Science can be creative (and fun)

Events in my life have conspired to create an interesting state in my academic life. It appears that I will be spending a good portion of my near future designing an experiment which studies human gesture and the development of phonology (or sub-lexical compositionality) using a fucking WII-mote.

There's a small, but significant part of me that is giddy at that proposition. That is the WII-msical side of me which causes me to spend a good part of my free time playing video games. The serious, pragmatic, scientist part of me is apprehensive, concerned about the aspect of these events that leads to the future state in which I'm, potentially, publishing the results of such a study (under, what is likely to be, a very clever title).

One really awesome aspect of my recent work is that it's actually involving a lot more creativity than I've experienced in much of my previous academic work. I love doing simple research, but there's something really appealing about stepping in new territory, the kind of territory where a linguistically trained graduate student is programming an unintuitive input/output mapping from a fucking WII-mote to a three dimensional space represented in a computer screen. If you would have asked me in my undergraduate days whether I thought that computer programming for academic purposes would become one of the few creative outlets of my future career, I may have laughed at the question.

Speaking of creativity: I'm just loving the band "Immaculate Machine". At their best, they sound like an interesting mix between "the new pornographers" and a classic rock cover-band. At their worst they sound like a classic rock inspired folk rock group (which actually doesn't sound so bad).

Even though it doesn't sound anything like what I just described, I'm particularly taken by the song "Dear Confessor" from their 2007 release "Fable" (see video).



They later re-recorded that song in what I think is Mandarin Chinese (see Wo Xian Tanbai below, from "wont be pretty", their 2008 7-inch EP) which I think is really awesome because, up till now, the vast majority of music I've heard in Mandarin has been boring top 40 adult contemporary.



It's always fun to hear foreigners sing rock (see l'aventurier for an example of how cool the 80's were for France, though I prefer the more recent ska version made by a bunch of CANADIANS) (I'm being tongue-in-cheek condescending here. No hate mail please).



Anyway, Immaculate Machine, along with "Fanfarlo" and a few others, are setting up 2009 to be the year of group-chanty-folk rock for me.

300th post: revisitng intuitiveness and sports science

Talk about counter-intuative:



When I was a young'un playing baseball, on the on-deck circle I would practice swinging a bat with a weight on the tip. When I was up to bat, the weight-less bat felt incredibly light and I felt like I could swing much harder.



Well, someone went ahead and actually tested whether practicing with a weighted bat actually made a difference to your swing in the batter's box. It turns out that it actually slows you down rather than speeds you up. If you want to swing faster, you actually have to practice with a lighter bat, not a heavier one.

Now, swinging faster doesn't necessarily mean you'll hit better. It may, for example, be detrimental to your accuracy. But, what I find fascinating is that, from personal experience, it certainly feels like you're swinging a normally weighted bat twice as fast if you've just practiced with a weighted bat. And this is likely why baseball players have practiced on the on-deck circle with weighted bats since... well who knows since when, but they do it all the time (see photo above).

I fucking love science, and I'm especially becoming enamored with Sports Science. I heard on the BBC radio station earlier this week an obituary for one of the first Sports scientists in the UK. A fellow, whose name I forget, who did his PhD in the sixties on how football (soccer) players injure themselves. He was also an expert on altitude effects on athletes, which is on a lot of Europeans' minds these days as the world cup next year will be held in South Africa, where many of the stadiums are significantly above sea level.

Sports science doesn't even have to be psycho-physical or biomedical in nature. It can be about counter-intuitive statistics as the 60 minutes video below will explain:



I suspect there's a general intuition that academics who excel in the science fields are likely to be nerds who care little for sports. Maybe that intuition is accurate of the mean, we'd need more data to find out if that's true, but some of the most interesting things happen when science moves into new territories which are typically not noted for drawing scientists.

science v culture multiplied by infants

I often joke around about all the crazy psycho-social experiments I'm going to put my children through. I kid about how I'll make a conscious effort to fail to invert auxiliary verbs in the appropriate contexts, or that I'll only read adult science fiction for their bedtime stories, or that every weekend they'll be getting training on how to 'cheat' on IQ tests.

Today I stumbled across this story. The scientist with me is intrigued while the human in me is horrified. I'm fairly certain that both of those reactions are inappropriate.

