Japanese firms divest themselves of whaling interests.

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for….  Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

The Wine Info Site.  Learn about your grape varietals.  They don’t have much info about Aghiorgitiko.

Wow, I’m glad I kept reading The Blank Slate.  The last two chapters, “The Arts” and “The Voice of the Species” were really, really, really good.  Maybe borrow the book and just read those?

I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion.  I’ve kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.

Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:

A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual’s body.

Now, hold on.  That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter’s definition of vivid imagination.  By this definition, brain death is not a disorder.  Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease.  They’re not causing suffering, right?  At least not unless you expand suffering to something like “eventual diminution of lifespan”, or “elimination of the potential for experience of happiness”. But maybe his argument doesn’t rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:

But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it’s usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it’s the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment.  (Emphasis added)

I’m not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That’s not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research.  The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.

(Magic post)

I went to the Ravnica prerelease today and had a blast.  Got some nice cards, too.

At the table where we were constructing and playtesting our decks, I played a game against a EE major from Cal Poly SLO. I was using a card with a mechanic called Dredge, which has, as a cost, putting cards from your library into your graveyard. One time when I used the ability, I lost the one card from my deck that could have won me the game against him.

“That’s why Dredge is dangerous,” he said.  “You can lose your best cards.”

An aerospace engineer, another technical person, and I all chimed in to disagree. We contended that it was just as likely that worthless cards would be put into our graveyard, giving us access to our better cards.

The technical person to my left said “I consider the top card of my library at all times to be the superposition of all the cards in my library until drawn,” and grinned.

“But then you open up your deck box and your cat is dead,” I countered.

The engineer exclaimed “What’s this dead cat doing in here?!”  And we all laughed.

“We’re nerds,” I said.

I opened a corked bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape this evening. This time it was an inexpensive wine, but last time it was a $135 vintage Jaboulet Hermitage.

From wineanorak.com: “A slightly dangerous response is that in old world wine countries there is less emphasis on product quality and greater tolerance of what could be considered wine faults by consumers and even the wine trade. The fact that the wine industry trades heavily on tradition may imbue it with a degree of inertia, and thus a significant change such as changing closure type is perceived as more problematic than a 5% taint rate.” This from a very interesting article on screwcap closures.

“The mutant phenotype that we saw when we crossed the two deletions … was an inability of [fruitfly] larvae to carry out vigorous, concerted head swinging to scrape their way out of the egg shell…” So they named the gene “amontillado”.  And a mutation causing learning defects is named “turnip”, because “vegetables are not well-known for their mental acuity.”

Missed prognostication, as promised: No earthquake occurred.

“[Phoebe] may be our first encounter with a Kuiper belt object.”

For the mathematically inclined reader, we note that a Calabi-Yau manifold is a complex Kähler manifold with vanishing first Chern class.

Egads.  I thought I was a mathematically inclined reader.

You have almost certainly seen the late-nineteenth century motion study work of Eadweard Muybridge before, even if you did not know what it was. There’s a great online exhibit.

(Oh, to clarify, I’m not the “fact-checking police” who originally posted the comment.)

I think somwhere in the fog of high school biology I may have been exposed to the correct information, but the plot lines and theme songs from two decades (60’s & ’70’s) of television seem to have used up all my long term memory slots.

Think I’m joking?  Try this:

Sing the theme songs to Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres and Mr. Ed (extra credit for the closing themes). Good, now (without looking it up) tell me the periodic table symbols for Sodium, Potassium and Silver.

Not feeling so smug right now, are you?

No clue about the TV theme songs.  I think the Gilligan’s Island theme lists the people on the island, and says something about a fateful trip, but when I try to hear it in my head I just get fragments of “A Whale of a Tale” from Disney’s version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.  I had to look up what movie that song’s from just now.  Mr. Ed: something about “a horse, of course, of course?”  Hell if I know about Green Acres.  But the elements are Na, K, and Ag, and I’m not a chemist.

I’m also not a child of the 60s and 70s, but I’m not sure I could do much better with more recent decades.  If Cheers’s theme indeed has just the one verse that I’m thinking of, I could probably do that. Faced with the choice of recitation or immediate execution, I could probably come up with The Brady Bunch’s song.  But not Friends, which had its theme song on the charts for a bit — or, well, anything else for that matter. Maybe TV show themes don’t have lyrics as much as they used to. Alias, X-Files, and Mythbusters don’t, anyway.

