Art – random thoughts.

Art, like money, is what we think it is. That’s why money is, apparently, the only measure of art. If it’s free, it’s not art. Or so it seems.

Painters were once prized as picture makers. Cameras have devalued the craft of making pictures by hand. That has shifted the focus to making pictures worth looking at. Composition now matters in ways it did not matter before. Hence abstract art, which is pure composition. Impressionism, which refuses to provide the optical illusion of reality. Expressionism, which claims to show emotions and meanings directly. Pop art, which detaches the image from its context. And so on.

Even photographers now attempt to do something other than make a naïve representation of reality. The subjects are staged, disparate objects are brought together in front of the camera, the photographer moves around to get the best angle of view, digital technologies enable manipulation well beyond the capabilities of the darkroom. 

Old and new image-making technologies are attempts at exploring and redefining picture-making in order to make images worth looking at.

All the while, the ease of making images has discouraged looking. Too many images – very few worth a 2nd look – how do we know that worth? By their nagging presence in memory? By the content? By the palette? The composition?

Any or all of these will make an image stick. The unpredictable part is individual preference or taste. And that perhaps even more elusive entity, meaning. All images signify, but what they signify depends on how the viewer decodes what they see. That includes the image maker, whose perception of meaning is no better or more valid than any other. The image maker’s intention cannot overcome the inherent ambiguities in the image. This inability to determine the significance of the work is common to all forms and modes of expression. Including this one, which is certain to be misunderstood, to be interpreted in ways I do not intend and cannot prevent. This lack of control explains the futility of censorship.

The report of the Amazon outage led me to reflect on the Internet and other things.

The Internet was devised to be resilient, hence its decentralised design, and its multi-path topology. DARPA (the Pentagon’s research & development branch) paid for it. Then (of course) the private sector took it. Now we have Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc violating the principle of decentralisation. That clearly makes the internet less resilient. The outage occurred in one of Amazon’s server centres, but if affected all of its network, and caused problems to millions of its customers.

The outage demonstrates the weakness or flaw of centralised control. Yet humans repeatedly strive to achieve just that. The ultimate centralised control in politics is totalitarianism, usually realised in a dictatorship. But oligarchy serves the purpose well enough that it’s the most common form of polity. Democracy touted as a system of voting for the leaders hides that unpleasant fact.

I think that democracy is better defined as a system of reaching consensus. Such systems have existed on the tribal and village level. At the tribal level, centralised control is reserved for war, when reaching consensus would take too long, and so the efficiency of a war chief as leader is worth the sacrifice.

Control is about information. Democracy as the method of consensus attempts to gather and disseminate information from everyone. When everyone listens to everyone else, there is an automatic error-correction. The best available information will usually determine the consensus. Usually, because values and desires also play a role, and we are willing to put up with less than the best in order to preserve our values or satisfy some desire.

Totalitarianism strives to concentrate all information in one person or small group. Since that means constant cognitive dissonance for most people, I wonder why it’s accepted. It seems we can tolerate a certain amount of cognitive discomfort. When too many people reach an uncomfortable level, there will be agitation for political change. So the aim of totalitarians is to keep cognitive dissonance within tolerable levels, and to deflect the inevitable anger onto some easily identifiable target. Orwell showed how that works in 1984. It seems the people behind Trump have understood his explanation, and are trying to install a self-perpetuating system.

Footnote: More on the development of the internet here: Arpanet Etc

Interior Monologue

I heard the phrase recently. Can’t recall exactly when. It was uttered on a radio program, but I can’t recall what the program was about. Probably literature, since interior monologue is a narrative ploy. The mention sent me off on a sidetrack. An interior monologue, in fact, in which I began to compose a note about how interior monologue has been part of my waking life for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, it’s me talking to myself, thinking out loud internally, so to speak, testing ways of saying things so they make sense. I talk out loud like this too, some of the time, which causes problems when people assume I’m stating some kind of position or point of view. I’m not. I sometimes wonder whether so-called mansplaining is just some other guy doing the same thing.

I also like to restate what seem to me plausible insights in order to lead into the test of whatever comes up as the next step. I want what I think I’ve found to be plausible to lead to the next idea. Anyhow, that’s how many of my ideas happen: I go over what I think I know or understand, and something new shows up. So I turn it this way and that, I say it several different ways to myself, to see which way of saying it makes sense. Sometimes this forces me to rethink what I think I know or understand.

Sometimes a new idea just appears. Well, they’re rarely new ideas, they’re usually new ways (to me) of saying old ideas. I try them out, vary them, until I find a formulation that seems to express that idea clearly and pithily. I do this with poorly-recalled memes I’ve found elsewhere too, like this one (I can’t recall the original):

We used to think the cure for stupidity was more facts. Then we got the internet.

