Philosophy – Page 13 – Me on the net

All things are connected

English: computer network IP address (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are networks everywhere. Not just the Internet or the LAN at work, but everywhere. A network could loosely be defined as being comprised of a number of nodes and a number of connections between them. A node is a point or thing which is connected through a connection to another node. A connection is what joins nodes together. This rather circular definition will do for now.

A family can be described by a network. Let’s consider a typical average nuclear family with parents and 2.4 kids. Errm, on second thoughts, lets make that 3 kids. If each person in the family is a node, we can’t really have 0.4 of a kid.

A Date with Your Family (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So there are multiple connections between any one family member and another. The father has a connection with his wife, his daughter and his sons. The daughter has connections with her father, her mother and her brothers. One way that this could be shown in a diagram is to draw a pentagon, each vertex of which is a member of the family and lines between the family member showing the relationships.

That’s a total of 15 interrelationships in a small family. Actually depending on the way you look at it, there may be more, as the father is the father of his daughter but the daughter is not the father of the father (obviously). This can be looked at at two relationships, one from father to daughter (A is B’s father) and another from the daughter to the father (B is A’s daughter), or one relationship between father and daughter.



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If you consider that there are two relationships between any two family members, then each relationship can be considered to have a direction and a value. “A is B’s brother” and “B is A’s brother”, for example. Alternatively the relationship could be simple viewed as “brothers”, in which case the relationship has a value, but is non-directional.

I’ve described the familiar relationships in detail to hopefully bring out the facts that relationships between nodes and connections can be complex or describe complex situations. It’s entirely a matter of what you want the network to show.

The Internet is what people tend to think of when someone says “network” and it is indeed a complex network with myriads of interconnections across the globe, but in another way it is quite simple. Basically you have a computer, say your desktop or laptop, connected to the Internet. When you request a webpage, your request is sent to another node on the network, which then sends it to another node, and that forwards it on to yet another node and eventually the request arrives at the destination.

The clever part is that you might think that every “node” on the Internet needs to know where all the other nodes are, but in fact all it needs to know is where to send the request next.

It seems almost magical. Your computer doesn’t know where wordpress.com is, though it does look up its unique address (known as an IP address). It still doesn’t know where wordpress.com is, so it sends the request and the IP address to your ISP. Your ISP looks at the IP address and sees that it isn’t one local to the ISP, so it passes it on.

As noted above the message is passed on and on until it reaches its destination and then more magic happens as the remote machine responds to the request and sends the response all the way back. It may even travel back by a different route.



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The magic is that some of the nodes know around 200,000 addresses on the Internet and where the next step should go. These addresses are in the most part partial in that the address will be like the street address, without the building number.

So although the Internet is a complex network with many many connections between nodes, the basic principle by which it works is simple, based on an address lookup system (DNS) and a simple unique address for each device on the Internet.



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(OK there’s more to it than that, but the complexities are mainly at the “edges” of the Internet and mainly spring from the need for security and for organisations to have a “gateway” or single address on the Internet).

When we plan a journey over the road network, we generally have some idea of where we are going or we get out a map. We then scan it for the start and end of our journey and work out what direction we need to travel and the intermediate towns.

But if we travelled like a message travels on the Internet we would first travel to the nearest town and ask someone where we need to go to get to our destination. He or she would point us to the next town to which he or she believes we should go. We would then travel to the next destination and ask again.

It would seem that such a process could result in us going round and round in circles, but eventually we will reach a place where the traffic director knows a large part of the roading network and is able to redirect us to another city which is known to be closer to our destination. Once we are on the right road, the process will eventually result in us reaching our destination.

Another network is the network formed by people we know and the people that they know, and the people that they know and so on. There is a theory that to from you, to someone you know to someone they know and so on, it takes six or less steps to reach any person on the planet. This is referred to as “six degrees of separation“.

Similar numbers can be calculated for smaller sets of people. The Kevin Bacon Number relates movie stars through films that they have starred in with other people. Number higher than 4 are rare. The Erdős Number relates people by the number of scientific papers that they have co-authored.

head of Paul Erdös, Budapest fall 1992 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These somewhat whimsical numbers do demonstrate how closely linked the human race is. So far as I know no study has been done of the importance of bridging individuals is. I’m talking about those who perhaps emigrate to a country, thereby directly linking together two populations that may be less loosely connected, increasing the connectivity and reducing the number of degrees of separation.

Phone amnesia and other things

[Unfortunately I wrote this but forgot to publish it. Which is ironic given the title of this post. I will publish this week’s post shortly]

I suffer from phone amnesia. At least, that’s what I call it. Here’s how it works, or rather, doesn’t work. I answer the phone and talk for any amount of time. I put the phone down and my wife asks me who was on the phone. Often I cannot recall. I literally cannot recall who I was just talking to.

If I mentioned the persons name in my conversation, my wife will ask what “person X” wanted. Very often I will not remember at all what the point of the call was. The effort I make to remember is almost painful.

I’ve noticed that it is often the case people don’t recall what the point of the conversation was, and on the contrary if the person who takes the call wants to tell someone about the call immediately they will have no problems.

So it seems that when we hang up the phone we also hang up our recall at the same time, sort of like filing a letter away. A few minutes later we may remember the call and what it was about. If we’ve trying to remember what it was about, it comes as a great relief!



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I appear to have a more extreme version of phone amnesia, but it seems to me that many people have this issue to some limited extent.

This all started me thinking about quizzes and recall. I like quizzes and do them all the time. What constantly surprises me is the answers that I know, in subjects which I have no interest in. I recently knew the answer to a question about women’s fashion, a topic which doesn’t interest me in the least.

Another example was the question about the date of some historical event. I’ve never been good at history. I can’t remember dates, you see. But I knew the correct answer to a history question, the answer to which was a date! Of course I can’t now recall the question or even the quiz. All I can recall is that I was astounded that I knew the answer.

Yet if another history question were put to me, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to answer it. But I could be wrong about that just as easily.

It seems that my brain is storing information about things that I have no interest in and I don’t recall even hearing, but for some reason a part of my mind decides to remember stuff.

