Again...

That's: dodopathy.blogspot.com

Nasty utilitarians

Moral philosophy: Goodness has nothing to do with it | The Economist

Here's a short article about the apparent personality traits of the small-ish number of people who (in a thought experiment) think strongly enough of utilitarianism to kill someone innocent to save the lives of others.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they don't appear to be very nice:

They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.

Always had my doubts about them!

Possible explanations

Gas 'n' Air - Technology Review

Wow, that was quick. The link above has quite a few papers from arXiv talking about how the faster than light neutrino experiment may be flawed, and/or possible explanations as to what is going on if the result is real.

Strange experiment

Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change

I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to take a shot at magic mushrooms if you knew ahead of time about this:

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn't usually change significantly.

"Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older," says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

All of the participants were already "spiritual", however, and the fact that they were agreeing to an experiment with a hallucinogen indicates something about their "openness" already, surely. The article also notes:

As a word of caution, Griffiths also notes that some of the study participants reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their daylong psilocybin sessions, although none reported any lingering harmful effects. He cautions, however, that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.

Count me out, thanks.

The Right gets a recruit

Angry Anderson has joined the National Party and is looking at running for a Federal seat.

This post from his blog: The New World Order of the New Free World gives some idea of the scattergun mind of someone who the Nationals (and Abbott) seem to think would be a good candidate:

Do we really believe that this push for a Tax on Carbon pollution is about anything but raising more revenue for the government and the United Nations in league with the international banks using the “New World Order” as a blueprint for the Globalisation of the New Free World?

Are we so naive that we have ignored those warnings written about, not so long ago, by the likes of Toffler and his ilk about how these unseen people will have to come up with more and more ways to separate us from our hard earned cash?

I, for one, do not believe in this transparent lie of global warming, global warming created by us the population. Talking of population, why isn’t anyone talking about that as an issue related to this matter – the world is overpopulated but is anyone talking about reducing or slowing the population growth as a measure to slow this so called warming? No they aren’t!...

David Suzuki once said that to be a productive citizen of the world we should think globally and act locally. This is what we need to do now, to even begin to address issues that do now affect us and will affect us for years to come. The World was created by the perfect hand and prolific forests were always integral to the quality of life on this planet; I am suspicious of the attempt to take our focus away from such obvious problems as rampant logging of old growth forest and replacing them with new less understood but seemingly “hipper” subject matter....

I get suspicious. Who is pushing so hard? Gee, it’s big business cleverly or not so cleverly disguised as “do gooders”. This has been pointed out in emails that have been circulating in recent times worth investigating. Wouldn’t be the first time the international banking cartels have duped and enlisted the young and outraged to do their dirty work whilst preying on the fears of the older working population threatening them with their mortgage and livelihood, keeping us distracted with issues, like trying to educate our kids and keeping a roof over our heads, while they plot and scheme to fleece yet more of our money away from us.

The Right of politics in Australia and the USA , with few exceptions, is truly in an embarrassing state at the moment.

An Australian birthday

I had missed this last week - the neighbour's out of tune birthday trumpet serenade that Prime Minister Julia Gillard received on the national news.  (It's the first part of the video after the newsreader's intro):


This strikes me as a very distinctly Australian thing to happen - a sign of our egalitarianism that includes not taking the office of Prime Minister too seriously, and a politician who is definitely not "up herself". 

Domestic report

Here’s what’s been going on at home:

*  In cute news:   the possum that lives under the balcony (well, most days anyway -  it would appear that brushtail possums like to keep alternative abodes going) has a baby.   My wife spotted this first, while handing the mother a piece of fruit.  The possum leaned down from its perch and a pink furless body was able to be seen in the forward facing pouch.  I saw it myself yesterday, when feeding it watermelon and kiwifruit.   It will be some months before the baby is furry and adorably cute, like this one, and I hope we get to see more of it.  Here's a recent photo of our possum eating:


She is much less shy than before, but I hope she never learns to knock on the front door.

*  Yesterday involved a bit of ambling driving around Brisbane, and on a whim, seeing we were at Hamilton already, I took a drive out to Pinkenba.

I grew up on the north side of Brisbane, and a trip out past the old airport to the strange combination of oil refinery, sewerage plant, houses and riverside shacks known as Pinkenba was always a novelty.   I am happy to report that a trip to this strange part of town is still interesting.   In fact, I am amazed as to how much of the old riverside land out beyond “Pinkenba Village” has been converted to light industrial.  During the weekday, at least, it looks as if it would be a much more lively place than it used to be in the 60’s and 70’s.  

There are more houses there than I remembered:  some of them not too bad looking for the area.   The small primary school, which looks very much like the old Nudgee Beach primary school also on the northside, appears to have closed late last year.

But the local hotel “The Pink” still exists, and from its website, looks a lot better on the inside than from the outside.  (A prominent sign for the scheduled “Hot Girls” shows mark it out as place catering for young male workers who go to the expanded industrial estate, I guess.)    While we drove past it, I suddenly remembered that I had brought something unusual from the bottle shop there once when I was young and used to visit unusual pubs occasionally for something to do.  I think it was there that I bought a bottle of Gekkeikan sake – the only brand you could ever get in Australia decades ago.    I didn’t care for the taste, but it represented a sort of foreshadowing of a turn my life would take.  Certainly, I enjoy sake a lot now…

The other reason to visit Pinkenba is because from the road you can get very close to one of the cavernous Qantas maintenance hangers, and watch planes being towed in if you’re lucky.   In fact, it might be Qantas workers, for all I know, who frequent the Hot Girls shows at the Pink; but I certainly hope it is only after work and they have their work on their minds while they check the fuselage of a 767.