Leave it to the swedes, I guess.

Komodo Dragons are still cool, just less so

I remember how giddy I was when I first learned about Komodo Dragons. (yes, I was probably a geeky teenager) They were these prehistorically scary lizards that could kill and eat even humans, those who were silly enough to decide to live on the island upon which Komodo Dragons existed.

The coolest thing about the Komodo Dragons was that they killed their pray, not with poison, or sheer strength of their jaws. No, what they did was something totally crazy: They cultivated killer strains of bacteria in their mouths and, upon biting pray, would transfer that killer bacteria to the poor animal, killing it in a relatively short time. At which point, the komodo dragon would simply have to track the dying animal and feast. It sounded pretty crazy, but totally cool. Symbiosis on a killer-cool level (much cooler than the human-ecoli crap we get).

Well, it turns out all that is bullshit. Komodo Dragons use venom. I hate it when herpetologists get their shit wrong.

I guess it'll be up to me to prove that you can kill prey with a bio-bite .

Scientists, they can be right, then wrong, then right again, finally ending up on being wrong

We all need to constantly re-evaluate our beliefs.

Yeah, low poverty and a good lifestyle provides you with the opportunity to grow taller

John McCain, in the debate last Friday, mentioned that North Koreans are an average 3 inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts. He was using this as striking evidence for the difference in lifestyle between a free nation (S.Korean) and a nation under tyranny (N.Korea).

Today I read a cool article in the NYT which uses the population height measure to compare Americans to Western Europeans.

Guess who's shorter?

Sex differences

I just read an article in the paper which describes a couple of cross-cultural studies (personality surveys actually) which show that the magnitude of personality differences between the sexes differs greatly from culture to culture.

Many people believe that gender differences are not a genetic/biological phenomena but a cultural one, and the findings of these cross-cultural surveys might support that. However, the survey also finds that in countries where the gender roles are much stricter (where, for example, women aren't allowed to work and men do very little child raising) the gender differences are much smaller than in countries where both the men and women seem to share the same kinds of work.

I always believed that gender differences arose from a combination of culture and biology (though, biology is the root of the difference since these differences appear in the natural world as well). But the findings that the cultural explanation is not that simple is really exciting.

Kick ass experiments

Why I love science so much:

Placebo

I've typically operated under the assumption that the placebo effect is ubiquitous, pervasive to the extent where not a thing happens in our minds that does not directly affect our entire bodies. I'm talking about 90% of our individual physical realities are completely mental.

When I was just a teenager, having just learned about the placebo effect, I was convinced that simply thinking about the destruction of my cold virus was more effective in speeding up my recovery than chicken soup or any other remedy available. I've never since had a horrible, debilitating cold.

I just stumbled on this NYT article here, found via metafilter, which seems to provide evidence that, regardless of the amount of physical exercise you actually do, what really influences how fit you are is whether you think you're getting exercise.

And the evidence piles up.

Free will and fMRI

I don't believe in free will. I believe that the decision I will make today about whether to cook pasta or rice for dinner will be a result of millions upon millions of factors, none of which I have control over. These factors might include: the amount of potassium in my blood stream, whether I ate pasta or rice 18 days ago, whether I know a person named Rick and whether I've kept in contact with him over the past 10 years, my entire child hood experience with pasta and rice, whether I stub my toe on the office chair near my desk in a few minutes, whether there is any pre-made pasta sauce in my cupboard, and whether I dreamt about running a marathon last night. There's some room for error, or 'probability', due to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, but it is a countably infinite probability.

Thus, because of what I know about physics and what I know about how our bodies and, more specifically, our brains appear to function, I'm very confident that when I finally make the decision to cook pasta (or rice), the very idea that I had any control over that decision will be an illusion. And it will be one of the greatest illusions mankind can experience.

However, despite my certainty that our brain operates under the simple quantum mechanical laws which physicists are currently studying, I'm also pretty confident that we are very far away from understanding even the basic functions of the brain as a system.