If I try to memorise something, it means reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the information until it sort of sink in. It’s like parading the information in front of my mind until it can’t help but remember it. We sort of bore the mind into remembering the information.

And all the while the mind is remembering fleeting facts that we barely notice as they flit by. Facts that are of little real interest to us.

Of course memories are not reliable. I “remember” something that happened to one of my sisters when she was small. Her push chair rolled down a small slope and crashed into the barrier round a small flower bed in the park. Over the other side of the barrier was a pond, I was worried that she would fall into the pond.

When I visited the spot many years later I was astounded. The flower bed was there and so was the pond. The distance between the barrier and the pond was such that she could never have fallen into the pond after hitting the barrier unless she was moving at a huge speed. Also there were no paths sloping down to the flowers and pond. The paths were all definitely up the hill.

It’s likely that there were some real events which led to me having this “false memory”. It may be that my sister’s push chair did roll away some time, or maybe my parents suggested that the push chair might roll away if I didn’t hold it tight. My mind could have turned the memory of the suggested event into a memory of the event as if it really had happened.



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My mind obviously built a worst case scenario around the event and associated it with somewhere that I knew. It altered a few details, the long hill down to the barrier and the pond, the narrow distance between the barrier and the water. It’s much more exciting that way, and “exciting” seems to be more memorable.

Back to the phone amnesia. When I do remember what the phone call was about (may be hours later), I can recall most if not all of the conversation, not word for word, but in general gist. It seems that the information was stored in memory, but the links to it were missing.



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This is similar to old feeling that something is “on the tip of your tongue”. You know (or believe) that the information is there, but you can’t access it. I expect that much of the time the memory is not there, and we only remember the times when it is recalled at a later time. That “tip of your tongue feeling can be very strong though.

It appears that our minds have memories of events (or pseudo-memories of events) and also memories of memories of events. The links between the two can fade out or maybe not be created properly in the first place, so that we can remember that we have a memory of something but we can’t access that memory, and the memories of memories of events are more easily accessible. It’s like a sort of unreliable index to the rest of the book that comprises our memories.



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The rest of the memory book, the actual memories, can be fact or fiction or both (like any biography or history book), which makes life interesting in so many ways. Every couple have had conversations about events that have happened to both, and in some cases the two people might be talking about different events, so different are their memories of it.

Computers and cells

(Oops! One day late this week!)

A computer has some similarities to living organisms. Both produce something from, well, not very much. A computer program has data input from various sources, and produces output to various sinks or targets. A living organism takes in nutrients from various sources, and produces branches, leaves, fur, bones, blood and other organs.

Of course there are differences. A computer is much, much simpler than a living being, even single celled organism. A computer in general only has a relatively small number of parts, but the “parts” in a living organism number in the billions. And of course, living organisms reproduce, but that may change in the foreseeable future.

Some animals are sentient, but I’m not going to discuss that here. Maybe in another post.

A computer has hardware, software and operates on data. The data is either part of the software or read from buffers in the hardware. It stores its calculations in “memory”, which is special hardware with particularly fast access speeds.

The computer produces results by placing data into buffers in the hardware. This results in things happening in the real world, such as printing a letter or number on paper, or more frequently these days, on some sort of screen. It may also do many other things, such as control the flow of water by moving a valve or other control mechanism.

Computers communicate with other computers, by placing data in an output piece of hardware. The hardware is connected to a distant piece hardware of the same sort which puts the data into a buffer accessible to another computer. This computer may be a specialised computer that merely passes on the data. Such computers are called routers (or modems, or firewalls).

Computers, specialised only in their usage, are found in washing machines, cars, televisions, and we all these days have multi-functional computers in our pockets, our cellphones. It would be hard to find a piece of electronic equipments these days that doesn’t have some sort of computer embedded in it. Very few of these computers are completely isolated – they chatter to one another all the times by various mechanisms.

(Incidentally, I came across a bizarre example of connectivity of things the other day – a wifi teddy bear. Say you are sitting in the lounge and you want to send a message to your child who is in her bedroom. You pick up your tablet and send a message to a “cloud” web site. This sends a message to your child’s tablet which is in her bedroom with her. The teddy bear, which is connected to the child’s tablet by wifi, growls the message to the child. No doubt scaring her out of her wits.)

So in the current technological world everything is connected to everything else. Much like all the cells in a living being are connected to all the other cells in the organism, directly or indirectly. So how far can we take this analogy, where the organism is the network and the individual cells as the computers. (Caveat emptor – I am not a biology expert, so don’t take what I might say from here on as gospel).



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A computer consists of hardware, software, and operates on data. A cell is sort of squishy, so “hardware” can only be a relative term, but a cell does have a relatively small number of organelles, such as mitochondria. The nucleus, which contains most of the genetic material, acts as the control centre of the cell, much as the CPU is the control centre of a computer.

The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression—the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.

In the cell, the genetic material is in some sense the software of the cell. It contains all the necessary information to create the cell itself or more interestingly the information needed to cause the cell to split into two identical daughter cells. This information is generally encoded in the DNA of the chromosomes.

The cell also contains, within the nucleus, an organelle called the nucleolus. This organelle (which is part of the nucleus organelle) seems from my reading to mostly relate to RNA, while the rest of the nucleus mostly relates to DNA, very roughly. RNA and DNA perform a complex dance called protein synthesis in organelles called ribosomes.

Cells produce chemicals, which can be consider analogous to computer outputs and receive chemicals from other cells, and so cells communicate, in a sense, with each other. Since all cells are equal genetically, it follows that a cell’s type, liver, skin, lung or brain neurone is determined by factors in its environment.

The model of an artificial neuron as the activ... — The model of an artificial neuron as the activation function of the linear combination of weighted inputs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This only loosely true as each cells is the daughter of another cell and inherits its type, but in the early days of an organism’s life, before organs are formed cells do differentiate. Just as when computers were new, they were all very similar, keyboard, monitor, and beige case.

As the computer-sphere evolved, special types of computer evolved, such as routers and modems, and firewalls. Not to mention phones. Computers became specialised. Similarly cells become differentiated, some going on to become liver cells for example, and others brain cells (neurones).