I’m not “feeling smug” right now, but it doesn’t strike me as a hard question.

Well, maybe I know bits of Thundercats, one of my brother’s old shows. And everything else I’ve forgetten. If you come up with songs you’re sure I’m forgetting, go ahead and ask. But let me state for the record that I have Gold, Antimony, Tin, Lead, and Tungsten down pat.   [Not enough emoticons in my posts of late. Any time it seems like I'm being a dick, mentally add a smiley. That will work, unless I'm actually just being a dick.]

Tolweb’s Tree of Life web project is so cool, you wish it was 1000 times as detailed as it is. Among other things, you’ll learn that they don’t teach you about Archaea in high school (or didn’t me), bats are more closely related to humans than they are to rodents, penis worms and peanut worms are different, and water bears aren’t nearly as cute as you’d hope.

“Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”  Typically sensationalist Sun journalism, but I’m captivated.  I know it’s morbid, but really, he had it coming.  Poisonous animals are not pets.  And make no mistake, nature needs scavenger animals, and there is no reason humans should be exempted.

I know I would have regretted it, but I wish there were pictures.

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Liquidmetal alloys are amazing.  Watch the ball bouncer demonstration, then visit the website (the latter only if you have a high tolerance for marketing-speak.)

Artificial limbs controlled by mind power: “Brain implants that could allow severely disabled people to control prosthetic limbs with their minds could be ready for use within two years, according to a team of scientists.  Their claim comes after tests with monkeys showed that the animals could control a robotic arm using just their thoughts.”

The 2002 Ig Nobel Prize winner for chemistry is Theodore Gray, who made an actual periodic table.  You know, four legs, wood, the kind you can sit at to eat lunch, but with inlaid wooden squares on the top, and under each square a sample of the element.  The site is fantastic: this guy has a taste for statistics, sorting, and random information that may even exceed my own: on his Collections of Elements page, he sorts the elements in more than thirty ways, including “Elements [you can buy] at Walmart”, “Coin Metals”, and “Elements that spell OLiVEr SAcKS”.  He has a page on How to Get Your Own Element Collection, and each element has its own page.

He also has an interesting discussion on education at the site:

Jerry: People are very attached to the value of their skills.  They believe that the skills of their generation should be preserved, with new skills added on.

Theo: Such an attitude represents a tremendous degree of disrespect of our forepersons.  It was really, really hard to be a cave person.  The skills needed to live comfortably in, say, northern Europe in 20,000 BCE were extremely complex.  They required then and would require now the full range of human intelligence.

To think that a modern human should be able to do everything that previous generations have been able to do (hunt, speak Latin, do square roots by hand, etc.), and also have any time left over to learn anything new (microbiology, email, calculus), is basically insulting to all those previous generations, since it implies that they under-employed their intelligence.  It is also quite false.

Beautiful portraits of Japanese mushrooms (I’m not kidding.)  For a sampling of the different colors and geometries, check these links.  It’s really worth a look.  (Thanks to MeFi for the link.)

At the Apotex Centre, Jewish Home for the Aged in Toronto, the dental clinic has no gas for anaesthesia.  When flu shots are offered, no one takes part.  Residents are afraid to report pain and weakness to nurses.  At night, flashlights are avoided by the staff, as are brisk walks in block-heeled shoes.  Residents are frightened of showers and hide food in their rooms.  Dining rooms and facilities are intentionally intimate and non-institutional.  When one adult child of a resident asked a construction company to take down the barbed wire surrounding a lot across the street, they did.

Half of the geriatric patients with dementia are Holocaust survivors.  And without short term memory, their past becomes their present.  Sixty years later, safe in a plush Canadian facility, the residents relive the Holocaust.

Project Censored’s number one story for 2001 regards the privatization of the world’s water supply.  The story states that “less than one half of one per cent of the world’s total water stock” is freshwater.  Much less, I would think.  As a botec, if the ocean covers two-thirds of the earth’s surface and the ocean is an average of two miles deep, that is enough freshwater to cover all of the continents to a depth of 50 feet.  I might believe five feet.  Anyone have better figures on this?

