Deep thoughts for a Monday

Physicist Bee H tweeted a link to this interview, so I presume she found it interesting.  Here's the best part:

Seeing as you’re a physicist who has thought so deeply about Gödel’s theorem, do you think the absence of a theory of everything in mathematics suggests there might be no theory of everything in physics?
I totally think about that. Why should we think, since physics is so rooted in mathematics, that there is going to be a physical theory of everything? The way we usually think about the Big Bang is: The universe is born, and it’s born with initial data. There are laws of physics, and somehow the initial data is just… something else. We really are dishonest about where that comes from. What if the law of physics that describes the origin of the universe is something that has to make a claim about itself, which is a classic self-referential Gödelian setup for a tangle. [A Gödelian tangle is an unprovable, self-referential mathematical statement, such as, “This statement is unprovable.”] What if the laws of physics have to make a claim about themselves in such a way that they themselves become somehow uncomputable?

I’m also super interested in the idea that the initial data of the universe could contain irrational or uncomputable numbers. Then the universe could never finish computing the consequences of the initial conditions. Maybe we can’t predict what’s coming next because every digit of the initial data is a toss of a coin.

But it’s not enough if I only have words, and I’ve never found something to write down in math, so I’ve just kind of waffled. I think a smart thing to do would be to look at a specific Gödelian tangle that exists in mathematics and try to map that to fictitious laws of physics. Then you would have a universe in which there was a Gödelian tangle. There are constructive things to try.

Just plain nuts

TLS | Otter ego

Is this to be taken seriously?   Sounds more like an April Fool's joke.   But if not, seems to me that this piece would be more appropriate in The Guardian as an example of self indulgent eccentricity, but here it is in the Time Literary Supplement.  An extract:

The real novelty of Foster’s approach, however, lies in his second
instrument. Foster is going to inhabit – not just imaginatively but
physically – the landscape of his target animals. He exchanges
hallucinogens in the living room for adoption of the lives of the
badger, the otter, the fox, the red deer, and the swift.

Foster is not someone who believes in half-measures. To replicate the
life of a badger, Foster and his eight-year-old son live for several
weeks in a “sett” – more accurately a hole in the ground gouged by the
JCB digger of a farmer friend – in the Welsh Black Hills. Like badgers,
they sleep in this sett by day, and crawl around the forest on their
bellies by night, eating worms, grasshoppers (and lasagne provided by
aforementioned farmer friend), licking slugs and smelling their
surroundings (they even construct a scent map of the forest). Over the
weeks, the importance of vision, in this new, dark, ankle-high world
they inhabit, is progressively replaced by hearing and smell.

If anything, Foster’s approach to being an otter is even more
demanding. Spraint is otter dung – used to mark their territory and
often deposited in highly visible locations, such as the rocks beside a
river pool. Foster enlists the help of his children, encouraging them to
deposit their own “spraint” along the riverbanks of Devon. They all
then learn to identify, using their olfactory abilities, each other’s
spraint, assigning individual piles of it to individual persons. Foster
completes his inhabiting of the life of an otter by sleeping in storm
drains by day – nestled warmly in a bed of nappies and syringes – and
swimming in the rivers of Dartmoor by night, attempting, unsuccessfully,
to catch fish with his teeth.

Update:  Ha!   I just click over to The Guardian, and what do I find?   Another story, this one about a British guy trying his hardest to become "goatman"!:

Thwaites spent three days in Alpine meadows, doing his best to mix with a herd of goats. “No one was using that much energy, there weren’t wolves around, we weren’t being driven along a mountain path, but it was still difficult, especially going downhill,” says Thwaites. “After a while, the prosthetics started rubbing, and I got sweaty and cold.” This physical discomfort “encroached” on his attempts to think like a goat.

Is there something in the water over there that the government ought to be looking into?

On shifting the blame for Trump

I don't always care for Bill Maher, but in this clip about how some on the American Right are attempting to blame the Left for the rise of Trump as a presidential candidate, he is spot on:

For those of us who can't get enough Wittgenstein anecdotes

Freeman Dyson in a review in 2012 (don't think I've linked to it before, although I certainly did refer to the book he's reviewing):

When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.

