Stephen's Personal Blog

The Guardian has an article talking about the mysterious progress of the oldest human space probes, Pioneer 10 and 11. The question is, “Is there dark matter or is the the universal law of gravitation wrong?” I think dark matter is bullshit like the theory of ether. Though I’m sure there is matter that does not reflect light back to the Earth. The fallibility of the law of gravitation has a recurrent pattern like the law of gravitational acceleration before relativity was accepted.

It is issues like these that should push us to throw probes as far out as possible to give us a sort of stereoscopic view of the universe. Perhaps, observatories or simple measurement devices designed to have an operational lifespan of 30 years. These simple devices may be able to answer physics questions by direct evidence instead of Earth based observation and complex analysis. No matter how detailed the analysis, a cyclops has only one eye and no depth perception.

Futures in Biotech was interesting last week, because it talked about why people’s bodies age. and the person being interviewed started as a Computer Scientist and switch to studying aging. The topic of aging and it’s reversal comes up in the metaphysical material. Most often statements like we will be able to stop it, soon.

Host: Marc Pelletier
Guest: Aubrey de Grey; Chairman and Chief Science Officer, the Methuselah Foundation.

Benjamin Franklin said: “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes”. But in these times of technological revolution, does this statement still hold true? And if so, for how long? Genes have been identified that upon activation can extend lifespan in most organisms. The great labs of Leonard Guarente at MIT (featured in FiB episode 2), Cynthia Kenyon at UCSF, as well Linda Buck, Nobel Laureate in 2004, are all working arduously to elucidate the molecular details to both slow down the aging process and extend lifespan. Well, Aubrey de Grey is a fairly controversial figure because he proposes doing away with death all together – leaving us with only taxes, I guess?

De Grey argues that the fundamental knowledge needed to develop effective anti-aging medicine mostly already exists, and that the science is ahead of the funding. He works to identify and promote specific technological approaches to the reversal of various aspects of aging, or as de Grey puts it, “the set of accumulated side effects from metabolism that eventually kills us,”[5] and for the more proactive and urgent approaches to extending the healthy human lifespan. Regarding this issue, de Grey is a supporter of life extension.
from Wikipedia

Presentation video at a conference given 7/2005

I love geeky humor. How many songs include high level mathematical formulas?

Mandelbrot Set by Jonathan Coulton

Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry
And a million miles away a butterfly flapped its wings
On a cold November day a man named Benoit Mandelbrot was born

Just take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Z’s should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set
Mandelbrot Set you’re a Rorschach Test on fire
You’re a day-glo pterodactyl
You’re a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You’re one badass fucking fractal
And you’re just in time to save the day
Sweeping all our fears away
You can change the world in a tiny way
And you’re just in time to save the day
Sweeping all our fears away
You can change the world in a tiny way
Go on change the world in a tiny way
Come on change the world in a tiny way
[Mandelbrot Set Lyrics on

For internal reasons, I was recently reminded of this. Thought others might find it interesting.

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The hypothesis postulates that a particular language’s nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community. The hypothesis emerges in strong and weak formulations.

In other words, if a word that represents a concept does not exist in your language, you are unlikely to think of that concept. Language is a constraint to the thoughts of the speaker.

from Whorf:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language [...] all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated

from Sapir:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached … We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir, 1958 [1929], p. 69)

Is it right that the father of Intelligent Design is a lawyer and not a biologist? Would you accept laws written by a garbage collector or biology theory from your priest. To do so is to rescind 500 years of enlightenment. I choose 2008 and not 1508.

I believe, this person is more interested in setting other people’s belief to his own choosing than finding truthful answers to honest questions. A choice is here; shall our science by based on propaganda or observation.

Anyone can choose to believe anything they want. My issue is with spending money to convincing others of a belief by choosing only to use ideas that support one point of view. Make your own decision, but don’t assume that because a scientists’ work is quoted that you are viewing all of the person’s research just because it’s a scientists’ work.

In Defense of Intelligent Design
Phillip Johnson is known as the father of intelligent design. The idea in its current form appeared in the 1980s, and Johnson adopted and developed it after Darwinian evolution came up short, in his view, in explaining how all organisms, including humans, came into being. Johnson taught law for over 30 years at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Darwin on Trial, in which he argues that empirical evidence in support of Darwin’s theory is lacking. In this interview, hear why he feels that such evidence is “somewhere between weak and nonexistent,” why he feels intelligent design is a testable science, and why he thought the Dover trial was a train wreck waiting to happen.
…