North Channel, Lake Huron, Blind River ON, 2025-04-29

 

I take a few photos of the North Channel about once a month. This a recent one. Windy, about 5C, looking south. Click on it to see it full-screen.

What "100 year flood" really means

How likely is a "Hundred Year Flood" this year? Does the likelihood change when you've just had one?

I have a subscription to an online new source. Many of the stories it publishes are open for comment. One of the reports was about a Turkish geologist, Naci Gorur, who was trying to raise earthquake awareness. I saved the following comment because it makes a crucial point about what the probabilities of "rare" events actually mean. The highlighted sentence sums up the math. Percentage odds are not intuitive. I've added the calculation below Repetto's comment. I used my computer's calculator to do the arithmetic.

[ by R.C. Repetto, Amherst, MA]

People can't deal with probabilities, such as "a hundred-year flood". If there was one ten years ago, they think they're safe for another 90 years. No, they face a one percent probability there will be one next year and more than a ten percent chance* there will be one in the next decade. That misunderstanding and shortsightedness is why people still move into disastrous locales, such as Florida or Phoenix or the mountainous regions of the West. It makes a mockery of the claim that "we" can adapt to climate change. We haven't and won't, until it's too late.

* If the odds of some event is 1 percent (one per hundred) per year, then the odds that it will happen within the next 10 years are (1.01^10*100)-100, or 10.4%

Footnote: If you knew there was a one percent chance of having an accident every time you drove your car, would you drive it?

Nasturtium

 

September 2009. This was a test of the close-up capability of my then-new Canon SX-20 digital camera.

The Library of Babel (The Universal Library) (long read)

Some thoughts on the Universal Library problem

The problem was fictionalised by Luis Borges. It may be stated thus: Can we specify a procedure for writing a Universal Library? A universal library contains all texts ever written and ever to be written, in all the languages that have ever and will ever be spoken, and many more that will never be spoken by anyone. The paradoxical answer to this question is yes, and several proofs exist that such a library is not only possible, but is of a finite size, albeit a very large one. One such procedure (adapted from one described by Martin Gardner) is the following:

Suppose a book of 100 pages of 100 lines of 100 characters each. Each such book contains a total of 10^6 characters, including the space. Using the Latin alphabet in upper and lower case (52 characters), 7 punctuation marks and the space, and 10 numerals bring the total to 70 characters. The total number of books, if each contains exactly one permutation will be 70^(10^6), a very large number. It is so large that if every atom in the universe were a printing machine printing at the rate of one character per second, it would take many lifetimes of our universe to print all the books.

Clearly, very, very large library. Does this library in fact contain all possible books?

Each book in the library is a specific combination of characters. Each such combination is 10^6 characters long. Given that any printed book is a combination of characters, that combination will occur at least once somewhere in the library. A book shorter than 10^6 characters will occur many times, since there will be (100-n)^(10^6) permutations of the characters filling out the book to 10^6 characters.

The same consideration applies to books not yet written, for each such book is a combination of characters. Books that will never be written by anyone will also occur in this library. And since all spoken languages can be represented by some scheme of matching characters to sounds, books written in all possible spoken languages will occur in this library.

This summary proof shows that all books ever written, ever to be written, and never to be written occur in this library, many of them more than once. Since every book can be printed with typographical errors, all possible combinations of typographical errors will also occur. In short, not only will all possible books occur, all possible variations on each book will occur. What’s more, a very large proportion of the books will be nonsense in any language, including languages not spoken on Earth (if there are such.) That includes Klingon, and any other fictional language.

This Universal Library is too large. It’s clear that “too large” means not only “utterly infeasible”, it also means “containing too much nonsense.” But mulling over the consequences of the procedure for constructing the library is a useful exercise in handling very large numbers, numbers that are unimaginably large. The Universal Library problem shows that we can conceive of entities that we cannot imagine, and that we can reason accurately about them.

Can the Library be made smaller? Yes, by using an encoding scheme that compresses the data. One might work as follows.

Suppose we use binary code. The we use only 2 characters, and the size of the library will be 2^(10^6), still a very large number. Is it smaller than the library using 60 characters? Yes. The fraction is [2^(10^6) / 70^(10^6)], a very small fraction. 

That’s still enormous, though. Is it enormous enough to contain all possible books? Paradoxically, yes. Every character will be encoded in binary, and hence every combination of characters will occur as a combination of binary characters. What’s more, since binary code can be represented by some combination of alphabetic characters (e.g, a for 1, b for 0), this binary-coded Universal Library will be included in the alphabetic one, once for every encoding of the binary characters. For example, (a,b), or (one, zero) and their equivalent in every possible, known, and unknown language. No wonder encoding the universal library using the alphabet is so inefficient.

Hence the supposedly larger set of books containing every possible combination of 70 characters will be contained in the smaller set of books containing every possible combination of only two characters. Thus, the library utilising 70 characters encodes its information very inefficiently. Can we improve that efficiency?