When an organism is young and a cell divides both cells are the same type, but when the organism is very young there is no differentiation. The DNA in the cell contains the necessary information to determine the cell type and tissues and organs are created in the more complex animals.

This process obviously can’t be random, otherwise cells of the various tissue types would be all mixed up. It seems to me, maybe naively, that while the “program” for creating cells is in the DNA, some factors in the environment convey such information as how old the organism is, and what type of cell needs to be created.

an example of a Program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We know from investigations into fractals that a simple equation can result in the creation of an image that looks very much like a tree or grasses and that small changes to the equation can lead to different tree or grass shapes. It is tempting to think that a similar process takes place in organisms – a general rule is given which results in the right sort of cells being produced in the right places.

The problem with the fractal idea is that it only creates simple shapes. An arm with fingers, skin and so on is beyond the capabilities of a fractal process so far as I know. Fractals don’t stop. Again, so far as I know there’s no way to iteratively create a tree structures with leaves.



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So the “software” of the cell, the “program” embedded in the DNA doesn’t appear to be analogous to a simple computer program that draws fractals. Of course that doesn’t mean that we can never describe a simple organism completely in fractal terms, and create analogous distinct individuals.

It seems that a long as the analogy is not pushed too far, computers in a distributed network are reasonably similar to living organisms. Please note I am note referring to the fractal type computer programs, but am talking about the way that computers themselves in a network are somewhat analogous to living organisms. Primitive ones!

Sample oscillator from hexagonal Game of Life. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Technolust



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I’m going to define technolust or technophilia as the almost uncontrollable urge to snap up the latest or most novel technical gadgets. I succumb to this disease frequently, although I do try to keep it under control. I do! Honestly!

I’ve been vaguely wondering about these selfie sticks, the ones where you stick your cell phone on the end of a pole and trigger it by using a bluetooth connection, so when I saw a bluetooth camera trigger in a local shop, I had to buy it. I had to buy it. I had no choice.



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Having got it home and played with it for a bit, I now have to find a use for the darn thing! I don’t particularly like selfies and you can only take so many of them, because essentially they are all the one picture with different backgrounds. You could essentially take one photograph against a “green screen” and chromakey in any background you desire.

My particular area of technolust is things related to or containing computer technology. It’s been with me all my life though I didn’t know it until I came across computer technology at home and at work. I had a Commodore 64 computer at home, and at work I worked on the old huge mainframes, mainly IBM ones. But it really blossomed when I came across mini computers, and the early PCs. I had one of the first portable PCs, like the one in the picture.

English: The IBM Portable PC 5155 model 68 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One mainframe computer I worked on had 256kB of memory and we agonised over how we should divide the address space up between three or four “domains”. Another had a staggering 2MB of memory.

Then at the other end of the scale one PC we had we also upgraded to 2MB of memory, which came on a plugin card which was around 30 – 40 cms long and 10 – 15 cms high. We had to leave the top of the case off to use it!

It’s not always physical things that trigger technolust or technophilia. Before all printers came with network connections they were connected (via a parallel cable usually) to a PC. It could then be shared to others over the network. HP produced a “JetDirect” device which connected the printer to the network either via a cable or a card inserted into the printer itself. I still remember the thrill that I got when I connected over the network to a JetDirect device (which is about the size of a small paperback book) using FTP as if it was a small computer in its own right, which in fact is what the device was.

I’ve got altogether too many computer-related devices in the house. Some I use all the time and others are gathering dust. If I was truly obsessive I could fill the house with devices and possibly go broke, but I haven’t gone to those extremes. So I have a “server” and a “workstation”, and my wife has a laptop. Strictly speaking I have a laptop, but I don’t boot it up very often. It is my wife’s old laptop which I fixed and rebuilt.

Some time ago we got an iPad, which I found amazing – something the size of a magazine, which was able to do much of what the other more conventional computers were able to, and which was run by the touch of a finger (or two!). I also got an Android phone and I fell in love with the thing, so I had to have an Android tablet. Had to. No question!



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I love my Android tablet! It’s a rare day when I don’t use it two or three times and often it is more than that. I investigated programming for it, though I don’t have a “killer app”, so most of my programming efforts are uncompleted. I mostly use it for reading ebooks, getting the latest news and to a lesser extent for email and other online web browsing.

I also use it for games. When I go to bed I take the tablet with me and complete a couple of Sudoku puzzles or similar before I go to sleep. Experts advise against this, but it works for me.

Many people these days appear to be afflicted with technophilia or technolust. When a new Apple device is released queues form at the Apple stores worldwide as people try to slake their desire for latest gadget. This is strange as their old devices, which used to be the latest devices at one time, are not rendered useless by the new devices, and transferring personal information to the new device can be challenging, in spite of attempts to make it easy.

Technolust also extends to software. Some people just have to have the latest apps, the latest operating system. The usual justification for such an upgrade is usually justified by the user as a desire for the new features in the new software or bug fixes in the new software. While I would not advocate never upgrading software, I find such justifications a little weak.

There is a danger that a software upgrade may “brick” a device, that is, it might stop the device from booting up and being used, which is why many people shy away from upgrades. While this is a real concern such happenings are rare and most upgrades go OK. Nevertheless, most users of technology have a horror story about how things have turned to custard during an upgrade.



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I’m what I would classify as a cautious early adopter. For instance, when the new software was released for my phone and tablet, and these devices informed me that the update was available, I waited for a few weeks and followed the news on the upgrade on the Internet. This is almost always a bad idea as long conversations between people who have had trouble (interspersed with odd rare comment “It went OK for me”) doesn’t encourage one to upgrade!

IPod touch with software upgrade and web clips (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Those who grow up with technology tend to use that technology without giving it much thought. Televisions are part of the environment. Cell phones are part of the environment. Maybe soon 3-D printers will be part of the environment. Smart phones and tablets, while desirable, are not quite so novel to the kids of today. They will no doubt direct their technolusts to other technologies.



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Beauty – and the beast

Modern society has something of a fixation with beauty. This has led to such bizarre things as “boob jobs” or cosmetic breast enhancements. Other women inject toxins like “Botox” into various parts of their anatomy to firm them up.

