The Peculiarist

My Sixth Sense Is Telling Me Something Is Bogus

I've long been concerned about the brainwashing and indoctrination found in school's science classes, going beyond teaching science and promoting a materialistic world view. Impressionable youngsters are told that humans have five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell) and they are the only way humans perceive and interact with the universe. The idea of a "sixth sense" or any other means of experiencing the universe is routinely mocked as the province of whackos and dismissed out of hand.

But no longer! A neuropsychotherapist at the University of Technology, Sydney* has claimed to have encountered the "sixth sense" and found a biological basis within the brain (via the SMH). So, is she peddling unscientific twaddle, or are schools doing so? Or is the whole concept bollocks?

The article notes that the sixth sense has "long been suggested but never extensively identified in science", but disappoints by actively mis-defining the "sixth sense". It's usually thought of as an ability to perceive the paranormal, non-physical aspects of the universe, and sometimes associated with hunches about the near future of events that the person could not know about. However, in the article the sixth sense is defined as "how people interact on a physiological level"...ooh, I feel goosebumps.

So, basically, as people interact and come to feel a sense of "oneness" with another person this is reflected in the activity of the brain. I have to admit it is a good move on the part of whomever was involved in writing the article to talk about a sixth sense and the concurrent hints about being able to pick up people at bars, its far more likely to grab interest than some random brain scans.

* Full Disclosure: One of my alma maters.

El Grito 200

Two hundred years of independance plus one hundred years since the revolution equals HUGE celebration! Except that Mexicans tend to celebrate in a big way on most occasions... September 15th is Mexican Indepedance Day, and this year marked the 200 year anniversay of the revolution against the Spaniards and the hundred year revolution against the people who revolted against the Spaniards.

 
Despite an obvious outlet for exuberant Mexican pride there was some concern that turn-out would be small; rumours abounded of planned attacks by the narco-traficantes similar to the grenade attack last year, and many people (such as Karla's elder family) said they would stay home and watch the events on TV. However, when all the younger family went the elder family went also and that seems to have been the case on a wide basis: The streets were empty and the plazas and zocalos full. And there were no attacks. The crowds were in all kinds of outfits, from traditional clothes from around Mexico to novelty hats, face-paint and all the rest of it.

Before heading out we pigged out on pozole (which is more Mexican than mole) then headed to the Delegación Benito Juarez for "El Grito". We grabbed some Jarritos (kind of alcholic soft drinks in clay pots with chili) and headed into the packed square. For those who haven't been to El Grito it consists of someone in political authority standing on a balcony yelling "¡Viva México!", "¡Viva Emiliano Zapata!" and so on, while the crowd below yells "¡VIVA!" in affirmation. It's fun standing there yelling VIVA with thousands of other people, waiting until the end when it explodes in confetti-filled eggs and canned foam. That's the most chaotic and awesome part, basically like a giant water-balloon fight but sticky and with dye... the reason why I don't wear good clothes to La Grita anymore.

After that there were the fireworks, generic explosions of light and sound. The Mexicans make them more exciting by sometimes having them explode too close to the ground so balls of burning whatever fly into the crowd and stalls.

After that we wandered the stalls, unable to pass up a chocolate-covered cajeta-filled churro (oh boy!) and then we split up, with the oldies taking Rigel home and the rest of us wandering around the rides and games of "skill" and so on. It's amazing how much more exciting fairground rides are in a country with relatively lax safety laws. The bumper cars were fun in that "get to ram your friends" way, the spinning cages good in that random centrifugal force way, and the scariest looking one -- where you were raised and dropped while going in a circle -- turned out to be like riding a wave-board behind a boat.

We won some prizes at the balloon pop via the fairly simple method of playing enough times that the guy running it felt compelled to give us a prize, and then on the way home Karla and Diana went on the pirate ship. That's the one that spins you upside down in a circle. In this case for about 20 minutes. No-one on the ride enjoyed themselves after the first five minutes, and Karla threw up when she got off.

So, a mostly successful evening on the town...

 

I'm Smart Because I Game

FIRST POST! (Well, entered on TypePad anyway)

A new study has been released showing that playing "action games" improves peoples decision-making skills. I'm not going to read the study, I'm going to go purely off this CS Monitor story.

By "action games" they seem to refer to first person shooters, and by "smarter" they mean able to make "judgments faster than the 12 non-gamers without sacrificing accuracy". So I'd like to clarify a few things here, since they go on to say that strategy and role-playing games don't have the same effect.