Suppose we limit ourselves to English books. Since any conceivable language should be translatable into English, surely we can reduce the size of the library? Yes, we can. We need only ensure the inclusion of every combination of characters that represents an English translation of a book written in some other language. But our multilingual library would include all translations of all books into every language. Limiting ourselves to one language to represent all possible books omits those multiple translations. If there are L possible languages, then there are L! translations of all books into all languages. Thus limiting ourselves to one language, the library’s size will be  {[2^6(10^6)]/L!}. This will be a fraction of the multilingual library. But it will still be enormous.

Nevertheless, we can estimate its size. Suppose there are 500,000 English words. Suppose the average length of an English word is 10 characters, including one space. Then each of our English books of 10^6 characters will have an average of (10^6)/10 or 10^5 English words. The size of this library (in binary characters) will be 2^(10^5) books. This is still very large: it’s [2^(10^6)]/[2^(10^5)], which is 10% smaller than the complete library. Not much of a saving. What’s more, it will be this size regardless of the total number of languages.

AI: A Conceptual Problem

AI is really a conceptual problem.

What is "human intelligence"? I think for most people it's a fuzzy concept combining self-awareness, reasoning, information processing, problem solving, symbol manipulation, insight, etc. In other words, not clear enough to make good sense when thinking about machine intelligence.

What is "thinking"? ChatGPT seems to think, but all it does it string together words and phrases and sentences, based on some probabilities that were calculated during its training. I've tried it several times, and what I notice about it is that it uses vast amounts of cliche. Which is not at all surprising, since cliches by definition are more likely to occur in text than original tropes. Its output makes sense, but it's yawn-inducing boring.

On the other hand, I think all those processes, plus processes not yet understood or recognised, are necessary for sentience and self awareness. Will machines get there? Maybe. The real danger is that we will confuse their making sense with wisdom, and rely on them to do things only humans should do. Such a judge guilt and innocence.

Footnote: The most common imagery of robots shows them as humanoid. But all robots currently at work are machines that look nothing like human beings. They're basically arms.

Language: What exactly do we communicate?

    We use language to fix memories, to construct our pasts, to invent a future. This thought came to me while reading, in a story by Malcolm Lowry, the description of a landscape I had never seen: Italy. The words Lowry used named familiar objects and experiences: tunnels, hawks, sunlit green valleys, trains, white oxen. Did, then, these words enable me to see what Lowry saw? No, they did not. For they recalled images from my memory, not his. Then I knew that if I described a train journey from my childhood, I would find myself selecting language that recalled to mind what I remembered. If the language-born image differed from memory, I would select new words, new phrases; and when I had finished my description, I should delude myself into thinking another would know what I meant by it.

     Thinking this (which took less time and language than it took to write it), I realized that we talk to ourselves. I describe my experience so that I will remember it. And because my language can arouse your memories, I can communicate an idea of a notion of an apprehension of what I experienced. (January 1976)

 (See also Steiner’s After Babel, which supplied ideas that made this thinking possible.)

Follow-up 2024: Whatever memories my words call up in my reader, they are accompanied by feelings and thoughts. We remember how we felt perhaps more strongly than the event itself. We also modify our memories every time we reconstruct them, so my words may change what the reader recalls. Our memories must pass the strictest test of all: they must be plausible, and our sense of what's plausible changes with experience and with remembering. It seems to me that the the sanest stance towards our own memories is This is how I think it happened, but I can't be sure.

Whoever reads this will agree or disagree depending on their experience of remembering, or of reading, of having their understanding or imagination altered by what they read, or what they heard someone say. That we are able to communicate well enough to work together, to continue to love each other, to agree on some notions of how the world works, all this and more seems to me an amazing accomplishment when I consider the certainty that what I intend to communicate and what is actually communicated are never the same.

Time (Some rambling thoughts)

 Time

2024-12-08 to 11 

Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) says that time is one of the four dimensions of spacetime. String theory claims there are more dimensions, but that’s a side issue.

We move through the three space dimensions. SR shows that our motion affects how we perceive motion and time.

We measure our own motion within our frame of reference. In fact, measuring motion defines a frame of reference. We ride in a car sitting still. But the car moves at 100 kph along the highway, so we are moving at 100kph along the highway, too. And the Earth spins, and orbits the sun, and the solar system moves within the local star cluster, which moves within the spiral arm that orbits the Galaxy. The Galaxy spins, and moves towards Andromeda. And so on.

Within us, the blood moves, air moves, muscles expand and contract, molecules move about and react with each other. Within larger molecules, groups of atoms move this way and that as the molecule changes shape. The atoms themselves move, and within the atom, the electrons and nucleus move. In fact, they move so much that the best we can do to specify their motion is to describe it as a cloud of possibilities, using a wave function that’s said to collapse when we measure those motions.