Whole magazine shelves are devoted to “beauty” magazines, and in recent times, they have been augmented by rows of magazines devoted to exercise. TV “infomercials” extol the virtues of this or that exercise machine for men or women, designed to perform miracles on a person’s shape for as little as 10 minutes exercise per day.



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Somewhere there may be someone who is happy with their weight and body shape, but I doubt it. I know that I am not completely happy with mine, but I don’t obsess over it. Some people turn around it and strive in the opposite direction from the mean and try to become, say the heaviest man in the world.

None of this artificiality is beauty. If one measures a beautiful woman for example, one will probably find that the statistics of her measurements are well removed from the average. Miss Beautiful Woman 2015 is way down the bell curve in many ways.

Angeline Jolie, considered to be a beautiful woman, says:

I don’t see myself as beautiful, because I can see a lot of flaws. People have really odd opinions. They tell me I’m skinny, as if that’s supposed to make me happy.

If Jolie is not 100% happy with her looks, how can other women, with less of the physical advantages of Jolie be expected to feel happy with their lot? Of course most women are realistic enough to know that not all women can look like Jolie (or would even want to for that matter), but that doesn’t stop them wishing. Similar holds for men. Not everyone can look like me or George Clooney.

It is evident however, that there is not one standard of beauty (for men or women). Beauty pageants promote one standard of beauty, but films and TV promote another. Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder. Though it is not usually considered to be a usual measure of beauty, body building is also all about having the best body.

There’s a double standard here, of course. People aspire to be beautiful, and to be highly regarded as such, but if someone goes out of his (or her) way to look at beautiful people, on the Internet, in magazines, all around them, it is rightly considered that there is something wrong with them.



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So on the one hand you have people who want to be beautiful, and that is pointless if they are not seen to be beautiful and on the other hand you have people who are obsessed with beauty, which is unhealthy. Of course most people as is usual fall somewhere in the middle ground – they want to be prettier, but they wouldn’t go to the lengths of cosmetic surgery or Botox.

So you have people who go to the gym twice, eat a week and a half of “healthy” food and then relapse back to their usual ways. They then feel some degree of remorse, have some degree of acceptance, and maybe resolve to try again some time in the future. (It’s these people who the gyms make their money out of, not the enthusiasts who turn up week in week out!)

Some expressions of the search for beauty verge on the bizarre. In particular the “child beauty pageants” are disturbing and border on the weird. Very young children are dressed up and made up like adults with revealing costumes and perform suggestive actions and dances on stage. Costumes sometimes include fake breasts on children well under teenage.

I personally find these shows distasteful. It teaches mostly female children pretty much all the wrong things about sexuality. The parents of the children justify these shows by claiming that it gives the child confidence and often that the child is the one that is driven by the urge to compete.

All this happens in a world where parents are told to constantly be on their guard on behalf of their children. The message is that there is a sexual predator behind every bush. While the advice to be on guard for the children is good advice, is it true that there are a vast number of pedophiles out there?

It seems unlikely that there are more than there were in previous generations. It may be that there is more opportunity for such people as people these days know far less about their neighbours than previously and people do move about much more than they used to. Maybe this has allowed such people to. if not flourish, to become more of an issue.

Even so, I think that the pendulum has swung a little too far in the wrong direction. Sure we should keep our children safe, but it seems that parents are being targeted for innocent photographs of their children. It would be a rare parent who has not taken photographs of their children in the bath, and to think that taking such photographs is a sign of a perversion is perverse.

To parents, their children are beautiful, clothed or unclothed and while it not impossible that parents could be sex offenders in that way, it is probably very rare. I’d suggest too, that it should be relatively quick and easy to determine whether or not parents are sex offenders. Here is another article about the case of a family in England, in which the authorities explain some of their thinking in such matters.

In one case of beauty and the beast, the beauty and the beast are the same. I refer to the situation where a young lady dresses in a beautiful if revealing dress and proceeds to get very very drunk. There is nothing beautiful in a young lady throwing up into a bush or stumbling into the gutter, not to mention the danger that she is putting herself in by getting into such a state.

Obviously the fact that a drunken woman might be vulnerable does not in any way justify someone taking advantage of her while she is in that state. Nothing does.



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Growing up, down and sideways, and George Clooney.

Often a plant seed will end up in a place that is not particularly suitable for it. In particular it may end up in a gravel path or similar where there is little real soil. Or it may end up in sand which drains quickly and may, if near the sea, contain high amounts of salt.

In such an environment it may grow stunted or may be deformed. For instance Bonsai trees are kept in a small container and kept relative short of nutrients so that stay small and become gnarled and twisted. They may even have their roots trimmed.

One can imagine a society of concerned individuals fighting against the sustained torture of the trees treated in such a manner, but strangely, I’ve never heard of one. Maybe it is because trees can’t scream?

All members of a species have the same genetic make up, the same genotype. All individuals grow in much the same way, to produce similar adult individuals. This is termed the phenotype.

There may be sexual dimorphism, where the female of the species differs from the male of the species, but in most ways, all members of one sex are pretty similar to one another. I am not too dissimilar from George Clooney. My wife is much like Angelina Jolie.

Of course individuals are not identical. I’m slightly taller than George, for instance. This difference can be genetic, or it may be environmental. My genes may be the cause of the difference, or maybe the environment when we were growing up has slightly affected our growth. Our good looks are almost certainly genetic.

Sometimes a plant grows in a particular way in one environment will look completely different in another environment. Also a young specimen of a plant may look different from a mature specimen of the same species. Lanceword (Pseudopanax crassifolius) has a juvenile form so different from the mature form that it was initially thought to be two different species.

The environmental effect on the phenotype or expressed shape can be seen in genetically identical twins. One would expect their phenotypes to be identical at all ages, however, while “identical twins” look very very similar there are detectable differences.

English: Comparison of typical zygote developm... — English: Comparison of typical zygote development in monozygotic identical and dizygotic twins. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For instance if one twin had suffered a serious illness at a critical stage of growth, then their adult sizes may be significantly different. If one twin had a rich diet and the other twin a restricted diet that also might affect their sizes and expectations of longevity. Scientists can tell a lot about the processes of growth and development by studying genetically identical twins.

