Where your eyes don't go

There's a They Might be Giants song with the same title as this post which is a tuneful take on the horror of having an unconscious mind that could be getting up to anything. I've always liked this line:

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders
What the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of

Brain scientists are still pondering this issue of when the conscious mind become aware of decisions the brain has already made, as a Nature News story tells us. (As usual, this will probably disappear soon, so I need to take out large extracts):

Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers. By looking at brain activity while making a decision, the researchers could predict what choice people would make before they themselves were even aware of having made a decision....

Haynes and his colleagues imaged the brains of 14 volunteers while they performed a decision-making task. The volunteers were asked to press one of two buttons when they felt the urge to. Each button was operated by a different hand. At the same time, a stream of letters were presented on a screen at half-second intervals, and the volunteers had to remember which letter was showing when they decided to press their button.

When the researchers analysed the data, the earliest signal the team could pick up started seven seconds before the volunteers reported having made their decision. Because of there is a delay of a few seconds in the imaging, this means that the brain activity could have begun as much as ten seconds before the conscious decision. The signal came from a region called the frontopolar cortex, at the front of the brain, immediately behind the forehead.

If you think you heard about this type of experiment before, you'd be right. It is building on some (now) quite old results of Libet, whose experiment was quite similar in design, as the article explains:

Libet's study has been criticized in the intervening decades for its method of measuring time, and because the brain response might merely have been a general preparation for movement, rather than activity relating to a specific decision.

Haynes and his team improved the method by asking people to choose between two alternatives — left and right. Because moving the left and right hands generates distinct brain signals, the researchers could show that activity genuinely reflected one of the two decisions.

But all is not lost for free will yet:

...the experiment could limit how ‘free’ people’s choices really are, says Chris Frith, who studies consciousness and higher brain function at University College London. Although subjects are free to choose when and which button to press, the experimental set-up restricts them to only these actions and nothing more, he says. “The subjects hand over their freedom to the experimenter when they agree to enter the scanner," he says....

But results aren't enough to convince Frith that free will is an illusion. “We already know our decisions can be unconsciously primed,” he says. The brain activity could be part of this priming, as opposed to the decision process, he adds.

Part of the problem is defining what we mean by ‘free will’.

Personally, I like to look in the mirror every morning and say "stop making decisions without me" ten times while I shave.

Gratuitous political postscript: I hope they never include Brendan Nelson in these tests. No ten seconds for him: I reckon he must surely have about about a 10 hour gap between speaking and recognition of what his stream of consciousness has already come up with.

More money than sense

$5m in will for right-to-die campaign

Who knew that the late (Labor) Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Clem Jones, was worth $150 million? And that he still wanted to be in politics after his death by funding the cause of euthanasia law reform?

This bequest is so stupid, it's verging on the positively offensive. Who on earth thinks that euthanasia has (to date) failed as a political cause because it can't get enough media attention? It gets a huge amount of coverage, most of it written by a profession (journalism) with an undeniably soft-Left tendencies. Whenever it comes up as a media topic, there is a flood of letters tot he editor from euthanasia reform supporters.

Aren't the chances high that the Northern Territory or ACT will have a go at implementing it again, now that we have Labor at Federal level?

Frankly, it's hard to see how the executors are going to find useful ways to spend the money. If I were them I wouldn't touch Philip Nitschke with a barge pole: his inability to rouse himself with too much concern about the merely bored wanting to kill themselves make him his cause's own worst advocate.

Surely it would be better spent on work directly relieving the suffering of the dying who either can't, or don't want to, accept euthanasia as an option. I would have thought that $5 million could fund at least a few palliative care beds indefinitely, or pay for a facility to be built in a place that has none at all at the moment. It would then be used for some direct relief of suffering, rather than helping a movement that the media can't get enough of.

On the new Futurama

Matt Groening makes feature-length DVD of Futurama - Times Online

The odd thing is, I didn't care much for the first episode of Futurama I saw many years ago. But after a couple of more episodes I was hooked, and I am happy to see that it is making a return.

Bryan Appleyard likes it too, and his interview with creator Matt Groening is worth reading. I wonder when we can get the DVD in Australia...

LHC black hole coverage continues

New atom-smasher could fill gaps in scientific knowledge -- or open a black hole - Los Angeles Times

While we're sitting around waiting for CERN to release its revised safety assessment, there is still some detailed coverage in the press turning up.

Physicist M Mangano appears to be wearing the brunt of the effort to re-assure everyone that they won't accidentally end the Earth prematurely, and it's important to note the tone he takes here:

Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world.

"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

It's not clear whether or not he is referring to someone other than Walter Wagner here; after all, Wagner's experience as a phyiscist has been called into question by some.

According to the article, Mangano himself is currently writing the updated assessment. Let's hope he finishes it in time for it to be properly considered by the rest of us before they power up the machine.

