freethoughtsweb.blogspot.com

Carl Sagan on Isaac Asimov

2010-09-18T03:01:00.001+01:00

Isaac Asimov was one of the great explainers of the age. Like T. H. Huxley, he was motivated by profoundly democratic impulses to communicate science to the public. “Science is too important,” he said, paraphrasing Clemenceau, “to be left to the scientists.” It will never be known how many practicing scientists today, in how many countries, owe their initial inspiration to a book, article, or short story by Isaac Asimov—nor how many ordinary citizens are sympathetic to the scientific enterprise from the same cause. For example, Marvin Minsky of MIT, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, was brought to his subject by Asimov's robot stories (initially conceived to illustrate human/robot partnerships and to counter the prevailing notion, going back to Frankenstein, of robots as necessarily malign). At a time when science fiction was mainly devoted to action and adventure, Asimov introduced puzzle-solving schemes that taught science and thinking along the way.

Carl Sagan on science and spirituality

2010-09-18T02:48:00.001+01:00

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

The Magic Income Number - NYTimes.com

2010-09-12T20:58:00.001+01:00

The Magic Income Number - NYTimes.com: "September 9, 2010, 9:30 am
The Magic Income Number
By FREAKONOMICS

What’s the magic income number? According to Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, it’s about $75,000, at least when it comes to day-to-day happiness. “As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness.” Income above $75,000, however, does improve people’s overall “life assessment.” ”Giving people more income beyond 75K is not going to do much for their daily mood … but it is going to make them feel they have a better life,” says Mr. Deaton.

Google's role in human affairs

2010-08-24T21:44:00.004+01:00

Vifginia Heffernan writes in the NYTimes (20 Aug. 2010) about the manner by which Google redefined the very notion of fact:

As broadband brought millions of facts, the fantasy of perfect factuality and the satisfaction of fact-checking to everyone. Soon — and astonishingly — Google became much more than trusted; it became shorthand for everything that had been recorded in modern history. ...

But if the Web has changed what qualifies as fact-checking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects. But I can’t verify that.

Blackmore on the Life of an Academic in the UK

2010-08-23T10:21:00.001+01:00

Susan Blackmore: "Why I’m leaving" (The Independent, January 2002):

Term is starting and I’m not going back! Whoopee! ... It’s really true. I have given up my secure academic job as Reader at the University of the West of England for the vagaries of life as a freelance. And why? Because I want to work - really work - and my job made that impossible. ...

Maybe some people can get home after a long day and have brilliant thoughts. Maybe some can write the best book they are capable of in the hours stolen from their sleep, or from their children. But I can’t. ...

The deal used to be, for the cleverest or luckiest few get a job in a university, give a reasonable number of lectures, do a few other useful tasks, and the rest of the time is yours. Yes it was often abused, and yes we can’t afford that in today’s climate, with so many more students. But what have we instead? The current deal is to give an unreasonable number of lectures, to ever larger groups of less interested students, plus a completely mind-boggling amount of marking, setting exams, going to meetings, and--on top of all that--justify everything you do with learning outcomes, aims and objectives, and the TQA....

The importance of blasphemy

2010-08-11T20:34:00.002+01:00

Peter Fosl writes in a not-so-new article in The Philosophers Magazine ("Open Debate: The Righteousness of Blasphemy") about the importance of blasphemy:

Blasphemy deflates some of the sanctimonious, holier-than-thou, I'm-absolutely-right attitudes of the religious. It makes religion safer. It does so by knocking religious authorities off their pedestals, by reminding us that their views (protestations to the contrary) are just those of silly humans, that they're just like the rest of us—that they and their views are equals with us and ours, that they are not our superiors.
...
It's easy to see why ideas related to the ‘sacred' and the ‘blasphemous' are so attractive and so fiercely defended. With them one can tell people what to think and how to live with the greatest authority while simultaneously establishing immunity from criticism.

The end of feminism?