Heisenberg says the more precisely we measure the motion of electrons etc, the less precise the measurement of their location. Or the more we know about how the electron moves, the less we know about where it is. Which interpretation of the math is correct? I don’t know. Take your pick.

Why do I emphasise motion? Because all motion “takes time.” That is, any change in a space dimension entails a change in the time dimension. This seems to me the intimate integration of space and time that Einstein formalised as General Relativity. I hope this interpretation Einstein’s insight is correct.

So the other day I was thinking about time as a dimension, for about the 777th time. It had occurred to me that if we move through space, what would it mean to say that we move through time?

We normally think of time as “passing”, and point to clocks that measure that passage one tick at a time. Where a tick is a small motion of something. In the international standard of time  measurement that tick is a single cycle of the vibration of caesium:

The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.[1]

That “.... one tick at a time...” is either evidence of our brain’s conceptualising limits, or else proof that time is real in the same sense that space is real. Take your pick. I mention this puzzle because recently Carlo Rovelli and other physicists have wondered whether time is real or an illusion. Maybe space is all there is, and the feeling that time passes is created by our brains. The question may have been instigated by the awareness that being aware means being aware of time passing.

We speak of “spending time”, and continue with the terrifying thought that once we’ve spent a chunk of time, we can’t (unlike with money) earn an equivalent chunk of time to replace what was spent. Heraclitus supposedly said that we never step in the same river twice, since the water has flowed on between steps. Time, he said, is like that river. There’s a hymn that includes the phrase “time, like an ever-flowing stream”, which is a cliche by now. These ways of thinking all imply that time is some kind of entity. It’s not like space. Which may be why we have trouble dealing with Einstein’s concept of spacetime.

Does thinking of time as something we move through solve these conceptual problems? Maybe. Let’s try it.

Begin by supposing that there’s more than one time dimension. We happen to be confined to a line within that space, our timeline. Specify a frame of reference and you specify a timeline. We move through time along that line whenever we move through space. And as I’ve sketched above, we are always moving with respect to some other entity. Utter repose is impossible. Even death entails motion: as our body decays, its bits and pieces move in all directions, transported by the critters that eat them or the wind and water that carries them away. The skeleton that remains moves with the Earth.  

Now suppose that we could move off that timeline, in any direction, sideways, up and down, at an angle, in a circle. Just as in space we can take a shortcut, we could take a shortcut in time, and arrive at a future point on out timeline without passing through the intermediate ones. Time travel the would be moving off our timeline, moving around in time, and rejoining our timeline.

If time is multidimensional, would there be some way of writing a formal theory that could be tested? I’ll leave that up to the people who can handle the math. But the concept could work as a premise for sci-fi story. I’m sure the idea has occurred to someone else. If not, I hereby claim first invention (or discovery), and grant a non-transferable licence to anyone who wants to use it. Just give me a cut of the royalties.

© W. Kirchmeir

Time (Lapham's Quarterly 7:04)

 Lapham’s Quarterly 7:04: Time (2014) How do you think about time? Is it a river that carries us along? Is it some abstract something that passes? Is it something that one spends, and once spent, is gone forever?

These metaphors and more are the ways we conceive of Time. Physicists point out that time is a conundrum. On the one hand all closed systems tend towards disorder. Open systems can scavenge energy that drives transformations that maintain or increase order. When that external energy input stops, the system decays into increasing disorder. Thus the forward direction of the Arrow of Time, which we experience as the flow or passing of time.

Expressions and musings about that experience form the bulk of this collection. Any reader will recognise their own experience and thoughts represented here. But there’s almost nothing about time as an aspect of reality.

Albert Einstein’s theories play a cameo role. More recent (and current) problems with time as a physical fact, or an aspect of reality, don’t show up at all. So let me offer a few musings of my own.

For us humans, the central fact of time is that for each of us it will end. For some that end

comes before the body disintegrates, when dementia destroys memories, and in doing so destroys the self. Knowing that this could happen to me creates a dread that I hurriedly push down below the tissue-thin surface of mind that I experience as my self. Time is the essence of what the brain constructs as my experience of reality. Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. That means my self, me, I exist only while I’m happening. Maybe that’s why the Christian creed asserts a belief in the resurrection of the body.

When I was growing up, the usual measure of distance was time. The next village was a half-hour away. Gruber’s farmstead was 3/4 hour away. The post office was 5 minutes away. And so on. So Einstein’s space-time to me seemed fairly obvious when I first read about it. Of course, I didn’t know the math that combines these aspects of reality. But I knew that moving through space always took time. Einstein’s space-time clarifies this: To move through space requires movement through time.

So what happens when we are standing still? Why do we still move through time? Well, we stand still within our frame of reference. But that frame of reference is moving with respect to every other frame of reference you care to specify. Which means we are not standing still. Which also means that time transcends frames of reference. Or that a frame of reference is specifiable only as moving through time. Which makes time, not space, the fundamental “whatever-it-is” of reality.

