General – Page 23 – Me on the net

Love Actually….

(I’m running late this week. I hope to be on time next week).

English: Beautiful scenery beautiful love story. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Love. The word is thrown around with gay abandon, people claim to be motivated by it when they do extraordinary things. It’s been the subject of literature, from classics to stuff which perhaps should never have been written. Atrocious poetry attempts to define it and celebrate it, and sublime poetry achieves its heights for the same reasons.

There are many sorts of love, man for woman, woman for man, and also the love of a person for another of the same sex. People love animals and people love children, though there are certain loves of these kinds which are strange, bizarre, or wrong. There are the loves for team mates or squad members which strengthens the team or squad, to the extent that in wartime a squad member may sacrifice himself for the sake of the others in the squad.

People love things. The new Maserati, Holden or Ford. The latest iPhone. An iPad, or other tablet. A new dress, new shoes, new Gucci bag. A new hairdo, new sneakers or a nice juicy steak.

I love a good lie-in in the Morning. Some (who in my opinion are slightly insane) love to be up with the lark. Some love a tropical beach, others an alpine traverse. Some love to run, to the extent where sometimes they will run for hundreds of kilometres.

New York Marathon 2013 (Photo credit: jaroslavd)

Most people love a challenge, a crossword puzzle or Sudoku. Some love competing with others, some love to challenge themselves by jumping out of a plane, or climbing a high peak in the mountains.

Maybe some would quibble that I have used the word ‘love’ above where others would have used ‘like’. I make no apology for that as the one shades in to the other. But what are the characteristics of love? I’d say that no one definition fits all cases, as is common with any human characteristic.

Love primarily is understood to be most simply defined by the (usually) male/female couple. In a marriage ceremony, at least in the Christian rites, the couple pledge to love each other, (amongst other things). In other religions where marriages may be arranged by the parents and the couple may not know each other very well at the time of the marriage, I do not know what pledges are made. Of course, it is not unknown for marriages to be arranged in countries that have adopted the Christian religion. If fact it is probably more common than people realise. The opposite probably holds in countries where the religion is not Christianity.

Rahul's Arranged Marriage (2005) — Rahul’s Arranged Marriage (2005) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m aware that the above is horribly full of unwarranted assumptions and suppositions about culture of which I know little. Someone once joked that in a Hollywood love story, boy meets girl, they fall in love, and get married. In a Bollywood (Indian film industry) love story, boy meets girl, they are married, they fall in love.

A quick scan of the synopses of both Hollywood and Bollywood shows that the truth in much more complex. The Internet Movie Database like 50 Best Bollywood films, and the teasers for the films show plots which would not be out of place in a similar list of Hollywood love films, with only minor amendments. The Hollywood films tend to replace parental pressure with a societal one, but much else remains the same. The gloriously over-generalised Hollywood love story is boy meets girl, they are forced apart because perhaps one is one is from the wrong side of the tracks (a Hollywood favourite), or they initially hate each other, or they are about to be married to others, or they somehow misplace each other. Finally they resolve whatever difficulties separate them.

Perhaps there is only one love story, across all of mankind – boy meets girl, difficulties keep them apart and either they resolve them (happy ending) or they don’t (tragedy). Now I come to think of it, most love stories apart from fairytales are of the second sort – the films “Love Story”, “Titanic” and perhaps “Gone with the Wind” bear this out.

But what is love? It is something some people spend all their lives looking for, and something which others find easy to find. Spousal love seems to be a binding force. It creates an unbreakable team and gives a couple extra power over adversity through synergy. Spousal love can lead to a long lifetime together and passing on within hours of the second spouse when the first dies.

Long Wedding Dress for Couple with Flowers (Photo credit: epSos.de)

Love in unidirectional. One can love someone without being loved back, but if one is loved back a positive feedback is achieved. Love is happiness, except for the case where the love is not returned, not even recognised. Love is eternal, except when the love ends. That is, if one loves one cannot conceive of the love ending. Love is generous, gentle and giving, unless the love of the loved one is claimed by another, in which case love engenders hate and loathing. Love is unselfish, unless the love is such that family and friends are cast aside. Love is selfish when the lovers are so engrossed in each other that worldly events pass them by.

love is not selfish (Photo credit: Leonard John Matthews)

The Bible says this about love:

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

This verse from 1 Corinthians 14:4-7, which is often used in marriage ceremonies in Christian churches only gives the positive aspects of love which is returned. Misdirected love has caused everything from domestic disputes to full scale wars. The mythical Trojan Wars were supposed to have been about the love of Helen who was already married to Menelaus for Paris. The story may have been based around true events which may have separately happened over some time around 1190BCE.

greece - scene of the trojan war — greece – scene of the trojan war (Photo credit: Xuan Che)

One can paraphrase the writer of the Epistile and say “Love is impatient, love is unkind. It is envious, it boasts and is proud”, because often it is. Love is not always good. But when it conforms to the Epistile writer’s definition, it is the oil that helps to make the world go around.

Love Actually (Photo credit: nehuenmingote)

Grandad’s a Geek!!

The original geeks were sideshow performers who did disgusting things like disembowelling a chicken and eating it raw. They often had mental issues and lived in squalid conditions, maybe even cages. They might be billed as “a savage from the depths of darkest Africa” or some such nonsense but more likely they were just people who had sunk to the bottom of society and had fallen in with the carnival. Alcoholics who would work for a bottle of moonshine would reputedly sometimes act the wild man for the carnival.

The film “Nightmare Alley” tells the story of one such geek, from his start as a sane and relatively normal person, who joins a carnival and works his way up to fame and fortune, only for his world to collapse around him, to his final fate as the alcoholic carnival geek.

The word “geek” (together with the similar word “gook”) has been used as a derogatory term for Asian people by Americans and others during war time. Troops were supposedly encouraged to use such terms in order to “dehumanize” the people of the countries which were being fought in or over. Hence the connotations of dislike that comes with the word.