2010-08-07T07:04:00.001+01:00

Research conducted in the London School of Economics ("Women’s ‘double shift’ of work and domestic duties a myth finds new research") has some surprising results:

If we consider the hours spent doing both paid work and unpaid household, care and voluntary work together, men already do more than their fair share, argues LSE sociologist Catherine Hakim in a special issue of Renewal: a journal of social democracy."

The dramatic effects of kindergarten education: A controlled (!) experiment

2010-07-30T10:27:00.006+01:00

The NY Times ("The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers", 27 July 2010) has just published an article about a very interesting controlled (!) experiment. The Harvard economists that conducted this unusual study (how many controlled experiments in education do you know about?) conclude that "a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime."

If this is true, deciding on a kindergarten suddenly becomes a lot more significant that you may have imagined...

Some interesting excerpts:

How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?

Economists have generally thought that the answer was not much. Great teachers and early childhood programs can have a big short-term effect. But the impact tends to fade. By junior high and high school, children who had excellent early schooling do little better on tests than similar children who did not — which raises the demoralizing question of how much of a difference schools and teachers can make.
...
Just as in other studies, the Tennessee experiment found that some teachers were able to help students learn vastly more than other teachers. ... Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.
...
The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?
The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better.

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

Some are highly effective. Some are not. And the differences can affect students for years to come.

Dirac: Elegance is more important than empirical fit

2010-07-16T12:26:00.008+01:00

Scientific American has re-printed a 1963 article by Paul Dirac, The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature, in which he says: "It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment." The sentiment expressed here by Paul Dirac, the celebrated quantum physicist, isn't that surprising to those who recall Einstein's famous quote:

Reporter: What would you do if the measurements of bending starlight at the 1919 eclipse contradicted his general theory of relativity?

Einstein: Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct.

In all, the article provides an enjoyable glimpse into the mind of a great scientist, showing that scientists do not always think and operate the way we expect them.

Michael Hawley: Sheet music piracy is okay (NYTimes.com)

2010-07-10T20:59:00.006+01:00

DAVID POGUE: "No Easy Answers in the Copyright Debate" (NYTimes.com 8 July 2010)

Michael Hawley, formerly of the M.I.T. Media Lab, now a digital-media researcher, award-winning pianist and polymath, ... wrote to explain why he thinks sheet-music pirating is O.K., or even necessary:

I play the piano. Over the years, I have collected 15,000 piano scores in PDF form, covering about 400 years of classical keyboard works.

It's like lint in the drier of the Internet. Much of it is not available anywhere for purchase, or even findable in libraries for circulation. Max Reger's arrangement for two pianos of Wagner's overture, for instance? Well, the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe, Germany has a copy...

The last classical sheet music store in New York, Patelson's, went out of business recently. The recession finished them off. It was THE place to go to buy piano music. When I was in high school, I used to go there for hard-to-find scores by Granados or Medtner, and then hit the Carnegie Deli for some pastrami. Amazing, isn't it? New York City doesn't have an independent store that sells classical music scores.

Fortunately, over the last ten or fifteen years, amateur pianists have been scanning the contents of their grandmother's piano benches, and... voilà. A million monkeys typing don't get you Shakespeare, but a million monkeys scanning -- that makes a dent. I began collecting this stuff as a hobby. One day, I looked at my pile of music score bits. In those days, 15 gigabytes was most of my hard drive. But it was all there. All of Bach. All of Scriabin. All of Rachmaninoff.

At the Van Cliburn piano competition, a couple years ago, I gave tiny thumb drives to some of the winners and said, "Enjoy." Each thumb drive was smaller than my pinky but contained was the whole 15 GB trove. It blew their minds. Basically, every significant piano piece is in the pile.

What happened is, the classical piano sheet music publishing world plotzed a long time ago. But thanks to the monkeys, a lot of DNA has been preserved and is more available now than ever before. The monkeys aren't as well organized as the Wikipedia minions, but someday they will be.