That is weird

The Mothership of All Alliances: Scientology and the Nation of Islam | New Republic

I now know slightly more about Nation of Islam, and am particularly surprised to learn it's a science fiction religion, just like Scientology (which it is in the process of embracing):

Farrakhan himself has called white people “a race of devils” and the
Nation teaches that the apocalypse will involve a UFO, or “mother
plane,” that will eradicate all Caucasians.However, there are
some striking theological overlaps that might help explain how Farrakhan
came to adopt a religion invented by a white man. There is, of course,
the attachment to science fiction: Scientologists believe in an alien
dictator, Xenu; the Nation holds that the white race was created by a
mad scientist named Yakub.

 

Marvel-lous box office (even if I don't care for them)

Here I was, idly thinking "is it just me, or has this latest Marvel Captain America movie really not had much build up and media attention - are people getting less excited about these multi superhero movies, which increasingly all look the same?"; and then I decided to check the box office numbers.

Worldwide gross of $765 million, in about a week??   Gee.   (It has had generally good reviews too, so it might not burn out as fast that [Bat V Super] x man critical failure.)

Marvel fanboys and fangirls obviously still care - as so do some reviewers - for a genre I don't (much). 

A gay explanation?

Genetic tug of war linked to evolution of same-sex sexual behavior in beetles | EurekAlert! Science News

In this study the scientists looked for evidence to support the
theory that genetic links exist between SSB and other characteristics
which carry benefits in one sex but not the other. Thus, SSB in one sex
could occur because genetically linked traits are favored by natural
selection in the opposite sex - the genetic tug of war.

The scientists based their hypothesis on the fact that most genes
are expressed in both males and females and often code for more than one
characteristic. For example, previous studies have reported that the
same genes that code for SSB are also the genes that code for mobility.
Mobility is known to be costly to female seed beetles as they do not
need to range as far as males to mate.

To test their hypothesis, the team of scientists selectively bred
male and female beetles to display increased SSB, studying how this
affected their mobility and reproductive success compared to beetles
that had been bred to display decreased SSB. The scientists showed that
when a particular sex had been bred for increased SSB, siblings of the
opposite sex enjoyed an increase in reproductive performance. They also
showed changes in traits such as mobility and sex recognition after
selective breeding on SSB, providing evidence for genetic links between
SSB and these traits across the sexes, according to the researchers.

Not sure about the design

Inside the world's largest cruise ship, Harmony of the Seas | Travel | The Guardian

There's no doubt about it, these massive new cruise ships look awesomely, um, massive, and are surely marvels of modern engineering.

The waterslides look a bit scary, though:

And I have two other reservations:  the way these cabins look across the void straight into other cabins - not much privacy there without a closed curtain (although no doubt much better than being stuck in an windowless internal cabin):

And - I'm no marine engineer, but the whole ship looks a bit disturbingly top heavy, doesn't it?:

There's a hell of a lot of ship for a side on wind to blow against...

Dubious journalism continues

The Right is thrilled that a person who appeared on Q&A and made an entirely valid point about tax rate changes turns out now to have some pretty serious sounding criminal convictions, too.

I would have thought sensible people would at least have misgivings about national media giving front page treatment to this guy's past - is embarrassing a Liberal politician on the ABC enough grounds for the Murdoch press to do that?   But, there is the aspect that an Q&A producer had (unwisely) referred to him as a "national hero" in a tweet, and the fact that lots of people promised money to him when they didn't know the full story.   So I find it hard to say that his background is completely un-newsworthy; but surely it is still being handled disproportionately and with no regard to how it may affect Storrar and his family.

Of course, Storrar himself could help by, say, getting someone to agree to be trustee of the money on a trust set up for his daughter's education and benefit.  That is, if any of the money promised now materialises.

And my complaint about Sinclair Davidson (who thinks the ABC should be running around investigating the private live of everyone who has ever appeared on Q&A) remains:  he was calling this guy a "parasite" before any of this came out, and simply because he doesn't pay net tax.

Update:  it's been decades since I have seen it, but the movie Absence of Malice just came to mind.  I remember few details, except I'm sure it dealt with the journalistic ethics of printing stories that were technically newsworthy, but which carried a strong chance of "collateral damage" to people who were part of the story.    (I only remember one scene, which must mean it was really effective - the poor woman who, I think, had had an abortion after an affair with a politician? running around the neighbourhood in the early morning, trying to pick up newspapers delivered on the front step before they could read them.  I wonder if I have that right?)   Pretty much the same goes here.

Update 2:  I just checked the plot of the movie on Wikipedia - I was pretty close.

New summer melt record seems increasingly likely

People who follow these things closely are increasingly saying that early conditions are so below average for this time of year, a record summer Arctic ice melt this Northern summer seems on the cards:

Not sure I'd feel comfortable within 20 m of it...