The word “geek” meaning a clever person may possibly have its origins in the United Kingdom. It’s possible that its use in this sense may have arisen when the word which had been used to target overseas people was instead used to target unlikeable people much closer to home! The person who top scored in all tests and had no social graces became known as a “geek”. Of course, in some cases the so-called “geek” eventually by virtue of his smartness became the employer of those who belittled him at school.

In the highly technical world that we live in, the “geek” naturally became a wanted person and while the term is still often used in the derogatory sense, it can be a term of back-handed admiration, and the term is often proudly asserted by the geeks themselves. Indeed, having worked in Computers and Information Technology for all of my working life, I somewhat proudly consider myself to be a “geek”.

The techno-heroes of the current day are the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne of Apple, and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard of Hewlett Packard. There is a sort of sense of awe that these geeks have achieved so much.

Latter day geeks have had films made about them. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zucherberg has been portrayed in a film, in a not so flattering light, I understand, not having seen the film. The school geek appears late on in the film “Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion” to whisk the eponymous heroines off in his helicopter.

“Geeks”, “boffins”, “back room boys” have existed in every era of history, no doubt. They are relied upon to produce the technical goods while being regarded both as humorous and not quite normal. However their status has risen of late, driven by the vast technological boom that pretty much started during the Second World War. The Dambusters, the Enigma machine and the atomic bomb all came from that era and after the war the boom exploded.

ENIGMA cipher machine collection (Photo credit: brewbooks)

Geeks and computers go together. In the beginning, in the late 1940s, large machines started to appear in back rooms, tended by men and some women in white coats. These mysterious machines performed strange calculations and the geeks in control were treated like high priests of some mystery cult.

At this time a relatively new company called IBM rose to prominence and dominated the new field of computing. Mainframe computers as they were called swiftly spread to many companies, and special rooms were built to house the multitude of beige cabinets that formed a mainframe computer system. By the 1980s there were many computers performing many different tasks and companies began to depend on them.

However there were smaller, simpler computers starting to appear. Many households of that era would have had a Sinclair or Commodore or Atari computer on which to play games. IBM introduced a computer of this size, the IBM Personal Computer, but then they dropped the ball. While IBM is still one of the biggest companies in the world, they did not really embrace this technology, allowing the rise of the PC.

One company did embrace the technology and realised that the way to make the big money was not to provide the hardware, but to provide the software that ran on it and Microsoft became its rise to prominence, like IBM before it, and the Microsoft Operating System became dominant, and is still dominant today.

1993 - Grandad's old computer setup, Irith - — 1993 – Grandad’s old computer setup, Irith – (Photo credit: Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL))

So what has this got to do with Grandad? Well, the current generation wonders whether the older generations will “get” the new technology. Consider though. Grandad will be 60-ish, right? That will mean that he would have been born in the early 1950s or late 1960s. In the 1980s he will have been around 20 and just the right age to take part in the spread of computing around the globe. He may have had a Commodore or an Atari at home.

Commodore 64 (Photo credit: unloveablesteve)

In his thirties he will have seen the rise of DOS and Windows and he may even have had a 386 machine at home. Possibly he became proficient in DOS and the early Windows being what it was he probably was proficient obtaining and loading “drivers” for his machine.

It is likely that he has experienced the joys of persuading a modem to connect to a bulletin board, or through a fledgling ISP to this new thing, the Internet. He may have spent hours downloading a blocky, slow game to display on his CGA-capable monitor, transferring it down the telephone lines at the rate of a few bytes a second. A megabyte download might have taken half an hour or more.

As the Internet grew he would have switched to the Netscape browser and accessed the Internet at 2400bps, then 4800bps, then a massive 9600bps and on to an astronomical 56kbps! Doubtless these days he uses some form of broadband or cable connection.

Today’s geeks believe that because they have grown up with the technology that Grandad (even Dad) will not be able to cope with it. They conveniently forget that while they may have grown up with the Internet and the technology, the Internet and technology have grown up with Grandad!

Blowing out Grandad's birthday candles — Blowing out Grandad’s birthday candles (Photo credit: djdpascoe)

The black dog

English: A black dog (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is insidious. It can be attracted by the most innocuous of happenings, such as losing a sock. You can expect it after a mini-disaster, but it doesn’t come. It can come on a bright or a dark day, a high day or a normal day. It can come when you win the race, but stay away when you come last. You cannot predict when it will come.

I fully understand why those under its spell commit suicide. It makes any achievement worthless, makes the future into a black pit. Those who succumb may be weaker than most or stronger than most. Weaker because they give in to the black dog, stronger because it takes a sort of strength to kill one’s self.

The black dog turns you in on your self, eats you up internally, until you are a shell. The world may see you smiling and joking, while inside you are decaying, eaten up inside like a caterpillar infected by an ichneumon fly. Everything is filtered through it, so it affects everything that you do. Everything is flavoured by it, or more correctly, over-flavoured by it. Sweetness is saccharine, bitterness is burning, sourness is acrid, saltiness is excessively salty, pungency is repelling. Everything is metallic in feel or taste or smell.

I call depression ‘entering the chrome world’. In the chrome world everything is a glitzy, like a 1950’s world in the ‘modern’ style. Everything is sharp-edged and out to snag you or harm you. All surfaces are slick and smooth and encourage things that you put down to slide and slip. Lights are neon bright and shine into your eyes. Voices are loud and raucous, high and penetrating. You know that if you put down a drink it will slide away or get knocked over, and a dropped coin will roll away either to an awkward place or will disappear. You know that this will happen, even if it doesn’t.

You don’t feel sorry for yourself. That would involve caring. You could be outwardly cheerful and sociable, (though it is unlikely) and yet be withering inside. More often you just want to be alone, which can upset loved ones who want to help you.

Depression makes you irritable. You don’t see why others care and it seems so pointless to you. If others ask how you feel it is impossible to say. They may have felt ‘down’, and they know that they have been able to overcome that feeling with effort, or maybe chocolate and a glass of wine, so they don’t realise that depression can’t be shifted simply by making an effort, or with simple treats. If you want someone to do something and they ask why, it can infuriate you. Petty things, like finding a knife to be blunt when you need a sharp one become frustrating out of all proportion.