When the publishers, composers, music stores have long since gone out of business, when the libraries don't have the stuff, the internet quickly becomes the Sargasso sea for catching this stuff. Not saying that your songwriter friend's points aren't completely valid -- of course they are. As slippery as digital rights are, the fact is that digital publishing probably gives people more ways to make more money and reach far wider audiences than the paper-based music publishing racket ever did.

But copyright, like the people who originate the material and the industries that promulgate it, has a lifespan. I think the classical piano sheet music world gives a glimpse of the end state -- out of the ashes of the music business, comes the rebirth of the musician business (as John Perry Barlow once said). It also, more importantly, shows what happens when a society does a poor, random job of preserving their cultural heritage to nurture future generations.

Generally, I side with the teenagers.

Fair Trade

2010-07-03T12:42:00.002+01:00

From: Fair Trade and the Food Movement - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

The problem with Fair Trade coffee is that as the program scales up, the alternative market ethics it wants to sustain collapse. Inevitably, the Fair Trade market becomes subject to the same laws that drive the conventional commodities market. When the price of coffee drops, the appeal of Fair Trade’s price support lures growers into the cooperatives that sell coffee under the Fair Trade label. As poor growers rush into Fair Trade agreements, the supply of Fair Trade coffee rises. Protected by the price floor, the Fair Trade coffee remains inflated despite flagging demand. What Fair Trade importers thus end up doing with the excess Fair Trade coffee is dumping it—upwards of 75 percent of it!—on the conventional market.

US Supreme Court Rules: Religious Group Can’t Demand Funding while Violating Non-Discrimination Policies

2010-06-29T03:34:00.002+01:00

The case concerns a student chapter of the Christian Legal Society (CLS), which sued the school after being denied official recognition and funding because the student group violated the school's non-discrimination policy. That policy requires that student groups must be open to all students in order to receive funding and official recognition. The federal appellate court below ruled unanimously against CLS because the school's policy prohibited every student group, whether religious or secular, from excluding students that disagree with the group's mission. For example, if the school's Democratic club cannot access school funding while excluding Republicans from its membership, a conservative Christian group cannot demand funds while excluding gay, non-Christian, or non-conservative Christian students. CLS appealed, claiming that it had a constitutional right - not enjoyed by any secular organizations - to receive state funding while discriminating against students on the basis of religion and sexual orientation.

Israel: Fundamentalist Judaism's Culture War

2010-06-17T20:19:00.013+01:00

Yossi Sarid / The great Haredi rebellion is raging on several fronts (Haaretz, 17 June 2010)

For many years the culture war has hung over us like a dark cloud... Now it is happening; the war has erupted. The great Haredi [ultra-orthodox] rebellion has begun and is raging on several fronts... and no place is safe. The ultra-Orthodox public, which has always been cutting down our trees, is now uprooting them. It will destroy basic values, without which a democratic, developed state cannot exist. It will be lost unless it fights back.
...
The Haredim have declared a rebellion now for an obvious reason. ... In every other country they obey the state authorities. Only here, in the state they made no effort to establish and make no effort to maintain, are they a law unto themselves.
...
We have brought this calamity upon ourselves with our own hands, with our weakness and concessions. While every country worthy of the name makes efforts to separate state from religion, here they are mixed together, wallowing in the same mud, both getting soiled.
...
Only in Israel are they such heroes. Everywhere else they are submissive and docile. It wouldn't occur to them to curse judges in America or attack policemen in Europe.
...
This is a war that has been forced upon us, a war we cannot afford to lose. The rebellious Haredim must be put in their place, so that we, too, have a place in which to live.

