Philosophy – Page 18 – Me on the net

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)

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.

Sickness

Today I am going to reflect on sickness. As an aside, my aim was to write something every Friday and post it here, but lately the deadlines have been slipping past and I didn’t complete the previous post until Tuesday. This Friday I was still suffering from the bug that I caught, and motivation and energy levels were low, so I didn’t start this until Sunday. The effects hang on, but if I don’t start now, I may not get a post done at all! So here goes.

Last Monday I was feeling like I was coming down with something but struggled into work anyway. A couple of hours into the day it was obvious to me that I was rapidly getting worse so I headed home and put my feet up. I fully expected to be over the worst by Wednesday but on Wednesday morning it was obvious that I wasn’t recovered enough to return to work, so I visited the doctor who confirmed a flu-type illness.

The doctor didn’t prescribe anything apart from rest, which suited me. I must write a post about over prescribing of medicines by doctors as I see it sometime. So the rest of the week was taken up by lying around, drinking copious tea, coughing and aching. I believe that one of the symptoms of the sickness I am still suffering from is to make everything ache. Of course, the constant coughing results in aching of the chest muscles, but my arms and legs and head also ached. Not nice.

Add on on shivering fits and sweats and it all makes for a fun week. Did I mention a sore throat?

I think that I am suffering the attack of a flu virus, but obviously not a strain that was targeted by the flu jab that I had. Since it was presumably a virus there is no treatment possible, apart from alleviating the symptoms.

Speaking anthropomorphically, it is in the virus’ interest to not reduce the functional level of the organism that it attacks to the level where it quickly dies and so cannot pass on the infection, so viruses tend to merely make you sick. So infected organisms remain more or less functional. They still eat, drink, and interrelate with others of their type, which allows the virus to spread by coughs and sneezes which fill the air with the virus which can then be inhaled by well individuals.

It is good strategy for the virus to irritate the nose and the the chest, increasing the possibility of the virus being passed on. I say “strategy”, though of course it is pure evolution in action – viruses which don’t cause you to cough and sneeze don’t get spread around so easily and so tend to die out. Of course there are other ways to spread a virus or other disease, STDs and diseases transferred by physical contact spring to mind.

When you think about it, sneezes and coughs are a pretty damn efficient way of spreading a virus. A cough or sneezes creates a mist of tiny virus-laden particles that can be inhaled or picked up from surfaces where they settle. It follows that viruses at least of this type would spread most efficiently in enclosed spaces such as homes and workplaces. A farmer could sneeze in the fields and not affect anyone, but a sneeze in a packed classroom could result in several pupils being missing in the next day or two, not to mention the teacher.

A man mid-sneeze. Original CDC caption: "... — A man mid-sneeze. Original CDC caption: “This 2009 photograph captured a sneeze in progress, revealing the plume of salivary droplets as they are expelled in a large cone-shaped array from this man’s open mouth, thereby dramatically illustrating the reason one needs to cover his/her mouth when coughing, or sneezing, in order to protect others from germ exposure.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the silly things about employment laws is that a person who takes leave from work because of sickness can be asked to provide a medical certificate, even if the employer doesn’t believe that the worker is faking the sickness. Usually there is a day or two’s grace to allow the sick person to obtain a certificate from the doctor. This usually means that the sick person has to go out into the community, sit in a waiting room which is probably a miasma of viruses, and talk to a doctor who is then subjected to the airborne virus! It’s possible that evolution will favour viruses which reach maximum infectiveness in 2 – 3 days!

The reason for the laws is to prevent people from claiming to be sick when they aren’t (known colloquially as “taking a sickie”). While this is obviously a problem it does mean that people may struggle into work when sick in order to avoid the expense of a doctor’s visit, and they may spread the virus around the workplace, resulting in more absences and more costs to the employer.

Viruses are amazing things, on the borders of death and life. They are simply little packets of genetic code for self-replication which utilise the organism’s own machinery against it. Of course all living organisms are packets of genetic code for self-replication, but viruses are the smallest possible, with the possible exception of things like prions. (Which, I’ve just read, don’t contain any genetic code).

The immune system of the body is triggered by viruses (which results in all the coughing and sneezing) and so the body is not defenceless. However viruses mutate quite quickly, so we have many ‘strains’ of common viruses. The common cold is, I believe, a particularly mutable virus which is probably why research into it has not gone far in combating it. The flu virus that attacked me is likely to have been a mutation of a strain of the flu virus that was targeted by the flu jab that I had.