English: Lots of frustration spikes experienced (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Depression can only be alleviated by time or chemicals. Doctors will prescribe drugs to, hopefully, stop the onset of a bout of depression, or to dispel it. They seem to work pretty well, and with modern drugs you no longer need to be ‘doped to the eyeballs’. Nevertheless the depression still seeps through at times. If life is a switchback, up and down all the time, drugs can reduce the depths of the downs, but probably also reduce the height of the ups.

Depression is also associated with dissociation. More or less this is an extension of the lack of caring, about what other people do, what they might do to you. It’s like being in the cab of a truck, but as a passenger, not as the driver. The driver decides where you are going and you have no input into that. It’s as if the driver won’t even acknowledge your presence and indeed in extreme dissociation, its as if you have no physical presence in the cab of the truck.

1915 Packard Model E 2 & 1/2 ton C-Cab truck o... — 1915 Packard Model E 2 & 1/2 ton C-Cab truck on display at the Fort Lauderdale Antique Car Museum. Cab from left. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is not a form of fatalism as you don’t care what happens, whereas in fatalism, you might care keenly what happens but be unable to do anything about it.

Depression trumps love, and depressive people often push loved ones away. If the loved one doesn’t know what is happening that can be distressing to them and may actually create a split. Even if the loved one does know, the depressive person’s desire to be alone may be, will be, felt by the loved one as rejection.

A depressive episode is endless. By this I mean that the depressed person will not and cannot believe that the episode will end. The depressed person will not be aware, often, that they are suffering a depressive episode, so they do not know that it will almost certainly end at some stage.

I’ll wrap up with two points.

Firstly, I believe that it is impossible for a person who does not suffer from depression to understand what it is like, just as one could not imagine what it would be like to be a bat. Sure, one is a mental difference and the other is a physical difference, but to experience something is a mental experience, man or bat, depressive or non-depressive.

Secondly, I am not currently experiencing a depressive episode, or am anywhere near experiencing one. I can’t remember exactly how I got onto this track, apart from the fact that I was trying to find a subject for this weeks blog and this somehow came to mind. So there is no need to send out rescue parties!

Actually a third wrap up point comes to me. In discussing what makes a person, philosophers often conjecture what would happen if someone’s brain were transported into another body. My third point is the question “Assuming that it is agreed that the transplanted brain results in the transplantation of the person, would that person be susceptible to depression, or would it be possible that the new body’s chemistry would be different enough that the person would no longer suffer from depressive episodes?” Certainly a large part of our personalities are determined by the subtleties of the chemistry that takes place in our bodies, and depression can be alleviated by drugs. Maybe I’ll go deeper into that another time.

Phone Brain Transplant (Photo credit: Sorbus sapiens)

…for Christmas comes but once a year (Southern Style)

The Examination and Trial of Father Christmas,... — The Examination and Trial of Father Christmas, (1686), published shortly after Christmas was reinstated as a holy day in England. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“At Christmas play and make good cheer, for Christmas comes but once a year” said Tomas Tusser. Many people would rather it didn’t. Christmas is a time when stress levels go through the roof. People eat too much, drink too much and spend too much, meaning that January, a time when people traditionally go on summer holidays in this part of the world, is a time of dieting and financial restriction. Without careful planning the later part of the year around Christmas and the New Year can get very messy.

Another area of stress is in the receiving and giving of presents. Trying to decide who to buy for and what to buy for them is always difficult and many people resort to providing cash or vouchers or gift cards, and it still doesn’t remove all the issues. A card for a department store may be just what someone wanted, or it might languish in a drawer until it expires. Apparently by some estimates $2 billion of credit on gift cards goes unredeemed. But then again, a tie or socks might also be banished to the back of someone’s wardrobe.

20091226 - Christmas presents - misc - gift ca... — 20091226 – Christmas presents – misc – gift cards – GEDC1240 (Photo credit: Rev. Xanatos Satanicos Bombasticos (ClintJCL))

The religious aspects of the holiday (“Holy Day”) are often ignored, and though thousands may gather for the “Carols in the Park”, few of those attending will go to church during the holiday. These aspects also exclude those of different religions, nominally, but many non-Christians celebrate some aspects of the holiday anyway, and gather for family time and exchange presents.

Christmas parties are a feature of the period before Christmas, and again, while one might think that those of other religions than Christianity would be excluded, office and private parties do not exclude non-Christians. In fact parties around this time of year are an opportunity for people to eat and drink and socialize and religion seldom figures.

The secularisation of Christmas is both good and bad. Good, because it is not exclusive, but inclusive, and bad because it hides the traditional reasons for Christmas. But even within Christianity the reasons for Christmas are being lost – Christians buy Christmas trees and Christmas lights, and exchange presents, eat turkey and drink alcohol, all of which hark back to times before Christianity, to times often loosely called pagan.

Indeed it is often said that Christmas is when it is simply to align with the so-called pagan festivals of mid-winter that celebrate the solstice. The winter solstice marks the time of year when the sun reaches its lowest point of the year and is closely related to the shortest day. Of course in this hemisphere the solstice is the summer one, and the sun is at its highest, so the day is the longest one. This usually happens around 21st of December.

The traditional northern hemisphere Christmas is in mid-winter, more or less, and the traditional fare is heavy mid-winter fuel of turkey with stuffing, vegetables including potatoes, with gravy and followed by heavy fruit pudding and mince pies. In the southern hemisphere the solstice is, as I said, the summer one, and, really, the traditional fare is probably unsuited to the climate. The southern hemisphere is developing a tradition of holding a barbecue for Christmas dinner, thereby replacing the turkey with steak and the heavy root vegetables of the northern hemisphere with salad and the Christmas pudding with ice cream. The heavy room temperature ales favoured north of the Equator are often replaced by lighter chilled beer and lager.

New Years 2010-2011 (Photo credit: russelljsmith)

Some of the more modern symbols of Christmas northern hemisphere style have received a southern hemisphere make-over. Santa is still a fat old man with a beard, but his clothing is often changed to, more suitable for the climate, board shorts, though they will still be in the “traditional” Coca-Cola red, and even on the surfboard he will likely retain the floppy hat. The reindeer are, at least in Australia, replaced by kangaroos.