A more subtle variation in the phenotype can be seen when populations are considered rather than individuals. A population of moths that lives on darker surfaces may tend to be darker in colour than the same species that lives on lighter surfaces. Since this effect happens slowly, over many generations, it appears to be a genetic change or shift. However this change to the genotype is at a lower level than the species as the lighter moths and the darker ones can interbreed.

Some plants look completely different if grown in different environments. The weed that grows in gravel may look completely different from the weed that grows a metre away in a more favourable environment. It’s as if a switch has been thrown which turns on a totally different way of “building” the plant, as it may well be something like that.

If the genome of the organisation is a “program” to “build” the plant, it is perfectly feasible that a lack of resources at an early stage in the plant’s life might well kick in a different path in the developmental process from the path that it would take if resources were abundant.

if (abundant_resources == true)

then build_good_version

else build_poor_version

This is a simple branching process in a computer program, but the process is almost certainly a lot more complex in real life. However the principle is sound, I believe.

A simple iterative process can be used to generate complex shapes that look a lot like real plants. Minor changes to the process can cause significant changes to the end results. Tall thin shapes can morph into shorter bushier ones with a few changes to fixed numbers (constants) in the iterative process.

The phenotype of a plant of a particular species will be similar in all individuals. If an individual has leaves, stem, flowers of a particular sort then the phenotype of an individual in a different (eg poorer) environment, will most likely have similar parts, though some differences will be obvious.

Maybe the stem into of being long and flexible, it may be a lot shorter and stiffer. Maybe the leaves will be a lot thicker and fleshier in the poor environment plant and may therefore be able to retain water which will be scarcer in the poor environment. Perhaps the flower will be more robust in the harsher environment.

One would expect such variations of phenotype, the poor and the rich, to be implicit in the genome if the wider environment is patchy, with areas of rich soil mixed up with areas where the soil is poor. Otherwise, the ability of the genome to be expressed in multiple ways would likely be bred out of the population, as nature always goes for the simpler rather than the more complex.

The flexibility of the genome is something that the organism benefits from its whole life. For example there are some fish which live in groups of one male and several females. If the single male is killed by another fish, an octopus or a human being, one of the females will change sex and become male, taking the place of the missing male fish.

I’ll not speculate on how that happens in detail, but it seems that it must be implicit in the genome. The trigger is the absence of the male fish, but how the “genetic program” detects this, I don’t know, but once is does it transforms the largest female into a male, presumably by triggering changes in the genetic organs. That’s bound to be a complex process.

The central idea in this post is that the genome is much like a computer program and that the environmental influences are like the parameters to such a program. This is probably an over simplification in many ways, but by considering it as a program can explain why the same genome can produce such different individuals.

A computer program can be controlled by inputs while it is running, and similarly the environment can shape an organism while it is growing and after it has reached maturity. The idea of organism as computer controlled machine is not new, but I like to bring it out and have another look at it now and again.



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The Solstice Again

Today is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, the time when the sun is furthest south in the sky and hence at its highest. From here on in, the days get shorter as we slide back towards winter.

In the Northern Hemisphere, it is of course the winter solstice, and those living there can expect the days to lengthen, as they move towards summer. Today is the Northern Hemisphere’s shortest day.

Seasonal lag means that we can look forward to the warmest months of the year after the solstice, and those unfortunate enough to live in the Northern Hemisphere can look forward to a couple of their coldest months before things start to warm up.

I read somewhere that winter months are the months when people tend to put on weight and this was attributed to the fact that in winter, in the coldest weather people tend to exercise less and eat more. The reduced exercise is attributed to the tendency to stay home in the warm, by the fireside to avoid the often hostile weather.

And the eating more is because, well, what else is there to do but eat, when you are trapped by the weather. Our ancestors used to use up all the reserves that they had laid up for just this occasion, the hams and preserves, dried fruit and root vegetables and so on.

When the summer solstice happens, the weather is warmer and better, so people can get out an exercise, and, for our ancestors at least, agriculture kept them on the move, and the aim was to replenish the stores for the winter months, hence an emphasis on growing rather than eating. Besides, most crops would not be ready for harvesting.



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The winter solstice is one candidate for the start of the year. It marks a definite point in the cycle of the year. It’s after the solstice (a few months after the solstice) that things start growing again. The summer solstice is probably not a good choice as things are humming along then, ploughing and planting, growing and nurturing so it doesn’t really fit as the start of the year.

The spring or vernal equinox falls in March, around the 21st in the Northern Hemisphere. This is also a candidate for the start of the year, but to my mind, it is too late. Winter is tailing off at that time, things are starting to grow and because of the seasonal lag, it’s the start of spring. The year, are I see it, is already under way.



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Interestingly our fiscal year ends on 31st March. This is the date used by individuals to account for tax obligations. In many countries using the Gregorian calendar, the fiscal year ends on 31st December and almost aligns with the (winter) solstice based year. Other countries which use other calendars have fiscal years which relate to the local calendar.

As I have said the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere falls on 21st December (in most years). It is an astronomical point in time, not a whole day and can happen on 20th December. In the decade from 2010 to 2020 it falls on the 20th on three occasions.



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The summer solstice, Christmas Day, and the official 1st January New Year Day all fall within just over a week of each other. There is good reason to suspect historical links between these days, and there is much debate on the actual historical relationship between these events.

It is often said that early Christians adopted the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, to squeeze out or replace a pagan celebration at that time. This may or may not be the case (or it may be partially true), but what is evident is that many cultures outside of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn celebrate a festival at around the time of the solstice.

Between the two Tropics the sun is overhead twice in a year while the sun reaches a southerly point at the time of the southern solstice (winter in the north and summer in the south) and a northerly point at the time of the northern solstice, the hottest time occurs when the sun is overhead. This divides the year into unequal parts in these latitudes.

The climate of these regions is dependant on local conditions, such as whether or not the region is close to an ocean or is in the middle of a continent, and many tropical areas have wet and dry seasons, typically of unequal extents. One example know to many people outside the tropics is the monsoon season when a regions rainfall may predominantly happen.