In origin:

שנים רבות היתה מלחמת התרבויות תלוייה מעלינו כחשרת עננים, כאיום. עכשיו הוא מתממש; המלחמה פרצה. מרד החרדים הגדול התחיל, והוא מתחולל בחזיתות רבות: בירושלים, באשקלון, ביפו, בעמנואל, בבאר שבע, אין מקום בטוח. הציבור החרדי, שמאז ומתמיד קיצץ בנטיעות שלנו, עכשיו הוא עוקר אותן משורש. הוא ישמיד ויאבד ערכים בסיסיים, שבלעדיהם אין למדינה מפותחת ודמוקרטית תקומה; היא אבודה, אם לא תשיב מלחמה שערה.
...
רדים הכריזו על מרד עכשיו מסיבה ברורה: הם יודעים שיש להם סיכויים טובים לנצח... בכל מדינה אחרת הם מצייתים בהרכנת ראש לשלטונות, כי דינא דמלכותא דינא. רק כאן, במדינה שלא טרחו בהקמתה, ואינם עמלים על קיומה, רק בישראל דינא לא דינא, והם עושים דין לעצמם.
...
רק בישראל מותר להם להשתגע, כי מתירים להם. הנה, רק לפני כשנה אסר בית משפט בלונדון על בית ספר חרדי פרטי לבדוק בציציות יהדותם של מועמדים לקבלה. וראה זה פלא - לא פרץ ולא צווחה. שלומי-אמוני נשקו על פיו של השופט, ואולי גם באברי גוף אחרים.
...
את הפורענות הזאת הבאנו על עצמנו במו ידינו, בקוצר ידינו; הרווחנו אותה בהפסדים חוזרים ובוויתורים נשנים. אם בכל מדינה ראוייה לשמה עושים ככל שניתן כדי להפריד בין פוליטיקה לדת, אצלנו הן משמשות בערבוביה, משתמשות בכתר אחד, משתכשכות באותו בוץ, ושתיהן מתלכלכות.
...
המלחמה הזאת, שלא ביקשנו ונכפתה עלינו, אסור להפסיד. את החרדים, במריים, חייבים להעמיד במקומם, כדי שגם לנו יהיה מקום לחיות.

Call for papers: Philosophy of Computer Science

2010-05-08T21:05:00.003+01:00

Track in:

8th European conference on Computing And Philosophy — ECAP 2010
Technische Universität München
4–6 October 2010

Submission deadline of extended abstracts): 7 May 2010 (submission form)

The Philosophy of Computer Science (PCS) is concerned with philosophical issues that arise from reflection upon the nature and practice of the academic discipline of Computer Science. Below we indicate a few of the central questions.

I. How is a programming language determined? What role does a semantic definition play? Does it have to be a formal abstract specification?

II. What sense is to be made of the notion that a programming language has an ontology? What is the role of such an ontology? How is it linked to the type structure of the language?

III. What does it mean to say that a program is correct? What role do specifications play in correctness? How does the nature and use of theorem checkers and verifiers inform the debate? What are formal methods? What is the difference between a formal method and informal one?

IV. Is there a distinctive form of reasoning that might be called computational reasoning? How, if at all, does it differ from mathematical reasoning?

V. What kinds of things are digital objects?

VI. What is abstraction in computer science? How is it related to abstraction in mathematics?

VII. Does the Church-Turing thesis apply to physical machines? Does it make sense to say that the universe computes?

Among others, papers that address issues that the concern the methodology of the discipline, the status and nature of its claims to knowledge, the nature of its artefacts, the nature and form of computational reasoning and the philosophical basis of computational modelling are welcome.

Track chair: Raymond Turner
Philosophy of Computer Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Gita Sahgal, a freethinker

2010-04-19T12:06:00.003+01:00

Meet Gita Sahgal, a freethinker and a former head of the gender unit at Amnesty’s international secretariat. In her statement to The Times, Gita reveals how Amnesty interprets "human rights":

“I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights,” Sahgal wrote in an email to the organisation’s leaders on January 30. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.”

What is Islamophobia?

2010-04-19T11:49:00.003+01:00

Ibn Warraq has just published an in interesting post on the question What is Islamophobia? While the views expressed are not new to Ibn Warraq, an ex-Moslem who lives in constant fear from religious fundamentalists, this will surely will fuel a debate on the line between legitimate criticism and bigotry.