Stephen Jay Gould died today of cancer at age sixty.  Much sadness.

I heard a sound bite yesterday in which President Bush announced his administration’s new air quality standards.  In justifying the need for change, he stated that U.S. power plants are putting “tons” of pollution into the air every year.

This is one of the situations in which a politician’s statement is technically correct but completely out of scale with

reality.  According to 1999 EPA figures cited in the Public Interest Research Group’s

paper “Lethal Legacy: The Dirty Truth About the

Nation’s Most Polluting Power Plants“, the figures for U.S. power plant annual emissions are as follows:

• SO₂: 20.4 million tons
• NO_x: 23.3 million tons
• CO₂: 6 billion tons

So yes, technically, if you are putting six billion tons of pollution into the air, you are putting tons of pollution into the air.  In that spirit, here are some comparable statements in terms of scale distortion:

“Bill Gates has tens of dollars.”

“The Earth is centimeters in circumference at the equator.”

“The human body contains tens of thousands of cells.”

“Light travels hundreds of miles per month.”

“There’s a person on the Earth.”

[Donna] doesn’t know that [man-made objects in orbit] fall out of the sky all the time.  Once every ten days, as a matter of fact.  Since the first year we started putting man-made objects in space, 17,000 have come back and remarkably, not one person has been hit.

                – The West Wing, “The Fall’s Gonna Kill You”

Thus, we started putting objects in orbit about the time (1535 C.E.) that Henry VIII formed the Church of England.

No complete report on Author Unknown yet, but I wanted to take a moment to follow a thread from a couple of chapters ago.  Foster writes:

[T]he Unabomber obtained names and addresses for Charles Epstein, a geneticist [...], and David Gelernter, developer of the networking software called LINDA. Both scholars were critically injured by Unabom devices a week later. (pp. 136)

This passage suddenly personalized the Unabomber attacks.  I began (and abandoned) one of Gelernter’s books, The Muse in the Machine. I did not particularly care for his theories or his writing, but regardless I felt I somehow knew him. Suddenly, the Unabomber attacks were personal.

I find the results of the Unabomber’s actions to be horrific. I am overjoyed that Gelernter and his family survived, and I mourn the three men successfully murdered by Kaczynski. I felt somewhat foolish and irresponsible not knowing of his 1993 accident (which was, by the way, before I purchased his book.) I set out to Google in an “Is he OK?” panic. One article grabbed my attention but only listed his being “severely wounded”, so I put the page in the background until I found the specifics (disfigurement and partial loss of use of right hand, partial loss of sight in right eye, disfigurement [implied] to the right side of his face, injuries to the right side of his body requiring ten surgical operations.) I breathed a partial sigh of relief (he can see, hear, walk, type, etc.), as much as one can when learning when an injury “could have been worse”.

Now I turned back to the attention-grabbing article entitled “Save the Unabomber” which argues (quite convincingly, I think) against executing Kaczynski:

If there were real justice in America, the Unabomber would be institutionalized, probably for the rest of his life. And his brother would be invited to the White House lawn and given a medal live on national television by our selectively empathetic president.

Like decorated veterans and patriots, David Kaczynski confronted one of the most awful choices in life – to betray a member of his own family to save innocent lives – and did the right thing. He saved others at dreadful personal expense. It’s hard to think what more any country could expect of a citizen.

Concerned about possible future victims, he decided to notify the FBI of his suspicions in the spring of l996. Federal officials have repeatedly have said they might never have arrested Kaczynski – or any suspect – if not for this information. The only thing David asked for from the beginning was that his brother not be executed.

I did not need any convincing in the first place. I am a strong and vocal opponent of the death penalty, which I consider to be barbaric, ineffective, and cruel. But this objection is a novel, and quite moving, twist.