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On the Arctic and Antarctic circle, at the solstices the sun just grazes the horizon at the summer solstice and the day lasts 24 hours. At the winter solstices the sun just barely reaches the horizon and the night lasts 24 hours. Closer to the poles the number of sunless days or days with the sum always above the horizon increase. At the poles the sun is below the horizon for three months and above it for three months. (I hope this is correct. I did research this a little, but I am not 100% sure).

Interestingly, I learnt recently that the sunset will continue to become later for the next few weeks. The reason for this according to the linked article is because we have tied our clocks to 24 hours exactly and the day is not exactly 24 hours long. Not only is it not exactly 24 hours, but its length varies during the year. In Wellington the sunset goes out to around 3 minutes to 9 and doesn’t dip below that time until 7th January 2015.

English: Sunrise at Winter Solstice (December ... — English: Sunrise at Winter Solstice (December 21, 2006 at 8 a.m.) as viewed through the doorway half way up Maiden Tower (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(December data here, January data here).

While looking up these numbers I noticed that the day length in Auckland is nearly half an hour shorter up there. Also sunset is about a quarter of an hour later in Wellington meaning that when the summer weather finally arrives we will have an extra 14 minutes to enjoy the balmy evenings. That’s yet another reason to prefer Wellington over Auckland! We have more time to celebrate the solstice.

[Darn! I completed this on Monday but forgot to publish it. Better late than never, I guess!]

Why Pi?

If you measure the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of any circular object you get the number Pi (π). Everyone who has done any maths or physics at all knows this. Some people who have gone on to do more maths knows that Pi is an irrational number, which is, looked at one way, merely the category into which Pi falls.

There are other irrational numbers, for example the square root of the number 2, which are almost as well known as Pi, and others, such as the number e or Euler’s number, which are less well known.

Illustration of the Exponential function (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who has travelled further along the mathematical road will be aware that there is more to Pi than mere circles and that there are many fascinating things about this number to keep amateur and professional mathematicians interested for a long time.

Pi has been known for millennia, and this has given rise to many rules of thumb and approximation for the use of the number in all sorts of calculations. For instance, I once read that the ratio of the height to base length of the pyramids is pretty much a ratio of Pi. The reason why this is so leads to many theories and a great deal of discussion, some of which are thoughtful and measured and others very much more dubious.

Ancient and not so ancient civilisations have produced mathematicians who have directly or indirectly interacted with the number Pi. One example of this is the attempts over the centuries to “square the circle“. Briefly squaring the circle means creating a square with the same area as the circle by using the usual geometric construction methods and tools – compass and straight edge.

This has been proved to be impossible, as the above reference mentions. The attempts to “trisect the angle” and “double the cube” also failed and for very similar reasons. It has been proved that all three constructions are impossible.

English: Drawing of an square inscribed in a c... — English: Drawing of an square inscribed in a circle showing animated strightedge and compass Italiano: Disegno di un quadrato inscritto in una circonferenza, con animazione di riga e compasso (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Well, actually they are not possible in a finite number of steps, but it is “possible” in a sense for these objectives to be achieved in an infinite number of steps. This is a pointer to irrational numbers being involved. Operations which involve rational numbers finish in a finite time or a finite number of steps. (OK, I’m not entirely sure about this one – any corrections will be welcomed).

OK, so that tells us something about Pi and irrational numbers, but my title says “Why Pi?”, and my question is not about the character of Pi as an irrational number, but as the basic number of circular geometry. If you google the phrase “Why Pi?”, you will get about a quarter of a million hits.

Animation of the act of unrolling a circle's c... — Animation of the act of unrolling a circle’s circumference, illustrating the ratio π. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most of these (I’ve only looked at a few!) seem to be discussions of the mathematics of Pi, not the philosophy of Pi, which I think that the question implies. So I searched for articles on the Philosophy of Pi.

Hmm, not much there on the actual philosophy of Pi, but heaps on the philosophy of the film “Life of Pi“. What I’m interested in is not the fact that Pi is irrational or that somewhere in its length is encoded my birthday and the US Declaration of Independence (not to mention copies of the US Declaration of Independence with various spelling and grammatical mistakes).

What I’m interested in is why this particular irrational number is the ratio between the circumference and the diameter. Why 3.1415….? Why not 3.1416….?

Part the answer may lie in a relation called “Euler’s Identity“.

$e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0$

This relates two irrational numbers, ‘e’ and ‘π’ in an elegantly simple equation. As in the XKCD link, any mathematician who comes across this equation can’t help but be gob-smacked by it.

The mathematical symbols and operation in this equation make it the most concise expression of mathematics that we know of. It is considered an example of mathematical beauty.



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The interesting thing about Pi is that it was an experimental value in the first place. Ancient geometers were not interested much in theory, but they measured round things. They lived purely in the physical world and their maths was utilitarian. They were measuring the world.

However they discovered something that has deep mathematical significance, or to put it another way is intimately involved in some beautiful deep mathematics.

English: Bubble-Universe's-graphic-visualby pa... — English: Bubble-Universe’s-graphic-visualby paul b. toman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This argues for a deep and fundamental relationship between mathematics and physics. Mathematics describes physics and the physical universe has a certain shape, for want of a better word. If Pi had a different value, that would imply that the universe had a different shape.

In our universe one could consider that Euler’s Relation describes the shape of the universe at least in part. Possibly a major part of the shape of the universe is encoded in it. It doesn’t seem however to encode the quantum universe at least directly.

English: Acrylic paint on canvas. Theme quantu... — English: Acrylic paint on canvas. Theme quantum physics. Français : Peinture acrylique sur toile. Thématique physique quantique. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I haven’t been trained in Quantum Physics so I can only go on the little that I know about the subject and I don’t know if there is any similar relationship that determines the “shape” of Quantum Physics as Euler’s Relation does for at least some aspects of Newtonian physics.

Maybe the closest relationship that I can think of is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Roughly speaking, (sorry physicists!) it states that for certain pairs of physical variables there is a physical limit to the accuracy with which they can be known. More specifically the product of the standard deviations of the two variables is greater than Plank’s constant divided by two.