פשיעה סביבתית-אסתטית

2010-04-17T00:19:00.004+01:00

דורון רוזנבלום | טיוטה להצעת-חוק בעקבות פרשת הולילנד:

למרות שברור לכל, כי פשיעה סביבתית-אסתטית היא אלימה, דורסנית והרסנית יותר מפשיעות רבות אחרות - היא נחשבת 'עובדה בלתי הפיכה'. כמו הקופים והפרות בהודו - המחטף הנדל'ני והבנייה נחשבים בארץ לקדושים, אסורים לנגיעה; הם חסינים מפגיעה מרגע השלמתם - כמיטב מסורת ה'חאפ' הישראלית, מימי חומה ומגדל דרך המאחזים וההתנחלויות ועד ל'קבוצות הרכישה', כרישי הנדל'ן, בעלי המגדלים וארסופי החזירון העליון למיניהם.

כנגד חוסר אונים כמעט מוצהר זה אנו מתקוממים בכל נפשנו. אנו דוחים בשאט נפש את מנטליות 'אי ההפיכות', ה'עובדה בשטח', וה'בכייה לדורות'. אנו טוענים שזכותו של הציבור לתבוע בחזרה את שנלקח ממנו - הנוף שנהרס, המגרש שעליו השתולל איזה ברוטליסט, הרכס שהפך לאסלה נדל'נית. מה שטוב לכל העולם - שם הורסים בסיטונות שיכונים מכוערים ובתים חדשים-יחסית - חייב לחול גם עלינו: ניתן כבוד למבני העבר היפים; אבל שום מבנה חדש אינו רשאי לתבוע נצחיות למפרע ומראש

Technological Singularity and Acceleration Studies: Call for Papers

2010-04-01T13:37:00.025+01:00

Track in:

8th European conference on Computing And Philosophy — ECAP 2010
Technische Universität München
4–6 October 2010

Important dates:

Submission (extended abstracts): 7 April 2010 7 May 2010
Notification: 9 May 2010 9 June 2010
ECAP Conference: 4–6 October 2010

Submission guidelines, important dates, avenue, registration, etc.: See ECAP 2010 Website

Theme

Historical analysis of a broad range of paradigm shifts in science, biology, history, technology, and in particular in computing technology, suggests an accelerating rate of evolution, however measured. John von Neumann projected that the consequence of this trend may be an “essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue”. This notion of singularity coincides in time and nature with Alan Turing (1950) and Stephen Hawking's (1998) expectation of machines to exhibit intelligence on a par with to the average human no later than 2050. Irving John Good (1965) and Vernor Vinge (1993) expect the singularity to take the form of an 'intelligence explosion', a process in which intelligent machines design ever more intelligent machines. Transhumanists suggest a parallel or alternative, explosive process of improvements in human intelligence. And Alvin Toffler's Third Wave (1980) forecasts "a collision point in human destiny" the scale of which, in the course of history, is on the par only with the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

We invite submissions describing systematic attempts at understanding the likelihood and nature of these projections. In particular, we welcome papers critically analyzing the following issues from a philosophical, computational, mathematical, scientific and ethical standpoints:

Claims about and evidence to acceleration
The nature of an intelligence explosion and its possible outcomes
The nature of the Technological Singularity and its outcome
Safe and unsafe artificial general intelligence and preventative measures
Technological forecasts of computing phenomena and their projected impact
Critical analysis of past and future technological forecasts
Beyond the ‘event horizon’ of the Technological Singularity
The prospects of transhuman breakthroughs and likely timeframes

Amnon H. Eden, School of Computer Science & Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, UK and Center For Inquiry, Amherst NY

The university professor who stood up against dumbing down of degrees

2010-02-28T09:04:00.004Z

... Last week, a decision by the Court of Appeal hopefully marked the end of his ordeal. To the academic's immense relief, the court upheld his contention that the south-coast university raised the grades of weak students without his knowledge, and that his resignation, when it refused to reinstate his marks, amounted to constructive dismissal. (Read on)

