John Sperling is putting his $3 Billion fortune into life-extension research

Not a bad article at Wired

More Than Words for Snow (3): Birth Control and Selfish Genes

In some ways, I'm not very happy with the writing in this post, and some of the problems I've had writing it I'll put down to the awful problems I'm having with my back, which make it so hard to think clearly when I'm sitting down at the computer....

I've talked before (here and here) about how the structure of our language and thought can easily mislead our thinking; here's another example, derived from Richard Dawkin's excellent book The Selfish Gene.

It's known that most birds regulate their clutch size -- the number of eggs they lay -- and it seems as if they do it for the good of the species, so they don't overtax the available resources. Dawkins argues, however, that this seemingly altruistic behaviour is in fact better explained as the result of the workings of selfish genes.

How could this behaviour arise from selfish genes? If the selfish gene view is correct, shouldn't we be expecting the birds to be wanting to have as many eggs as they can, so their genes are propagated as much as possible? Why then would these birds be limiting the number of eggs they are having - why would they be practising birth control? It's hard to imagine!

Actually, it's not that hard to imagine if we frame the problem in a more appropriate way. It's hard to imagine because of the way I've put things. I don't mean to say I've used some sort of special language-trick, however; what I mean is that we can, if we are not careful, be subtly mislead by the language we are using. To see what I mean you'll have to read on and see the details.

So what have I done to misleadingly frame the issue? What I've done is exemplified by the use of the term birth control. But what is wrong with that? If birds are laying less eggs than they could, are they not practicing a form of birth control? Would we not say that if people were limiting the number of children they have they are not practicing a form of birth control?

Perhaps we can clarify the problem by considering what we mean by 'birth control'. I think the essence the term's meaning can be captured by the following: birth control is limiting the number of children born; birth control controls (limits) the population; if you want to go about limiting the population you need to practicse birth control. It's hard to think how this meaning for birth control could be wrong, but it is -- in fact, as Dawkins explains, birth control can have exactly the opposite effect!

Dawkins says (pg 116):

[Each] selfish individual [chooses] the clutch size that maximizes the number of children she rears. If three is the optimum clutch size for swifts, what this means [is] that any individual who tries to rear four will probably end up with fewer children than rivial, more cautious individuals who only try to rear three. The obvious reason for this would be that food is so thinly spread between the four babies that few of them survive to adulthood.

That is, birds are practicing birth control in order to increase the number of children they have!

Lets now consider how and why the language has been getting us confused. How can birth control limit the number of children and also increase the number of children? The answer: it depends on the context. In the case of humans, at least in countries with a high-standard of living, birth control will limit the number of children. This is because baies have a high chance of surviving into adulthood, so any child born will increase the population and any child that isn't won't. In the case of the birds, and no doubt many other creatures, however, child mortality may be high, with the chances of a child surviving being dependent upon how much time and effort the parent(s) can devote to it. And thus having more children may, because you can't care for any of them adequately, mean you end up with less surviving children.

That's an explanation of how it's possible for birth control to either limit or expand the number of children, but how was it that we got confused in the first place? It was because the problem was framed in terms of number of children born, that this was simply the causal factor that effected population size, and that an increase in births meant an increase in population size (or, put the other way around, that an increase in population size comes from an increase in births). If we'd been careful about what we were thinking, we would have realised that we aren't really interested in the number of births but the number of children that survive. We'd assumed that the two meant the same thing.

We assumed the two meant the same thing because we didn't really think about the relationship between number of children born and population size. If we give the issue a quick think over in terms of the concepts such as 'giving birth to children' and 'population size', it's seems quite natural that there's a direct causal relationship between them, and if you take this answer it's hard to look at it and see why it is wrong. But there's a big difference about thinking about the concepts and really thinking about what the situation could be like (thinking 'what if the mother had twenty eggs rather than three?'). If we'd really thought it through, it ought to have been easy to see that having more children born could mean less children surviving.

I was originally planning to have a second part to this post, where I would discuss where our thinking had been going wrong, in terms of some vocabulary I've been developing for talking about this kind of stuff. But now I'm going to do that in a separate post which I'm going to start writing next.

Simulations, All

I've been reading Richard Dawkin's book about evolution, The Selfish Gene. It's apparent that a lot of ideas about evolution are tested out through computer simulations. Of course, it's not just evolutionary theory where computer simulations are heavily used - there's other areas such as Economics, Physics and Meteorology. But despite the fairly widespread use of simulation, despite its utility, may people seem to consider it somehow lesser than other techniques for understanding the world.

