Philosophy – Page 6 – Me on the net

Measuring things

English: Ruler Italiano: Righello (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When we measure a length, with a ruler, say, we can’t measure it exactly. The ruler will be marked off in, say, millimetres, and the length we are measuring will probably fall somewhere between two markings on the ruler, so we can only say that the length is somewhere between the distance between the two markings and the start of the ruler.

Probably. Actually there are a number of things that could mess up our measurement. We may not be able to line up the start of the length we are measuring with the start marking on the ruler, as the marking on the ruler is not of zero width. The best we can do, when aligning one end of the length to be measured with the ruler, is to align the start of the length to the middle of the marking on the ruler.

English: A close-up picture of a section of ru... — English: A close-up picture of a section of ruler with British (inches) and Chinese (cun) scales on its two sides. This is the 10th cun – the last cun of a chi, so that one can see that 1 chi (10 cun) was equal to 14+5/8 inches, i.e. 371 mm. A metric ruler is shown next to it for scale. As can be seen from the worn corners, the ruler has been well used in measurements of length, such as perhaps of garment cloth, for trade transactions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We then have to transfer our attention to the other end of the ruler. Probably the other end of the length and the edge of the ruler don’t align, so we shuffle the ruler to try to align the two ends of the length with the edge of the ruler, checking all the time that the start of the ruler is in line with the start of the length to be measured.

When all is aligned we can then read of the approximate value of the length, assuming that the ruler is still properly aligned and that the start of the ruler is still properly aligned with the start of the length. However, as mentioned above the end of the distance being measured will probably fall between two markings.

A carpenters' ruler with centimetre divisions — A carpenters’ ruler with centimetre divisions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So any measurement with the ruler should be stated with an estimate of the margin of error in the answer. “About 73mm, with an error of about 0.5mm” might be a reasonable estimate.

The accuracy of a measurement may depend on the material from which the ruler is made. It may be wood, plastic or metal, or some other material. Wood is a natural material, and as such it may warp, or shrink or expand unevenly. It may deteriorate over time, so that today’s measurement may be slightly different from today’s. The ink used to make the markings may migrate into the wood through natural pores and cracks in the wood, rendering them wider and fuzzier than when the ruler is new.

Diagram showing operation of temperature compe... — Diagram showing operation of temperature compensated “gridiron” pendulum, invented in 1726 by British clockmaker John Harrison. The pendulum uses rods of a high thermal expansion metal, zinc (yellow) to compensate for the expansion of rods of a low thermal expansion metal, iron (blue), so the overall pendulum doesn’t change in length with temperature changes. Therefore the period of swing of the pendulum, and the rate of the clock, are constant with temperature. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A metal ruler can be marked more accurately, and the markings won’t blur, and the markings can be much thinner or sharper than those of a wooden ruler. Unfortunately metal will expand and contract depending on the temperature, adding errors to the measurements. This can be alleviated by careful choice of alloy for the ruler, but not eliminated.

All rulers are these days fabricated by machines of course, and the markings are made by these machines. Such a machine has to be as accurate or more accurate than the end product of course, which means that the scale marks must be located more accurately, and probably be narrower than those of the end product.



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In order to be more accurate, various techniques are used to achieve the extra accuracy, and I’m not going to discuss them here, mainly because I can only guess what they are! Vernier scales and error averaging techniques spring to mind, but as I said, I don’t what is actually used.

Microscopes and similar allow the measurement of very small distances against a scale calibrated to very small tolerances. This pattern is repeated endlessly – to measure small distances accurately your measuring device (or technique) needs to be an order of magnitude more accurate than the distance to be measured.

Microlitic volcanic lithic fragment, scale in ... — Microlitic volcanic lithic fragment, scale in millimeters. Top picture in plane-polarized light, bottom picture in cross-polarized light. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If we want to measure atoms, we need an atomic sized scale and that cannot be made of atoms, obviously. We can use electromagnetic waves, other atoms, subatomic particles and so on, of course, but we are now in the quantum world, so not only do we have the sorts of issues mentioned above, but we have issues that related primarily to the quantum world – such as the Uncertainty Principle, and the fact that an atom can behave like a particle or a wave.

Down at these levels we use atoms to measure other atoms – there is of course no possibility of a ruler type scale which is made up of atoms. Instead things are measured by noting the frequency of emissions from the atom as its electrons changes from one quantum state to another.

Atomic Clock FOCS-1 (Switzerland). The primary... — Atomic Clock FOCS-1 (Switzerland). The primary frequency standard device, FOCS-1, one of the most accurate devices for measuring time in the world. It stands in a laboratory of the Swiss Federal Office of Metrology METAS in Bern. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is referred to as a quantum jump and is popularly interpreted as an electron moving from one electron shell to another, in the common view of an electron orbit around the nucleus of an atom like a planet around a star.

A popular view is that at quantum levels the apparent continuity in time and space is not seen and that space and time appear to have a discrete structure. At some scale this makes it impossible to measure very small lengths, as it is impossible to tell whether or not two points are at different locations or not.

It follows that in the usual macro world that apparent continuity is probably illusory – if we can’t tell the difference between two points at a very small level, our measurements at the macro level are not well defined. It seems that the appearance of continuity at the macro level is an emergent phenomenon.

Maybe. The appearance of continuity probably comes from the fact that when we look at a line from A to B we can always pick a point C between them. We can then pick a point D between A and C and a point E between A and D and so on, apparently forever. But in fact the process has to stop, and the stopping point is where we find that we can’t distinguish the two end points of the line.

Is the issue caused by a conflict between our physics, which is at heart a description of the world as we see it, and what the world is actually like? A line is a mathematical concept which has extent (length), but no width. In the real world a line is marked by some means, pencil or laser beam, and has an extent, which is what we are trying to measure, and certainly has some width, the width of the lead of the pencil, the width of the laser beam. Are we starting to find out about the things that we can’t know about the world?

