Our Lord”.

I’m not going to argue whether or not Jesus really existed and whether or not he was divine, but if we assume for a moment that he was born, there is a lot of discussion on what year it was that he was born. Using the gospels and other historical information as a guide, many people believe that he was born 4 to 6 years before start of the Common Era. Or using the terminology, he was born up 6 years “Before Christ”! Humorous, I suppose.

Christ's Birth Orthodox church — Christ’s Birth Orthodox church (Photo credit: baswallet)

Most people view history as continuous and the dates as fixed and well known. That’s not the case of course – the calendar has been revised several times, and even countries which are Christian may have different calendars. Other religions naturally don’t relate their calendars to the birth of Christ. I believe that some even count backwards.

Calendars have grown out of necessity. Tax collectors in particular love calendars. Calendars are used to keep track of one’s age. Before calendars were widespread years were kept track of by relating births and deaths to important events, like the installation of a particular ruler. For instance, the gospel writer Luke relates Jesus’s birth to a census taken at the time:

<code>In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. 2 (This was the first census that took place while[a] Quirinius was governor of Syria.) 3 And everyone went to their own town to register. Luke 2 1-3</code>

This shows the way that all dates were reckoned, relative to fairly recent events. The possibilities for error are obvious. Even if the events are written down, going more than a few years into the past involves research and calculation. Such calculations lead to such absurdities as Bishop Ussher’s calculation of the age of the earth as around 6,000 years. Even the dates of events early in the Common Era can be dubious. This seems strange to citizens of the modern world, who can measure time to the accuracy of the vibration of an atom, and can accurately date events for at least a hundred or more years into the past.

One last comment – people who were born in the same year as the Queen, but born after her actual birthday and before her official birthday can claim to be both older and younger than the Queen.

Where do ideas come from?

I was watching this on Youtube, and I found myself saying “Yes, but…”. What Stephen Johnson says in there is all true. I like his idea of a “slow hunch” that takes several years or decades to develop. Stephen’s environmental approach looks at the places that provide the environment where ideas flourish, such as coffee shops which flourished in the 17th century and later. The Wikipedia article notes that

Though Charles II later tried to suppress the London coffeehouses as “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”, the public flocked to them.

Apparently Charles did not like the new ideas emanating from the coffee shops and thought that doing away with them would do away with the ideas. I’m not so sure – the discussion groups from the coffee shops would almost certainly have moved elsewhere.

Lloyd's Coffee House — Lloyd’s Coffee House (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ideas certainly sprang from the coffee houses which mutated into or gave rise to the London Stock Exchange, Lloyd’s of London and some famous auction houses. I refer you to the Wikipedia article.

Stephen Johnson describes the environments that provide fertile ground for new ideas, and similar places have been invented and reinvented over the years. While Universities were, I believe, originally set up as places for the studying of religion, the concentration of bright people and the opportunities for discussion inevitably led to ideas which were not to the taste of the religious establishment.

Victoria University, Kelburn, Wellington, New ... — Victoria University, Kelburn, Wellington, New Zealand. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My “yes, but..” in relation to the Youtube article was not in relation to the matters Johnson discusses, which was the types of environments that favour new ideas, but how the ideas are formed in the human brain. Johnson talks about one person having “a piece of the puzzle” that completes a new idea, but I think that that is an oversimplification. I see it more like a huge floating jigsaw puzzle, with no edges and maybe many many puzzles. Each person gets millions of puzzle pieces and each person does his or her best to fit together as many pieces as possible and some of the pieces may be assembled incorrectly. I’m thinking of the “Intelligent Design” people when I write that.

a drawing of a 4 piece jigsaw puzzle (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An idea in that model is simply a realisation that that piece or pieces of the puzzle over here seem to fit with the piece or pieces over there. Any idea is based on innumerable prior ideas or realisations.

Ideas also seem to change over time. I think that I recall that when the idea that white light can be split into many colours was first put to me I accepted it with some reservations. Sort of “If you say so”. But today it seems obvious to me, though it can be that probes into the obvious turn up the un-obvious.