They've been talking about the need to clean up the Ganges River in India for years, possibly decades, but here we have another lengthy article at the BBC about the dire condition it's in.  How's this chart, for example:

And after that appears the line:

Here in Varanasi it is sometimes more than 150 times the recommended safe level for bathing, yet vast numbers of people bathe away regardless.

Mice behaviour

Mice cooperate if they benefit -- ScienceDaily

I didn't know mice often have communal nests:

Female house mice can raise their young with other females in a communal
nest. Two or several females pool their litters in one nest and jointly
care for all offspring, even if litters differ by a few days in age. As
the females cannot tell apart between their own young and the offspring
of the other females, they indiscriminately nurse all pups in the
communal nest. If one female has more pups than the others, she invests
the same into nursing but weans more young and therefore has an
advantage.

All a bit socialist of them...

Help! Our cash reserves only went up $150,000 last year!

I love the way the IPA makes a call for membership/donations when there's an issue they think can motivate  the suckers  sympathising readers to part with their cash.

The reality is, as I'm sure I've pointed out before,  that the IPA already sits on a piggy bank of  cash that's been increasing substantially over the last 5 years.  Here, look at this page from their 2014/15 report:

Oh woe is them!  Cash reserves have only increased $1.14 million over the last 5 years. 

And for all of that, what did they get?   A Liberal PM who made promises directly to them that he didn't keep.    And even he's supporting the new PM in the superannuation changes the fight against which is supposed to be the rallying point for new membership.

If the IPA wants to run an advertising campaign supporting the ALP on this issue (lulz), why don't members (new or existing) tell them to use their growing cash reserves to cover it? 

Delcon dismay

The Delusional Conservatives who pine for the return of Tony Abbott as PM must be feeling some dismay at his lengthy support for the Turnbull changes to superannuation in the budget.

More skepticism on company tax cuts

Election 2016: The weak case for a company tax cut

Oh, so it's not just Crikey and Bernard Keane arguing that the benefits of cuts to company tax aren't proven.  Peter Martin now explains the reasons it might not be such a good idea, after all.

I find this issue confusing, partly because someone like Ken Henry, who was clearly perceived by some Right wing economists as being a soft headed friend of the Left, argued for it.  But as Martin says today:

And earlier plans to cut company tax were to be at least partly
funded by the companies themselves (Wayne Swan wanted to do it by
removing loopholes, the Henry review by a mining super-profit tax).
Turnbull's plan is different. It's give, without the take.

On the plus side he is cracking down on multinational tax avoidance, and to
some extent a lower company tax rate might itself make avoidance less
attractive.

The centrepiece of his election campaign is far more than a thought bubble. It derives from serious economic modelling. But it might not yet have been completely thought through.

On the matter of the "Google tax", I heard on Radio National this morning that (based on Britain's experience, which Turnbull is copying), it's not really expected to raise much tax of itself, rather it is designed to encourage companies not to minimise their tax by their offshoring profit methods.  [Hence, it wouldn't do much to make up the loss in revenue that Martin explains today.]

Both sides take damage; but only one looks nasty

I didn't see Q&A on Monday night, but have been following the story about Mr Storrar, who argued that a tax change at the high end of the scale gives no benefit to people (like him, allegedly) with income at the bottom of the scale.  Fair enough argument, one would have thought, but he did paint it in a very personal light.

I take it that Kelly O'Dwyer (who, in my opinion, used to come across as very hard nosed and an economic dry, but has softened somewhat since having a baby) didn't counter convincingly.   Whereupon The Australian decided to follow up on Storrar's personal life not once, but two days running.  Meanwhile, a unionist set up a donation site which has led to much money being promised to Storrar, most of it perhaps by people who may not have realised he didn't live with his daughters and (from today's Australian) has an adult son who is estranged from him, claims he led him into drug problems, and is annoyed at the positive image his father got from his TV appearance.

Even before this morning's story in The Australian, Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy was angry at this guy's "sense of entitlement" and quoting passages from Atlas Shrugged(!) at him.  In comments, he went as far as calling him a "parasite". 