Santa Claus, Christmas Parade, Lambton Quay (Photo credit: Velvet Android)

Southern hemisphere cities tend to put on “Santa Parades”. I don’t know if this happens much in northern cities, though I do see a website for a Santa parade in Toronto. It seems to me that the weather would be better in the southern cities! Strangely the big man, who always brings the end to the parade in the last float, usually wears the full regalia of red suit, boots, and cap. He must swelter!

This has been a rather unstructured look at Christmas with an emphasis on the southern hemisphere celebrations where they differ from the northern version of the same. All that remains is for me to wish anyone who stumbles across my blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Ngā mihi o te wā me te Tau Hou.

Me

Grace - Mirror — Grace – Mirror (Photo credit: phil41dean)

Who is this strange person “Me”? Obviously I am “Me”, but you claim that “Me” is you. How could that be? And when you say “You”, you mean me! You are you and I am me and that’s an end of it! It is absurd for you to claim to me when, patently, you are you.

Have you (yes, YOU! I know that I have!) ever read science fiction? An SF story might revolve around a device, maybe invented by Professor MacGuffin, which allow the actors in the drama to move instantly from one place to another. The ‘transporter’ may be a simple tool to place the actors in a situation from which they have to extract themselves (as in the Startrek TV series and movies), or a device central to the plot, such as the machine in movie “The Fly” (‘Help me! Help me!)

Cover of "The Fly [Blu-ray]" — Cover of The Fly [Blu-ray]

Sometimes, for plot reasons, the device may malfunction and instead of transporting the person from A to B, it essentially copies the person so that he exists at both A and B. (Both you and I agree that he is ‘he’ or she is ‘she’, don’t we? I’m glad that that is sorted out, at least).

Transporter (Star Trek) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So if I walk into the transporter at A, I walk out of it at B, don’t I? But the person at A claims to be me and to have walked into the transporter at A and walked out of it at A, thinking that it hadn’t worked. He, (obviously “he”, since he isn’t me and he isn’t you), also claims that my car, my dog, my wife, are all his, and they are because he was me when he walked into the transporter. Obviously “his”, since they aren’t yours and they aren’t mine. Hang on a minute! They ARE all mine! This is getting tricky.

So which of us is me, and which isn’t? Which is ‘him’? Which of us gets my things? Do we get half each? It’s a puzzle.

Even when we exclude transporters as ‘impossible’ (but who would be so bold as to rule them out entirely), even then, there are other ‘mes’ to consider. There’s the ‘me’ from five minutes ago. The ‘me’ who had yet to write this sentence, who didn’t even have this sentence in mind, in fact. There’s the ‘me’ of five minutes in the future, who know what the next sentence brings. (I can’t even guess what it will bring). Are they the same ‘me’? Well the future me knows things that I don’t, and I know things that the past me doesn’t (yet) know.

It gets worse as you consider moments further from the ‘now’. When I was at school, I was not the same person as I am now – I have years of experiences that the schoolboy had not yet had. I’ve no idea what will happen in the future, but the future me does. So are the future ‘me’ and the past ‘me’ really me? They are different from me in terms of their memories and experiences. They have different bodies, maybe sporting scars that I don’t have or vice versa.

Most people would think that they are ‘me’, in spite of these differences. There is a continuity of memory, a thread of remembrance, that joins all these ‘mes’ in a continuous thread of experience. But if you take two widely time separated ‘mes’ they in fact have little in common. The schoolboy ‘me’ has not learned things that the future ‘me’ knows and the future ‘me’ may have forgotten much of what they schoolboy has experienced.

From some points of view they are very much not the same person. It reminds me of the saying by Heraclitus “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man”. While it may seem to me that the memories I have connect me to the school boy that I was, as I can work backwards down the stream of memories and say ‘I was that school boy’, that same stream of memories makes me different from him. Even in my own mind I think of the school boy as ‘him’ and refer to him as ‘myself, X years ago’.

It’s not uncommon for people to say things like “If I hadn’t done so-and-so, something else would have happened”. “If I hadn’t read that book in school, I wouldn’t have chosen to study history at university…” There is a probabilistic component to personality. If things had been otherwise I would be a different person, probably living in a different country, and certainly with different memories and desires. “I’m glad I went to the moon, even though it meant giving up that opportunity to live and work in Antarctica”. Well, something like that!

So this mysterious ‘me’ lives only in the present, and is different to all other ‘mes’ through time. Yet this ‘me’ is singular, for I am the only ‘me’, and your claim to be ‘me’ is patently false. This ‘me’ is not any of the possible ‘mes’ that could have been, had things been different. This ‘me’ is not the same as the ‘mes’ that have been and the ‘mes’ that will be, even considering the chain of memory that connects us. The ‘me’ that goes through a transporter device is not the ‘me’ that stepped into it, as the new ‘me’ is composed of different atoms (presumably, ducking a few questions), even though the transported ‘me’ feels otherwise. But then again neither is the ‘me’ who stayed since time separates him from the ‘me’ that entered the transporter, even if it is only seconds.

“A Vision of the Future. An aërial motor-car” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The more that I consider ‘me’, the stranger ‘me’ (or ‘I’) appears to be. Each ‘me’ exists only in the now, but is linked in more ways than one to future and past ‘mes’, just as the river exists today, and is different to the river yesterday, though they are connected by the flow of time.

Flowing Waters of Time (Photo credit: MaugiArt)

Models

Mathematical models are supposedly descriptions of a real phenomenon. The descriptive and predictive power of a model depends on how well the model represents the real phenomenon. Extreme precision is not necessary for a good models, so long as it doesn’t vary wildly or deviate from the real phenomenon. If the accuracy of the measurements or observations of the phenomenon are less than the deviation of the model from the real phenomenon, then the model suffices for the purposes.

For instance, a stone thrown upwards or a ballistic round fired from a cannon roughly follow a parabolic trajectory and the model (in this case a simple algebraic equation) is often accurate enough. However other effects, such a the resistance of the air to the passing of the object and the curve of the earth have to be accounted for in the model if the accuracy of the measurements is such that deviations from the model caused by these effects can noticed.