The censorship of "Putin: The dark rise to power"

2009-12-27T14:55:00.004Z

The following article was originally published in GQ in September 2009:

Putin: The dark rise to power: "Ten years ago this month, Russia was rocked by a series of mysterious apartment bombings that left hundreds dead. It was by riding the ensuing wave of fear and terror that a then largely unknown Vladimir Putin rose to become the most powerful man in the country. But there were questions about the nature of those bombings - and disturbing evidence that the perpetrators might actually have been working for the Russian government. In the years since then, the people who had been questioning the official version of events began one by one to go silent or even turn up dead. Except one man. Scott Anderson finds him."

A powerful tale, true or not, on power and corruption.

What reinforces the suspicion that this story is more than yet another wacky conspiracy theory is the effort that GQ spent on suppressing it, including, but not limited to, removing any mention from its cover, withdrawing it from its Website, and removing it from its Russian versions. The picture this affair draws on the state of human rights in the former soviet empire is not encouraging.

A sober look at Hanukkah

2009-12-23T12:14:00.016Z

Those who underwent Jewish upbringing may have received the religious rationalization for Hanukkah: a standard take on the few vs. many/David and Goliath fable. A legend that contained the right mixture of miracles, self sacrifice, and reckless acts of "heroism", it mainly served in the propaganda of the religious right and settler terrorists, who are perhaps the only ones in Israel to commemorate it with fanfare.

But what has traditionally been a very minor Jewish holiday has become in the diaspora synonymous with "the Jewish Christmas" for no reason other than because Jewish parents in the complacent post-Christian West felt the pressure to compete with the popular ritual of shopping orgy and excess taking place every Christmas. Only naturally, the politically correct were quick to embrace the Hanukkah token as a rhetorical nod to the false god of tolerance (using the word 'Hanukkah' proves that I'm enlightened and open minded).

To those of us who were blissfully ignorant of it, David Brooks of the NY Times offers a synopsis of the religious and the secular versions of the Hanukkah story:

The Maccabees are best understood as moderate fanatics. They were not in total revolt against Greek culture. They used Greek constitutional language to explain themselves. They created a festival to commemorate their triumph (which is part of Greek, not Jewish, culture). Before long, they were electing their priests.

On the other hand, they were fighting heroically for their traditions and the survival of their faith. If they found uncircumcised Jews, they performed forced circumcisions. They had no interest in religious liberty within the Jewish community and believed religion was a collective regimen, not an individual choice.

They were not the last bunch of angry, bearded religious guys to win an insurgency campaign against a great power in the Middle East, but they may have been among the first. They retook Jerusalem in 164 B.C. and rededicated the temple. Their regime quickly became corrupt, brutal and reactionary. The concept of reform had been discredited by the Hellenizing extremists. Practice stagnated. Scholarship withered. The Maccabees became religious oppressors themselves, fatefully inviting the Romans into Jerusalem.

To summarize, looking at the picture as a whole, Hanukkah is pretty much the same three-G combination (God, Gore, and Greed) you see in the story behind every other religious holiday. Keep it in mind when you decorate your Hanukkah bush.

Jolly holiday and a happy new year!

Plant bill of rights?

2009-12-23T00:25:00.001Z

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delivered the following bizarre piece of news. Apparently, plants are much more capable for interacting efficiently with its animated environment than you would expect:

Another Challenge for Ethical Eating - Plants Want to Live, Too [NYTimes.com, 23 Dec 2009]

Certain plants can sense when insect eggs have been deposited on their leaves and will act immediately to rid themselves of the incubating menace. ... when a female cabbage butterfly lays her eggs on a brussels sprout plant and attaches her treasures to the leaves with tiny dabs of glue, the vigilant vegetable detects the presence of a simple additive in the glue, benzyl cyanide. Cued by the additive, the plant swiftly alters the chemistry of its leaf surface to beckon female parasitic wasps. Spying the anchored bounty, the female wasps in turn inject their eggs inside, the gestating wasps feed on the gestating butterflies, and the plant’s problem is solved.