Virtual Reality



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Back in 1999 I was just finishing my Masters degree at Victoria University of Wellington. I needed a subject for my research paper and I chose what was then a hot topic, Virtual Reality (VR). At the time, the computing resources that were available to most people were, by today’s standards pretty limited.

17 years ago we measured RAM in megabytes, and disk space in gigabytes. The Internet was not as pervasive as it is today, and most people, if they accessed the Internet at all, used dial up modems. Broadband was for most people, still in their future. As were smartphones and all the technology that we immerse ourselves in today.

As could be imagined, this limited the effectiveness of VR. If you were trying to set up a VR session between two geographically separated places, then the VR experience could be somewhat limited by the low resolution, the speed of updates of the views that the users experienced, and the lags caused by the (relatively) slow connections.

Nevertheless, research was taking place, and Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) and VR gloves were researched and developed. The HMDs provided the user with displays of the virtual world around him/her, and the gloves provided the tactile element to some extent.

English: zSight HMD by Sensics, Inc. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These devices have their current descendants of course, though more is heard of the HMDs than the gloves. The HMDs range from the highly developed devices like the Oculus Rift right down to cheap devices like Google Cardboard which literally that, a head mounted device consisting of a cardboard body and a cellphone. The cellphone’s screen is divided into two and different images are provided to each eye for the 3-Dimensional effect.

It was evident, back in 1999 when I wrote my paper that VR was a technology looking for an application, and it still is. Some TVs have been made which incorporate 3D technology, but the production of these appears to have tailed off almost completely. Apparently the added ability to experience movies in 3D which involved wearing special headsets, wasn’t enough to offset the necessity to wear the headsets.



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People just used their imaginations when immersed in a program or movie and didn’t feel that they needed the extra dimension, and the headset added a barrier which prevented experience of shared movie watching that forms at least part of the entertainment value of watching movies with friends and families.

My paper was about diffusion of VR techniques into everyday life, and it mostly missed the point I think in retrospect (though the paper did help me get the degree!) My paper used a Delphi Technique for the research. This technique involves posing a series of question on the research topic to a number of specialists in the field. Their answers are then summarised and passed back to the whole panel. Any subsequent comments are then also summarised.

English: Temple of Apollo in Delphi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Obviously as workers in the field my panel was positive about VR’s then prospects, as you would expect. They however did sounds some notes of caution, which proved to be well founded. I’m not going to do a critique of my paper and the panel’s findings, but I will touch on them.

Specifically, they mentioned that my questions were all about fully immersive VR, which is basically what I’ve been talking about above, the HMD thing. Augmented VR, where our view of the world in not (fully) obstructed by the technology, but the technology enhances our view of the world is used much more in practise, and was when I wrote my paper too.

Augmented VR is things like Head Up Displays (HUDs) and Google Glass where information is added to the user’s field of view, providing him/her with extra information about the world around him/her is much more common. HUDs are common in planes and the like where the operator cannot spare the time to go and look up important information so the information is projected into his field of view. Google Glass was similar but allowed the user to feed back or request information, but unfortunately this did not really catch on and was dropped.



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I mentioned in my questions to my panel that maybe the speed of the Internet was a barrier to the introduction of VR into everyday life. The panel were mostly sympathetic to this viewpoint, but in summary thought that fibre, which was on the horizon would significantly reduce this barrier to the everyday adoption of VR techniques. In fact people do not use the extra bandwidth for VR (except in a way that I will touch on in a minute), but for other things, like streaming TV shows and downloading music.

English: Screenshot of NcFTP downloading a fil... — English: Screenshot of NcFTP downloading a file Category:Screenshots of Linux software (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I envisaged it, a typical VR setup would consist of someone in, say, London, with VR set interacting over the Internet with someone in, say, Tokyo who also has a VR set. They could shake each other’s hand, and view and discuss three dimensional objects in real time, regardless of whether the object was in London or Tokyo. Although I had not considered it at the time, a 3D printer could duplicate a 3D object in the other location, if required.

This has not happened. Teleconferences are stubbornly 2D, and there is no call for a third dimension. Some people, myself included, would not miss the 2D visual aspect at all, would quite happily drop back to voice only!

In one respect, though, VR has come and has taken over our lives without us realising. When we interact with our smartphones, texting, sending photos, emails and so on, in real time, we are immersing ourselves in a new sort of VR. When we are chatting about something and someone gets the cellphone out to google the Internet to check or look something up, we are delving into a new Virtual Reality that we could not have envisaged way back in 1999.



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So when I look back at my paper from that era, I could easily update it and make relevant to the current era, but only in the respect of that limited view of VR. That has not really eventuated, and most likely will have limited application (remote appendectomy anyone?), but it could be considered that facebook/twitter/google/gmail/dropbox and all the other tools that we use on our smartphones has opened up a different alternate Virtual Reality that crept up on us while we were not watching.

Imagine this….

Flying Swan — Drawn using Python and Matplotlib. This picture is serendipitous and not intended.

[Grr! While I finished my previous post, I didn’t publish it. Darn it.]

Since I’ve been playing around with computer generated images recently, my thoughts turned to how we see images. When you look at a computer or television screen these days, you are looking at a matrix of pixels. A pixel can be thought of as a very tiny point of light, or a location that can be switched on and off very rapidly.

Pixels are small. There’s 1920 across my screen at the current resolution, and while I can just about see the individual pixels if I look up close, they are small. To get the same resolution with an array of 5cm light bulbs, the screen would need to be 96 metres in size! You’d probably want to sit at about 150m from the screen to watch it.

The actual size of a pixel is a complicated matter, and depends on the resolution setting of your screen. However, the rating of a camera sensor is a different matter entirely. When I started looking into this, I thought that I understood it, but I discovered that I didn’t.

What complicates things as regards camera sensor resolutions is that typically a camera will store an image as a JPG/JPEG image file, though some will save the image as a RAW image file. The JPG format is “lossy” so some information is lost in the process (though typically not much). RAW image file are minimally processed from the sensor data so contain as much information about what the sensor sees as is possible. Naturally they are larger than JPG format images.