In this case the skill being measured is the ability to recognise the movements of dots on a screen, and extrapolated out to recognising the movements of other things in our field of vision and extrapolating on what they're going to do and whether we need to take any action. It's a cerebral activity, but not the normal definition of smart as associated with problem solving.

While strategy games aren't likely to hone your reflexes, I reckon they're likely to hone decision making skills in complex situations with multiple people, taking into account the behaviour of opponents, the various possibilities the game can take and the laws of probability. Role-playing games, if done properly, should help with imagination and empathy.

So the logical conclustion to take away from all of this is to play more games. Now you have scientific backing when someone complains about it...

It's The End of the Vox as we Know it.

And I feel fine.

I actually feel pretty shitty, because most of the people (outside of Vox) I know who have blogs have them on Blogger. I haven't tried Typepad or Wordpress...I guess I'll see where people go and head there.

I guess we now have vox unpopuli...

Ha! I've been waiting two years to use that joke...

 

Sigh.

On New Fatherhood

The following was written for comments on this blog , and so impressed was I with my verbosity I couldn't let it go to waste.

My biggest fear was something happening to my wife...and now it's something happening to my wife and daughter. Not much change there then... As for a baby who "wouldn't be healthy or happy" etc, if your goal is to give them a great life and help them become a great person anything like that won't diminish your capacity for love or for providing.

The problem is that people always talk about the problems and challenges and things they had to do and give up and never talk about why they did it: They did it because it's worth it. To use an analogy that you might understand: It's not easy for an overweight person to lose a lot of weight and get fit enough to run a marathon, it's hard and it's ugly and means giving up a lot of stuff you like and doing a lot of stuff you don't like. But it's _worth it_.

As for "pathetic", if your partner doesn't let you feel any kind of fear or anxiety it doesn't sound like she's a good partner. Having ones problems recognised and taken into account doesn't necessitate the diminishing of other people's problems.

I look forward to travelling with my current one-year-old. Taking her to places neither of us have been, as well as returning to places I have been and know well and showing her those places...it will be like going there anew. 

The biggest issue is that babies are demanding, most of them demand to have attention paid to them all the time. That's why couples need to alternate in caring for the baby. The woman will spend most of the time because of the breastfeeding, that is about three full time jobs, so the guy has to do all the other stuff around the house. Also, if the baby is just in a bad mood, the man can carry her for an hour or three until she settles down and dozes off.

When our daughter falls over or hits herself or something she likes both of us to comfort her. If mum picks her up she asks for dad, and then back to mum. If dad picks her up the opposite occurs.

As for the expense, it's a really good idea to get started early, even if you're not doing the intelligent thing and planning for your future needs anyway. Obviously in your early twenties is best but that never happens...but even if you hit 27 and think "I'm going to have kids one day" 50 bucks a week for the next several years adds up.

Finally, my main advice to fathers-to-be is to talk to their child in the womb. It can hear you, and come to recognise your voice. My friend related his work-day to his wife when he got home, I sang songs, anything will do the trick. When my daughter was born it was -- naturally -- a fairly terrifying experience for her; but I was in the room, and spoke to her to let her know it would be all right, and she calmed down. It was worth it for that alone, but it also meant it was easy for me to calm the newborn by singing and talking to her. Sometimes easier for me than for her mum in the early weeks.

Can God Create A Rock So Big That Even God Couldn't Lift It?

Perennial philosophical questions abound, one of the most asked is: "If God is all-powerful, can God create a rock so heavy that even God couldn't lift it?"

The answer, of course, is "yes".

As the rock gets heavier, God continues to be able to lift it. However at some point the rock will become so massive that it ceases to be something you can lift, and instead becomes the object that other things are lifted from. At which point the phrase "lift the rock" becomes meaningless.

My Reaction To The New York Building Debate

If there is�such a high�level of feeling and sensitivity over building an Islamic community centre that close to the site of the World Trade Center then the polite and reasonable thing to do would be to seek another location for it.

However, since Mosques all over America are being protested against, it's apparent that the area that is considered "too close" to the World Trade Center is "everywhere within US borders". This indicates it's not proximity to the site of the World Trade Center that is the problem, but the fact that its Islamic -- ie, the opposition to the building is based on bigotry.