Here’s the lurid Edgar Allan Poetry of it: that benzyl cyanide tip-off had been donated to the female butterfly by the male during mating. “It’s an anti-aphrodisiac pheromone, so that the female wouldn’t mate anymore,” Dr. Hilker said. “The male is trying to ensure his paternity, but he ends up endangering his own offspring.”

Microcephaly genes associated with human brain size

2009-12-22T23:30:00.007Z

Fresh from Science Daily are news on the genetic mechanism determining the size of the cerebral cortex:

Microcephaly genes associated with human brain size

ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2009) — A group of Norwegian and American researchers have shown that common variations in genes associated with microcephaly ... may explain differences in brain size ...

In relation to body size, brain size has expanded dramatically throughout primate and human evolution. In fact, in proportion to body size, the brain of modern humans is three times larger than that of non-human primates. The cerebral cortex in particular has undergone a dramatic increase in surface area during the course of primate evolution. ...

mutations in [The microcephaly] genes can reduce brain size by about two-thirds, to a size roughly comparable to our early hominid ancestors. There is also evidence that four of the genes -- MCPH1, ASPM, CDK5RAP2 and CENPJ -- have evolved rapidly and have been subject to strong selective pressure in recent human evolution....

The most statistically significant associations were consistently found with the areal expansion measure, which has implications also for future studies...

Highly significant associations were found between cortical surface area and polymorphisms in possible regulatory regions near the gene CDK5RAP2. ...

"One particularly interesting feature of this new discovery is that the strongest links with cortical area were found in regulatory regions, rather than coding regions of the genes," said Andreassen. "One upshot of this may be that in order to further understand the molecular and evolutionary processes that have determined human brain size, we need to focus on regulatory processes rather than further functional characterization of the proteins of these genes. This has huge implications for future research on the link between genetics and brain morphology."

This is from The Telegraph, not The Onion:

2009-10-31T23:10:00.009Z

Chief drugs adviser sacked by Home Secretary

Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, has sacked his chief drugs adviser, Professor David Nutt, after he criticised the reclassification of cannabis and said alcohol and cigarettes were more dangerous than ecstasy.

Read it for yourself if you don't believe it.

It's less funny further on:

This week he called for the current drug classification system to be replaced with a "drug harm ranking" including legal substances such as alcohol and tobacco.

...

Prof Nutt said: ... Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, "makes completely irrational statements about cannabis being 'lethal', which it is not".
...
He said:"I'm not prepared to mislead the public about the harmfulness of drugs like cannabis and ecstasy," he said.

"I think most scientists will see this as a further example of the Luddite attitude of this government, and possible future governments, towards science."

CfP: The Philosophy of Computer Science (special issue of Minds & Machines)

2009-08-26T16:41:00.004+01:00

Special issue of Minds and Machines (Fall 2010)

Important dates:

Submission deadline: 1 Dec. 2009 extended to: 1 Jan. 2010
Notification: 1 May 2010
Appearance (tentative): Dec. 2010

Submission page: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pcsmm2010

Size limit: fifteen thousand words. More submission guidelines: See Springer' Instructions to Authors

Two special editions of Minds and Machines (2007) and the Journal of Applied Logic (2008) dedicated to the philosophy of computer science have already appeared in print. Another special edition of Minds and Machines is planned for 2010. We invite submissions concerned with philosophical issues that arise from reflection upon the nature and practice of the academic discipline of computer science. In particular we welcome submissions concerned with questions such as the following (Turner & Eden 2008):