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When we look at a screen we don’t see an array of dots. We pretty much see a smooth image. If the resolution is low, we might consider the image to be grainy, or fuzzy, but we don’t actually “see” the individual pixels as such, unless we specifically look closely. This is because the brain does a lot of processing of an image before we “see” it.

I’ve used the scare quotes around the word “see”, because seeing is very much a mental process. The brain cells extend right out to the eye, with the nerves from the eye being connected directly into the brain.

The eye, much like a camera, consists of a hole to let in the light, a lens to focus it, and sensor at the back of the eye to capture the image. Apparently the measured resolution of the eye is 576 megapixels, but the eye has a number of tricks to improve its apparent resolution. Firstly, we have two eyes and the slightly different images are used to deduce detail that one eye alone will not resolve. Secondly, the eye moves slightly and this also enables it to deduce more detail than would be apparent otherwise.

That said, the eye is not made of plastic metal and glass. It is essentially a ball of jelly, mostly opaque but with a transparent window in it. The size of the window or pupil is controlled by small muscles which contract or expand the size of the pupil depending on the light level (and other factors, such as excitement).

The light is focused on to an area at the back of the eye, which is obviously not flat, but curved. Most the focusing is done by the cornea, the outermost layer of the eye, but the lens is fine tuned by muscles which stretch and relax the lens as necessary. This doesn’t on the face of it seem as accurate as a mechanical focusing system.

In addition to these factors, human eyes are prone to various issues where the eye cannot focus properly, such as myopia (short sightedness) or hyperopia (long sightedness) and similar issues. In addition the jelly that forms the bulk of the eye is not completely transparent, with “floaters” obstructing vision. Cataracts may cloud the front of the cornea, blurring vision.

English: Artist's impression of appearance of ... — English: Artist’s impression of appearance of ocular floaters. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When all this is considered, it’s amazing that our vision works as well as it does. One of the reasons that it does so well is, as I mentioned above, the amazing processing that our brains. Interestingly, what it works with is the rods and cones at the back of the eye, which may or may not be excited by light falling on them. This in not exactly digital data, since the associated nerve cells may react when the state of the receptor changes, but it is close.

It is unclear how images are stored in the brain as memories. One thing is for sure, and that is that it is not possible to dissect the brain and locate the image anywhere in the brain. Instead an image is stored, as it is in a computer, as a pattern. I suspect that the location of the pattern may be variable, just as a file in a computer may move as files are moved about.

The mind processes images after the raw data is captured by the eye and any gaps (caused by, for example, blood vessels in the eye blocking the light). This is why, most of the time, we don’t notice floaters, as the mind edits them out. The mind also uses the little movements of the eye to refine information that the mind uses to present the image to our “mind’s eye“. The two eyes, and the difference between the images on the backs of them also helps to build up the image.

It seems likely to me that memories that come in the form of images are not raw images, but are memories of the image that appears in the mind’s eye. If it were otherwise the image would lacking the edits that are applied to the raw images. If I think of an image that I remember, I find that it is embedded in a narrative.

Narrative frieze. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That is, it doesn’t just appear, but appears in a context. For instance, if I recall an image of a particular horse race, I remember it as a radio or television commentary on the race. Obviously, I don’t know if others remember images in a similar way, but I suspect that images stored in the brain are not stored in isolation, like computer files, but as part of a narrative. That narrative may or may not relate to the occasion when the image was acquired. Indeed the narrative may be a total fiction and probably exists so that the mental image may be easily retrieved.

The Banach Tarski Theorem



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There’s a mathematical theorem (the Banach Tarski theorem) which states that

Given a solid ball in 3‑dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball.

This is, to say the least, counter intuitive! It suggests that you can dissect a beach ball, put the parts back together and get two beach balls for the price of one.

This brings up the question of what mathematics really is, and how it is related to what we loosely call reality? Scientists use mathematics to describe the world, and indeed some aspects of reality, such as relativity or quantum mechanics, can only be accurately described in mathematics.



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So we know that there is a relationship of some sort between mathematics and reality as our maths is the best tool that we have found to talk about scientific things in an accurate way. Just how close this relationship is has been discussed by philosophers and scientists for millennia. The Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates and others, reputedly thought that “all phenomena in the universe can be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios“.

The Banach Tarski theorem seems to go against all sense. It seems to be an example of getting something for nothing, and appears to contravene the restrictions of the first law of thermodynamics. The volume (and hence the amount of matter) appears to have doubled, and hence the amount of energy contain as matter in the balls appears to have doubled. It does not appear that the matter in the resulting balls is more attenuated than that in the original ball.

Since the result appears to be counter intuitive, the question is raised as to whether or not it is merely a mathematical curiosity or whether it has any basis in reality, It asks something fundamental about the relationship between maths and reality.

It’s not the first time that such questions have been asked. When the existence of the irrational numbers was demonstrated, Greek mathematicians were horrified, and the discoverer of the proof (Hippasus) was either killed or exiled, depending on the source quoted. This was because the early mathematicians believed that everything could be reduced to integers and rational numbers, and their world did not have room for irrational numbers in it. In their minds numbers directly related to reality and reality was rational mathematically and in actuality.

These days we are used to irrational numbers and we see where they fit into the scheme of things. We know that there are many more irrational numbers than rational numbers and that the ‘real’ numbers (the rational and irrational numbers together) can be described by points on a line.

Interestingly we don’t, when do an experiment, use real numbers, because to specify a real number we would have write down an infinite sequence of digits. Instead we approximate the values we read from our meters and gauges with an appropriate rational number. We measure 1.2A for example, where the value 1.2 which equals 12/10 stands in for the real number that corresponds to the actual current flowing.

English: A vintage ampere meter. Français : Un... — English: A vintage ampere meter. Français : Un Ampèremètre à l’ancienne. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We then plug this value into our equations, and out pops an answer. Or we plot the values on a graph read off the approximate answer. The equations may have constants which we can only express as rational numbers (that is, we approximate them) so our experimental physics can only ever be approximate.