I’m going to draw a slightly artificial distinction here between ‘mathematical effects’ and ‘physical effects’. By mathematical effects I mean effects like the curvature of the earth (and also, the distance to the centre of the earth), both of which affect the geometry of the model. By physical effects I mean things like air resistance, and the roughness of the missile, which can’t be directly deduced from the physical situation and have to be assessed by experiment. Of course in many cases others have studied the effect of things like air resistance and their results can be plugged into our model to enhance its accuracy.

Mathematical effects are ultimately based on physical ones. For instance Newton’s Law of attraction between two masses is a physical effect represented by a mathematical equation – the product of the two masses and the gravitational constant divided by the square of the distance between them gives a measure of the gravitational attraction between them. On the surface of the earth, where the vertical movement of a thrown stone is negligible compared to the distance between the centre of the earth and the stone, this means that we can ignore the variation of the trajectory due to this effect since it is so small and use the mathematical model of a parabola for the projectile’s trajectory.

It turns out that simple parabola is useful as a model only for simple cases where the velocity is low and the distances are small, and the accuracy of measurement is low. For artillery purposes a model based on a simple parabola is not accurate enough. To drop a shell on someone’s head, where you know the distance, you need to factor in not only wind resistance and the curve of the earth, but also such factors as wind direction and strength and even then a sudden gust of wind could put your aim off. The model that artillery men used is contained in a set of tables which were built up over years of experience.

It is clear, I think, from the above discussion that models are pragmatic constructs. If a model doesn’t work you merely change it or replace it with one that suits your purposes better. That doesn’t mean that the old model is totally abandoned. After all, the artillery man doesn’t need his complicated tables when all he wants to do is shoot a basketball through a hoop.

Some models are purely descriptive and non-quantitative, such as the economic ‘supply and demand’ model. This is usually depicted by a graph showing one line sloping down from left to right crossing another line sloping up from left to right. The upwards sloping curve is the ‘supply’ curve and the downwards sloping curve is the downwards sloping one. The vertical axis is marked ‘Price’ or similar and the horizontal axis is marked ‘Quantity’ or similar. Rarely are there any tick marks or values on either of the axes.

The trouble this model is that it is, to my mind, too vague and woefully incomplete to be really useful. Firstly, the lack of any quantitative units means that any usage of the model must be qualitative and prevents it from being useful in any real situation. Secondly, while the trends of the supply and demand curves may be generally in the directions usually shown, this is not generally true, especially if the demand or the price moves far from the current ‘equilibrium’ point. Thirdly price changes are usually discussed in terms of change in demand, whereas the opposite is probably more usually true, and demand is driven by price. Fourthly, the shape of the curves does not stay static and they change with time, often unpredictably. Fifthly, there are many more external influences that are likely to have a bigger effect on price than simply supply and demand. Monopolies and monopsonies have huge effect on prices, and supply and demand can have little or no effect in these situations. The validity, if any, of the model is limited to a very restricted domain of situations.

The biggest criticism of this economic is that it doesn’t lead to quantitative models. It doesn’t direct strategies and few people, I’d suspect, actually use the curves for anything, except economics lecturers. It is not alone in the economics field, though, as there appear to be no models which are quantitative, valid in more than a small domain, and generally accepted in general use. It’s possible that there never will be.

And Again? Throw the Ball! (Photo credit: wharman)

I’ll close off by mentioning two other usages of the word ‘model’. There are many more usages, but I’ll leave those for now.

Firstly there is the catwalk model – young ladies and some men who acts clothes horses for fashion and ‘haute couture’. I’ve no problem with that except the usual one, that the models are thin to the point of anorexia, and sometimes the clothes stray to the bizarre side of the street. These young people, should they catch the eye of the fashion industry, may make many millions of dollars. The people who pay them these dollars must feel that they get some benefit from the payment, which brings us back to economics, supply and demand!

Secondly there is the constructional meaning of the word – where people construct sometimes exquisite copies of objects at a much smaller scale and of different materials to the original. Often these models are placed in context in models of the usual surrounding of the original – a model train may run on a complex layout with stations, signals, bridges and so on. Often as much care is lavished on the model’s surroundings as on the model itself. Many of these are true works of art.

"Carlton J. Dearborn, S2c [cements a stri... — “Carlton J. Dearborn, S2c [cements a stringer on the fuselage of balsam model of Stuka Dive Bomber at Camp Smalls, U.S. Naval Training Station, Great Lakes, IL. Dearborn teaches sailors to identify enemy and Allied aircraft].”, 03/13/1943 (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)

The Hubris of Scientists

Screenshot from the public domain films Maniac... — Screenshot from the public domain films Maniac (1934) showing Horace B. Carpenter as the character “Dr. Meirschultz” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Scientists talk about gravity, mass and probabilities, atoms, Higgs boson, black holes and qasars. Certainly the universe seems to behave as if these concepts represent reality and so scientists are justified in the their assertions and predictions. Nevertheless the assumption that the concepts that scientists use represent reality is debatable.

The scientific method which has been a part of science since 17th century is a set of rules that scientists use to develop and test theories about the scientific view of the world. Basically, the scientist formulates a hypothesis (based on an earlier theory or as a totally new theory) and develops experiments to test the theory. The experiments produce observations which either support or do not support the theory.

If the observations agree with the theory they are said to support the theory. If they do not, they are said said to disprove the theory. So far, so black and white. An experiment may be challenged on many grounds. For example the search for the Higgs boson is not done by actually isolating candidate particles and looking at it directly. Instead the expected properties of the Higgs boson, perhaps its mass or energy, the way it interacts with other particles, or other more esoteric properties, can be used to deduce that, for example, in a particular experiment a peak at a certain point on a graph produced by a scientific instrument could only be the result of the presence in the apparatus for at least an instant of the required Higgs boson.