Many people would consider verbal or mathematical means of understanding the world superior to simulations. I believe the argument is that simulations seem so paltry against the complexity of the real world, with the assumption that the other techniques are much better at dealing the nature of the world, perhaps because they don't try explicitly representing it. Against this idea, it occurred to me before -- and this probably has occurred to others -- that all thinking is fundamentally simulation.

Any reasoning about the world -- verbal, mathematical, etc -- involves some conception of the way the world is. In short, when you're reasoning you're manipulating this model in some way in order to see what it can tell you. What does this have to say about the relative efficacy of a computer simulation? That's something I'll consider another time.

This post is really just a quick sketch - I want to come back to this and consider it more fully another time, but now it's beddy-bies time and I need my beauty sleep :-).

An Example of a Mental Bias Towards the Physical

A while back, I gave a glowing review of Harold McGee's The Curious Cook. This post is about a single sentence from that book, which I'm using to illustrate a facet of the way our minds seem to work. This post doesn't provide a complete argument - at the moment I'm just trying to collect examples in order to build a fuller case, one that I'm hoping to present in the future. And you might find its conclusion rather lightweight - but after all, it's only a single, small example...

In the book's article on making mayonnaise, he explains how a microwave can be used to kill the salmonella that can sometimes be found in eggs. A microwave is suitable for the task because it can kill the bacteria without destroying the "rawness" of the egg yolk, which is important for making mayonnaise. It can do so because it can cook yolks at precise "temperatures" for a precise duration of time.

"As for the cooking itself, after years of owning a microwave oven, I finally found a task that it alone can accomplish well. On the stovetop, it's very difficult to ..." (pg 99)

It's easy to nod along with what he's saying, and I think it gives us a glimpse of something interesting about the way our minds work to see why he's not really right. When you think about it, a task that microwaves alone can accomplish is the task of heating something up quickly. That's not to say the results are always fantastic, but if it's speed you're after, a microwave is your best bet.

That microwaves can heat things up quickly is a rather obvious fact, and yet you may have noticed that its doesn't come obviously to mind when you read the quoted sentence. Why is that? I think the reason is that our minds have a bias towards thinking in terms of physical entities over more abstract properties such as the duration of something. "Cooking something fast" is definitely valid as a task a microwave can alone do well, but it's far less obvious a task than something physical such as "frying something", "baking a cake" or "making rice".

There's an objection to my argument that you may have found yourself thinking. That is, that when he said "I finally found a task that it alone can accomplish well" he was only talking about physical tasks such as "frying something", "baking a cake" or "making rice". I can't say this wasn't the case, but even if it was, I don't think it really says anything against the point I'm making.

If he intended the sentence to refer only to physical tasks, then perhaps it's illustrative that he didn't feel the need to qualify himself, despite the raher obvious thing microwaves do well (cooking things quickly), even if you don't consider that a task. And regardless of how he intended it, it's still illustrative if people still read that sentence without realising the possibility of a task being "cooking quickly".

Example of Rejecting the "Ridiculous"

People will often reject a notion on the grounds that it's "ridiculous". I want to eventually write a longer post about this, but for the moment I'm just collecting examples. Tim Cahill provides one in his book Remote Journies Oddly Rendered. The particular story in the book recounts the time he camped in Yellowstone National Park near a set of remote geysers, and it notes:

Early white explorers sent back accounts of the boiling water and steam erupting from the earth. One eastern publication, in 1870, rejected what now seems like a solid descriptive manuscript with the words, `Sorry, we do not print fiction.’ And it was in 1870 that men who wondered at the supposedly fictional geysers first expressed the thought that the entire areas would be set aside as a National park. (1st ed, pg 200. Note that in the US the book seems to be called "Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered").

Testing Common Wisdom on 'Drinking Lots of Water' when ill

Researchers have investigated the common wisdom to 'drink lots of water' when ill with a cold or the flu, finding it ineffective and potentially dangerous, as reported in this article.

So why do so many people, including doctors, recommend drinking plenty of fluids when ill? "It's not really clear," Del Mar noted. "All we know is that the idea arose in ancient times, and has been carried on ever since without anyone really challenging it."

(Also reported at: TheAge, Abc.net.au, WebIndia123, TheStar)

Musing

Here's a name for a record label or album: music to f*ck people's heads with. At the time of writing, a Google search for this phrase turns up zero results.

There ought to be...

...keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen, when you're in a program like a word processor or text editor. You might think that the page up and page down keys do this, but they scroll the screen up or down when they move the cursor, whereas I want something that keeps the screen the same and just moves the cursor. I think I'd often find this feature useful.

