The Peculiarist

Review: Paradise Lost

 

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost by John Milton is an epic poem, written in free verse and in English. This was apparently the main aim of Milton, to write an epic poem for England and to do so in the Enlish language. That's the format, and if you're unwilling to read a free-verse poem published in 1667 give this a miss -- but if you're willing to have a go, it's a worthwhile effort, and not just because it's a much-referred-to classic.

The general theme is well known -- the Fall of Man, the sins of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden -- but it includes the history and creation of Earth and the fall of Satan and his cohorts as well, thanks to a fairly long-winded conversation between Adam and Eve and an angel who was sent to warn them against being tricked into eating the forbidden fruit.

It's interesting reading his particular theology (making sure you don't get sucked into the trap of thinking that's what all Christians thing/thought) and his explanations for the actions of the various participants in the great tragedy. Satan is portrayed as rallying his troops against the great oppression of God, although none of them seem to realise the obvious point that he's planning on replacing it with a great impression by himself. This book could very well be the source of the quote "better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n" (Book I, 263) and there are quite a few well-turned phrases, as you'd expect. Of Belial: "To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds/timorous and slothful", and the works of Sin and Death to create "a passage broad/Smooth, easy, inoffensive down to Hell". On that note, I particularly liked Milton's origin of Sin and Death, a quite deft allegory.

As befits an epic poem there are sections of great battle, brave derring-do, triumph and defeat. However, it also deals lengthily with the more mundane aspects of the tale; the tempting by the serpent and the eating of the fruit. To Milton the knowledge gained was of evil, and the ability to think and be evil. After falling prey to the wiles of Satan, "innocence, that as a veil/ Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone" (Book IX 1054), and "since our eyes/opened we find indeed, and find we know/Both good and evil, good lost, and evil got" (Book IX, 1070).

As a story it's quite compelling even if the format is a little strange, but for me the best part was an insight into Milton's mind, how he intepreted the beginning of Genesis. Or at least, how he wrote it down for the poem -- it's worth remembering that he wasn't writing an historical account nor a theological tract, but an epic poem, and it's quite possible he didn't follow his personal philosophy in the interests of the story.

One jarring aspect was the chauvinism/misogyny. Women are portrayed not only as vain and easily tempted, but also alarmingly good at tempting men who are reportedly powerless against their feminine beauty and wiles.

All in all, a worthwhile read if you're looking at getting acquainted with the literature that has had a significant effect on the world.

Paul The Precognitive Cephalopod

 

625px-Paul_the_Octopus

So, imagine you're an octopus...

One of the biggest stories to come out of the World Cup -- apart from Suarez's new "hand of God" -- was Paul the Octopus flawlessly predicting the result of every world cup game he was presented with. You can check Google New or Wikipedia if you're unfamiliar with the cephalapod, and pay attention to this paragraph: "Assuming Paul's predictions were no better than fair coin flips, the probability of 12 or more successful predictions in 14 attempts is ~0.65%, as given by the binomial distribution.[34] The probability for 8 out 8 successful predictions is ~0.39%"

So according to scientific standards the result is "significant", which means that it was unlikely to have occured by chance. So, proof of future-predicting powers if only in cephalopod mollusks? A skeptic will of course deride this as ridiculous, usually without giving any reason for the result apart from a vague "in an infinite universe anything can happen" statement.

Of couse, one might suggest retrospective bias, where only successes are remembered...but this falls down when you realise that Paul was preselected before the World Cup as being able to predict the outcome of matches, which he then went on to do with one hundred percent accuracy. You might suggest that the handler was somehow guiding the octopus, but that merely implies the handler can predict the future. What do you want, a double-blind test where neither the octopus nor the handler knows what is being predicted? That just doesn't make sense.

So the challenge is: Why should we not consider this as evidence of precognition? Try to think for yourself before heading to Google...

(Photo is photoshopped and from here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_the_Octopus.jpg)

Correlation Vs Causation

There's an article on Slate about a study looking at the relative pay of various United Methodist clergy of Oklahoma, which comes to the conclusion that pastors get "incentive pay" for growing their flocks.

It turns out United Methodist congregations gave their leaders a $15 boost (in 2008 dollars) on average for each new member added (about 3 percent of new revenues generated from the membership increase) and cut their pay by about $7 for each member lost.

They go on to note that entrants and exits of new members via births and deaths aren't rewarded or punished. As far as I can tell economics is the paradigm of viewing human choices based on rewards and penalties, and financial rewards and penalties are most often looked at because they're the easiest to measure and quantify.