Now that doesn't bother me, because when you fundamentally look at Islamic Americans you can see what they are. It's obvious; it's in their name. That's right, they're AMERICANS. So if Americans are persecuting Americans that's really an American thing, and since I'm not American I don't care. If Americans like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh and� want to join the rest of the world in hating on Americans I'm pretty sure they can catch up fast if they try hard enough. It's very European of them.�

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Locavores Are Go

There's a good op-ed in the NYT about Locavores -- those who decide to only eat things from within a certain radius of their house. To give the flavour of the article:

"the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use".

Thus you get counter-productive habits and thoughts, such as: "it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley". Either way, the largest component of energy usage in the food change is the end user...

"The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far...Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage."

The idea is virtuous and the general concept is good, but it's always worth remembering that there is no simple idea or one-size-fits-all solution that covers everything.

Humans Vs Ecosystems: Which Is Worth More?

Humans do a lot of unnecessary things that are incredibly destructive to the environment and mostly it's easy to condemn the practice because there are alternatives. This is a bit trickier: What if something is proven to save lives but is destructive to the environment? It's natural to say humans are more important, but what if it doesn't save very many lives? What exactly is the ration of worth between a human being and an ecosystem?

This was brought on by a story in the SMH about shark nets. These are nets that are strung along some beaches in Australia (way out in the water, beyond the surf) which "work to stop sharks establishing territorial areas near the shoreline". First the good news: There has been no fatal shark attack at a meshed beach in over 50 years, so they seem to do the job.

Now the bad news: "Of the official count of 3944 creatures trapped, about 60 per cent were sharks and less than 4 per cent were considered "target" species (or those particularly harmful to humans) - that is, 100 great whites and 49 tiger sharks...Among them were 15 grey nurses, a harmless species considered critically endangered...Also on the list were stingrays (1269), dolphins (52), turtles (47), whales (six), seals (four), a penguin and a dugong".

Now this is over 20 years, but it is along a relatively tiny piece of coastline that is subject to plenty of other problems such as over-fishing and pollution run-off. Also, the creatures caught are large ones, so there's relatively less of them overall and -- especially with endangered species -- any loss is bad.

So what's the ration of good to bad? Around the entirety of Australia, mostly unmeshed, the standard statistic is one fatal shark attack a year on average -- there have been 15 over the past decade according to Taronga Zoo. More people have died after being hit by lightning, and hundreds of times that number have died from drowning. The deaths are gory and get headlines, but they don't really constitute a major danger.

If you ask someone whether they'd rather be eaten by a shark or have the above animals caught, they'll probably sacrifice the animals. But if you ask someone if they'd like to run the 1 in several million risk of being eaten by a shark or killing the above animals, I think most people would accept the risk.

There are some alternative methods but people are unsure of their efficacy. So the questions are: Can scientists come up with a replacement for the nets? And for the philosophers, how much is a human life worth in species or ecosystems?

Review: Fight Club (Let's Ignore The First Rule For Now)

 

Fightclub

Pretty much everyone has seen the movie Fight Club, which covers a wide range of topics including: The confusion of being a male in these times, issues around mental health, knowing one's self, how to make soap and explosives, the power of not caring to fit into society, and so on and so forth.

However it's a book too, a book by Chuck Palahniuk that the movie was based on. The movie and the book closely follow one another and any differences are quite minor, so you should know the plot and quite a bit of the dialogue.

So, if you've seen the movie is the book worth reading? I'll say yes. Mainly because the book is written in the same way the movie is shot, but it's far more effective in the written word because we're less used to jump shots and random one-liners.

The book is fast-paced and well-written and has a good story to tell, but the most interesting part for me came in the afterword. To quote:

It was just an experiment to kill a slow afternoon at work. Instead of walking a character from scene to scene in a story, there had to be some way to just - cut, cut, cut. To jump. From scene to scene. Without losing the reader. To show every aspect of a story, but only the kernal of each aspect. The core moment. Then, another core moment. Then, another.

Palahniuk thought you'd need some glue to stitch the scenes together, something bland that wouldn't keep the readers attention but which could act as a kind of place holder, to announce the next topic. So he wrote a list of eight rules, and they had to be about something so he came up with the idea of a Fight Club from a random juxtaposition of chat shows, documentaries and a black eye.

Considering how well the movie took off, how strongly the concept of a Fight Club took hold, how soundly the feelings of the men resounded in the male audience, I find it astounding that all of that was by-the-by, window dressing so the author could write a book in a particular style and it was that style which was important to him.

There is some lesson about art and literature there, if you want to look...