Since, in Windows at least, CTRL + UP ARROW (or DOWN ARROW) are already used, perhaps CTRL + < could be used for 'move cursor to top of page' and CTRL + > for 'move cursor to bottom of page'. I'm also wondering, is there any program or operating system that already has this feature?

An Idea Involving Places, Races and Faces

I've had a number of unsatisfactory attempts at expressing this idea, and it could be who-knows how much longer until I'd be fully satisfied, so enough's enough. Here's my latest attempt, still a little rough around the edges, but otherwise okay, I think...

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Like everyone else, my experience of others is a combination of the people I see and interact with in person, plus those I see through the media -- through movies, documentaries or other tv shows, newspapers, books, National Geographic magazines read in waiting rooms etc.

My familiarity with people from different countries may be more than the average person's because for the last nine years I've either studied or worked at a university, but even if that's the case I think that my knowledge of the different races and cultures is in many ways quite vague and incomplete.

Even so, it often doesn't feel that way. I think that we tend to have a sense that we have a fair, if incomplete, picture of the rest of the world, what the people in various places look like, what their culture is like, and so on. If you show me any country in the world on a map my mind will be able to conjure up notions of things like what the people there probably look like, what sort of existence they have (whether they're fairly industrialised, for example).

But I don't automatically think that because it seems that way, it is that way. I'm aware that our minds, when they don't have the actual details to go on, unconsciously fill in the blanks with stereotyped information, which we gleam from a variety of sources.

I have, for example, a notion of African people, but I'm sure this notion does not properly incorporate, or distinguish between, all the different cultures and racial groups it lumps together. I have certain notions of what an African person looks like, but until I, say, spend time in various places in Africa, how do I know how accurate these notions are? Sure, these notions will be affirmed, negated or expanded by the people I see in person or in the media, but I think it's difficult to claim that these are representative samples.

What I would really like is some real knowledge that is representative of what other people in the world are like. Of course, to understand the people, the places, the culture, the history of everyone on earth would be a mammoth task. But I have thought of an idea for the modest task of presenting a real sense of what people in different places in the world look like.

In theory, this information is already available, and the idea is more than just about providing this information. Part of the idea is about how to present this information such that it is interesting and has a chance of having real reach. It's no good if it's just information sitting around that no one ever sees.

What I want is something that will help create, in the world, a greater sense of others, by giving people a more concrete knowledge with which they can mentally connect up places and races to a more richly detailed set of faces.

The World Seen Though Images

Short of going on a world tour, the only practical way of gaining this understanding is through some form of visual media. Certainly there's a suitable set of images out there if you consider the combination of what's found in the various documentaries, magazines, books, image databases and whathaveyou, but it's too dispersed and awkward to get at and use for these ends.

I can think of things which give various pictures of people in places, but it's usually a scattered set of images, not comprehensive to cover all of the different racial groups in a place or a representative sample of each. Often the images are not labeled sufficiently to determine exactly where the person is from or what sort of racial background they have. A further issue is that people are often not the focus of the images: the focus is often the scene the person is in or the task they are performing, and this means that you can't as clearly see what they look like. It also means that people are in different positions, taken from different angles, making it difficult to get a comparative sense of their features.

The short of it is, if you want to do this with what's out there, you'd have to do a lot of work, and why would anyone in an ordinary situation bother to do this? The problem would be hard enough even if you just were interested in a single place or racial group, and if you're interested in every country in the entire world you have that multiplied by about one hundred and ninety.

You can think of my idea as a coffee table book containing a page for each country in the world, each of which shows an image of a collection of people representative of those in that country. Each page/image/country might have twenty five or so people, and they are standing side-by-side and facing the viewer. It could also have a bit of textual information indicating the country, the racial make up of the people in it, and so on. That's the essential idea, though there is more to it which I'll explain further down, after commenting on these basic details.

Since the focus should be on the people and what they look like, I think they should all be standing next to each other, facing the viewer. I think the background to the image should be fairly neutral and I don't think there should be anything in the pictures that could bring up racial or cultural stereotypes or associations, like people wearing traditional dress or having images of the landscapes 'typical' for that country in the background. For this reason, I think it would be best if they were, in all of the pictures, wearing the same type of clothing, something minimal, plain and as culturally neutral as is achievable.

And that's basically it. I have in mind something that's visually striking, memorable, and which fascinates the viewer. I think this idea could meet those criteria, criteria which bring to mind those Benneton ads by Oliviero Toscani and Yann Arthus-Bertrand's Earth from the Air pictures. Consciousness raising, largely.