I'm very skeptical of brain imaging techniques such as fMRI because I have a hard time understanding how brain region activation leads to the wondrous conclusions scientists make whenever they get consistent measurements from people's brains. For example, let's say that when you look at a picture of your mother and regions X, Y, and Z light up in the visual cortex. Then you look at a live fish in a tank and regions X, A, and Z light up instead. Now let's say that this happens pretty consistantly with 9 out of 10 people that show up to participate in the experiment. We then use logic to try to deduce something about regions A, X, Y, and Z. We'll say things like "regions X and Z are all purpose regions that light up whenever you see something familiar, bur region Y lights up whenever you see something familiar and specific (or photographic/static) and region A lights up when you see something familiar but generic (or live/dynamic)". Then you go and devise another experiment to try to pull those possibilities apart.

My problem is that the brain is a pretty complicated object. Trying to figure out what's happening in there when I see a picture of my mom is like trying to figure out how it is that dreaming about running a marathon is going to influence my desire for pasta or rice. So a good hypothesis for the experiment explained above is that "A combination of activity in region X and Y is a result of recognizing the features of a familiar nose, but region Z is where the memories of my mother's voice lies. and back when I was an infant I learned to associate the sound of my mother's voice (one of the first things I learned about my mother in utero) with the sight of a prominant facial feature (my mother's nose). However, upon seeing a moving thing, regions X and Z light up simultaneously because, when combined, these regions help me predict the trajectory of a moving object. Region A is my fish visual memory region and it lights up anytime I see something recongizable to me as a fish."

Of course, occam's razor tells us that we should prefer the simpler explaination over the more complex one. That's a very useful axiom, but when it is applied to over-simplistic data like the activity cloud on an fMRI image I think we're always going to fail reconciling the big picture with the details. But science, being the way that it is, and people, being the way that they are, will combine to make all kinds of interesting and/or impotent predictions. Those are going to be interpreted by the popular press and digested by the masses. When we later find out we were wrong, the new material will propagate while the old material sticks around for a while in the consciousness of the populace who will continue to make claims like "Did you know that Fish and Mothers are actually the same thing in your brain?"

I don't want to be misunderstood, so let me just say that I am happy that people are doing brain image research. We have to start somewhere with any new technology. People should go ahead and use those MRI machines and try to figure out what's happening, preferably not stating their opinions and hypotheses as facts, and write and inform others of the results as carefully as possible.

Until recently, I always thought that the reason why I am skeptical about brain image research's more amazing claims was because I only had a basic grasp of the brain imagine methodology. But as I learn more about what the data actually looks like and what the hypotheses being concocted are I'm actually becoming more skeptical. And then I come across this article which provides me the first concrete evidence that imagining researchers are actually growing weary of the direction their field is heading, in part because of the same issues I have.

I still think that I have no free will, and that the cells in my brain are deterministically leading me on and on to a conclusion which is predictable by anyone with a complex enough computer. But I think that our ability to really figure out which parts of my brain are currently calculating my choice of pasta over rice is about 200 or more years off.

I am colorblind (but that's a loaded word)

When I was about 10 years old, an eye doctor told me (and my mother) that I was colorblind. The diagnosis came after I repeatedly failed to tell the optometrist what numbers were hidden in several shapes made up of various arrangements of colored dots. At that age, I was a little confused because I was sure that I could tell the difference between colors: I didn't see the world in 'black and white'. But quickly I realized that there was really no way for me to tell if and how I was experiencing the world differently from my fellow 4th graders. Is a rose as red to me as it is to you? How do we know or find out? What if the color I call green actually looks blue to you? (this, by the way, was also my introduction to philosophy of the mind)

A few weeks later, when I tried to learn more about this horrible thing that had happened to me, I learned that being 'colorblind' did not necessarily mean that you could not see colors. It simply meant that I had a ratio of certain types of cones and rods (cells) in my eyes (that help reflect light to the appropriate receptor cells) that was different from the general population's ratio which, in turn, affected the way colors reached the image centers of my brain.

As I grew older, when it came up that I was colorblind in my interactions with other people, I was continuously surprised by their reactions. They typically were a little shocked(even though colorblindness in males is not so uncommon) and many seemed to pity me for not being able to experience the world at its fullest. I often had to explain that, yes I can tell the difference between a red crayon and a green crayon, no the world is not gray for me, and no I don't have any trouble whatsoever at traffic lights (shockingly the most common question... people fail to realize that the position of the green light with respect to red is fairly consistent so even if I couldn't see the color difference, which I can, I could deduce which light meant 'stop' from its position relative to the one meaning 'go', even when the lights are horizontal).