Maybe.

To exist means moving through time. When an entity ceases to exist, it disappears. But nothing disappears. So to cease to exist means to change into something else. 

Consciousness exists only while it’s happening. Anesthesia interrupts consciousness. Sleep is a different form of consciousness. When you “wake up from” from anesthesia, there is no sense that time has passed. Well, that’s my experience. But when I wake up from sleep, I know that time has passed, because I have memories of dreaming. I don’t know about comas, but descriptions of the experience suggest that comas are interruptions of consciousness like anesthesia.

Since consciousness exists only while it’s happening, time is of the essence of consciousness.

“Exist” implies time. Hence the question “Does God exist?” is a non-question, since by definition God is not in time but beyond it. (That phrasing shows that we can draw logical conclusions from statements that refer to things we cannot imagine.)

Time is a puzzle.

As always, this collection is an excellent overview and sampling of what humans have thought and imagined and reported about its topic. Recommended. ****

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all except the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the filtered, hence limited, data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

Social Media and Social Disruption

     The media are still obsessing about the effects of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, and his rebranding it as X. It seems to me that Twitter was always more important for the media than the rest of us. If the media hadn't reported on the latest Twitter kerfuffle, I wouldn't have had a clue. Without the media, Twitter would have had no presence in my life. That's still so.

     From where I sit, "social platforms" differ from previous media in one crucial respect: the audience controls the content. Newspapers, radio, TV all had a passive audience. You bought the paper, switched on the radio/TV, and got the news the purveyors thought was fit to tell. Despite different political/etc viewpoints, those media created a mass audience with a common culture. Cable began the shift to audience control. The internet has made it the default. We now have a fractured culture, with no common narratives, and hence no widely held understanding of how the world works. Worse, we have an increasing number of people who believe that they and those who agree with them know the truth. Too many people no longer understand that all insights about the world are provisional. At best, they are merely good enough approximations to the truth. At worst, they're delusional.

     In many ways, this fracturing repeats the fracturing of the common religious culture when print made books cheap, and so fostered reading. The almost immediate effect was individual interpretations of the sacred texts, which led to disagreements about creeds, which triggered wars. It took two centuries before something resembling a consensus about the social role of religion emerged in Europe.

     Every time a disruptive communication medium appears, there is cultural reconfiguration. People "do their own research". The effect is profound disagreement and mutual distrust. It is always painful, and often bloody. We're living through such a reconfiguration. It's more complicated, difficult and dangerous than previous ones because we're also living through a major environmental change. It's going to be a very rough ride.

Edited and extended version of a comment posted in the New York Times 2023-10-19

 

Evolution 101: What it isn’t, and what it is.

It's taken me quite a few decades to clarify my understanding of evolution.

For example, like many people, I once believed that evolution somehow improves a species. Problem is that we think of improvements from our human point of view. That often makes our notions of improvement irrelevant. And even when our notions of improvement are relevant, they may be mistaken.

A widespread mistaken expectation is that evolutionary theory gives definitive answers. It doesn't. No science does, although some answers are more definitive than others.

Several years ago, a blog I read claimed that the epicanthic fold is “unimportant” if not “useless”, and therefore its existence makes the theory of evolution doubtful. For evolution is all about developing useful traits, right?

Well, no, actually. I'll take up the epicanthic fold.

a) "Unimportant" and "important" aren't what a human might think they are. Just because someone may think something is an unimportant feature doesn't mean that it really is. What’s more, “important” depends on context. "Context" for an organism means its environment.

b) The epicanthic fold may be a consequence of genetic drift. Evolution will not eliminate neutral changes in the genome. Accidents of mating may therefore concentrate some part of a genome and so enhance a particular variation of some trait. The primary accident of mating that affects this is the size of the mating pool. In a small population, genetic drift can show up within half a dozen generations or less, and can disappear just as quickly. In larger populations the effect is slower. However, a trait may become universal.  A secondary cause of genetic drift is aesthetic preferences (for want of a better term), aka as "sexual selection".

c) Actually, the epicanthic fold is helpful in the Arctic in late winter and early spring, when there's still lots of snow around, and the sun is higher in the sky. By shading the pupil of the eye, it reduces the glare from snow and sky. Fact is, the Inuit made sunglasses by cutting narrow slits in flat bones which were fastened in front of the eyes. These are artificial epicanthic folds taken to the extreme, so to speak. It’s also helpful in insulating the eye.

d) The epicanthic fold shows up in several variations. I have a version, but it's not like the one you would see on a Japanese person.

Generally speaking, the phrase "survival of the fittest" has caused much misunderstanding of evolution. It does not mean "survival of the strongest or fastest or etc". It means survival of those who fit their environment best; those which are the best suited to their environment. At the time the phrase was coined, “physically fit” was also becoming common. It meant something like “physically well put together, hence suited to strenuous exercise”, but quickly morphed into “physically superior”.

