Sabbatical

This will be my last post for the year, as the capricious complexities of the real world demand my immediate attention now and for the immediate future. I write this post to preempt any feelings of guilt my 'blog neglect' may have otherwise engendered. I hope to be back in January.

A quick digression to prevent this post from being more than a mere note. Having recently watched 'Eight Below', a film about a bunch of dogs in peril, I was struck by how much more empathetic I was towards dogs in such situations on screen than I typically am towards humans in similar situations (on screen). Maybe it's just me, or maybe it's this particular film - which is very good by the way - but I found myself genuinely concerned for the well being of these canine protagonists.

I'm going to put it down to the film being an excellent piece of storytelling, but I wonder...

Best Poll Ever?

Could this Slashdot Poll be the best poll ever? It's probably nothing new, but I've never seen it before. It's fascinating.

How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You?

• 0%


• 1-25%


• 26-50%


• 51-75%


• 76-99%


• 100%


• Just CowboyNeal (joke option)

Sounds simple, but just think about it a moment. I actually didn't immediately get the implications of what the poll was asking. It's an opinion poll that asks you to predict the outcome of the poll itself. Part statistics and part psychology I guess. Depending on the results, it's possible for there to be more than one correct answer. It's also possible for all the answers to be incorrect. Very clever. The comments that accompany the poll are also interesting (provided you browse the page with only well moderated comments being displayed).

Darwin's God

I don't know for how long this New York Times article will be freely available online before it's archived (it's over a week old), but here it is anyway.

The lengthy article, entitled Darwin's God, is about a scientific explanation for mankind's belief in deities and religion in general. Since religion seems to have cropped up in societies all over the world, some evolutionary scientists and anthropologists figure there must be a logical reason for it. There appear to be two schools of thought - one that religious beliefs were 'adaptive' evolutionary traits that helped humans to survive, and the other that they are merely byproducts of other evolutionary traits - namely "agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind". No, I'm not going to explain them. The latter theory is given more attention than the former.

It's an interesting read, but one thing that disappoints me about the article is the lack of insight into why some people don't believe. There's a couple of paragraphs that touch on the idea right at the end, and that's it. It basically concludes that rationalism requires a lot of effort and entails suppressing natural instincts - i.e. the desire to 'believe'. No thoughts on whether we'll ever evolve to leave behind religious beliefs. If anything, it implies the latter: No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.

End of blog entry. I'm going to get back to my "emotional and intellectual struggle to live without God in a nonatheist world".

Medical Tricorder + Flame Wars

This article on the BBC News website states "An electronic clipboard that has the potential to save lives has been unveiled." My first thought was "at last, we're one step closer to the medical tricorder!" The device, which goes by the rather lame name 'mobile clinical assistant (MCA)', promises to allow clinicians to "access patient records at the bedside, write notes and order essential tests in real-time". It also has, amongst other things, a camera for taking pictures of injuries. It's also expected to "cut mistakes made when administering drugs by up to 70%". Sadly, it's also "prone to frequent crashes"; rumours that Microsoft wrote the software have been vehemently denied. (Note: I made that last part up)

Not quite the tricorder, but merge it with the iPhone in some way and build in some kind of scanner, and we're halfway there! Also, rumour has it that because of the frequent green screens of death it turns users into crotchety people who mutter things to themselves... like 'that green blooded Vulcan'. Pointy ears sold separately.

The New York Times has a story about why people turn into uncivilized animals when engaging in online written communication. Huh? I thought this mystery had already been solved - isn't it because people are assholes and the anonymity of the web allows them to reveal their true nature? Apparently not. It's actually got to do with a "design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world". A design flaw? Scientists that believe in intelligent design are not to be trusted! This is all bunk! The article goes on to state "Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way. And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited, we type some infelicitous message and hit “send” before a more sober second thought leads us to hit “discard.” We flame."

So there we go. The next time I get into an online argument, I'm going to blame it on my orbitofrontal cortex. That excuse is golden - God I hope my orbitofrontal cortex is still intact! Orbitofrontal cortex orbitofrontal cortex orbitofrontal cortex!