I've found that people don't really understand what it means to be color blind and it's difficult to express it in words. But I've finally discovered a website that might help: How do things look to colorblind people?.

If you want to get a feel for how I see the world, take a look at the little image applet in the center of that page and scroll your mouse over the words protan and deutan. Now, I think actually see more color than that (those images look very dull to me) but the difference between those two is basically indistinguishable for me (I see a very slight difference in brightness). I suspect it is stronger for you (if you are not colorblind). I do see a much larger difference between either of those and the 'normal' but the hues for the normal picture have probably been enhanced for purposes of demonstration (and also, as I went through puberty I noticed that I became more adept at finding the numbers in the shapes of dots which means either that the severity of my colorblindness decreased with age or I just learned some other trick).

My optometrist tells me that I suffer from deutonomaly and protonomaly. This apparently means that different shades of red (and green) are simply not as different to me: I often mix up purple for brown and brown for purple and I have to take your word that those leaves on certain plants that turn red at the edges but stay green in the center are actually as you describe them, because for me they are typically just light green leaves that become darker.

In terms of tests: If you take a look at the bottom most test on this page, while I have no problem finding the numbers in step 2 and 3, I basically fail step 4. I see nothing but one hue of colored dots at different brightnesses. There is no number for me (is it a 5? or logically a 7, the next number in the series?)

But to recap, when you learn that someone is colorblind, try to find out what type of colorblindness that someone has before extending your pity (I get incredibly embarrassed when people feel sorry for me over my inability to be an interior decorator or airline pilot). But if I fail to see the beauty of the colors in a flower arrangement or a watercolor painting, you should cut me a little slack.

One interesting behavioral outcome of my colorblindness, I speculate, is my increased interest and appreciation for the geometry of paintings over the colors and color contrasts. This is probably why I find Picasso's guitarist infinitely more eye catching than van Gogh's starry night, for example.



But I'd love to find out in what other ways my poor ability to contrast red and green have influenced and distinguished my adult self from those freaks, the colorseers.

How traffic happens

People aren't robots. They operate relatively inefficiently, with lots of errors. For example, they sometimes get tired while driving and let their foot press down on the gas a bit too much or a bit to little and before you know it, you've got this shockwave:

My Hero: Richard Feynman

Richard Feynman seemed like an amazing guy. I never met him, but I've read some of his books and I've read/heard other people's impressions of the guy. So as good as those can be expected to be for judging a guy's character, they make me wish I had known him personally.

He was an amazingly clever guy, he won the nobel prize in physics, he was an unbelievably great physics lecturer (at all levels of instruction), his interests went way beyond the world of physics, he had an insatiable curiosity, and was an overall friendly and personable man. All of these are wonderful qualities for a graduate student to look up to and learn from and be inspired by. But these aren't really the reasons why he's one of my heroes.

In Oslo, I believe at the city hall where they award the nobel prize laureates every year, on the wall are portraits of all of them from the first to the most recent. And you can travel from one end of the hall admiring all of these stately looking gentlemen (and a bit later on women as well). I'm sure you can imagine it, as one travels from photo to photo and you would see all of these old guys in suits looking very posh and proper, each with their heads either staring directly at you or at a 45 degree angle to the right - one after the other, exactly the same, they begin to blend together. Of course as "time goes by" the people in the portraits begin to get more relaxed, wearing less formal suits instead of the tuxedos of their predecessors, smiling a bit more often than frowning. But eventually, you get to one portrait that is just completely different from all the others. This portrait just catches your eye and doesn't let it go. This is Richard Feynman, with his head resting on an oak desk, perpendicular to the floor.

Here, Feynman was being awarded the highest prize in his field, achieving what many believe to be the apex of the academic profession, and he demands to be photographed with his head perpendicular to the floor, forever marking his place in this hall of nobel prize winners. And that's why he's my hero. No matter what you read or hear about this guy you always come away with the sense that he didn't take himself so seriously, yet managed to balance this aspect of his personality with the seriousness required to become a giant in his field.