In this case I think they've mistaken correlation for causation. For example, they say that a good pastor is one who increases his flock, and they do this (at least in part) to get more pay. However, I think the quality of a pastors work is based on other factors, such as teaching, inspiring, comforting in times of problems and so on. The better a pastor is at pastoring, the more people want to attend his church. Further, the better a pastor is at doing his job the more his congregation want to reward him to show appreciation (since it is the congregation, after all, which sets the pay).

So, to put it into logical terms, if we let: A = Good Pastoring; B = Increased Flock and; C = Increased Pay, we have:
If A, then B.
If A, then C.
However, it's a logical fallacy to then conclude: If B, then C. There is some connection, of course, since a congregation pays its pastor and a smaller congregation may not have the money to pay no matter how good a job they think the pastor is doing.

This interpretation is further backed by the revelation that pastors get a higher increase in pay for members that switch from other congregations than from members that come from outside the church. The economists conclude that "local interests may be well-served by attracting other Methodists, who may be more stable, dues-paying members than those who are new to the church", but this doesn't make a lot of sense since the people who set the pay aren't the people directly receiving the benefit of the "more stable dues-paying".

A more likely explanation is that if people transfer from another Methodist church it's an indication (rather than a causal factor) that the pastor is doing very well. People might join a church for a number of reasons, such as investigating a personal spiritual experience or coming to like the overall concepts behind the broader church. If they switch from another church of the same denomination it's either because they've moved or it's specifically for the pastor/community...so there would be a stronger correlation.

Most Recent Human Evolution: Tibetans

Chinese scientists have determined that Tibetans are genetic mutants...that term sounds really loaded, doesn't it? Anyway, the Tibetan population has a greater number of alleles for 30 genes that help them live at such a high temperature where there is only 40 percent of the oxygen available at sea level (from the New York Times).  

The geneticists say that the Tibetans and the Han Chinese split apart about 3,000, and the NYT makes a big deal of the fact that archeologists believe the Tibetan plateau has been inhabited for 7,000 - 21,000 years. This isn't actually contradictory, since the biologists are not talking about when the people moved to Tibet but rather giving a rough measure of when the genetics in the populations diverged, which of course takes time (they didn't just suddenly become genetically distinct in one generation) but also depends on the threshhold at which you set the divergence.

This is a more interesting paragraph: "The Beijing team calculates that at the time of divergence there were only 288 Han Chinese and 22,642 Tibetans. These estimates have bewildered archaeologists, given that rice cultivation in southern China started 10,000 years ago and there was an extensive civilization by 3,000 years ago. Dr. Nielsen said that the figure of 288 people was meant simply to indicate a bottleneck in the Han population, meaning a time when it was very small, and that this bottleneck could just as easily have occurred 10,000 years ago."

Which would mean the bottleneck happened before the Tibetans diverged, which would make the numbers puzzling. I think I'd want to see how they drew their conclusions before accepting this. If it is true, 288 people became over 1.2 billion in a few thousand years.  

Peculiarist: Big Black Cats and Bunyips

America has Bigfoot; Canada has omajinaakos; Panama has gollums; Australia has the Big Black Cat. For decades a Big Black Cat which some believe to be a panther or leopard has roamed the mountains west of Sydney. Witnesses have been routinely mocked, derided and dismissed, but it's out there. The government thinks so. Parks and Wildlife think so. The Peculiarist thinks so. All authorities of the utmost respectability (except the government, which we only believe because it tried to cover up the Dread Big Black Cat).

The assumption is that it has been introduced somehow, possibly from a circus, possibly from a travelling cat show. The Peculiarist thinks these theories are a bit unrealistic -- how to you lose a cat the size of a pony and have no-one notice? Not all cats in Australia are introduced: It's far more likely it's a species of native cat, related to the quoll. Some have criticised this position, pointing out that quolls are of the order Dasyuromorphia while cats are of the order Carnivora, but that's just semantics.

So, if this animal has been roaming the mountainside since time immemorial (or at least since before I can remember), why is it so often derided as an urban myth? Maybe the latest witness has some insight: ''I'd heard the stories but never believed a word of it,'' said Mr Cauchi. ''... how has this remained in doubt for so long?'' The Peculiarist reckons that only an idiot would think this is an urban myth considering that the cat is only seen in rural areas. A rural myth, maybe.

Speaking of which, the omajinaako in Ontario, whose name means "the ugly one" (a fairly subjective criticism, I should point out) bears a startling resemblance to my idea of what the Bunyip looked like. Evidence of Australia-Canada migration? Only time will tell.

Normal Approach...