One possible way the Higgs boson might be prod... — One possible way the Higgs boson might be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. Similar images at: http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/Conferences/2003/aspen-03_dam.ppt (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In a similar way, we don’t detect an electric current directly. Instead we rely on electromagnetic theory which predicts that moving electrons should produce a magnetic field and that magnetic field would interact with a static magnetic field of a permanent magnet perhaps to produce a force on the permanent magnet hence moving a needle. Behold! We detect an electric current. Actually what we see is the movement of a needle and we infer the electric current from that observation.

Sometimes the chain of inference is short, as in the electric current experiment, while in others it is very much longer. I expect that the detection of the Higgs boson falls into the latter category, but I could (easily) be wrong. It is apparent that the more links that there are in the chain of inference, the higher the likelihood that one of the links might be debatable.

So, faced with an experiment that supposedly tests a theory, the result does not absolutely prove or disprove the theory. If the experiment appears to show agreement with the theory, an opponent of the theory may cast doubt on the experimental method or in the theories that the theory being tested relies on. He or she would claim that the result doesn’t show what it purports to show. In addition he or she might point out that one experiment does not prove the theory as the next experiment could show the opposite. One experimental failure is enough to disprove the theory.

My cooking companions this evening- Zak dispro... — My cooking companions this evening- Zak disproved the “watched pot” theory. (Photo credit: who_da_fly)

Or is it enough to disprove it? Not really because the proponent of the theory could claim that some currently unknown effect or other is preventing the experiment from producing the correct observations. So debate follows, more experiments follows, and in the end, a consensus is achieved. History will record that theory A was generally accepted until so-and-so’s experiment replaced it with theory B. Or that theory A was extended by theory B and confirmed by so-and-so’s experiment. Or similar. Much more black and white!

Scientists explain experimental results in terms of theories. For instance when sodium is introduced into a flame (perhaps in the form of sodium chloride – salt) and the light from the flame is passed through a prism then a bright yellow line is seen. Scientists explain this as the result of the transition of an excited electron from an elevated orbit to a lower one. This explanation depends on several, maybe many, other explanations, such as an explanation of what ‘excited’ means and what ‘electron’ means and what ‘orbit’ means. In many cases these explanations are based on mathematics, and an explanation is based on concepts each of which requires explanation.

So therein lies the hubris of scientists. Their attempts at explanation of observable facts is a bottomless pit of explanation on explanation. There is no ultimate explanation. The universe is and does what it is and does.

So, am I saying that science is pointless? No, I am merely saying that we need to be careful and not treat our explanations as anything other than very clever descriptions of those bits of the universe that we are have seen.

Contents of the universe according to WPAP 5-y... — Contents of the universe according to WPAP 5-year results (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I like the analogy of the sheet. Suppose you have an object hidden behind a sheet. You are allowed to make pin pricks in the sheet, one at a time. The universe is the object behind the sheet and each pin prick is an observation. As you make more and more pin pricks in the sheet you see more and more of the object behind the sheet. You may discover that a line of pin pricks is showing red. You form a theory that behind the line joining the existing pin pricks, between the existing pin pricks and, with less certainty, beyond the end pin pricks in the line, everything is red. To check this theory you make a pin prick between two existing pin pricks and find that the new pin prick shows red. The theory is supported by this new observation.

Scientists have been creating these pin pricks for centuries and now have a pretty good idea of the shape of the universe (and a pretty holey sheet!). Nevertheless there are parts of the object behind the sheet, the universe, that they haven’t yet uncovered, and maybe never will.

As an example of the type of thing that I mean, consider the so-called dark matter. Scientists appear to have pretty much discovered what constitutes matter but they can’t account for some aspects of certain large scale phenomenon observed in the universe and have hypothesised a new type of matter called ‘dark matter’, which doesn’t appear to interact with normal matter except gravitationally. It’s like suddenly finding some pin pricks showing blue in a line that is otherwise red. Something unexpected that needs explanation.

I accused scientists of ‘hubris’ above. That’s not entirely fair as hubris implies arrogance and while scientists confidently create explanations for phenomena that they study, I believe that most would concede that their explanations could (with very low probabilities, I would guess) prove to be erroneous.

''I think that it's important for scientists t... — ”I think that it’s important for scientists to explain their work, particularly in cosmology. This now answers many questions once asked of religion.” – Stephen Hawking (Photo credit: QuotesEverlasting)

Yellow

I believe that some firm or other once tried to patent the colour yellow, but I’ve not be able to track this down so far. Although this sounds silly, I believe that the firm extensively used the colour yellow in all its adverts and publicity material and believe that people identified the firm’s adverts by the blocks of yellow colour used in the adverts and that a competitor could take advantage of this by using adverts with similar blocks of yellow. One can see where the firm was coming from, of course, but thankfully the attempt failed I believe.

Yellow is, in the societies that I have lived in anyway, associated with sun, well-being, summer and generally good and beneficial things. In subtractive combinations of colours, yellow, along with magenta and cyan are the primary colours. Many computer printers use these three colour. When I was researching this post I found that computer screens use additive combinations and the primary colours are red, green and blue. (“Research” is a fancy name I use for Googling for something – I usually end up at Wikipedia, so ‘caveat emptor‘!) Apparently the reason that there are three primary colours is that the human eye contains three types of cone cells, and each type is most sensitive to one of the ‘primary colours’.

Some animals have four types of cone cells and thus would see four primary colours. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject some human females may have four types of cone cells. Most placental mammals seem to have only two types of cone cells so can only distinguish two primary colours. As Wikipedia says, it would be wrong to suggest therefore the world ‘looks tinted’ to them. It would look normal to them.

I said above that the colour yellow is generally associated with positive things, like summer, warmth and other things. It is however also associated with cowardice, but I haven’t really been able to find out why. This Yahoo Answer is inconclusive, for example. The best answers, in my opinion, relate it to the ‘yellow bile’, one of the four fluids that were assumed to circulate around the human body. It was assumed that one character was determined by the balance of these four ‘humours’.

Hmm, what else about yellow? The centre of an archery target is yellow, although it is often referred to as ‘gold’ for some reason. Interestingly, in the obviously related sport of darts the centre ring is red or black. Rifle shooting, which also uses a target of concentric circles, uses only black and white, with the circles quartered and the inner circles all coloured black, the outer ones being white.