It’s a wonder that we can get useful results at all, what with the approximation of experimental results, the approximated constants in our equations and the approximated results we get. If we plot our results the graph line will have a certain thickness, of a pencil line or a set of pixels. The best we can do is estimate error bounds on our experimental results, and the constants in our equations, and hence the error bounds in our results. We will probably statistically estimate the confidence that the results show what we believe they show through this miasma of approximations.

Image of simulated dead pixels. Made with Macr... — Image of simulated dead pixels. Made with Macromedia Fireworks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s surprising in some ways what we know about the world. We may measure the diameter of a circle somewhat inaccurately, we multiply it by an approximation to the irrational number pi, and we know that the answer we get will be close to the measured circumference of the circle.

It seems that our world resembles the theoretical world only approximately. The theoretical world has perfect circles, with well-defined diameters and circumference, exactly related by an irrational number. The real world has shapes that are more or less circular, with more or less accurately measured diameters and circumferences, related more or less accurately by an rational number approximating the irrational number, pi.

We seem to be very much like the residents of Plato’s Cave and we can only see a shadow of reality, and indeed we can only measure the shadows on the walls of the cave. In spite of this, we apparently can reason pretty well what the real world is like.

Our mathematical ruminations seem to be reflected in reality, even if at the time they seem bizarre. The number pi has been known for so long that it no longer seems strange to us. Real numbers have also been known for millennia and don’t appear to us to be strange, though people don’t seem to realise that when they measure a real number they can only state it as a rational number, like 1.234.

English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco... — English: The School of Athens (detail). Fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For the Greeks, the irrational numbers which actually comprise almost all of the real numbers, were bizarre. For us, they don’t seem strange. It may be that in some way, as yet unknown, the Banach Tarski theorem will not seem strange, and may seem obvious.

It may be that we will use it, but approximately, much as we use the real numbers in our calculations and theories, but only approximately. I doubt that we will be duplicating beach balls, or dissecting a pea and reconstituting it the same size as the sun, but I’m pretty sure that we will be using it for something.



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I see maths as descriptive. It describes the ideal world, it describes the shape of it. I don’t think that the world IS mathematics in the Pythagorean sense, but numbers are an aspect of the real world, and as such can’t help but describe the real world exactly, while we can only measure it approximately. But that’s a very circular description.

English: Illustrates the relationship of a cir... — English: Illustrates the relationship of a circle’s diameter to its circumference. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Evolution

If we accept Darwin’s theory of evolution, which I do, then we accept that we are the way we are as a result of a very period of gradual changes brought about by the pressures that our species has experienced through emergence and during process of its existence.

But let’s take a step back. All organisms have so called genetic material, stuff within them which encodes the way they are and the way that their offspring will be. The genetic material is copied as a part of the process of living, of growing and of repairing the organism if it sustains damage.



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If that were all there was to the process, then organisms would be static, with no changes and no evolution. In fact the process is not perfect and both minor and major changes to the genetic material happen all the time, by all sorts of means.

Obviously, if too many changes or major changes occur in the genetic material, then the organism may not grow properly and may not repair itself properly when damaged. Also if the genetic material is passed to the organism’s descendants, they may they may not be viable or they may be disadvantaged and be unable to thrive and reproduce.

To counter this, our bodies have mechanisms to repair our genetic material, our DNA. If our bodies did not have this ability, it is unlikely that we would last long, as our body cells could experience millions of cases of damage to our genetic material per cell per day. That’s an awful lot of damage!

As described in the Wikipedia reference above, the errors in our genetic material could result in cell death or unregulated growth resulting in tumours. The DNA repair mechanism in our cells do a good job, but they are only effective if the DNA strands are broken or incomplete. If a change is minor, and is properly reflected on both strands of our double helices, then the repair system will not notice the change.

This allows small changes to slip through, and provided they don’t cause life threatening problems, they may get passed to our descendants. The same applies to organisms other than ourselves of course.

Some major changes do slip through and organisms may end up with extra chromosomes or with damaged chromosomes. Sometimes these issues may not cause too many problems for the organism, while in other cases the descendant organism may not survive long enough to breed.

The minor errors mentioned above may affect the descendant organism to some extent, making it more or less successful than its parent organisms. The theory of evolution suggests that if the change in the genetic material makes it more successful than its siblings who don’t have the small errors, then, over generations, organisms carrying the new DNA changes will eventually replace those who don’t carry the change.

This could lead to problems for an organism. If we consider a stable population with few pressures, that has plenty of resources, there is little that would cause any permanent changes to the population, and small genetic traits could appear and disappear over time and not have any measurable effect.

If the environment then changes, such that one trait provides a large benefit to those individuals who have this trait, then over time there will be a tendency for the trait to be found in more individuals and the number of individuals without it would fall.

If the environment changes back again, then those with the trait may be disadvantaged and those without the trait could then come to dominate the population. However if enough time had passed and all the individuals without the trait in their genetic material had died out, then the population would be stuck with the trait.

It would be extremely unlikely but not impossible for the change in the genetic material to be reversed by chance as this would require another minor error to exactly reverse the original error. In effect, evolution as reflected in the genetic material never (or astronomically rarely) reverses.

If a group of organisms gets isolated from the rest of its species, some of the genes that are present in the population at large will not be present. In addition, some of the genes in the isolated population will also die out, either by chance, or because the trait that they confer is not beneficial in the isolated environment.



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This can cause problems for the population if the environment changes dramatically to the detriment of the organisms. While the population at large may have genes which would enable the population to survive the changes, but those genes may have died out in the isolated environment, and the population may fail.

Of course, a mutation may arise which would enable organisms to survive in the new conditions, but environmental changes would almost certainly be faster than the rate of evolution through mutation.

exemples de mutations possibles sur l'ADN — exemples de mutations possibles sur l’ADN (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Some species have different behaviours and appearance while still remaining the same species. Some of Darwin’s finches are an example. At least two varieties of one of the species feed on the Opuntia cactus, but they have different ways of feeding on them. One variety has a long beak and can punch holes in the cacti, while the other variety, with a short beak, break open the cacti to feed.