Useless

Source: http://xkcd.com/55/

Not Artifical Life, But Impressive

Chimera

I was stunned, absolutely stunned, when I saw a headline in the SMH: Breakthrough as Artifical Life is Created. "Well now," I thought,  "that's far sooner than I expected." As it turns out the headline is a furphy, and I'm a little disappointed in Deborah Smith because she is usually far more precise about these things (I do acknowledge that it's possibe an editor put in the headline and the first paragraph).

So what really happened? The J. Craig Venter Institute, the guys who tied with the world in the race to sequence the human genome, have managed to transfer an entire synthetic genome from one type of bacterium into a closely related type of bacterium (see this Nature article). "Synthetic" means that each bit of DNA was created by a machine, rather than the sequence being developed by humans.

This is a remarkable technical achievement. Not only putting the jigsaw puzzles of the genome together in a way that worked but also disguising it with methyl groups so that the host cell would accept it (and disabling the attack enzyme in the host cell as well). It provides opportunities and challenges with manipulating DNA at the genome level rather than just tinkering with a few genes and might give a bit more control to the chimeraic organisms created.

However, it's not a conceptual advance. At an idea level there's no real difference between moving genes and chromosomes and genomes. It still needs a host cell from a naturally created organism very closely related to that of the genome to get it to work. It doesn't shake the paradigm of biology; it generates a nod of respect for technical advancement and skill.

There's also an interesting PDF with comments by eight independent experts, which gives some idea of the general reaction of the scientific and philosophic community.

Australia Ninth Worst Environmental Degrader

I was alarmed to find that a recent report puts Australia in the top 10 countries with an absolute negative effect on the environment. I knew that on a per capita basis we were pretty high up there, but on an absolute basis? Physorg has run a piece and linked to the article, which finds that Australia does well in the proportional rankings but not in the absolute rankings. The proportional ranking is based on degradation compared to total resource availability, although it's unclear how "total resources" are measured.

Australia has a great deal of resources no matter how their measured, so it's unsurprising it did well there. Still...being in the top 10 absolute environmental degradation with a population only in the top 50 countries isn't a proud thing.

The study measured seven impacts on the environment (chosen as the most ubiquitously reported) which were: Natural forest loss, natural habitat conversion, marine captures, fertilizer use, water pollution, carbon emissions and biodiversity threat. Australia received its worst ranking in the natural habitat conversion statistic, where it was sixth worst in the world, and it ranked 10th worst in natural forest loss.

There is some argument to be made that older developed countries did all their environmental degradation centuries ago (if they cut down all their forests in the middle ages then they're not there to be cut down now) but that only applies to two of the statistics, forest loss and marine captures.

So the unmistakeable conclusion is that Australia needs to get its arse in gear if it wants to get some environmental cred.

Politician Accused Of Being Too Scientific

An Australian politician was recently accused of being ''neo-Darwinian … Has there ever been a lower watermark in public life?" which you can read about in the SMH. I think we should rally around Nick Minchin and show and show there's nothing wrong with a politician taking a scientific view of the world.

We're All Better Than Average, But What's Better?

Pyramidofevil

Behavioural economists are working on ways to "nudge" people into doing the right thing -- or at least doing something the behavioral economists want them to do. The specific example given is from energy companies putting tidbits of usage information in their bills, telling their customers how their energy use compares to the average of the neighbourhood as well as to an "efficient" household; the trial had less than stellar results reports Slate:

The economists found that the 2 percent average decline in energy use obscured significant differences in the responsiveness of different types of households to the conservation message. Registered Democrats who give to environmental organizations and live near other liberals reduced their consumption by 3 percent. For liberals who started out as heavier-than-average consumers, the reduction was almost 6 percent. Republicans who live in conservative neighborhoods (and hence had no neighborly pressure to conserve) and had no record of giving to environmental organizations actually increased their consumption by 1 percent.

The point being that people try and improve their performance so they are above average, for whatever reason you might like to think they do so. The problem is that the group they might think is above average isn't the group that you might think is above average. In the above case the assumption is that the average Republican doesn't think using less energy is good for the environment and so goes in for a bit of conspicuous consumption.

This post is not about Republicans though, it's about the attitudes of people in general, so let's go for a less charged observation: "In one early study, 93 percent of Americans rated themselves as better than average drivers (as compared with 69 percent among the more modestly deluded Swedes in the sample)."

This is very similar to the moral scales people tend to have.

If half of us are below average, can 93 percent of people really be better than average drivers? Of course they can. Some people consider good drivers to be those with "mad skilz", other people consider good drivers to be those who are cautious and safe, still others consider good drivers to be those who are polite and accomadating on the roads, and so on and so forth. Without defining what one means by "better" or "good" the question becomes meaningless. Likewise, without understanding what someone considers to be "better" or "good" little psychological nudges won't help much.