So continuing with the Google search, I find that Gelernter has written a book entitled Drawing Life : Surviving the Unabomber in which he advocates killing the Unabomber and (according to Amazon) “locate[s] the madman on a continuum of modern social degradation,” with the remainder of the “degradation” composed of scum such as liberals, intellectuals, feminists, etc. (one Amazon reader wrote an excellent critique; I wish the author had left an email address so that I could write to express my compliments.) Amazon describes the book as “not tightly reasoned”. Well, no, one wouldn’t expect it to be: this is Gelernter. This is the reason I gave up on The Muse in the Machine to begin with.  That book, which would like to consider itself in the same category as books by Denett, Hofstadter, and even Penrose, is full of absurd assertions that Gelernter does not bother to substantiate.  An example, from my copy of the book:

“If I ask you to close your eyes and imagine lying on the beach, the better you succeed, the closer you’ve come to staging a small-scale auto-hallucination. If we say you have a vivid imagination, we mean that what you imagine seems real to you.” (pp. 10, emphasis his.)

This is, at best, a miserably incomplete definition.  What if my next question is “What do you see?”  Subject A reports:

A blue sea, with perhaps three-foot swells. The sky is pale blue, paler than the water, with small pockets of white cumulus clouds. To my right is a mother, dressed in a red and black one-piece bathing suit, sitting on a striped beach towel under a green umbrella. She is trying to applying sunscreen to her four-year-old boy straining to run after his big brother into the surf. Above, a few seagulls, cawing out of unison. To my left, a boy and girl, probably siblings, building a sand castle with an old garden spade and an empty plastic plant pot. The sand is near white, the reflection blinding around the rims of my sunglasses; I’m glad I wore them. When I stretch my arm out, the sand is perceptibly and uncomfortably warm on my hand. So are my kneecaps and earlobes; I should probably apply some sunscreen or get in the shade. A quiet breeze is blowing up from the water. I can smell the kelp, a gentle iodine rot-smell, a stone’s throw away.

Subject B reports:

Umm … the ocean?  Some sand?  Uhhh … a sand castle?  I guess that’s about it….

The relevant difference here is not that Subject A is more accomplished at self-deception. Subject A is, in my view, better at associating stimuli and memories with each other, visually modeling situations in order to closely examine them, holding complex images in the mind at once, etc. But the hallucination interpretation is apparently obvious enough to Gelernter that it does not deserve supporting evidence, not even supporting examples. Further Google explorations uncovered a transcript of Gelernter’s C-SPAN “Booknotes” interview. Gelernter continues in the same fashion, with unjustified generalizations and instances of false consensus perceptions:

“There are very few people who can live their lives
without [religion].”

“Environmentalists are explicit about the spiritual,
religious side of what they’re doing.”

“[T]here are [...] many other people who, when they
look for this New Age stuff [...] and that self-esteem
movement, seem to be groping pathetically in the dark
for the kind of moral and spiritual guidance that
traditional Christianity rendered very successfully
for a couple of millennia and Judaism for even longer.”

“And I have a feeling that many of these people are
coming up with makeshift simulated religions [...]
because they don’t know what their traditional
religions are. I can tell you the average Jew in this
country has no concept of what Judaism is[...].”

“I’ve always been in favor of the death penalty for
murderers [...] I can’t conceive of [...] our not
sentencing such a man to death if we are serious about
murder, if we are serious about our absolute refusal
to tolerate murder.”

“[T]he art market today is such that there isn’t a
person in America who couldn’t sell artwork for money.
My pet parrot could. Anything goes on today’s art
market.”

“I’m not a great talker; I mean, I’d rather write than
talk. But very–all writers feel that way.”

As a jab at him, note:

“I’m just tremendously impressed by the imaginativeness
of this technology [that repaired my right eye after the bombing] and by the skill of the surgeons
who did it.”

Good thing those technologists are adept at “auto-hallucination”, eh David?

Gelernter says he does not wanted to be treated as a “victim” (as I understand it, this is a central point of Drawing Life.) I believe this statement and I congratulate him. But in my view the most dangerous possibility is that people consider him a victim anyway and neglect to question his assertions simply because “he’s been through so much” or “I could never understand what he went through.” Mail-bomb or no, these statements deserve skepticism on our part and justification on his.

But all this notwithstanding: Dr. Gelernter, please accept my best wishes for you and your family.

This is the article on nutritional toxicology that I mentioned earlier.  The key passage: “Toxicology today possesses the means to incriminate any substance to which it cares to devote sufficient testing. This science can indict any substance if it has the inclination.”