The birds can and do interbreed, so they are indeed the same species. This is similar, I presume, to the variation in skin colour in humans or the various blood types in humans. Such species have the same genes, but have slightly different versions (alleles) of it. This is called genetic polymorphism.

A species, like the finches, has to adapt. If its environment changes and it is unable to respond, then it will die out as innumerable species have done and are still doing. However, a species needs time to respond to environmental changes. For instance, polar bears may die out because the sea is is not freezing over as it usually does, and as a result there are no seals for the bears to hunt.

Whether or not you attribute the warming to mankind’s actions or not, the lack of freezing is a fact, and the bears are so far unable to adapt to the new conditions, and are often becoming a nuisance to arctic communities.



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How to change the world

Why do people think that petitions and protests can change the world? Well, they can but only if many, many other factors also fall in line. I’m thinking here of the protests about Post Offices or Bank Branches that are shut down when the demand for the services falls away.

If demand is falling, then the branches will not be financial profitable, and the bank or Post Office will be very unlikely to keep them open. Banks and the Post Office and not charitable institutions and have to make a profit for their shareholders, and they would not be able to do that if the branches are unprofitable.

In the same way cash strapped public services (such as the Police) are also being forced to close public offices. While the Police closures mentioned in the linked article cite the danger to the volunteers who man the offices, and the closures are supposed to be temporary, many people believe that the real reason is costs. In fact the Police management claim that using modern technology police of the street can be more mobile and do not need to use the offices so frequently.

Whatever the true reasons, protest and petitions are unlikely to have any effect. If changes are for operational or financial reasons, then unless the reasons change, the changes are very unlikely to be reversed. Any opposition is going to be ineffective.

Sometimes a protest or petition can be effective, but that requires that a lot of things go the the way of the protesters. In this country the Mixed Member Proportional election system was selected in 1996 to be the method of electing Parliament.

There were two main factors that enabled the selection of MMP as the election system. Firstly, there was a feeling that a change needed to occur, as many people thought that with the then existing system a vote for a losing candidate was a wasted vote, and that minor parties were unable to make an impression on Parliament – frequently a minor party would get 10 to 15% of the vote, but would get maybe only one or two seats out of 100.

English: Election signs for the major parties ... — English: Election signs for the major parties plus a sign supporting the MMP side in the referendum in the constituency of Ottawa South. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty is the Liberal candidate there. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the two previous elections, one party, Labour, had secured more than 50% of the vote, but had lost out to National, because they had won more seats. Naturally the Labour voters were incensed by this seeming injustice.

The second big factor was a small and vociferous group of people who felt that it was necessary to change and the system and who were able to use their political connections to influence media and political commentators to promote their favoured system, MMP. It also helped that they had no effective opposition, as the opposition was politically naive and unorganised.

Dubious tactics were alleged (and probably were used, on both sides), and well before it came to a vote in a referendum on the subject, it was almost a foregone conclusion. Actually the result was closer than many people predicted, though in retrospect that was probably just due to political inertia, and many people voted for the status quo of the time, rather than the new and untested alternative.

There were no real financial or operational reasons for not changing the voting system. If, say, it made it a lot more expensive to run an election, then the voting system would not have been changed, and if it made it a lot more complicated to vote (as did one of the competing systems, STV), then it would not have been changed.



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Similarly, if the proponents of the new system had been disorganised, disunited, or politically naive, then they would not have stood a chance. They would have failed at the first hurdle, which was getting a Royal Commission to look into the options set up.

As an example of how it can go wrong, fairly recently a referendum was held to decide if we were going to keep our existing flag or get a new one. There was no groundswell of dissatisfaction with the existing flag, except for the niggle that it kept getting mistaken for the Australia flag and vice versa.

There was no politically inspired organisation to push for a new flag and there was no obvious contender for a new flag. Therefore, there was no momentum going into the referendum for a change in the flag. So the referendum came down to firstly choosing between some mediocre choices for a replacement and then a fight off between the existing flag and the alternative.

An interesting point is that the “winning” alternative was not the one that got the most votes at the first count. As the selection was done on the STV system, as flags were removed from the list and the votes were reassigned, the second highest polling flag in the first round gained enough votes to overtake the highest polling flag.



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This demonstrates a deficiency of the STV system, though its supporters would claim that it was an advantage! In any case the alternative flag lost out to the existing flag by a fairly wide margin.

As an example of how to change the world, this debate and referendum was a dud. There was just not enough political nous on the side of those who would change the flag for it to become a reality. In addition, while the change was sponsored by the Prime Minister, it was not adopted by his party in a comprehensive way. It gave the impression that it was a pet project of the Prime Minister, and was not fully endorsed by his party.

So that is brief and by no means exhaustive look at how to change the world. It starts with a small number of dedicated and driven people and builds from there. It doesn’t matter if the ideas are actually good or bad, because if you can get the ball rolling, people will fight to sign up for the cause.

If you can’t build the support, well, then your aims and ideals will go nowhere. That’s why little protests about Post Offices and Bank Branches will never win. They can’t build the momentum.

‘Pushed to breaking point’: Post Office workers on today’s strike

Trivia



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Most people know that bees make cells which are hexagonal to store their honey. As it says in the article, this is the most economical structure in terms of the amount of wax that is needed to construct it, as the linked article describes.

Some people go into raptures about how clever the bees are and assume that they have some instinct which guides them in constructing these almost perfect hexagons. In fact the cells start out round and the bees warm them to make the wax mobile and liquid tension does the rest.



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The same process occurs in bubbles in a bath. If the bubbles are all roughly the same size, they also form a hexagonal array. This sort of diminishes the mystery of the beehive and the seeming ability of the bees to do geometry, but it seems obvious in retrospect. Bees don’t know geometry but they do know (in some sense) the properties of beeswax.

The above is a prime example of trivia. As defined at Dictionary.com trivia is merely inconsequential information. However, it can be more than that, as while the information is (in most situations) totally useless, many people find it interesting and a few find it fascinating.