“Being best suited to their environment”  has a consequence that may seem counterintuitive when evolution is seen as primarily explaining changes. Evolution will preserve traits necessary for life, or that maintain a good adaptation to the environment even when the environment changes. That’s why we share so much of our genome with other animals. The shared bits code for features such as enzymes or hearts, without which survival would be impossible or difficult in any environment.

On the other hand, genetic changes can change the environment, because every organism is part of the environment from the point of view of the other organisms in that environment. If the change confers some survival advantage, there will be new selective pressures on some of the other organisms, and they may change, which may change the selective pressures on still other organisms, including the one that triggered the changes. That means that adaptation is a complicated feedback loop. Or rather a feedback tangle, which means it’s a complex system. As in ecosystem. Unfortunately, our brains are not very good at making sense of simple systems, let alone complicated ones.

As for genetic determinism: People who believe that genes rule are way behind the curve. Genes cannot "determine" anything in the absence of environmental inputs, which includes inputs from other components of the organism itself. In fact many genes will have no effect until some environmental trigger causes them to "express", that is, to start making the proteins they specify. What happens next may eventually trigger other genes. This, in a general way, is how an organism grows and develops.

You are what you are because of your genes _and_ your environment, and your environment includes the environment of your ancestors. Environmental factors can change the DNA by a process called "methylation", which affects gene expression. One consequence of methylation is that a mother's or father's illness can affect their children and grandchildren, and possibly even their great-grandchildren.

Evolution is complicated, but it works because of the interaction of the environment and genetic differences between individuals. If an individual lives long enough to reproduce, its genes and the genes of its mate will survive for another generation. If some variation improves the odds of having more offspring than average, that variation may spread through the following generations until it dominates the population. Cumulative changes may make offspring long separated in time and space so different that they are different species.

But what’s a species? That’s another concept that's not so easy to define. I’m not happy with my concept. I may discuss the results of my attempts at clarification here. Or maybe not.

Bread (musings)

     Bread is called the staff of life. When I was a kid, I thought of a staff as made of wood. A staff made of bread made no sense. That was before I understood metaphors of function: Just as a staff supports a man, so bread supports life.

     But in fact through most of human existence, there was no bread. The earliest archeological evidence for bread of a sort is about 30,000 years old. By that time homo sapiens had existed for at least 200,000 years. That bread was a cooked or semi-roasted porridge made of grains; I don’t think anyone nowadays would recognise it as bread. Flatbread baked on hot stones or a griddle is the closest modern equivalent.

     The archeology shows that these first bread makers relied on hunting and gathering for most of their food. Cereal grains were one among several types of seeds gathered for food. It took several thousand years to develop cultivation of grains; perhaps someone noticed that spilled grain would provide a crop the following year, and decided to experiment. However it began, that invention or discovery began the constantly accelerating development of technology that has made our species the dominant life form on this planet. 

     Bread as staple food and agriculture go together, in fact agriculture makes no sense without bread. The earliest agricultural settlements were villages, some fortified, some not, surrounded by fields and pastures. The last users of stone tools built them about 10,000 years ago. When metallurgy was invented around 3500BCE, that technology developed swiftly, and within a few hundred years we find cities dominating the farming villages in their vicinity. These complex polities require writing, an armed force, and centrally administered law to survive.

     I think it’s no accident that the invention of bread and the earliest forms of writing, mnemonic symbols, are nearly contemporary. These symbols were used to help the reader recall everything from lists of trade goods to signs of future events to myths, those stories in which the sacred and secular histories of the tribe were mingled. Surprisingly quickly, these early mnemonic systems developed into scripts. 

     Bread as a staple requires agriculture, which requires a hierarchical social structure to ensure that the backbreaking (and boring) work of plowing, seeding, and harvest is done. A hierarchical society needs an agreed body of rules and customs. Law, in other words, enforced as much by common beliefs as by physical force. Customs, religious and otherwise, express the common understanding of how the world does and should work. Written law codifies those beliefs; the law describes what is to be done and what is not to be done. Writing is also handy for keeping accounts, so much so that writing numbers probably predated writing words. 

     Bread is not only the staff of life, it’s the driver of those changes in human society that we are pleased to label progress.

 

 

Why grades and scores are bad incentives

 

An edited letter to the New York Times in 2019. The paper had run a story about Alfie J Kohn’s campaign against standardised testing.

Alfie Kohn [https://www.alfiekohn.org/article/fighting-the-tests/] is right. "People respond to incentives" is true, but when the incentive is a letter or number in a little box on a report card, the incentive is unlikely to produce learners.