Yellow flags flown on a ship used to indicate that the vessel had a contagious disease on board. A plain yellow flag stands for the letter ‘Q’ in semaphore core and the speculation is that this was used because it was the initial letter for the word ‘quarantine’. The Wikipedia articles says that these days the plain yellow flag is used to indicate that a vessel is free of contagious disease and requests boarding for customs inspection. I had not heard of that change of meaning, but then again, I’ve not had need to raise a yellow flag! The current flag used to indicate contagious is a quartered yellow and black flag which stands for the letter ‘L’ in semaphore code.

In many cases yellow is used to indicate warnings as in ‘yellow alert’. A yellow alert is usually one level below a red alert which is usually the top level of seriousness. Generally a yellow alert means ‘avoid, take care, and be alert’. The GeoNet site currently shows a yellow alert level for the volcano called ‘White Island’ which is around 50k from the coast of New Zealand. The volcanoes on the mainland are currently quiet. Incidentally if you look closely at the Crater Floor image at the bottom right you will see Dino the Dinosaur quietly monitoring the volcano as he has done for several years.

Animals are often referred to as ‘yellow’ although it might be more accurate to describe them as ‘light brown’. Some birds, however, are definitely yellow and domestic canaries have given their name to the colour ‘Canary Yellow’. The Yellowhammer, introduced into New Zealand from Britain is a handsome bird with a yellow head breast and belly, marked with black, and with a yellowish brown back. They can form quite large flocks and are probably more numerous in New Zealand than they are back in Britain (as are many European species). The American Yellow Warbler is also a fine yellow plumaged bird.

There are some yellow animals and someone has made a collection on this web page. Most appear to be cold blooded or insects, but there are a few ‘yellow’ mammals. The mammals don’t look particularly yellow actually, but the snakes, spiders and crabs certainly are. Some albino animals (eg ferrets) tend to look distinctly yellow at times.

In autumn (fall) leaves on some trees go yellow, while species have leaves that turn red. This is because the chlorophyll which is green is lost in the autumn as the trees prepare for winter. Many flowers, like the buttercup, have yellow flowers and domestic plants like the tulip or the rose have been bred to have yellow blossoms too. Daisies also have yellow centres and I’ve seen speculation that yellow plants are the colour that they are because the pollinating insects are sensitive to that colour, which makes sense, but I’m not sure if that is the whole story, since I believe that most insects’ eyes are most sensitive to ultraviolet. The pollen that the insects inadvertently transfer from flower to flower is often yellow.

Finally to end this ramble through the colour yellow, I’ll just mention that the inanimate world also has yellow chemicals. The element sulphur is the obvious one, though some Chromates, some Iron compounds, and lead iodide are examples of yellow compounds. In addition chemists (and almost any schoolboy) who have put sodium compounds into a flame will be familiar with the deep yellow colouration of the flame that results. It’s often the first step in the analysis of a compound.

Round numbers

It seems that we have a fascination for numbers that end in zeros. One thousand (1,000) and one million (1,000,000) and so on and to a lesser extent numbers like one hundred (100) and ten thousand (10,000). Fractions of round numbers also appeal to people. Reaching the age of 50 (half of 100) or 75 (3/4 of 100) is considered an interesting milestone while reaching 74 or 51 for some reason is not so interesting.

English: One Billion Dollar Artwork (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However some fractions are not even noticed. At the age of 33 years and 4 months you will be 1/3 of 100 years old and at 66 years and 8 months you will be 2/3 of 100 years old. When I passed the second milestone, I mentioned it to people and they didn’t seem to care. No prezzies were forthcoming.

There is one special number that could be considered a round number, and the wellspring of all round numbers and that is the number zero. The first number which is usually considered a round number is ten (10), where the zero indicates the absence of any digit (except zero itself, which is normally considered a numeric digit), and the 1 is positional and represents the number ten or ten units. Stick another zero on the end has the effect of multiplying all the digits in the number by ten, so 10 becomes 100 which represents one hundred.

One zero zero for dummies 2011-04 (Photo credit: hare :-))

The number 100 could be considered to be, reading from the right, zero ‘units’, zero ‘tens’ and one ‘hundred’. 110 is zero ‘units’, one ‘ten’ and one ‘hundred’ giving the number one hundred and ten. When I was learning arithmetic as a small boy, while I grasped the principles quickly enough, I continued to ponder this mapping process from numbers, like seven hundred and thirty one to the mathematical representation of 731. Maybe I was a strange child. I still ponder it, even today. I look on “seven hundred and thirty one” as a name of the number, ‘731’ as a representation of the number, and the number itself as some ineffable thing. Maybe I grew up to be a strange adult!

Notice that above I said that “seven hundred and thirty one” is a name of the number and ‘731’ is a representation of the number. This is because there can be other representations of the same number, mainly in different bases. For all the numbers above I’ve used the number ten (10) as the base, but I could have used another base, such as sixteen (16) which is frequently used in computers. The number “seven hundred and thirty one” in base 10 representation is represented as ‘2D8’ in base 16 or hexadecimal representation. The ‘D’ is in there to represent the number thirteen (decimal 13).

Any positive integer can be used as a base. The bigger the base the more ‘digits’ are required to represent numbers, making them hard to read and hard to calculate with, so a base of ten (10) is a reasonable choice for general use. Negative integers can also be used as bases, but then things get very difficult! I’ve occasionally wondered if rational numbers or real numbers could be used as bases, but I can’t see how that would work.

Computers are interesting, since they, at the lowest level, appear to use a base of two (2), which is the smallest possible positive integer base. The numbers are conceptually simple strings of ones (1) and zeros (0) called ‘bits’. It’s not as simple as that however as in the computer’s central processor the data and programs are shunted around like little trains of bits, switching from track to track and in many cases circulating round small loops, merging with other trains of bits, eventually arriving in stations called buffers.

These buffers can be 8 bits long (one byte) or 16 bits long (2 bytes) or even longer. The length is related to the architecture of the processor, and a 64-bit processor can handle addresses, integers and data path widths up to 64 bits, so effectively they naturally use numbers up (but not including) decimal 18,446,744,073,709,551,616! Computer people can’t read such long strings of bits of course so they convert the numbers to base sixteen (16) otherwise known as hexadecimal. It’s still very long, but can be handled and is less error prone than long strings of zeros and ones.