(As I said in an earlier post, the fact that the report has been somewhat delayed is not exactly comforting.)

Fisking incoherence

Rachel Cooke meets Middle East reporter Robert Fisk | Media | The Observer

Rachel Cooke interviews and talks about Robert Fisk in this rather interesting article. I get the strong feeling that Fisk would not like the picture painted of him. Try this long section:

We are talking - or, rather, he is talking. Luckily he has a loud, uncompromising kind of a voice and the balcony is tiny, so he is close to me, both of which ensure that I can hear him above the roar of cruising Mercedes below. It is the end of a long day - he picked me up at nine this morning for a drive south to the border with Israel, and I've been with him every minute since - but, if anything, Fisk's energy, unlike my own, increases with every word he utters. On he goes: unrelenting, furious, pernickety and labyrinthine in argument. Every anecdote involves three dusty side alleys, every explanation three historical examples. Worn down by these things, I ask - too casually, I see now - if he thinks that, once the Americans exit Iraq (he believes that they will do this soon; that the US media is already preparing the ground by running articles bemoaning - I paraphrase - the fact that the Iraqis simply don't deserve what the US has offered them), there will be a civil war. 'Do you CARE?' he shouts. Perhaps I look startled, because he now corrects himself. 'Do WE care? I don't think we do.'

It's at this point that I start to think longingly of my hotel room in the Holiday Inn; not the old Holiday Inn, which stood close to the green line during the Lebanese civil war and is a pockmarked, shelled-out monument to terror to this day, but a new one, above a smart shopping mall. But it's difficult to get away. For one thing, every time I open my mouth to make my excuses, either he interrupts - Bin Laden this, Noam Chomsky that - or he takes another mobile phone call (no call can be missed, no matter that those coming in tonight are not from top contacts but from groups wanting to book him for lectures). When I do finally lift my bottom from my seat, he takes it as an opportunity to show me his desk - on it, a set of Russian dolls decorated with the faces of Israeli prime ministers and a framed postcard of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the moments before his assassination in 1914 (Fisk's father fought in the trenches in the First World War, a fact that has had a profound influence on his own life). At last he puts me in a taxi, though not before he has reminded me that he'll pick me up at 5.30am so that we can travel to the airport together: he is off to Canada to lecture; I'm going home to sleep like the dead. It's kind of him to take such care of me, but I can't say I feel too grateful at this moment. Will he still be like this in the morning? Fisk's long-suffering driver, Abed, was right: one day with him is like a month with anyone else.

And how about this for an irritating habit:

But it is worrying that he refers to himself repeatedly in the third person. 'Have you read any Fisk?' he asks me on the telephone before I land in Beirut, a question that is insulting on so many levels. And now I'm here, he keeps calling himself 'Mr Bob'. Oh, well.

The actual sections on his analysis of the Middle East make him seem as incoherent and rambling as some of his efforts on ABC's Lateline. He actually seems to dislike or distrust just about everyone in the Middle East, even the Lebanese he has lived amongst for years, as well as most of the West.

Maybe he would have been happier on another planet.

Unpopular vicars

So, there was a vicar in England with some anger management issues (spitting on a parishioner was probably not a good way to keep on good terms with the Bishop.) Who knew that this sketch on That Webb and Mitchell Look was based on fact?:



Incidentally, the ABC has replaced Webb & Mitchell with another couple of Brits on "The Armstrong & Miller Show". They are rather hit and miss, as were W&M I suppose, and the style of the humour is often similar. But I find Webb & Mitchell much more likeable and overall significantly funnier.

I also see that Channel 7 has had big ratings with repeats of the Vicar of Dibley, with episodes from 1994! Years after it was shown on the ABC. This must drive ABC programmers nuts: knowing that the 'plebs would like a show if only they watched it.

However, I should hasten to add that personally, I can't stand Vicar of Dibley. Dawn French can be funny, but I find her acting way too hammy in this show. And it's not just her: everything about the attempted humour of the show fails for me.

Lurid crime reports of Inida (continued)

Youth kills grandmother for denying porn

There's no need for a court when you have The Times of India on your case:

Denied his daily staple of porn and horror films on his personal computer, a youth from an affluent family decided to get rid of what he thought was the root cause of his misery.....

On April 3, Abhishek smashed Shantabai's head with a stone pestle, killing her instantly. He also stabbed Viren to make it look like an outside job. During interrogation, he tried to mislead the police by saying that Shantabai's head had been smashed by an intruder. He claimed that he had tried in vain to catch the intruder.

However, the police found discrepancies in the statements given by Abhishek and other family members. Abhishek was picked up on April 5 and subjected to questioning.

On Tuesday, he finally cracked and admitted that he killed his grandmother and stabbed his brother.

(This is not a report from a court sentence: it is simply the report of the alleged confession.)