Anecdote: Early in my career, one of my students achieved 19/20 on a short-answer test. I saw this student in the hall, and explained the incorrect answer. The student's eyes glazed over, the first time I'd ever seen that cliche operate in real life. The student didn't care about knowing the right answer, they cared only about the score. 19/10 = 95%, that's A+, that's all that mattered. I found out later that too many of my "best" students had exactly the same attitude.

Tests and exams are at best diagnostic. For the student and teacher, they may tell how far the student has come since the last test, and may provide guidance for future learning. For other people, such as college admissions officers, they provide some data (mostly over-rated and misunderstood) about the odds that the student will continue learning.

You might as well grade students on their height. Tall ones worked hard to add an inch or two, the lazy ones just sat around and shrunk. Silly? Sure, but that's how people too often think about students. In a typical class, there's about a one year range in chronological age, and usually much more than that in psychological age, which includes cognition. We humans develop at different rates, and development is never uniform. To expect grades to show that some students are "better" than others is asinine.

The supporters of grading, significantly I think, are mostly academics, whose working life consists of grading students. It's difficult to accept that a tool you've been using all your working life is not fit for purpose.

Unfortunately, people treat grades as rankings. They look on them like scores in a game. Winners score high, losers score low. That is no way to incentivise learning.

The only real regret I have about my teaching career is that I didn’t oppose the misuse of tests and exams.

 

Advertising and Identity Politics

Is there a link between advertising and identity politics? This ad for a 1958 Edsel was posted on a Usenet newsgroup recently. I read it several times, and that question and some tangential thoughts developed.

The text is fascinating. The italicised arrived tell the reader that it’s not just about pulling up in front of the house. The car is a “status symbol”, a phrase much used in the 1950s to deprecate advertising. But some 60 years on, the text looks like it’s about more than mere status. It’s about achieving an identity, that of a successful businessman. It’s about being recognised as a person of importance. It’s about getting the respect the Edsel owner clearly deserves.

It begins by touting the car as a signal of status and identity: Other drivers spot that classic vertical grill a block away. Whomever the Edsel owner encounters will treat him as he deserves.

The neighbours will admit you deserve respect, too. And parked in front of your home, your Edsel always gets even more attention. It says you chose elegant styling....  And it all comes at the lowest cost of the medium-priced cars. Status at a bargain, which stamps the buyer as a canny money manager besides all his other virtues.

Advertising always tells a story. This ad tells the story of a successful white middle-class man, someone who has transformed himself from whatever he was before he started working towards this day. The day he drives up in a brand new red two-door hard-top Edsel in front of his a ranch style home, his good-looking (slim) wife, his two charming children. He’s wearing a suit, white shirt and tie, and a hat. He has arrived, he’s achieved the American Dream.

That dream doesn’t consist of house, car, clothes, or other goods. Those are mere signs and symbols of what actually matter: status, identity, privilege. By linking the Edsel to success, the ad assumes the values that prompt the striving for success. By taking those values for granted, the ad creates an assumption of shared values. That in turn reinforces those values. The central value is being somebody.

I think the link to identity politics is obvious. Identity politics is about being respected. More, it’s about being accepted as worthy of respect, as deserving acknowledgment, as having one’s proper place in society. It’s about having the same status as everyone else. It’s about being somebody instead of being ignored, deprecated, disrespected. It’s about deserving to achieve the American Dream.

How to spell ʃ (and brief a note on English spelling)

     

     English spelling is notoriously problematic. It's a mashup of several different spelling conventions, made worse by a number of inconsistencies. Teaching spelling is also problematic. English-speaking countries focus on letters instead of sounds, so much so, that some English speakers refer to "alphabetic languages". Another result of this focus is the insistence on correct spelling for words that are never confused when speaking. That's just two (too, to) effects of confusing letters and sounds.

     Every language uses a specific set of sounds, called phonemes. Most languages use around three dozen phonemes. An "accent" consists of variations of the phonemes, and may have more or fewer phonemes than the standard version. The English alphabet is borrowed from the ancient Romans, with a few additions. We have 26 letters for about 40 sounds. Q and X each spell two sounds, which could be spelled KW and KS. C duplicates the sounds of S and K. In effect we have only 23 letters. So we use letter combinations (which include  "silent letters"), and spelling conventions that signal different sound values. But for many common words, one must memorise the spelling.

     And there's a twist: English speakers are more willing to adopt foreign words than just about anybody else. Along with the words we usually adopt the foreign spellings. So we end up with multiple spellings for the same sound.

     One of these sounds is the one that begins "she". It has more spellings than any other sound. Here are the most familiar ones:

How to spell ʃ

Common words:
oCEan
groCery *
CHef
caCHE
suspiCIon
Sugar
nauSEous
faSCist
conSCIence
SHine
aSSure
seSSIon
naTIon

From other languages:
FuCHSia
GauTHier **
SCHnapps

* Regional dialect
** Pronunciation varies

Footnote 1: Linguists have identified about 400 distinct sounds used by the known languages. Another linguistics concept is the "morpheme": think of it as a unit of meaning. For example combine the base "dog" (which refers to an animal) with "s" (which means "more than one), and you get "dogs".  Some linguists refer to the spelling unit as a "grapheme": a letter or combination of letters that spells a single phoneme, or some conventional combination of phonemes.