*   Went kite flying today.   Brisbane is not the best place for kite flying, at least if you are not near the coast, as I just don’t think it is that breezy a place.  [Well, unless you are dealing with a summer storm, in which case it can be very breezy indeed, but only in short bursts.]  But today was a good day for my daughter to get out a birthday present she got last year from a friend.  It was from Aldi, which was a bad sign, and indeed it needed work with a pair of scissors usually reserved for eyebrows and nose hair to get rods into pockets which otherwise did not exist.  But despite all of this, it flew quite well.

I find getting a kite airborne and keeping there for more than 10 minutes at a time is an unusually satisfying experience.  I’m not sure about my daughter: I was reluctant to hand it over to her at all.  (I’m joking, but as it turned out, she did relinquish it to me often.)

Like taking kids fishing, having a go at kite flying with them is something that just has to be tried  at least once.   That reminds me, we need to go fishing again to see if they can catch something next time.  The first attempt only resulted in my wife getting something.   My manly abilities to provide food from the wild for my family are still in question.

An alternative outlet

Introducing Dodopathy.

May be gone a while ....

I really need to concentrate more on work at the moment. I probably won't post again until next weekend - possibly longer. Wish me luck with resisting the urge to post, and my attempt at ignoring the internet generally. (But I will be back.)

The Doctor is back

After complaining about Dr Who recently, I just wanted to note that the last two episodes, which were "stand alone" stories, were really quite good.

It confirms my earlier observation that the big story arcs are the worst aspect of the show now. It seems that I am not alone in these thoughts.

An interesting idea

Gravitational Waves Can Explain Dark Energy And Axis of Evil, Says Cosmologist - Technology Review

I've had a look at the paper, which is not written for the lay person, of course, but I remain a little uncertain as to whether he is claimed that this gravitational wave idea could explain away the apparent acceleration of the universe entirely, or only partially.

Thinking about teenagers

Teenage Brains - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

Mind Hacks liked the above article in National Geographic a lot, as it gives a fresh perspective on why teenagers take risks, other than the overly simplistic "brain's not fully developed yet" meme.

In the garden today…

My wife grouped some flowers together in pots a couple of  months ago, and they look very nice now:

"Overshare" (The correct name for Facebook)

Facebook Ticker: Mark Zuckerberg's terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web. - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I saw something on TV about his last night, and thought it looked terrible.

Manjoo actually hates the whole devaluation of privacy that Facebook imposes much less than me, but his point is still good: if Facebook makes it easier to share any old rubbish, it is killing taste and the exercise of good judgement.

About Ebert

Life Itself - A Memoir - By Roger Ebert - Book Review - NYTimes.com

Maureen Dowd wrote this review of movie critic Roger Ebert's new memoir.

I am not the world's greatest fan of Ebert's reviews. I tend to find him inconsistent; sometimes too forgiving, sometimes far too nitpicking. He doesn't write with the depth and wit of Pauline Kael, but still, I am usually curious to see what he thought of a movie if I have seen it and have my own strong reaction for or against.

Sometimes he really despairs of modern tastes in movies, and I understand the sentiment. He really hated Kick-Ass, for example, and called it morally reprehensible. This half tempts me to see it, because I don't really like morally reprehensible things to pass without enough condemnation.

I knew almost nothing of his personal life, except that his writing sometimes gave me the feeling that he may be gay. Turns out he's married (well, I think I did read that some time ago) to an African American (I didn't know that), but he did marry late due to the influence of a very domineering mother. Dowd writes:

Ebert writes about his own alcoholism — his last drink was in 1979 — and that of his mother, who wielded a ’50s Catholic sexual repression that retarded Roger’s ability to “make free” with girls and produced a few scenes with a whiff of ­“Psycho.”

His mother’s recriminations about his girlfriends, as well as his drinking, caused him to live vicariously through movies and kept him “unmarried for an unnatural length of time. Did I know drinking made me unmarriageable, or did I simply put drinking ahead of marriage?”

Well, certainly sounds like the conditions were right for my suspicion.

The review spends a fair bit of time on Ebert's illness (jaw and related cancers which have led to massive facial surgery which failed, and he's now unable to speak and has to eat through a gastric feeding tube.) Poor guy. As Dowd notes, though, he's remarkably upbeat about the fact that he is still alive.

Don't hold your breath

Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

As I hoped, Cosmic Variance has the best commentary on the faster than light neutrino story I've seen. I liked this in comments too:

a nicely nuanced and non-dismissive interpretation of a nicely nuanced and non-hyperbolic announcement that has, predictably but unfortunately, resulted in a comically un-nuanced (perhaps even anti-nuanced) avalanche of headlines.

Seems about right.

Violence down

The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker - review | Books | The Guardian

This review contains a detailed summary of Pinker's book long argument that humanity has become much less violent over the centuries. It sounds like a fascinating read. Here are some extracts (of the review, not the book):

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. ...

At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend.

Heartwarming

Forgotten Japanese War Diary Returns Home - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

This was a lovely story on 7.30 last night, about the return of a war diary to the daughter of a Japanese naval officer who died on New Guinea during the World War 2.

Getting closer

London fashion week finale: menswear - in pictures | Fashion | guardian.co.uk

Have a look at some of the photos half way through this slide show from fashion week, and see if you agree that we seem to be coming close to actually having the Urban Sombrero.

If you want more to worry about re methane...

Try reading this post: Idiot Tracker: More methane madness