And so the war goes on.

Comparison of mechanisms of drug resistance am... — Comparison of mechanisms of drug resistance among viruses (Photo credit: AJC1)

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.

The number of the universe.

Anything that can be measured can be encoded in a single number. Take for instance the trajectory of a stone thrown into the air. Its position in relation to the point of launch and the time it has taken to reach that point can be encoded into a set of numbers, three for the spacial dimensions and one for the time dimension. This can be done for all the points that it passes through. These individual numbers can then be encoded into a single number that uniquely identifies the trajectory of the stone.

Or, a physicist can describe the motion of the thrown stone by using generic equations and plug in the starting position and starting velocity of the stone, which can then be encoded, probably in a simpler fashion than the above point by point encoding.

If we can imagine a set of equations that describe all the possible physical processes (the “laws of nature”?) and we can imagine that we can measure the positions of all the particles (including photons,’dark matter’ and any more esoteric things that might be out these), then we could encode all this in a huge number which we could call the ‘number of the universe’. Such a number would be literally astronomical and I do mean ‘literally’ here.

The most concise expression of the state of the universe over all time is probably the universe itself and the laws that govern it. Each individual particle has its own attribute, like charge, mass, position and so on as well as things like spin, charm and color. Some of these change over time and some are fundamental to the particle itself – if they change so does the nature of the particle. The rest of the universe consists of other particles which have a lesser or greater effect on the particle, all of which sum together to describe the forces which affect the particle.

There are a couple of things which might derail the concept of the number of the universe. Firstly there is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and secondly there is the apparent probabilistic nature of some physical processes.

What follows is my take on these two issues. It may make a physicist laugh, or maybe grimace, but, hey, I’m trying to make sense of the universe to the best on my abilities.

People may have heard of the Uncertainty Principle, which states that there are pairs of physical properties which cannot both be accurately known at the same time. You may be able to know the position of a particle accurately, but you would not then be able to tell its momentum, for example.

It is usually explained in terms of how one measures the position of something, which boils down to hitting it with something else, such as a photon or other particle. The trouble here is that if you hit the particle with something else, you change its momentum. This is, at best, only a metaphor, as the uncertainty principle is more fundamental to quantum physics than this.

Wikipedia talks about waveforms and Fourier analysis and an aspect of waves that I’ve noticed myself over the years. If you send a sound wave to a frequency analyser you will see a number of peaks at various frequencies but you cannot tell how the amplitude of the wave changes with time. However, if you display the signal on an oscilloscope you can get a picture of the shape of the wave, that is the amplitude at any point in time, but not the frequencies of the wave and its side bands. Err. I know what I mean, but I don’t know if I can communicate what I mean!

The picture above shows a spectrum analysis of a waveform. I don’t have the oscilloscope version of the above, but below is a time-based view of a waveform.

In any case, the uncertainty doesn’t imply any indeterminacy. A particle doesn’t know its position and momentum, and these values are the result of its properties and the state of the rest of the universe and the history of both. This means that the uncertainty principle doesn’t introduce any possible indeterminacy into the number of the universe.

On the second point, some physical processes are probabilistic, such as the decay of a radioactive atom. I don’t believe that this has any effect on the number of the universe. The number incorporates the probabilistic nature of the decay, including all the possibilities.

There is an interpretation of quantum physics called the “Many Worlds Interpretation“, where each possible outcome of a probabilistic process splits off into a separate world, resulting in an infinity of separate worlds. I don’t believe that this tree of probabilistic worlds is a useful view of the situation.

No, I think that there is a probabilistic dimension, just like time or space. All the things that can happen, ‘happen’ in some sense. The probability of you throwing 100 tails in a row with a fair coin is very small, but it is possible. As I see it the main objection to this view is the fact that we only see one view of the universe and we don’t appear to experience any other possible views of the universe, but this is exactly the same with the dimensions of space and time. We only experience one view of space at a time as we can’t be in two places at the same time. While we could be in the same place at two times they are two distinct views of the universe.

In any case the number of the universe encompasses all probabilities so if you still adhere to the single probability model of the universe, our universe and all possible universes are encoded by it. The question then becomes how you can extract the smaller number that encoded the single universe that we experience. I believe that that is not a question that needs to be answered.

The question that does remain open is – why is that number the number of our universe? Why not some other number?

Hey Noni No

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grape Vine (Photo credit: Fire Engine Red)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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