For a very few people trivia can become lucrative and even a full-time occupation. The prevalence of quiz shows where people are rewarded according to their ability to recall inconsequential facts shows that the human race as a whole appears to have the ability to remember obscure facts which apparently have little to do with their needs as they navigate through their daily lives.

All humans remember items of trivia. Granny might be able to recall what her sister told her on her wedding day, or exactly what Grandpa said when he returned from the war, but these are probably of no relevance to her Grandchildren. Memory is fluid however, and Great Aunt Mary might have totally different memories of the occasion.

It may be that being able to remember trivia is one of the things that separates us from the rest of the apes. It would presumably be an evolutionary advantage to store great amounts of apparently irrelevant information because one never knows when apparently irrelevant information suddenly becomes relevant.

For instance, staring at the stars and noting their apparently irrelevant patterns suddenly becomes relevant when you notice that about the same time that that particular pattern rises in the sky that the whole river valley becomes flooded and it is time to temporarily move to the hills.



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Some people have minds that soak up inconsequential facts and others do not have that ability to the same extent. I know that my mind does so, and this has gained me invitations to join quiz teams and so on, and I’ve even managed to get onto a TV quiz show, though I didn’t do too well on it.

I’m constantly amazed at what trivia my mind has stored in it. When watching a quiz show on TV I quite often know the answer to obscure questions, and I’ve no idea how I picked it up. Sometimes it is something that I could perhaps only have heard once, in passing, and it for some reason stuck in my head.

Memory is fickle though. Many times I have been asked a question or a question has come up on a TV show and I am sure that I know the answer but I’ve been unable to recall it. When the answer is given there is a sense of “Of course!”.

As I mentioned above, memory can be totally false as well. Often an answer to a trivia question will pop into my head, and I’m certain that it is right, only for it to turn out to be wrong. I’m left with a sense of disappointment that my memory is incorrect.



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Some people, call them Quiz Masters, are able to store and remember trivial facts much better than the rest of us. These people star in quiz shows, win prizes and travel the world on the strength of their abilities. It’s not necessarily a sinecure, as they constantly have to top up their knowledge by reading, well, trivia.

On occasions a Quiz Master will mention that they have “just revised” a particular topic. Or that one of their peers has just recently told them something that just happened to occur in a question. A true Quiz Master apparently has to work pretty hard to keep on top of the facts that may occur in a quiz, to the extent of studying facts about something that they have no real interest in.

I mentioned above that I have no idea why the human race has this ability to store all this useless information. It’s evident that animals remember things, as you would not be able to train your dog if it didn’t remember things. However, it seems to me that other animals do not have this immense capacity to remember seemingly irrelevant information.

Maybe this is part of what leads to out ascendance on this planet. With our vast stores of information about things around us, we can use this information to survive where other animals can’t. Maybe it is this vast store of information, the ability to recall it all, and the ability to use or brains to process and use this information that allowed us to become ascendant.

Information-integration (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe the Quiz Masters are the intellectual descendants of the proto-humans who worked out that when those stars rose in that place in the sky that the animals that were their prey would be migrating around that time, and it was a good time to visit the migration trails.

Whatever the reason that we have the ability to remember information that appears at the moment of remembering to be totally irrelevant, we can nevertheless enjoy that moment when the Quiz Master on the TV gets the trivia question wrong and we can triumphantly claim “I knew that!”, in spite of the fact that we didn’t know the answers to the preceding twenty or thirty questions.



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Milestones



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The previous post that I made was the 200th since I started writing this blog. I started in January 2013 and intended, at the time to make it about cooking and my successes and failures in that respect. However the cooking has pretty much disappeared (at least for now) and I’ve been writing about things like science, politics and philosophy. It’s strange how things turn out!

200 posts mean 200,000 words, more or less. However some of the early ones are shorter and so I’ve probably not quite reached the 200,000 word point yet. I aim to keep going at least until I hit 250 posts which implies a word count of 250,000 or so.

I, and most other bloggers I guess, blog about things that interest me. I don’t do it as a job, and I don’t seek out to address any particular set of people or demographic. I just hope that what I write is at least mildly interesting to those who stumble across it. I have around 100 “followers”, people who have subscribed to this blog, but I can’t tell how many of those skip over the emails that tell them that I have posted a new article.

Posting articles must fulfil some need that I have, but I don’t really know what it is. This is the first time that I’ve done something like this and not failed to keep it going. My random ramblings don’t spring out of a need to “reach out” to those out there. I don’t have a burning desire to see that my message is promulgated to all that will listen. I don’t even have a message.



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Nevertheless, blogs are a way of putting out there the things that interest me, like science, religion, and, basically, philosophy. It’s not a way of sorting out my thoughts and rubbing the rough edges off of my ideas. I don’t even think that my ideas are unique! When I do what little research I do while writing these articles, I often stumble across some article that addresses the same issues that I am writing about, probably in a more organised and coherent way.

I cite Wikipedia quite often, not because I think that it is the best reference collection on the Internet, but because I can almost always find an article on there on whatever topic I am searching for. Wikipedia is often criticised for being potentially inaccurate, and to some extent that is true as it is maintained by enthusiastic amateurs, after all. It does represent a good starting point for research and is generally not that bad.

When I started blogging I didn’t have any time schedule in mind, and I hadn’t settled on the target article size of 1000 words. As I recall the first few posts were sporadic and short. Some of the really early ones have been removed. It wasn’t until I settled on an article size of 1000 words and a publishing schedule of once a week that the blog took off (so far as I was concerned anyway) and I have been able to maintain the schedule over the last three years or so.

I originally intended to publish on a Saturday. This has slipped to Monday and I write these articles mainly on a Sunday. I’ve maintained this schedule for three years or so, and the nearest that I came to breaking the chain was when my sister was visiting and I didn’t have the time to write the articles. After she left I worked out how many weeks that I had missed and wrote and published the missing articles over a couple of weeks. It was one of the hardest things that I’ve done.



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I’ve taken inspiration from other bloggers. A friend of mine has a blog that he, until fairly recently updated with his photographs on a daily basis for many years. Well done, Brian!