Footnote 2: Phonemes and sounds are not the same. The essence of a phoneme is that it signals a difference in meaning. Thus in "sing" and "sang", the sounds spelled by "a" and "i"  are phonemes  because  the two words have different meanings. On the other hand, the  sounds spelled by "ng" in "singer" and "finger" are different in most English dialects, but the difference is ignored. If they were phonemes, then "singer" rhymed with "finger" would be a different word than its usual pronunciation. (And in "ginger", "ng" spells a combination of three phonemes.)

Footnote 3: Homonyms come in two varieties: two words with the same spelling but different sounds (and meanings), called homographs. And two (or more) words with the same sound but different spellings (and meanings), called homophones. The study of homonyms helps one to understand the difference between a sound and a phoneme.

Footnote 4: Almost every phoneme in English is spelled two or more ways. Every letter and most letter combinations stand for two or more phonemes.
 

Class war? Yes, always.

NYT comment 2020-01-17 on “The Bernie Sanders Fallacy”, by David Brooks, in which he argued that there is no class war.

There has always been a class war. Rulers and ruled do have common interests, nicely summarised in the Canadian triplet of "peace, order, and good government." But they also have different interests, and these sooner or later lead to more or less open conflict.

Nevertheless, I think Brooks is correct: Values matter more than economics. Economics is a means, not and end. We want a strong economy not because a strong economy is good in itself but because it enables us to achieve our non-economic goals.

It seems to me that two of the central values of all human societies  are fairness and justice. Capitalism as it is practiced these days is unfair and unjust. The irony is that Trump's promise to "drain the swamp", to  punish China for stealing jobs, to restore good old American manufacturing and mining jobs etc, all these promises appealed to these values. That's why so many centrists and independents voted for him. That's why the Democratic hopefuls have to emphasise fairness and justice. E.g., the present tax system is unfair to the 99%. Dumping pollutants into the air, earth, and water is a form of freeloading, which is unjust. And so on.

The Dems' campaign is at bottom about fairness and justice. The leftist term "class war" is a distraction, especially so in a country where a sizeable minority freaks out at any hint of "socialism."

Cicero and Public Debt: A fake quote, but it gives one to think. (Repost)

 

 A statement allegedly (1) by Marcus Tullius Cicero (January 106 – 7 December 43 BC):

The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome will become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance.

Cicero lived in an empire, which was rich enough to pay the costs of military occupation and administration of the (ever longer) supply chains that sustained Rome. Whoever put these words in his mouth thought as if Cicero lived in a subsistence economy, one that's barely able to meet the needs of its citizens. They were wrong. (2)

We live in an economy capable of even greater over-production than Rome. We make too much, but we still think about our economy as if we can't make enough (3). That causes a lot of stupid decisions, whose effects are now becoming clear: Too many people (4), too much production and consumption, too much exploitation of natural resources (5), etc, all of which are the causes of the climate crisis, the ecological crisis, and the many sociopolitical crises around the world. The only question left is which crisis will destroy our way of life first, and just how bad it will be. If we don't learn to think differently, we won't adapt fast enough to survive with anything remotely like our present way of life (6).

Having made such gloomy pronouncements, I still wish you a good day. :-)

Footnotes:
1. From https://checkyourfact.com/2019/08/19/fact-check-cicero-quote-budgeting-treasury-public-debt/
“The quote does not appear in any of Cicero’s surviving works. It actually comes from best-selling author Taylor Caldwell’s novel about ancient Rome.” Note the phrase "assistance to foreign lands": Rome never did this. And the phrase "public assistance" is American, not Roman.

2. Any empire capable of maintaining itself for any length of time clearly was capable of producing far more than its citizens needed. Rome had about three times as many “statutory holidays” as we have, thus a much shorter working year. Even slaves got some time off on those holidays.

3. The USA spends over a trillion dollars per year on its armed forces and the wars they fight.

4. In my lifetime, the Earth’s human population has grown more than fourfold. 1940: about 2 billion.  2021: over 8 billion.

5. It’s likely that there won’t be enough food to feed all human beings sometime between 2025 and 2050, not because we don't produce enough, but because we insist on using "the market" to for its production and distribution.

6. Just how different will it be? Best case: Something like a medieval life-style for the survivors, with small farms producing enough food to sustain the necessary artisans and traders. Worst case: Back to the stone age, with perhaps some of the survivors being able to scavenge useful materials like iron from the ruins. That is, if humans don't go extinct.