About 52 years ago, a scientist published a paper in a journal in which he uses contemporary (for 1955) scientific data to make some logical speculation about what kind of chemical compounds could have existed during the period in which the earth was cooling.

Much of his speculation (I assume) proved to be unfounded as its scientific field grew in the ensuing decades. That scientist went on to publish more papers and probably gave little thought to that speculative work, until many years later he googled himself to find that the 1955 paper was being cited a lot.

Problem is, it's being cited by creationists. Turns out they are using that piece of outdated speculation as scientific evidence that life could not have begun without divine intervention.

That scientist didn't like it, so he retracted the paper.

That story in itself isn't too exciting to me. However, it reinvigorated memories of a rant I often feel like giving to anyone who will listen. That is: Scientists may be experts of their field but, like any expert of any field be it a doctor, a lawyer, a mechanic, or whatever, they are fallible and sometimes wrong.

Many logically minded, thinking, near-rational creationists are desperate for scientific validity so they scour journal articles as old as 1955 and older (Newton's Principia is often appealed to) just so they can do what their opponents in the argument are doing.

People tend to take expert advice for granted. The majority of the creationists citing the paper probably don't have the skill to read scientific articles (and it is a skill which requires practice). It seems like they couldn't even figure out that it was speculation with outdated evidence. It doesn't look like they knew that the author wasn't even an expert in astrophysics, but a material scientist. Yet somewhere through the grapevine, someone heard about (or researched) this paper, gathered what they wanted from it and began to pass that info along to people who just believed it and went on citing it.

This phenomenon is prevalent in our society. Take the atkins diet. If you ask the average atkins dieter to explain to you why this particular diet works, they don't know or have a basic, but probably fallacious or simplistic explanation of why carbs are bad for dieters. Little attention is paid to other health concerns about atkins, but they presume that the "doctor" who invented the diet is an expert and "diet" is inherently healthy. (carb elimination/all protein diets are actually quite old, suggested for obese patients who need surgery and must lose weight really fast, doctors have been putting people on these diets for a long time WITH THE STIPULATION THAT THEY NOT STAY ON THE DIET FOR LONGER THAN 3 OR 4 WEEKS lest their arteries explode)

Science reporting is bad. Scientists, even good ones, make all kinds of mistakes. The press often makes a big deal out of small discoveries and totally ignores important discoveries based solely on the news organizations' speculation regarding their viewership. And just because a scientist has done something amazing in, say, the field of genetics, doesn't mean he isn't an idiot when it comes to something like social biology.

Doctors are not all geniuses, in my experience I've met at least 2 very ignorant ones. Many many mechanics are amazing with machines, but many also exploit our ignorance and make us pay huge amounts of money for scams like "break pad cleaning". Lawyers have pretty amazing memory banks for all the texts they were forced to memorize by the educational system but few can extrapolate from those books to the real world simply because it isn't necessarily important to have that skill in the court of law.

I could go on, but my point is this: Don't look to experts for the definitive word. Question everything, be skeptical. A doctor is someone you need to trust regarding your health, a marine biologist is someone you need to trust regarding the health of polar bears and sea lions in a warming arctic, and your mom is someone you need to trust for advice when you're raising your first child. The real hard trick is to learn how much of what these people say is important, relevant, useful fact and how much is human self-deluding, inaccurate, harmful fiction.

When the creationists were looking for a paper to show how life couldn't have started on its own, they found a paper which supported that view and took it for granted that, being in a scientific journal, it weighed as strong evidence. I would like it if people hearing their claims would not take them for fact but would do something to learn for themselves whether those claims were accurate.

Scientific reporting

Shortly after posting my last poorly-thought-out-stream-of-consciousness post, I randomly stumbled on this article titled "Is scientific Journalism Doomed?" which is a more interesting informal analysis of the problem. (via slashdot)

Japanese innovation will never cease to impress me

Why can't American corporations invent something as cool as beta gel. This gel is such an amazing shock absorber that you can drop an egg on it from 22m high, heck, you can even throw an egg at it from up close, and the egg will not break. Watch it in action:



So why aren't American corporations inventing these things? Because they're busy funding creation museums and designing the next best war machine (saw this two mornings ago on the local channel 8 morning news show). Who's got the money to R&D these frivolous toys? (That's right, I verbed R&D)