Deadlines and milestones are, for me, the key to keeping up with this blog. Making a contract with myself to publish weekly affects no one else, unless someone out there is really waiting on the latest instalment of the blog, which I doubt.

Douglas Adams said about deadlines : “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” However, when I’ve blogged before I’ve found that missing a deadline has been fatal to my attempts to keep a blog going. Sure, I’ve missed a few but caught up again, and my self-imposed deadline has slipped a couple of times, so there must be other factors.

I think that I probably passed a watershed where I might have stopped if I missed a deadline and that watershed may have been at the 50 or so mark, where I would have been reaching about a year of posts. Anyway the longevity of the blog certainly aids in continuing when things get sticky.



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Things do get sticky. Sometimes I sit down to write, on a Sunday usually, and nothing comes to mind. I’ve never experienced a total “writer’s block”, though. I get through it by basically waffling about something until a theme comes to mind. That is not the case this time though!

Milestones are what we strive for. I want to keep going at least until the 250 post mark, but earlier on in the blog the milestones were far more modest. When I reached 50 posts that was a significant milestone, as where 100, 150, and now, 200.

Milestones show us how far we have come, and if we have a destination in mind, how far we have to go. The thing about milestones is that they shouldn’t be too far apart, and indeed a mile could probably be very loosely described as a reasonable distance that can be covered in a reasonable amount of time, and is roughly one thousand paces as measured by Roman legions on the march.

If milestones (general ones, not the specific distance related ones) are too far apart, then we often break that distance down into smaller parts. For instance, if we have a boring job to do, say weeding a garden we may break it into chunks – this bit to that shrub, then that bit to the peonies, then the bit to the small tree, and so on.

All the smaller, quicker to accomplish tasks give targets that are short to complete but which still add up to the larger goal in the end. It’s funny how we fool ourselves in this and other ways.



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Seasons (again)

This is a bit of a repeat, since I almost forgot about writing this week. I decided to revisit the seasons thing.

English: Kukulkan at its finest during the Spr... — English: Kukulkan at its finest during the Spring Equinox. Chichen Itza Equinox March 2009. The famous descent of the snake at the temple. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have just begun the season of Southern Hemisphere spring. This officially starts on 1st September and runs through to 1st December. Then summer starts and runs through to 1st March, then autumn runs through until 1st June, and winter extend to 1st September and the cycle repeats.

The reason that the seasons are defined like this goes back to 1780 when an organisation called “Societas Meteorologica Palatina” defined them as above. The organisation chose those dates because the seasons pretty much aligned with those dates in terms of temperature and rainfall and so on. The coldest three months in the Northern Hemisphere tended to be December, January and February, the warmest tended to be June, July and August, and so on.

Since the seasons are reversed in the Southern Hemisphere, the southern cycle is as described above. We have Christmas on the beach and spend July wrapped up and close to any source of heat!

Astronomers do it differently. They divide the year into four seasons, but the seasons are not aligned climatically, but are defined relative to the Earth’s position in its orbit around the Sun.

Because the Earth’s axis is tilted relative to its orbit around the sun, the axis is be tilted towards the sun at one time of the year and away from it six months later. When the axis is tilted towards the sun, the sun is at its highest in the sky and more energy is received on Earth per square metre than at any other time of the year. It’s summer and warmer. When it is tilted away, the sun is at its lowest and we receive less energy than at any other time of the year. It’s winter and colder. (But read on).

On Earth, when the sun is high it is in the sky longer than when it is lower. The day is therefore longest and the night is the shortest in the yearly cycle. When the sun is midway between its highest and its lowest, the day and the night are of equal length.

English: Midnight Sun in Tromsø, seen from the... — English: Midnight Sun in Tromsø, seen from the old port. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The time when the sun is highest or lowest in the sky is called a “solstice“, either a winter solstice, or a summer solstice. The times when it is half way are called “equinoxes“, either an autumnal equinox or a vernal equinox, and the night and day are equal in length. These are the four main signposts of the seasons, as used by astronomers.

Strictly speaking, to say “Today is the summer solstice” or “Today is the autumnal equinox” are incorrect. Since the day and night lengths are changing all the time, the solstices and equinoxes are points in time, not whole days.

English: Two equinoxes are shown as the inters... — English: Two equinoxes are shown as the intersection of the ecliptic and celestial Ecuador, and the solstice’s times of the year in which the Sun reaches its maximum southern or northern position. Español: Se muestran los dos equinoccios como la intersección del ecuador celeste y la eclíptica, y los solsticios momentos del año en los que el Sol alcanza su máxima posición meridional o boreal. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are four lesser known and less important signposts of the seasons, they are Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain and Imbolc. I’ve used the Gaelic names, but they correspond, in order, to the Christian festivals of May Day, Lammas, Halloween, and St Brigid’s Day. These all fall more or less halfway between the four main seasonal signposts.

Astronomically the Winter Solstice, which occurs around 21st December in the Northern Hemisphere. Many sources identify the date of the solstice as the beginning of winter. Similarly the Summer Solstice is identified as the start of summer, and the equinoxes are identified as the start of their respective seasons.

This is odd, as the climatic seasons are usually considered to start three weeks earlier, with Northern Hemisphere winter climatically starting around the 1st December, and similarly for the other seasons. Starting the astronomical seasons on the 21st (or sometimes 22nd) of the month misses out 3 weeks or nearly a quarter of the season!

It’s also odd for another reason. The Northern Hemisphere winter solstice is when the sun is at its lowest point in its apparent position in the sky, so it is at its turning point in the cycle of the season and indeed the word “solstice” means “the point where the sun stands still”. It seems to me that this should be considered the mid point of the season, not the beginning of it.

This is obviously true for the summer solstice too, and the equinoxes, being halfway between the solstices are add the mid points of the sun’s climb or descent to the solstices. They too also should be the mid points of their seasons, not the beginning points.