Your next car might be a hybrid

Hybrid cars aren't just for smug yuppies anymore. - Slate Magazine

An interesting article on how successful Toyota has been with their hybrids, and how they are only likely to get more popular in the near future.

Slate has also recently done some debunking of the anti-Prius comparison between a Hummer and the hybrid.

And in other pro-Prius news, they are capable of very substantial mileage on initial batteries. (410,000 km according to this story.)

Big picture time again

Here's a couple of Arxiv papers of interest:

The first one: a paper from January pointing out that finding a Higgs boson of just the right mass at the LHC could in fact confirm that the universe won't expand forever, but will undergo a "big crunch" in the distant future. (I would much prefer the universe to have a big crunch than accelerate into nothing. A big crunch leaves open Tipler's Omega Point, for which I retain a fondness.)

The second one: a recent paper talking at great complicated length about black holes as "fuzzballs". The thing is, black holes could hardly be described as well understood. Although there are astronomical objects which have the right weight and behaviour which would be expected of black holes, some still argue that they aren't "true" black holes at all, and there are questions about the exact nature of the horizon, etc of any black hole. When you get down to Planck size, I think the uncertainty is worse.

Anyway, although the paper seems to indicate that they still expect "fuzzball" model black holes to radiate with something like Hawking Radiation, I am not clear as to how they think this solves the information loss issue. (I have only skimmed this paper quickly.)

As for the relevance to the LHC and micro black holes, I would like the CERN safety review to take into account alternative models for black holes, just to see if they raise any safety issues in terms of potential for no HR, or increased accretion rates, etc.

Reads like fiction

Man with suicide victim's heart kills self - Life- msnbc.com

This is one of those real life stories that might strain credibility if you read it as fiction. (More remarkable than the fact that the heart recipient shot himself, as did the donor, is that the donor's young wife married the recipient!)

A witty Katz column today

Praise be to the Lord our Jobs - Danny Katz - Opinion - theage.com.au

The daily carrot routine

Health - Life & Style Home - smh.com.au

See the link to a story about a new book on anorexia, and how difficult it can be on the families. The way it can manifest does sound truly bizarre:

It [the book] features Hannah, who would peel and steam one frozen carrot at a time, weigh it, have three mouthfuls, turn the plate 45 degrees and have another three mouthfuls. When the carrot was gone, she would repeat the same routine with the next carrot from the freezer.

"It nearly drive us bonkers," her mother said. "It would take her up to 2½ hours each night to eat … 200 calories. It was mind-blowingly annoying. And we'd have to have the exact products in the right part of the fridge or she'd throw a hysterical screaming fit."

Such behaviour was extraordinarily difficult for families to understand, Professor Halse said.

Yes, it's hard to overstate how annoying that would be for the parents. Honestly, the first time your teenager did that routine for dinner, wouldn't you want to shake her and yell "pull yourself together", or something similar. Not that it would help, of course.

It really is one of the strangest medical conditions, and why is it that (as far as I know) it is only a relatively modern illness? Did a teenager's inclination to obsessive/compulsive behaviour 50 years ago just get directed into some other aspect of life?

Skin derived stem cells showing some promise

Technology Review: Reprogrammed Stem Cells Work on Parkinson's

Further confirmation in this story that embryonic stem cells may be unnecessary for useful therapy after all. It also indicates that unwanted cancer as a result of stem cell therapy might be able to be avoided.

Can I order my brain rejuvenation upgrade for 2030 now?

Things that turn up in libraries

The Tablet reports that:

Six previously unknown sermons of St Augustine of Hippo have been discovered at Erfurt University in central Germany, a find that the head of the university's library department, Thomas Bouillon, has hailed as "most significant".

As St Augustine died in 430AD, these are pretty old records relating to a very important figure in religious history.

Augustine could be something of a spoilsport, though:

In another sermon about St Cyprian, who was martyred in 258, Augustine criticises the practice of holding drunken orgies on martyrs' feast days.

Dang.

Just how bad can a little nuclear war be?

Limited nuclear war would damage ozone layer

Pretty bad, it would seem:

Mills and colleagues found that a regional nuclear war in South Asia would deplete up to 40% of the ozone layer in the mid latitudes and up to 70% in the high northern latitudes.

"The models show this magnitude of ozone loss would persist for five years, and we would see substantial losses continuing for at least another five years," says Mills.

The scenario they looked at was for 100 Hiroshima size detonations between India and Pakistan. (Those two countries apparently have 110 warheads between them, so the figure is relatively realistic.)

On the other hand, it would cool global warming for quite a while. But those who sunbathe to get warm will all get skin cancer from no ozone.

On the whole, not a good idea. (Incidentally, what sort of early warning systems do both of these nations have? It wouldn't hurt to have international co-operation to make sure these countries can't launch by mistake.)