In other words, if we accurately know the position of something, we only have a vague notion of its momentum. If we accurately know its velocity we only have a vague idea of its position. This “vagueness” is quantified by the Uncertainty Principle. It shows exactly how fuzzy Quantum Physics.

The mathematical discipline of statistics underlay the Uncertainty Principle. In a sense the Principle defines Quantum Physics as a statistically based discipline and the “shape” of statistics determines or describes the science. At least, that is my guess and suggestion.



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To return to my original question, “why Pi?”. For that matter, “why statistics?”. My answer is a guess and a suggestion as above. The answer is that it is because that is the shape of the universe. The Universe has statistical elements and shape elements and possibly other elements and the maths describe the shapes and the shapes determine the maths.

This is rather circular I know, but one can conceive of Universes where the maths is different and so is the physics and of course the physics matches the maths and vice versa. We can only guess what a universe would be like where Pi is a different irrational number (or even, bizarrely a rational number) and where the fuzziness of the universe at small scales is less or more or physically related values are related in more complicated ways.



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The reason for “Why Pi” then comes down the anthropological answer, “Because we measure it that way”. Our Universe just happens to have that shape. If it had another shape we would either measure it differently, or we wouldn’t exist.



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How do I get from A to B?

We had reason to visit another suburb today. It wasn’t until I was sitting waiting for some traffic lights to change that I thought about how I was navigating from home to destination.

We just got into the car and drove there. I didn’t consider the route in advance, and it seemed that I just pointed the car and we got there. Obviously I knew the way, as we had been there or through there a number of times in the past. But I didn’t have the destination in mind from start to finish, at least not consciously. I’m not sure that I had it in the forefront of my mind at all.

I knew that it was in that direction though, and that did not leave a lot of route options. I did have a general feeling that I should go south, in this instance and that really only leaves two options, the back road, or the motorway. The back road is a lot prettier!

I made the choice to take the back road but it was not, as I said, at the forefront of my mind, as I was doing other things at the time, like finding my keys, my phone, my wallet and these things occupied the forefront, while the decision about which route to take was more background.

So the route was chosen more of less in the background, but not subconsciously. Much the same process happened on the way there, and at each junction or turning point, I didn’t have to consider at the front of my mind which direction I should drive. I just did it. Some part of my mind knew that to get to our destination I had to turn right, or go straight on or whatever.

This is good because the front of my mind was doing the driving, keeping the car on line, signalling, accelerating or braking, keeping us safe on the road. Except that it wasn’t right at the front mind, since I was also talking to my wife about various things. Christmas things from memory.

English: Two motorcycle trailing off the brake... — English: Two motorcycle trailing off the brakes through Tooele Turn at Miller Motorsports Park. Rider on the white bike is Warren Rose, Rider of the green bike is Dave Palazzolo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve been driving for many years and I’m confident that if needed the driving part of my mind can instantly oust the things currently in my mind should the unexpected happen. Many year ago, when I used to smoke, I was driving with a friend and an emergency happened. When it was over I realised that I was no longer holding my cigarette. Meantime my friend was scrabbling between his legs where my cigarette had ended up when the driving part of my mind grabbed precedence and the cigarette holding part was temporarily ousted.

The route planning part of my mind would not suddenly get control like that, fortunately. That would be highly dangerous. I could if I had wanted have brought the route planning part of my mind to the front, but it wouldn’t say much except “turn left at the next junction”.

Turn Left, Turn Right (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have on occasion made a navigating mistake. I’m going to A and the route to B is the same in part. Suddenly I realise that I have missed a junction and will have to backtrack. It seems that the route finding part of my mind spends much of the time dozing and checks in only infrequently, sometimes missing the turning point or ritually following a more usual route.

It also seems that the information it keeps is like an instruction to take an action at each decision point rather than the whole route from home to destination as well as a general direction, less well specified. GPS guidance systems seem to work this way too in that they instruct you to take an action at each junction without setting out the whole route each time.



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The model of the mind that I’ve used above, of various parts of the mind at various levels of “forefrontness” or consciousness is nothing new. The need to make a part of the mind the one at the top of the conscious levels, suddenly as a result of a danger, or selectively by choice, as in route following reminds me of the way that computer programs

Computers have several methods for navigating through programs and reacting to things that happen when they are running. One big part is called “handling errors”. Dividing by zero is an error and if the computer reaches a point where it has to divide by zero something needs to be done. The program can report the error and gracefully stop, or it can take some action to fix the error and then carry on.

Computers handle error by means of “interrupts”. Whether the errors is software (eg divide by zero) or caused by hardware connected to it (eg input/output errors) the computer stops what it is doing and runs a bit of program that handle the errors by sending a message or fixing things up. The bits of program that were running are suspended and after the error is handled the bits that were running may be given back control.

The mind seems to work in a similar way. When an emergency arises the current part of the mind that is at the forefront gets suspended and the emergency is handled by another part of the mind. A pedestrian steps into the road and you react by standing on the brakes “before you know it” as the saying goes. As soon as the emergency is over, the conscious mind takes over again.

a short .gif of the Taiwanese animated pedestr... — a short .gif of the Taiwanese animated pedestrian road crossing sign (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You do indeed react “before you know it”, one might say instinctively. But humans have not been driving cars for much more than one hundred years, so it appears that the reaction is not instinctive in itself, but is an instinctive reaction to a danger that has been learned. We seem to have this fast reaction to events which is instinctively based but can be applied to learned situations, which is much more flexible than hard-wired instincts would be.

So, pondering on how I get from A to B has led me to conjecture that there are parts of the mind which are forefront in our minds and other parts which are not directly in the forefront but which can be brought to the forefront in an instant, when an event happens. It is evident that these parts are only partially backgrounded as the mind as a whole has some aware of the location at the time, but they do act semi-autonomously, that is until the pedestrian steps out onto the roadway.



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Evidently there are parts of the mind that are less foregrounded and more backgrounded. When the part of the mind that is concerned with driving wants to signal or change gear, another part of the mind which controls the arms and legs wakes up and make the limbs move as needed.