As far as I'm concerned, the whole incident demonstrates three things:

a.  a certain gullibility on the Left to immediately accept appearances when it comes to "hard luck" stories;

b.  the somewhat creepy way The Australian has sought to attack government critics personally, whether they be statutory appointments (Triggs) or mere audience members on an ABC show.    Sure, they came up with the goods, so to speak, this time;  and perhaps they would not have thought it worthwhile were it not for the donations being sought for him.   But it still seems to me to have become an ugly, nasty paper, even with former editor Chris Mitchell leaving.

c.  the nasty and poisonous taint of Randian name calling that is just under the surface of part of the Australian Right.  That Sinclair Davidson, a man who seeks to be influential in Coalition policy, and is invited to talk at Liberal Party functions, should use "parasite" for someone who receives government benefits shows he has no idea how that language demeans himself in the eyes of the broader Australian public.  The extreme and eccentric views of Ayn Rand have never caught on here like they have amongst a certain political corner of America, and in our more egalitarian society they are never likely to do so.  As I have said before, the Liberals could only benefit by distancing themselves from the IPA, and him.*

So, I think both sides take some damage from this story, but only the Right ends up looking nasty.

* And why no ABC journalist ever questions him when he on TV or radio about statements he has made on his blog, but give him a clear run, is a bit of a puzzle.  Perhaps they need me to supply links?

Intersex issues

The spectrum of sex development: Eric Vilain and the intersex controversy : Nature News & Comment

A somewhat interesting article here about an intersex researcher who has had his share of controversy.

Here's one part (in the first paragraph) that I thought surprising, if true:

At Necker University Hospital for Sick Children in Paris in the
1980s, he says, doctors presumed that a child would be psychologically
damaged if he or she did not have normal-looking genitalia. In Vilain's
experience, that belief was so strong that doctors would take genital
abnormalities into account when deciding how hard to fight to save a
premature baby. “The unanimous feeling was that boys with a micropenis
could never achieve a normal life — that they were doomed,” he says.
(The paediatric-surgery department at Necker refused to answer questions
relating to past or current standards of care.)

DSDs occur in an estimated 1–2% of live births, and hundreds of genital
surgeries are performed on infants around the world every year¹.
But there are no estimates as to how often a child's surgically
assigned sex ends up different from the gender they come to identify
with.

Of course they are right to worry

Packing Heat Onto College Campuses - The New York Times

Seems that there are a handful of sensible Republicans on guns:  such as this one:

The gun lobby’s relentless drive to arm students across the nation’s
college campuses ran into an unexpected hitch in Georgia last week when
Gov. Nathan Deal vetoed a measure that would have let students carry
concealed weapons to class. Mr. Deal scoffed at the rationale of fellow
Republicans in the legislature that arming students would increase their
safety. “It is highly questionable that such would be the result,” he
stressed in his veto message.

But the best paragraphs of this article are at the end:

And in July of next year, all six  Kansas state universities and dozens of community colleges and tech schools must allow their students to carry concealed weapons on campus, classrooms
included.  A poll of 20,000 Kansas college employees found 82 percent said they would feel less safe on an armed campus, according to National Public Radio. Two-thirds said the presence of guns would necessarily hamper their freedom to teach effectively. Critics of the move wonder, what if students get into a gun fight in class? And what happens to open discourse in a place tense with concealed carry?

The legislative majorities pushing this issue as a public safety necessity insist armed students and professors are the best way to defend against armed intruders. But a new study of federal firearms data indicates licensed and armed private citizens wind up harming themselves or others with their guns far more often than shooting attackers. The study by the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety advocacy group, found that over a three-year period ending in 2014, less

than one percent of victims of attempted or completed crimes of violence used their firearms to try to stop crimes. The notion of quick-draw self defense remains a macho fantasy for gun buyers.

He's got it all covered...or so he thinks

Backreaction: Book review: “The Big Picture” by Sean Carroll

Well, atheist physicist Bee thinks atheist physicist Sean Carroll's book is very good.

The comments following her review are likely to go on for some time, and be interesting, at least in parts.

I see one of them refers to Peter Woit's more skeptical take on the point of the book.  In fact, Woit's comments make for more interesting reading than Bee's review.

Legal cannabis and driving is a serious problem, after all

Fatal road crashes involving marijuana double after state legalizes drug: Foundation research also shows that legal limits for marijuana and driving are meaningless -- ScienceDaily

I always suspected that this would be a likely problem, but the evidence to show that it was really was seems to have been slow coming forward.  And the thing is, because of the way THC works and hangs around for a long time at detectable levels, it's a tricky one to respond to.   (Short of saying any THC in the test will result in a punishment, I guess.)

Update:  here's a story about a recent case in Australia illustrating the difficulties of making "drug driving" laws for THC.  I see that the Greens recommend following British laws where they also test for impairment - but I've always been doubtful about the reliability of roadside impairment testing.