Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus by Patrick Clair for Hungry Beast.

Once we admit that the extremes of absolute misery and absolute flourishing—whatever these states amount to for each particular being in the end—are different and dependent on facts about the universe, then we have admitted that there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

As much as I enjoy reading anything by Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape was a little bit of a letdown. Harris, who has a doctorate in neuroscience, asserts that morality is simply another question that can be fully understood and answered using the scientific method, which is sort of the problem in itself – assuming morality to be an empirical property of the physical universe (see Sean Carroll‘s nicely argued rebuttal). The problem arises when he tries to define ‘well-being’ and goes on to state that questions of morality “relate to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures”; though it isn’t quite clear as to why he thinks of well-being as a quantifiable property.

That said, he does not shy away from subjects such as psychopathy and the nature of consciousness; which when you think about it, does pose a threat to his theory.

Highly enjoyable and most certainly, just the beginning of an extremely interesting and important debate.

Hans Rosling’s (if you haven’t watched his TED talk, you should) Gapminder is a wonderful tool for statistics nerds.

If you’re as much a fan of data extrapolation as I am, you may want to check out his site or the desktop client. Some of the motion charts are very insightful.

Couple of examples:

1. Income/person vs CO2 emissions (tonnes/person)

2. Income/person vs Life expectancy

If you’re not reading Abstruse Goose, you should be. This comic is pure genius wrapped in delicious deep fried awesome.

(Click on the pic for the entire strip.)

Caught Tegan and Sara live at The Forum last month. I’ve loved the indie sister duo ever since I was introduced to Sainthood sometime last year.

Thing about a great live performance is that you forget the opening acts. The Jezabels, a relatively new Sydney based band were pretty good and Astronautalis put up an awesome show. I love this brilliantly shot jam session. Thundercats!

(NSFW)

Astronautalis from Coach House Sounds on Vimeo.

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

My favourite podcast, SGU has a list of 20 common logical fallacies up on their website. It’s a brilliant list; you tend to come across quite a few of them in everyday arguments.

Ad ignorantiam: The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don’t know that it isn’t true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.

Argument from Personal Incredulity: I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. Creationists are fond of arguing that they cannot imagine the complexity of life resulting from blind evolution, but that does not mean life did not evolve.

Confusing association with causation: This is similar to the post-hoc fallacy in that it assumes cause and effect for two variables simply because they are correlated, although the relationship here is not strictly that of one variable following the other in time. This fallacy is often used to give a statistical correlation a causal interpretation.

False dichotomy: Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.

Straw man: Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.

The moving goalpost: A method of denial arbitrarily moving the criteria for “proof” or acceptance out of range of whatever evidence currently exists.

Check out the entire list. It’ll probably come in handy the next time you’re matching wits with someone as logically dissonant as Bill Maher.

Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up.  Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.

For every Bobby Jindal, there’s one Aasif Mandvi.

Where would we be without self-deprecation?

A week ago, I found out that I had actually misunderstood something as important as evolution; which is sort of sad because my personal philosophy hinges on it being an accurate description of how and why life exists as it is.

There’s a chapter in The Blind Watchmaker (Chapter 3: Accumulating Small Change) that beautifully showcases the elegance of Darwin’s seminal theory. I’ve been told many times that evolution was only a theory and that it could never be proven or even justified by observation. This chapter, if understood properly, should change people’s minds.

Dawkins takes a rather straightforward approach in explaining Cumulative Selection and goes on to describe (what is now my favorite algorithm ever) The Weasel Program. With this, he illustrates how the common notion that evolution is ‘random’ is wrong and that a given target can be achieved in fewer steps through cumulative selection. All very exciting stuff.

After a very animated discussion with this guy last evening, I managed to put together a very shoddy program in Python that mimicked The Weasel Program (very crudely) only to be sent a much simpler program (in Matlab) by my brother this morning.

It’s sad that despite the beauty and elegance of Darwin’s explanation, an overwhelming majority of people still choose to buy into myths and superstitions espoused by some guy in a silly hat who thinks condoms increase chances of STD contraction.

Strange times, these.

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart‘s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem – financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

…

I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)