Round numbers are very useful as abbreviations. Saying nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy three is a lot more verbose than “about ten thousand” and is sufficiently accurate for many purposes.

One interesting use of round numbers is found in the nominal sizing of disk drives. To a computer person one byte is the smallest unit of storage. Bytes are usually grouped into ‘kilobytes’ where in this sense the prefix ‘kilo’ stands for one thousand and twenty four, and kilobytes are grouped into ‘megabytes’ where in this sense the prefix ‘mega’ stands for one thousand and twenty four again, and megabytes are grouped into ‘gigabytes’. This means that to a computer person a gigabyte contains 1,073,741,824 bytes. So this number (and numbers with the smaller prefixes of kilo and mega) are round numbers to computer people, because, if expressed in hexadecimal or binary bases these numbers end with long strings of zeros!)

Six hard disk drives with cases opened showing... — Six hard disk drives with cases opened showing platters and heads; 8, 5.25, 3.5, 2.5, 1.8 and 1 inch disk diameters are represented. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There is a source of confusion here, because outside of the computer world, the prefixes of kilo, mega and giga are defined in terms of thousands. A kilogram is one thousand grams. Technically a megagram would be a thousand kilograms or a million of grams. This confusion impacts the computer world when computer disks size are given. To a computer disk manufacturer a gigabyte is one thousand million bytes, not a bit over one thousand and seventy three million bytes as mentioned above.

This leads to disappointment when purchasing disks. A nominally one hundred gigabyte disk will contain one hundred thousand thousand thousand bytes (100,000,000,000) but when when formatted will be able to contain less than ninety three gigabytes as the computer world counts bytes and that doesn’t take into account the overhead of the method of storing data on the disk. This overhead is necessitated by the need to hold the file names and locations on the disk itself so that the files can be retrieved.

There is no right or wrong way to consider bytes on disks and so computer people are in general now aware that if they buy a disk it will not seem (to them) to be quite as big as advertised. The moral is to ask what people mean when they use round numbers.

I was going to go into topics like giving change and Swedish rounding, but this post is already long enough. I will just mention that the topic of round numbers came to me because this is my fiftieth post! Fifty is sort of a round number, I suppose. It is halfway to a proper round number.

Gambling

Gambler (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gambling has probably been a human activity since two cavemen had a bet over their respective hunting prowess. Or maybe it was over which of them could stay upright longest after sampling the newly invented alcoholic grog. Gambling games generally have probabilistic component, though the contestants generally try to remove or circumvent it, usually by such techniques as remembering the order that cards come out or ‘card counting’. This latter technique involves keeping track of the high cards that come into play.

For some people gambling can become a problem. Sometimes susceptible individuals can become ‘addicted’ to gambling to the extent that they embezzle and steal so that they can continue to gamble. They may rationalise this by claiming that they are only trying to regain what they lost, or repay the people who they have stolen from, and indeed, because of the probabilistic nature there is a chance that they might be able to do that. However the chance is very very small.

When a gambler starts gambling the reason that they gamble is the thrill of the possibility of winning big. Once the gambler has used up all his or her resources and has borrowed or stolen to keep gambling then the fear of losing and the fear of people finding out would be the predominant emotions, especially the fear of being found out.

They probably think to themselves that their luck must turn sooner or later and they must start winning, however this is just not true. Suppose the gambler is $100,000 in debt and chooses odds of evens. Then to win $100,000 he or she must wager $100,000 and to do that he or she would have to steal another $100,000. Such a theft is more likely to be noticed than a smaller amount and there is an even chance of losing and being $200,000 in the hole.

Slot Machines (Photo credit: ragingwire)

As a result, it is likely that a ‘problem gambler’ would choose to go for longer odds and therefore smaller amounts of stake money, but with less chance of winning.

Statistically, over a large number of gamblers and a large number of wagers on something like a horse race, if all the money taken on wagers is paid back to punters then the average return, over all punters taking into account the stakes and the winnings paid out, is exactly zero! Of course, not all the money taken in in bets is paid to the punters. If the bets are on a totalizator system then the organisation running the ‘tote’ takes out taxes and administration costs so the payout will be less than the amount taken in.

If the system is a ‘bookmaker’ run system then the bookie needs to cover his costs so he (or she) arranges his books so that not all the money taken in bets is returned to the punters. There is a very small chance that under some circumstances he cannot cover all the bets made, but it is rare for this to happen. A bookie will sometimes ‘lay off’ a bet somewhere else if he feels exposed as a result of a large bet.

What this means to the gambler is that, on average, he is going to get back from the system less than he puts in. What a gambler hopes is that his personal return is positive, and he will in fact beat the odds. It is highly likely that he won’t though. A ‘problem gambler’ is unlikely to be a clever gambler and is likely to continue to lose.

Lotto 5-4-3-2-1 logo in use from 2008 onwards (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lotteries are different. Although Lotto is referred to as gambling, it is different from card games like poker or betting on horses. Again the average return is going to be zero or negative. However, with a lottery, the only way to increase your chance of winning is to buy more tickets. There is no real or illusory skill involved. As a result the lottery is unlikely to attract the ‘problem gambler’.

Of those who do take part in the lottery there are some who fall foul of the “Gambler’s Fallacy”. Some people use the same numbers draw after draw after draw in the belief that their particular set of numbers must come up sometime. This is not so at all. It doesn’t do any harm, though, as their particular numbers are just as likely to come up in one draw as any other. In fact, if their numbers do come up, they are equally as likely as any set of numbers to come up the next week too.

Horse racing (Photo credit: Paolo Camera)

I confess that I don’t see much sense in betting on horses or dogs or whatever. I don’t have the skills necessary to increase the odds in my favour, though the so-called ‘professional gamblers’ appear to have those skills, and ‘problem gamblers’ definitely don’t. I do buy lotto tickets, though, but I’m not too upset when I lose and the rare small win is fun.