A Zoomable Kaleidoscope

While book-form has its advantages, you could do a lot more with this idea on the computer. When I originally thought of the idea, I had in mind a web-site or a multimedia program (I think it would work both on the computer and in book form). The static arrangement of images in a book could, on a computer, be arranged in any number of ways. Want to show the image of New Zealanders aside the image of Mexicans so you can view them comparatively? Want to show just the images of all the Asian countries? Want to show the images of all the racial groups that share some common ancestry? The computer could give you the means to show together whichever collection of images you wanted, in a kaleidoscopic number of potential arrangements.

I think a really interesting think you could do on the computer would be to allow the viewer to 'zoom' in or out, so they could, for example, see a larger, more representative, set of images for a particular country, or see a single image for a larger area, such as Europe. So even if you've just got the time to view the single image for each continent, you're getting at least as best a view as you can with that much information, and if you want to go deeper and more detailed you can. So you can get an image that gives you some idea of the people in a particular country, but if you want to get a more representative view you can zoom in and see perhaps three pictures for that country, and so on.

Corrective Lenses

What this idea is really about is giving ourselves a better perspective on the world. For most of us, myself included, the people of the place we've lived in exist in a much different part of our minds to those elsewhere in the world. Being able to see everyone one in the world, together and on equal footing, would hopefully help put things into proper perspective.

Favour the Intrepid in the Search for Knowledge

Favour the intrepid in the search for knowledge, for their job is far easier than the naysayer's. The naysayer says, I know there is not an answer out there. The intrepid says, how do I know there is not an answer out there? The intrepid must search for an answer somewhere in the landscape of knowledge, for a path that will lead them to it, and they have all of the future -- and the developments it brings -- in which to find one.

The naysayer too must search for an answer somewhere out there in the landscape of knowledge, an answer which says that there is no path, no where, that the intrepid could ever follow to reach their answer. This is a fundamentally more difficult task, and one which puts the seeker at a far greater risk of finding a mirage when they think they've found an answer, for when they have found their answer, everyone else has all the future to prove them wrong.

Article on Effectivenss of Open Dissent in Organisations

Effective organisations are nourished by an internal culture of open dissent, while pressure to conform is damaging. Take the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster as an example: the report into the accident cites the lack of such a culture as the major cause. Cass Sustein, in his (I checked, he is a guy) Los Angeles Times article, takes this example as a starting point for a brief look at this issue, in which he further illustrates his point with examples involving Enron, judges and private investment clubs. (for some reason that URL is not currently accessible to me, nor any others at uchicago for that matter, and an alternative source for the article can be found here).

Thoughts in Few Words (4)

Oh, how the foolish have risen. (or, How far the foolish have risen).

Feeling the Physics

I've recently started reading Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher, which is derived from a text written by Richard Feynman back in the sixties (it's the six easiest chapters from that text). The text itself was derived from a series of undergraduate lectures Feynman gave at Caltech.

Despite the fact its derived from a text book, it's quite readable and I think he explains the concepts well. Reading it, it's easy to picture the things he's describing. His explanations are not perfect, though. There's a few places where it seems he knows too much for his own good, where he doesn't sufficiently anticipate some of the things a naive reader's will want to know in order to understand what he's talking about. But they're relatively minor complaints against a book that scores well in terms of readability and the clarity of its explanations.

And I can say now that I have finally progressed beyond my high-school knowledge of physics. This knowledge consisted of simplifying but ultimately incorrect concepts such as the "solar-system" view of an atom, with the electrons orbiting around the neucleus. I had some idea of the true story, but it's satisfying to have a more concrete picture there in my mind.

And that's the thing that's struck me while reading the book -- having that concete picture in my mind and realising that that's what's really going on, everywhere. In every speck in every part of your field of vision (if you are sighted, of course) there's a whole world, radically different to ours, made up of strange particles interacting in quirky ways. From your eyes, recieving the light carrying that picture, through your optic nerve, to your brain, to you -- all these things, too, are part of this strange world. It's there, right now, right in front of you, in you, you.

Blogging in the Open Air

The other day I bought a laptop, one of those ones with built-in wireless networking. Right now I'm sitting on a bench outside, in the Queen Street Mall, which is in the center of Brisbane. Sitting here typing this blog post, because the mall has got free wireless access, and watching the people go past. I think that's great, to be able do everything you can do with a computer and access to the Internet, not stuck at a desk, but in an environment like this or anywhere else that has wireless net access.