I’ve spoken above as if all these different levels are discrete states, but I think it more likely that is a continuum from the foreground of the mind to the background or a least the series of levels of consciousness are close enough togerther to appear so. The mind is a complex and wonderful thing.



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[Comment: After finishing this post I went looking for other discussions of the same topic. I first found this Wikipedia article which has the issues mentioned in the article’s header. Interestingly the implication in the article is that there is a single level of consciousness at any one time. This I do not agree with. Another article I found was a little better, I feel, but only because it acknowledges that several levels may be active at the same time, but divides them into three levels with well defined scopes. I feel that it is a lot more complex than that, with all sorts of sections of the mind at all sorts of levels being active at the same time. Neither article deals with the issue of one section of the mind apparently seizing the highest level when an external event triggers it.]

Dis-Continuum

Where ever one looks, things mostly seem to be in lumps or clumps of matter. We live on a lump of matter, one of a number of lumps of matter orbiting an even bigger lump of matter. We look into the sky when the bigger lump of matter is conveniently on the other side of our lump of matter and we see evidence of other lumps of matter similar to the lump of matter that our lump of matter orbits.

We see stars, in short, which poetically speaking float in a void empty of matter. We can see that these stars are not evenly distributed and that they gather together in clumps which we call galaxies. Actually stars seem to clump together in smaller clumps such as the Local Cluster of a dozen or so stars, and most galaxies have arms or other features that show structure at all levels.

The galaxies, which we can see between the much closer stars of our own galaxy, also appear to be clustered together in clumps, and the clumps seem to be clumped together. Of course, the ultimate clump is the Universe itself, but at all levels the Universe appears to have structure, to be organised, to be formed of lumps and clumps, variously shaped into loops, whorls, sheets, arms, rings, bubbles, and so on.

OK, but in the other direction, towards the smaller rather than the larger, our planet has various systems, weather, orogenic, natural, social and evolutionary. All sorts of systems at all levels, from global scope to the scope of the smallest element.



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In other personal worlds, below the level our interactions with our families, we have all the systems that make up our own bodies. The system that circulates our blood, the system that processes our food, the system that maintains our multiple systems in a state homeostasis.

That is, not a steady state, but a state where all the individual systems self-adjust so that the larger system does not descend into a state of chaos, leading to a disruption of the larger whole. Death.

By and large most systems in our environment are made up of molecules, which are in turn made up of atoms. Atoms are a convenient stopping point on the scale from very large to very small. They are pretty “well defined”, in that they are a very strong concept.

Atoms are rarely found solo. They are sociable critters. They form relationships with other atoms, but some atoms are more sociable than others, forming multiple bonds with other atoms. Some are more promiscuous than others, changing partners frequently.



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These relationships are called molecules, and range from simple to complex, containing from two or three atoms, to millions of atoms. The really large molecules can be broken down to smaller sub-molecules which are linked repeatedly to make up the complex molecules.

To rise higher up the scale for a moment, these molecules, large and small are organised into cells, which are essentially factories for making identical or nearly identical copies of themselves. The differences are necessary to make cells into muscles or organs and other functional features, and cells that make bones and sinews and other structural parts of a body.

A section of DNA; the sequence of the plate-li... — A section of DNA; the sequence of the plate-like units (nucleotides) in the center carries information. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I said, atoms are a convenient stopping point. Every atom of an element is identical at least in its base state. It may lose or gain electrons in a “relationship” or molecule, but basically it is the same as any other element of the same sort.

Each atom consists of a nucleus and surrounding electrons, a model which some people liken to a solar system. There are similarities, but there are also differences (which I won’t go into in this post). The nucleus consists a mix of protons and neutrons. While the number neutrons may vary, they don’t significantly affect the chemical properties of the atom, which makes all atoms of an element effectively the same.

An early, outdated representation of an atom, ... — An early, outdated representation of an atom, with nucleus and electrons described as well-localized particles on well-localized orbits. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Each component of an atom is made up of smaller particles called “elementary” particles, although they may not be fundamentally elementary. At this level we reach the blurry level of quantum physics where a particle has an imprecise definition and an imprecise location in macroscopic terms.

Having travelled from the largest to the smallest, I’m now going to talk mathematics. I’ll link back to physics at the end.

We are all familiar with counting. One, two, three and so on. These concepts are the atoms of the mathematical world. They can be built up into complex structures, much like atoms can be built into molecules, organelles, cells, tissues and organs. (The analogy is far from perfect. I can think of several ways that it breaks down).

Below the “atomic” level of the integers is the “elementary” level of the rational numbers, what most people would recognise as fractions. Interestingly between any two rational numbers, you can find other rational numbers. These are very roughly equivalent to the elementary particles. Very roughly.

One might think that these would exhaust the list of types of numbers, but below (in a sense) the rational numbers is the level of the real numbers. While many of the real numbers are also rational numbers, the majority of the real numbers ate not rational numbers.

The level of the real numbers is also known as the level of the continuum. A continuum implies a line has no gaps, as in a line drawn with a pencil. If the line is made up of dots, no matter how small, it doesn’t represent a continuum.

A line made up of atoms is not a continuum, nor is a line of elementary particles. While scientists have found ever more fundamental particles, the line has apparently ended with quarks. Quantum physics seems to indicate that nature, at the lowest level, is discrete, or, to loop back to the start of this post, lumpy. There doesn’t seem to be a level of the continuum in nature.

That leaves us with two options. Either there is no level of the continuum in nature and nature is fundamentally lumpy, or the apparent indication of quantum physics that nature is lumpy is wrong.

Pineapple Lumps (240g size) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s hard to believe that a lumpy universe would permit the concept of the continuum. If the nature of things is discrete, it’s hard to see how one could consider a smooth continuous thing. It’s like considering chess, which fundamentally defines a discontinuous world, where a playing piece is in a particular square and a square contains a playing piece or not.

It’s a weak argument, but the fact that we can conceive the concept of a continuum hints that the universe may be fundamentally continuous, in spite of quantum physics’ indications that it is not continuous.



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