What kinds of things are programs? Are they abstract or concrete? (Moor 1978; Colburn 2004)
What are the differences between programs and algorithms? (Rapaport 2005a)
What is a specification? And what is being specified? (Smith 1985; Turner 2005)
Are specifications fundamentally different from programs? (Smith 1985)
What is an implementation? (Rapaport 2005b)
What distinguishes hardware from software? Do programs exist in both physical and symbolic forms? (Moor 1978; Colburn 2004)
What kinds of things are digital objects? Do we need a new ontological category to house them? (Allison et al. 2005)
What are the objectives of the various semantic theories of programming languages? (White 2004; Turner 2007)
How do questions in the philosophy of programming languages relate to parallel ones in the philosophy of language? (White 2004)
Does the principle of modularity (e.g., Dijkstra 1968) relate to the conceptual issues of full-abstraction and compositionality?
What are the underlying conceptual differences between the following programming paradigms: structured, functional, logic, and object-oriented programming?
What are the roles of types in Computer Science? (Barandregt 1992; Pierce 2002)
What is the difference between operational and denotational semantics? (Turner 2007)
What does it mean for a program to be correct? What is the epistemological status of correctness proofs? Are they fundamentally different from proofs in mathematics? (DeMillo et al. 1979; Smith 1985)
What do correctness proofs establish? (Fetzer 1988; Fetzer 1999; Colburn 2004)
What is abstraction in computer science? How is it related to abstraction in mathematics? (Colburn & Shute 2007; Fine 2008; Hale & Wright 2001)
What are formal methods? What is formal about formal methods? What is the difference between a formal method and informal one? (Bowen & Hinchey 2005; Bowen & Hinchey 1995)
What kind of discipline is computer science? What are the roles of mathematical modelling and experimentation? (Minsky 1970; Denning 1980; Denning 1981; Denning et al. 1989; Denning 1985; Denning 1980b; Hartmanis 1994; Hartmanis1993; Hartmanis 1981; Colburn 2004; Eden 2007)
Should programs be considered as scientific theories? (Rapaport 2005a)
How is mathematics used in computer science? Are mathematical models used in a descriptive or normative way? (White 2004; Turner 2007)
Does the Church-Turing thesis capture the mathematical notion of an effective or mechanical method in logic and mathematics? Does it capture the computations that can be performed by a human? Does its scope apply to physical machines? (Copeland 2004; Copeland 2007; Hodges 2006)
Can the notion of computational thinking withstand philosophical scrutiny? (Wing 2006)
What is the appropriate logic with which to reason about program correctness and termination? (Hoare 1969; Feferman 1992) How is the logic dependent upon the underlying programming language?
What is information? (Floridi 2004; Floridi 2005) does this notion throw light on some of the questions listed here?
Why are there so many programming languages and programming paradigms? (Krishnamurthi 2003; Eden & Turner 2007)
Do programming languages (and paradigms) have the nature of scientific theories? What causes a programming paradigm shift? (Kuhn 1970)
Does software engineering raise any philosophical issues? (Eden 2007)

Raymond Turner, Amnon H. Eden
School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex

References

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Future Shock: 30 years on

2009-08-26T15:32:00.018+01:00

Alvin Toffler's Future Shock has won so many recommendations that I was afraid it will prove to be pop pulp. Finally I got over my prejudice and read the book. I was wrong.

30 years on, the book's numerous predictions are more accurate than any other I've ever come across (but please do enlighten me if you know better). He is right about the present. Consider this for example:

In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizen’s of the world’s richest and most technologically advanced nations, will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time. For them, the future will have arrived too soon. (p.11)

For the acceleration of change ... is a concrete force that reaches deep into our personal lives, compels us to act out new roles, and confronts us with with the danger of a new and powerfully upsetting psychological disease. (p.12)

Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on the old one[:] a culture shock in one's own society. ....

Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified. ... The victim may become a hazard to himself and others.

Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest ... members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale.

This is the prospect that man now faces. (p. 14)

The truth about Amsterdam...

2009-08-25T23:38:00.004+01:00

Someone in Fox News has apparently decided that Amsterdam is a sink of iniquity which should be used as an warning against legalizing marijuana. As a rebuttal, a diligent Dutch has prepared this hilarious clip titled "The truth about Amsterdam"