If the solstices and equinoxes are the middles of their seasons, where are the start end points then? Well, they would then coincide with the Gaelic or pagan festivals of Beltane, Lughnasadh, Samhain, and Imbolc! For example Beltane is about halfway between the Northern Hemisphere spring equinox and summer solstice on 1st May.

Although Beltane is a Gaelic or pagan festival and has mostly fallen out of favour, some cultures do celebrate the festival and some of the customs persist, such as the custom of dancing around a Maypole. Beltane and the other three similar festivals coincide with important agricultural events, such as sowing seeds and gathering in of harvests, so were of interest in earlier times.

However, if the astronomical seasons starts and ends were to be moved to coincide with the Gaelic festivals they would not coincide with the climatic seasons. The reason for this is that there is a seasonal shift because of the time that the seas and land take to warm up in spring and to cool down in winter. This pushes the climatic seasons back a few weeks and the start of climatic spring in the Northern Hemisphere is pushed back to about the 1st March and the same for all the other seasons.

That’s why I think that the current idea of the astronomical seasons starting at the solstices and equinoxes is wrong! They should coincide with the Gaelic festivals instead, and then the astronomical and climatic seasons are related by the seasonal shift, instead of not being related properly at all.

Illumination of the earth during various seasons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More on Quantum things

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

Schrodinger’s wave equation describes how the quantum state of a quantum system changes with time. Everett’s insight was that the observer of a quantum state was as much part of the system as the observed part of the system. Therefore they were “entangled” in the quantum sense and would be covered by a single quantum state equation.

If the observer and the observed are thus entangled, then so must be an observer who observes the quantum state of the observer and the observed. One can then extend this to the whole universe, which leads to the concept of a wave equation or function which describes the whole Universe.

That there is an equation for the universe is not really surprising and indeed, it is not surprising that it could be a quantum wave equation as the quantum world seems to form the basis of the physical, apparently classically described, world that we see.

I base this idea on the fact that everything that we sees appears to be describable in terms of a deterministic equation. It has been argued that such things as “psi phenomena“, but such claims are yet to be conclusively verified, with many putative examples having been discredited.



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Some people argue for a soul or mind as an example of a non-physical entity, but any such concept leaves a lot of questions to be asked. A non-physical entity cannot, by definition almost, be measured in any way, and there is difficulty in showing how such a non-physical entity can interact with physical ones, and therefore be noticed or detected.

By definition almost, a physical entity, such a body, is only influenced by physical things. If this were not the case we would see physical entities not following the laws of physics. For example, if it is possible to move an object by mind power or telekinesis, one would see the object disobeying fundamental scientific laws, like Newton’s First Law of Motion.

English: Isaac Newton Dansk: Sir Isaac Newton ... — English: Isaac Newton Dansk: Sir Isaac Newton Français : Newton (1642-1727) Bahasa Indonesia: Issac Newton saat berusia 46 tahun pada lukisan karya Godfrey Kneller tahun 1689 Lietuvių: Seras Izaokas Niutonas 1689-aisiais Македонски: Сер Исак Њутн на возраст од 46 години (1689) Nederlands: Newton geboren 4 januari 1643 Türkçe: Sir Isaac Newton. (ö. 20 Mart 1727) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The mind is a curious example of a physical entity which is often thought of as being non-physical. After all, a mind does not have a physical location, apart from the skull of the person whose mind it is, and it can’t be weighed as such.

The mind however is a pattern, on the brain, made up of the state of trillions of neurones. It is made up of information, and is much like a computer program which is made up of the state of a few billion physical logic circuits in the guts of the computer.

Open a computer and you won’t see “an image” anywhere. You will see patterns of bits of data in the memory, or on the hard disk, or maybe in transit, being sent to a computer screen. Similarly if you open someone’s skull you will not see an image there either. Just a bunch of neurones in particular states.

The one glaring exception to all the above, is, perhaps, consciousness. It’s hard to describe consciousness in terms of a pattern or patterns of the states of our neurones, but I believe that that is fundamentally what it is.

Some people argue that we are conscious beings, (true), and that we consciously make choices (false, in my opinion). When we look closely at any choice that we make, it appears to be that choice is in fact illusory, and that our actions are determined by prior factors.

People seem to realise this, although they don’t acknowledge it. When questioned, there is always some reason that they “choose” in a particular way. Perhaps they don’t have enough cash to choose the luxury option when out shopping, or their desire outweighs their financial state. When pushed people can always think of a reason.

To be sure, many “reasons” are actually post choice rationalisations, and choices may be based more on emotions than valid rational reasons, but whatever the emotions (such as the desire for an object), the emotions precede decision.

If, as sometimes happens, a person has to make a choice between two alternatives, that person can be almost paralysed with indecision. Even then, when a decision is finally made, it can be either a random choice, or maybe the person may say that they made a particular choice because they had decided a different way in another situation, or similar (e.g. they like the colour blue!).

If there is no non-physical component to the Universe, as appears very likely, and psi phenomenon do not exist, then everything has a cause. I don’t mean this in the sense that event A causes event B which causes C, but more in the sense that the slope that a marble is on causes it to move in a particular direction.

Causality seems to be a continuum thing, rather than the discrete A causes B case. We can only get an approximation of the discrete case if we exclude all other options. There is a latin term for this : ceteris paribus – all other things being kept the same. “Ceteris paribus” would exclude the case where a wind blowing up or across the slope changes the path of the marble.

For this reason I dislike the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics, as it is usually stated. The usual metaphor is a splitting movie film, which results in two distinct tracks in the future. I feel that a better picture would be a marble on a slope with a saddle.

The marble may go left, or it may go right, or it may even follow the line of the saddle. We still require “ceteris paribus” to exclude crosswinds, but there is no split as such. In a quantum model, the marble goes both left and right (and traverses the peak of the saddle with vanishing probability).

The probability that it goes left or right is determined by the wave equation for the system, and has a real physical meaning, which it doesn’t (so far as my knowledge goes) in the splitting metaphor.

I don’t know how my speculations stack up against the realities of quantum mechanics, but I like my interpretation, purely on aesthetic grounds, even if it is far from the mark!



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