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.

Maybe it’s just easier, psychologically, to swallow the lie that these scientists who devote their lives to their work are actually greedy deceivers and left-wing extremists — and that we should instead put our faith in the pseudoscientists financed by large carbon polluters whose business plans depend on their continued use of the atmospheric commons as a place to dump their gaseous, heat-trapping waste without limit or constraint, free of charge.

…

We haven’t gone nuts — but the “conversation of democracy” has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired. Throughout American history, we relied on the vibrancy of our public square — and the quality of our democratic discourse — to make better decisions than most nations in the history of the world. But we are now routinely making really bad decisions that completely ignore the best available evidence of what is true and what is false. When the distinction between truth and falsehood is systematically attacked without shame or consequence — when a great nation makes crucially important decisions on the basis of completely false information that is no longer adequately filtered through the fact-checking function of a healthy and honest public discussion — the public interest is severely damaged.

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.

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.

The LHC gets switched on in a few hours and contrary to what lunatics may want you to believe, the world will not be swallowed by a black hole. What interests me more is as to what *will* actually come out of this 6 billion dollar science experiment. Will they find the Higgs boson? Or will Hawking win that wager?

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, governments cooperate to build this giant dodecahedron (after receiving step by step instructions from a very ambiguous extra-terrestrial intelligence). After spending trillions of dollars on a project that many believed would shape humanity’s future, remember what happened?

Nothing.

“Plurality should not be posited without necessity.” – William of Occam

Ever since the emergence of quantum mechanics thanks to the efforts of an obscure patent clerk nearly a century back, scientists have been trying hard to reconcile two seemingly correct but mutually disagreeing theories about the way our universe works- Gravity and Quantum Mechanics. MIT (quantum) mechanical engineer, Seth Lloyd attempts to give us an alternative to the countless theories that spring up every day, most notably the String Theory. Throughout the book, Seth Lloyd thinly disguises his disdain for the aforementioned theory which strives to explain the universe by stating the building blocks of everything to be 1 dimensional ‘strings‘.

Lloyd follows Occam‘s (William of Occam’s) lead and puts forward a simpler theory (nothing in physics is that simple); he proposes that the universe is a giant quantum computer churning out complexity bit by bit. What’s better, the author takes us through the basics- the definition of information on a more macroscopic level. You see, the information the universe apparently creates is entropy, which Lloyd claims is an oft misunderstood word. What follows is a 211 page discourse on a variety of topics – consciousness, cosmology, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics (something I loathed from the bottom of my black soul in school) and chaos theory.

The book is an immense joy to go through; understanding something so complex has never been so rewarding and engrossing. I have always been fascinated by theoretical physics (never mind that I suck(ed) at math) and some of the questions attempted in this book are the ones that have plagued me for years- the initial moments after the big bang and the reasons for complexity in the universe. Seth Lloyd also gives valuable insights as to why the intelligent design debate may be moot because, if the universe is a quantum computer that creates complexity from simplicity bit by bit, serendipitous coincidences within cosmic chaos are inevitable.

This book is unlike most other popular science texts I’ve read. For one, it is understandable (for most part) and it does not rely heavily on the ignorance of the reader. Plus, my brother backs the book and that’s good enough for me.

Very highly recommended.

Links:

• NYT Review of Programming the Universe
• About the book: Random House
• Seth LLoyd @ MIT