Type Letters In Your Own Handwriting

Fontifier is a neat looking web service that lets you create a computer font based on your own handwriting. What you do is write each letter of the alphabet (plus the numbers and symbols) on a template, which you can download from the web-site and print out, then scan in the filled-in template as an image, which you then upload to the web-site -- and voila, it sends you back a font constructed from your filled-in template. I can't try it out on my computer here -- no printer or scanner -- but I'd like to have a go when I get a chance.
(via http://del.icio.us/, via Many2Many)

Species, Language and Reality

You may have heard that the fossil record shows surprisingly little evidence of gradual transitions between species, which is the kind of evidence we should expect if the theory of evolution is to be believed. So then what's going on? Nothing, Richard Dawkins argues, in his book Climbing Mount Improbable, as the whole issue is actually a phantom created by language overshadowing reality.

From pages 95 and 96 of the first Penguin paperback edition of the book:

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There is a supremely banal reason why transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level. I can explain it best with an analogy. Children turn gradually and continuously into adults but, for legal purposes, the age of majority is taken to be a particular birthday, often the eighteenth. It would therefore be possible to say, 'There are 55 million people in Britan but not a single one of them is intermediate between non-voter and voter.' Just as, for legal purposes, a juvenile changes into a voter as midnight strikes on the eighteenth birthday, so zoologists always insist on classifying a specimen as in one species or another. If a specimen is intermediate in actual form (as many are) zoologists' legalistic conventions still force them to jump one way or the other when naming it. Therefore the creationists' claim that there are no intermediates has to be true by definition at the species level, but it has not implications about the real world - only implications about zoologists' naming conventions.

To look no further than our own ancestry, the transition from Australo pithecus to Homo habilis to Homo erectus to 'archaic Homo sapiens' to 'modern Homo sapiens' is so smoothly gradual that fossil experts are continually squabbling about how to classify particular fossils. Now look a the following, from a book of anti-evolution propaganda: 'the finds have been referred to either Australopithecus, and hence are apes, or Homo and hence are human. Despite more than a centruy of energetic excavation and intense debate the glass case reserved for mankind's hypothetical ancestor remains empty. The missing link is still missing.' One is left wondering what a fossil has to do to qualify as an intermediate. In fact the statement quoted is saying nothing whatever about the real world. It is saying something (rather dull) about naming conventions. No 'missing link', however precisely intermediate it was, could escape the teminological force majeure that would thrust it one side of the divide or the other. The proper way to look for intermediates is to forget the naming of fossils and look, instead, at their actual shape and size. When you do that, you find that the fossil record abounds in beautifully gradual transitions, although there are some gaps too - some very large and accepted, by everybody, as due to animals simply failing to fossilize. In a way, our naming procedures are set up for a pre-evolutionary age when divides were everything and we did not expect to find intermediates.

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Contab's Clever Table

I always find it strange that while lunches or dinners with groups of people are meant to be social events, people there for the other people, they tend to -- if there's more than a handful attending -- split up into little isolated islands.

I've always wished my hearing was better so I could hear more than those people immediately next to me, but a New Zealand company called Contab have come up with an elegant solution to this problem, in a special type of table they've devloped.

The tables are designed such that your chair, as well as the table top in front of you, moves, ever so slowly, revolving around the table's circumference. Because the table is longer than it is wide, this means that over one two hour revolution of the table, you'll have ended up having spent an equal amont of time near each of the people at the table.

I think that's great, and I'm encouraging every restaurant in Brisbane to go out and buy one right now. At the very least, I would like to try one out and see how effective it is in practice.

Their web-site (as linked above, and also here) has more information, including more pictures, time-lapse videos, and info about a few other potential applications for the tables, such as in business meetings.

Two bits 'o good news

The toothache lasted for a few days, but is gone now. Ohhhh, that's a relief [*]. And an even bigger relief: I got the PhD scholarship I had applied for! :-). I'm starting in late February next year.

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[*] Well, it's largely gone. Prepare to find out more about my teeth than you wanted to know: it's a long story, but the problem isn't actually a cavity, but a funny shaped gap between two teeth that causes food to get stuck there and from this, gum pain (and don't think that gum pain can't be as big and burly as tooch ache...), which ultimately can't be fixed (short of removing teeth or something equally drastic).

PowerPoint, Faux Analytical Techniques and Sales Pitches

This article on PowerPoint contains some nice quotes from Edward Tufte on what's wrong with so many PowerPoint presentations: PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. [...] Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

Toothache

Ughhhhrr, the last three days I've been captive to a damn toothache. The pain killers don't seem to help much. Last night was, at times, pure, fangs-gleaming agony. I'm really looking forward to that fresh, springtime-air of life without it.