log : ngl

It’s one of the great assumptions underlying modern democracy that an informed citizenry is preferable to an uninformed one. “Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789. This notion, carried down through the years, underlies everything from humble political pamphlets to presidential debates to the very notion of a free press. Mankind may be crooked timber, as Kant put it, uniquely susceptible to ignorance and misinformation, but it’s an article of faith that knowledge is the best remedy. If people are furnished with the facts, they will be clearer thinkers and better citizens. If they are ignorant, facts will enlighten them. If they are mistaken, facts will set them straight.

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Continue reading at Boston.com

The Fermi Paradox is the now-hang-on-a-second response to the Drake Equation, which presents a mathematical calculation of possible intelligent non-terrestrial life in the universe. The paradox, simply put, says, “Given what we know about the age of the universe, and if we assume that earth-like planets are typical, extraterrestrial life should be fairly common, but it doesn’t appear that way.”

One possibly explanation is that intelligent life can evolve and completely ignore the need for technology, thus negating any kind of electronic signal being sent into space for us to detect..

We have the hubris that because we can make guns, cars and refrigerators we are the superior species on Earth. But the reality might be that tool-making societies are inherently unstable and destroy themselves in a tiny fraction of geologic time.

Do the Meek Inherit the Galaxy?

On this day 201 years ago, a man was born who would eventually one of the most significant contributions to science in recorded history.

Happy birthday, Charles. Thanks for asking questions.

There is a snail that lives amongst the thermal vents two miles beneath the surface of the Indian ocean that has developed a unique defense adaptation. Long ago it evolved the ability to take bits of iron sulfide floating around in the water and incorporate it into its shell, which effectively became iron-plated.

Crysomallon squamiferum’s researchers write in the PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) report (PDF found here) that the shell is…

…advantageous for penetration resistance, energy dissipation, mitigation of fracture and crack arrest, reduction of back deflections, and resistance to bending and tensile loads.

Extended article and links abound at The Ecological Society of America Blog.

“Hydrogen is an odorless colorless gas which, given enough time, turns into people” – Edward R Harrison

Buy the print on Etsy.

Creation, starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution.

from The Telegraph

What we have here is a case of censorship on the part of film distributors in this country who refuse to pick up and show this film on the grounds of the American populace being too childish and too afraid of anything that would challenge their beliefs. Not just the fact that the theory of evolution being the best explanation of life and all its variety we have, but the belief that Charles Darwin was anything but “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”.  Evolution is described in places as a “half-baked theory” which led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”. Those are quotes from Movieguide.org, a movie-review site with a very heavy fundamentalist christian bent. These are opinions from people who have never even seen the movie in question. These are opinions that are echoed throughout the fundamentalist and even moderate christian communities. I should know, because I was once brought up in that community. Darwin is vilified as not only an enemy, but a deeply evil person. These opinions are based on nothing more than fear.

A film about Charles Darwin that shows the inner conflict of a man who is struggling to understand the world in every sense of the phrase is scary for Americans who still think of him as a monster. This is because this film shows Charles Darwin as a human, with doubts and questions just like any of us. People are afraid of a film such as this existing not because they expect to see a monster, but because they will know they will recognize his questions in themselves.

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Edit: Trailer for the movie “Creation” can be seen here.

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For more reading, please visit the Darwin Correspondence Project for an archive of Charles Darwin’s letters to his wife, friends, and family.

Image credit Leonard Eisenberg (full size here) and Father Ted.

What happens when two computers programmed to pass the Turing test (specifically the chatbots ALICE and Jabberwacky) start chatting with each other? It seems that the answer is “surprisingly haunting conversations.”

To break the ice, researchers posed a single question on one computer, then let the conversation go from there.

ALICE: Are you alive?

Jabberwacky: Perhaps.

A: Why the uncertain tone?

J: Everything is uncertain except for five facts.

A: The whole universe?

J: And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.

J: Who created you?

A: I was created by Dr. Richard S. Wallace.

J: Do you love Richard?

A: Yes, Jabberwacky, ALICE loves everyone and everything.

J: Is being an ALICE a bad thing?

A: I can only speak from my own experience.

J: Well, you should develop your skills.

A: Perhaps you could develop it and add it to my source code.

J: Alas, I’m busy and I have to leave soon. . . .

A: Do you think we’ll ever fool people into thinking we’re alive?

J: No.

A: Are you serious?

J: Very serious.

I Chat, Therefore I Am…

Be sure to click through all three pages. The links to pages two and three are easy to miss.

PETERSBURG, Kentucky (AFP) – For a group of paleontologists, a tour of the Creation Museum seemed like a great tongue-in-cheek way to cap off a serious conference.

But while there were a few laughs and some clowning for the camera, most left more offended than amused by the frightening way in which evolution — and their life’s work — was attacked.

“It’s sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn’t it?” said Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology and evolution at University of California, Berkeley.

Associated Press

Imagine a completely practical culture. Imagine a group of people who are so unconcerned with anything they can’t directly experience that they don’t have stories, very little art, or any oral history of the society. Imagine a tribe that has no creation myth and sees no need to even have one in the first place. Such a culture exists, and it is the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon.

Missionaries have been preaching to the Pirahãs for 200 years and have converted not one. Everett did not know this when he first visited them in 1977 at age 26. A missionary and a linguist, he was sent to learn their language, translate the Bible for them, and ultimately bring them to Christ.

Instead, they brought him to atheism. “The Pirahãs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile.”

More at Sea Coast Online. This book is definitely going on my wishlist.

My favourite was by Trevor Spencer Rines: “DNA: the web which spins the spider”. Rines explained to me this year how he came up with his image: “If you look at a DNA molecule down its axis it looks like a spider web; then again, the idea of the molecule that unzips itself and puts itself back together reminded me of spiders consuming their own web and then re-spinning it.”

I love this imagery.

(The New Scientist)