ETs as they could be

     Terence Dickinson (text) & Adolf Schaller (original illustrations).  Extraterrestrials (1994). An essay in controlled imagination.  Dickinson and Schaller begin with fictional ETs, then survey the Universe as we know it. Then they discuss evolutionary pressures which (probably) constrain the forms and functions of organisms. Finally, they speculate how ETs may appear if these evolutionary constraints work as expected. The book is handsome, pithy, and inspiring. Recently, SF movies have gone a step or two beyond the bug-eyed variants of human forms of Star Wars and Star Trek. I think this book and similar exercises in speculative imagining have had an good effect.
     The cover shows a half-kilometre long aerial whale swimming through the dense atmosphere of a gas giant like Jupiter. Symbiotic “crabs” living on and in the creature provide the manual dexterity needed to build cities and space-craft. ***

The Improbability Pirnciple: Why we don't notice the improbability of eveyday life (re-read)

 

David Hand. The Improbability Principle (2014) Suppose you’re playing bridge. You get a hand of all 13 hearts. How unusual! In fact, this deal is one of  635 013 559 600 possible hands. “Ordinary” hands are much more likely, right? Well, yes and no. The fact is that any combination of 13 cards is equally likely. The all-hearts hand is unusual only in that you notice it. A hand with a mix of values and suits looks normal, and it is, in the sense that there are only four all-suit hands, and 635 013 559 596 mixed-suit hands. But each one is unique. So each one is as unlikely to be dealt as any other. All bridge hands are equally improbable. 

     The same goes for lottery number picks.  

And when you have absorbed that fact, you are on the way to understanding Hand’s book. He explores odds and chance, our perceptions of odds and chance, and the tools available for estimating odds and chance more accurately. The exploration shows that “Coincidences, miracles, and rare events [will] happen every day”. He demonstrates several laws of probability that combine to make the improbable happen.

                                                  Ian Fleming was wrong.

    Hand’s book will help the reader realise how improbable every event is. It’s a good introduction to probability and statistics, with many real-life examples as well the standard text-book ones. It will help the reader see the world in which they live with more understanding, and I hope more curiosity. Hand writes well, his tone is conversational, he allows himself the occasional dry joke.
     Recommended. ****
     

Here’s my take on his work. It builds on his book, and other books I have read.
     Improbable events must happen, for there are long and convoluted chains of cause and effect leading up to every event. Call them event-chains. Looking forward from here and now, an enormous number of possible event-chains stretches into the future. They intersect and criss-cross in unpredictable ways. The future is a network of possible events. Any one event lies on a node, where several possible paths through the network meet. Which paths through this network could lead to events involving you, tomorrow morning, while you are having breakfast? An enormous number. You can list some of the most likely events (the cat will want to go out just before you set the breakfast table, you will fetch the cereal from the pantry, etc).

Jung didn't understand probability. Nor did he notice that "meaningful coincidence" is meaningless. What's meaningful for one person is a mere oddity to someone else, and triviality to a third.

      But there are other ones, trillions of them in fact (a meteor will crash into the garden, a storm will strip the leaves from the oak tree, two cars will collide in front of your house, the water heater will spring a leak, etc). The odds that any one of them will happen is small (the microwave will stop functioning). For most of them, the odds are very small (one of the people in the collision is a schoolmate whom you haven’t seen in twenty years). Some are extremely small (on the back seat of the blue car there’s a paperback that you donated to the Goodwill in another town seven years ago).
     One of these unlikely events will happen. True, some event-chains are more likely than others, but in general, there are far more unlikely possible events than likely ones. There are so many that unlikely events are more likely to happen than likely ones. The likely ones just happen more often.

      As with the all-hearts hand, most events are equally unlikely. Or equally unlikely enough that it makes no difference. We pay attention to the ones that we feel are strange in some way. (That's why Jung was wrong about "synchronicity".)

     Think about it this way:
     You go to buy a box of ball-point pens. Consider the event-chain leading up to your purchase. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people were involved in producing the raw materials, shaping them into parts, assembling them into pens, packaging them, distributing the pens to the store. Then there’s the event-chain leading up to your decision to buy the pens. Today, not yesterday. This store, and not another. And so on. What are the odds that you would buy this particular box of pens, today?
     Exactly.
     So why don’t you think of it as improbable?
     We don’t usually notice the improbability of any given event. That’s why we’re flummoxed when we do notice one.

 Another review of this book:  https://kirkwood40.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-odds-that-odd-things-will-happen.html

 

A comet's song.

The comet is singing! Well, not really. Rosetta detected variations in the comet's magnetic field, at a very low frequency. The signals had to be raised in frequency to where we humans can hear them, so that many minutes of magnetic field variations around the comet have been compressed to 87 seconds. Listen here.