So where do ideas come from? I’m uncertain. I’m not sure that there aren’t several sources of new ideas, but one that I keep coming back to is that there might be some process in our brains of which we are not conscious that continually and somewhat dumbly searches the puzzle pieces and tries to fit them together. It probably has guidance rules that say that, metaphorically, knobs must fit into sockets, there should be no gaps or space between puzzle pieces.

I call the process dumb because it seems to favour picking close by pieces, and it seems to repeatedly try the same configurations that have failed previously. I say this because sometimes, looking at a fact a new way or introducing a concept from another field may result in a totally new solution to a problem.

Visual Example of the Eight Queens backtrack A... — Visual Example of the Eight Queens backtrack Algorithm (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m aware that I’ve used the word “idea” in a number of senses above, but I hope that it doesn’t detract too much from the argument. I’m also aware that I’ve stretched the jigsaw analogy well beyond the bounds!

As a final comment, I think that people misunderstand the Eureka Moment. The moment occurs not when one solves the puzzle, but the moment that one realises that the puzzle is solved. For instance, when a mathematician works on a proof he may get stuck on a particular step. He may try several solutions, proceeding from the solution under test through several other steps in the proof before he discovers the solution which works. The Eureka Moment happens when he discovers that the solution he is trying is the correct one, not when he chooses the solution. A subtle but definite difference.

archimedes (Photo credit: Sputnik Beanburger III)

Why are there always lemons?

English: Random copolymer brush (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m always interested in random happenings. Of course ‘random happenings’ always have a cause. Or less linearly, the whole field of the past results in the outcome at the point in question and all other points at the moment in time under consideration and at future moments in time. Or the space-time continuum is not mutable.

Whatever. We have recently had a couple of big storms. it being the winter season, and debris has piled up on the beach. This detritus is mostly of marine origin, mostly seaweed, with a sprinkling of other marine debris, such as mollusc shells, not to mention non-organic materials like rocks and sand.

IMG_20130712_131400 — Debris. Notice the small pieces of plastic.

There is a noticeable contribution of terrestrial origin of course, like tree trunks, limbs and even foliage. A significant portion is of anthropological origin, such as worked wood and plastic, and even concrete, tarmacadam, glass and metals.

The plastic is interesting. With the exception of the occasional chunks of polystyrene foam or similar, most of the plastic debris is small, like the rings from the necks of plastic topped containers or the teats from the tops of water bottles. (Aside: Why buy water when you can get it from the tap?) Whole bottles are rare for some reason.

IMG_20130712_131406 — Debris. If you look carefully you may see a few ballpoint pens.

To get back on topic, one of the things that I’ve noticed about the debris is that some objects tend to be found together – for instance left footed shoes may be found on one beach and right footed shoes on another. There is an unconvincing (to me) theory about this.

I’ve discovered that things appear to be washed ashore in groups. This may be a statistical aberration, but, for instance, after a recent storm I came across a group of toothbrushes scattered over a relatively small area. Now, there were about a dozen, which rules out a single source, like a flat or house, and they weren’t packaged in any way so that rules out a commercial source, so what could explain it?

Another time the flotsam consisted in part of what was probably spoon worm corpses. In two particular areas there were hundreds of the disgusting looking things.

I don’t know the reasons for these groupings, but obviously some set of circumstances must have resulted in these happenings. Of more obvious provenance are the mass strandings of jellyfish at some times of the year which are no doubt related to the breeding cycle of these animals and particular wind direction. The occasional tennis balls or golf balls that I spot are easily explained too.

But…. But there are always lemons. Whenever I walk along the beach after a storm, I can almost guarantee that I will find at least one lemon. Why? I don’t tend to find apples, though apples float too. Nor, typically any other fruits. Maybe apples are softer and easily broken up?

Regardless, there are always lemons. Why are there always lemons?