I am quite fond of nutmeg, and I use it regularly in my cooking.  With this being the Christmas season, I’m drinking eggnog; probably more than I should, judging by its nutritional profile.  To this, of course, I add nutmeg.

Perhaps too much nutmeg.  Tonight I decided to have a cup full and began grating a nutmeg into it.  Soon the cup contained half a grated nutmeg.  I stirred it, added a small splash of brandy, and began sipping it.  Halfway through the cup it occurred to me that this could be a very dumb idea: I knew nutmeg could be hallucinogenic or toxic in relatively small quantities (neither of which effects I wanted), but I had no idea what “small” meant.  A gram?  10 grams?  50 grams?  I put down the eggnog and performed a Google search for “ld50 nutmeg”.  LD50 is a term that denotes the fatal level of consumption for fifty percent of the population (that is, if you have a group of one hundred people and give each of them the LD50 of a substance, around fifty of them will die.)  A very cool article debunking nutritional toxicology scares (showing that “natural” ingredients could be far more hazardous than “artificial” ingredients) that I read four years ago got me convinced that the LD50s of many common substances are well within reach.

So, to begin with, how much had I injested?  I had three nutmegs left, and weighed them on the finest-precision scale available to me, my postal scale.  The three nutmegs came in at a third of an ounce (or around 10 grams) total.  That meant that each nutmeg was a little over 3 grams, half a nutmeg was between 1.5 and 2 grams, and half a cup of eggnog containing half a nutmeg delivered under a gram of nutmeg, total.  I found a webpage that read “Even though there have been cases of narcosis and collapse with just one whole nutmeg, people universally use nutmeg as food seasoning.”  This was not particularly good news.  The next source was also not very positive (intriguingly, this is from a book entitled Legal Highs: A Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Herbs and Chemicals with Psychoactive Properties by one Adam Gottlieb, self-proclaimed 20th Century Alchemist.  This is an interesting counterpoint to my position: I’m trying to make sure that I didn’t do something very stupid and injest dangerous amounts of a substance while using it for flavoring, while there are apparently people who want to know if they can use it as a psychotropic drug without injesting dangerous amounts.)

“Possible nausea during first hour; may cause vomiting or diarrhea in isolated cases. Takes anywhere from one to five hours for effects to set in. Then expect severe  cottonmouth, flushing of skin, severely bloodshot eyes, dilated pupils. [...] “Intense sedation”. Impaired speech and motor functions. Hallucinations uncommon in average (5-10 gm) doses. Generally followed by long, deep, almost coma-like sleep (expect 16 hours of sleep afterward) and feelings of lethargy after sleep. [...] Safrole is carcinogenic and toxic to the liver.”

So, bad things can happen, and I was unsure how exactly to interpret this paragraph.  “Hallucinations are uncommon in average [...] doses”, but what about the other effects?  Common?  Do they set in at a lower threshold than the hallucination?  The final source I found said this:

“The perceptible dose is 5 to 15 grams (1 to 3 ground nutmeg seeds). It is a carminative in a dose of 0.03 mL. It is used as a hallucinogen in doses of 2-4 teaspoonfuls or greater than 2 whole nutmeg or 18 grams of fresh ground nutmeg. Effects begin in 3 to 6 hours but may be delayed 8 hours after ingestion and the duration is up to 60 hours. Effects are similar to LSD. Toxicity produces dry mouth, GI upset, abdominal pain, agitation, tremors, feeling of impending doom, delirium, psychosis, and coma. It is reported to produce miosis or mydriasis, hypothermia, hypotension. Cardiovascular effects including chest pain, palpitations and mild hypertension have been reported. One fatality reported in an 8 year old boy who ingested 14 grams was reported in 1908. Severe reactions with shock, hypotension, cyanosis and hypothermia may occur with very large amounts .”  I had to look up carminative, miosis, and mydriasis, by the way.

OK, we finally have a definition of the perceptible dose, which is a factor of 4 to 12 above what I injested.  So it looks like I’m in the clear, although this safety margin is significantly lower than I would like.

Do we need a moral here?  Don’t be an idiot like me: many herbs and spices contain dangerous chemicals in significant amounts.  Significant increases in their culinary usage should probably be investigated before ingestion, not after.

.