Here’s what Douglas Hofstadter writes about relationship analogies in I Am A Strange Loop.

If two people are romantically involved (or even if they aren’t, but at least one of them feels there’s a potential spark), then almost any conversation between them about any romance whatsoever, no matter who it involves, stands a good chance of being heard by one or both of them as putting a spotlight on their own situation. Such boomerang-back is inevitable because romances, even very good ones, are filled with uncertainty and yearning. We are always on the lookout for clues or insights into our romantic lives, and analogies are among the greatest sources of clues and insights.

Julia Gillard’s carbon tax announcement over the weekend is currently the most popular topic of debate here and I’m a bit taken aback by the amount of venom spewed over an average increase of living expenses of just under $10/week.

Here’s a wonderfully written albeit, slightly snarky post on the recent goings-on.

This taps into a very prominent feature of our political landscape: the constant line from Tony Abbott that Australian families are hurting, that Aussies are doing it tough, that life is somehow getting harder, that the cost of living is on the rise.

Shenanigans, Tony. Let’s get one thing very clear. Australians, en masse, are enjoying a better standard of living than has ever been enjoyed in this country’s history.

And not just marginally, but by a huge degree. Really, along with a few other developed countries, we are enjoying a better standard of living than any group of people has in human existence. We have every kind of food and beverage from around the world deliverable to our doors. We have technological advances that make a decade ago look archaic. We have goods and luxuries of every conceivable kind; cheap and accessible. We have more and better options with transport, entertainment, comfort, place and style of residence. We have the most advanced medicine and best life expectancy of all time.

[You shut your goddamn carbon-taxin’ mouth]

I’m reading Douglas Hofstadter’s tremendously engaging book, ‘I Am a Strange Loop‘. If you’re the kind that understood (or like me, pretended to understand) Godel, Escher, Bach, I cannot recommend it enough.

Devotees will recall that I’ve been trying to get better at coding in MATLAB. Here are a couple of z^2+c fractals I plotted thanks to an unusual spike in interest which will most likely vanish after this post.

Also, getting Octave/GNUPlot to work on MacOSX wasn’t as straightforward as I’d have liked.

Shamelessly borrowed stuff from here, here and here.

Taken from here.

“How does he go before the Australian people dressed in the clothes of a Liberal leader and deny more than 20 years of Liberal engagement with the science of climate change?” she said.

Mr Abbott then took another point of order.

“The question was about the Lodge, not the dodge – that’s what it was.”

After outlining her belief in climate change and the need for a price on carbon, Ms Gillard launched another attack on Mr Abbott.

“If he wants to debate political honesty in this place, then bring it on,” she said.

“Did he go to the Australian people before the last election telling them about his $11 billion black hole?”

Amid roars from the Opposition benches and futile attempts by Mr Jenkins to restore order, the Prime Minister went on.

“Did he go to the Australian people before the last election saying [Pauline Hanson's] One Nation would write his economic policy?” she said.

“Did he go to the Australian people before the last election saying senior members of his frontbench like the shadow treasurer would agitate for the return of WorkChoices? No he did not.

“So if we want to have a debate about political honesty then bring it on, Mr Speaker, bring it on because we have the most hollow man with the least conviction sitting in the Opposition Leader’s chair we’ve ever seen in this Parliament.”

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.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.

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

Inception was everything I hoped it’d be.  It was sufficiently complex (though nowhere near as complicated as Primer or even, Memento) and despite the 148 minute running time, very very engaging.

(Spoilers)

Then again, like all great films, Inception has its flaws and it’s not just the false narrative or the plot holes. Christopher Nolan has a set of rules for his world – rules that are essential in moving the plot forward; call it cinematic license, but it does feel like Nolan gets away with a little too much. I might be nitpicking but that’s what happens when you go in with great expectations.

Critics who’ve compared it to 2001: ASO or Blade Runner are only kidding themselves. Inception is more than just another great science fiction film – it’s about mathematics and engineering. The narrative is so tightly constructed that when scenes flit across the three (or four) ‘dream levels’, you cannot help but marvel at the genius behind it especially since time is supposed to be relative in all levels. A couple of years ago, the brother suggested I read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s wonderful book, Godel, Escher, Bach and after Inception, I find myself comparing the two. The film’s production design is certainly inspired by M.C. Escher’s art and some of the themes have been explored in other films. In fact, for a much more accurate interpretation of lucid dreams and more specifically, the concept of limbo, I’d recommend Richard Linklater’s underrated Waking Life.

Despite my reservations, I loved Inception. I find it oddly comforting that amidst all the crap that finds its way into cinemas, we can still count on someone to deliver a truly original blockbuster that you don’t have to switch your brain off for. And yes, I’ll be watching it again.

9/10

There’s an article in New Scientist that pretty much confirms something I’ve always suspected. If you buy into one kind of woo, the rest start looking pretty too.

Dan Kahan at Yale Law School has found that people’s views on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage predict their position on climate science too. This, he argues, is because social conservatives tend to be pro-business and resist the idea that it is damaging the planet.

I’ve noticed that acquaintances who smugly declared back in school that the moon landing was a hoax tend to belong to the same school of thought as people who think vaccines are a scam, evolution is controversial, crystals have energy and that global warming was a story dredged up hippies.

Another not-so-surprising finding that explains the phenomenon that is Deepak Chopra.

… instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. “They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder“, he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. “Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory.”

(…)

Denialism has already killed. AIDS denial has killed an estimated 330,000 South Africans. Tobacco denial delayed action to prevent smoking-related deaths. Vaccine denial has given a new lease of life to killer diseases like measles and polio. Meanwhile, climate change denial delays action to prevent warming. The backlash against efforts to fight the flu pandemic could discourage preparations for the next, potentially a more deadly one.

If science is the best way to understand the world and its dangers, and acting on that understanding requires popular support, then denial movements threaten us all.

Also, watch this wonderful TED talk by Michael Specter.

While I don’t agree with Cory Doctorow on comic books (I rarely, if ever lend mine out), this is exactly why I won’t be getting an iPad.

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

(…)

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.