The Stormwatch Brewed

Your Brain on Language

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

You All Ready For Me To Drop Science On Your Ass?

Well, the sex blogs are gonna be in mourning - Helmut Newton died. I've seen some of his work and it's OK. Nothing especial, IMHO.

And Rush Limbaugh is going to have to face charges. Poor guy. Mr. Prosecutor has 10 felony counts for him but offers a bargain: Rush plead guilty to 1 count and get 3 years probation. And fatboy's lawyer says this is unfair! That he's being singled out for being a celebrity. Oh, that's right - if you're a celebrity, you get 100% of the charges thrown out instead of 90%. Christ, do you think Joe Six-Pack could get such a good deal?

Speaking of celebrities getting busted, Art Garfunkel was slapped with a fine for possession. The accounts I've read are all sure to mention that the cop didn't recognize him. I guess Paul Simon would have gotten off scot-free.

Oh, I love this. God came to some Latter Day Saints nutcase named Rulon Jeffs and told him to excommunicate several people from the church. This also involved the men leaving behind their wives, children, and possessions. Wives (and presumably the children) would be "reassigned". Among those dissed were a couple gents in their 90s who were favored to take over the leadership role in this Jonestown when Jeffs usurped the position.

Thankfully contact has been reestablished with the Mars rover so research into mineral exploitation of the planet can continue. Wait, no. It's in critical condition. Nevermind. The evil capitalists have been thwarted. ;)

On the good side, the European Mars Express has confirmed the existence of water ice on Mars' southern polar cap. Hell, maybe we can terraform the place, melt the water, and make Mars a nice spa resort destination.

From The Times:

ISAAC NEWTON had one, as did Michael Faraday and some chap called Murphy. What if you could distil your own sharpest observation into a scientific law that would bear your name? The literary agent John Brockman recently posed the question to the scientists, thinkers and technology innovators who visit his online salon at Edge.org. Now 164 of them have replied — and their insights make for wonderful reading.

Sir John Maddox, former editor of Nature, offers an immutable law of the peer-review process: “Reviewers who are best placed to understand an author’s work are the least likely to draw attention to its achievements, but are prolific sources of minor criticism, especially the identification of typos.”

Then there is Devlin’s First Law, from the acclaimed mathematician Keith Devlin: “In the hands of a charlatan, mathematics can be used to make a vacuous argument look impressive.” (His second law: “So can PowerPoint.”) But the most precise formula comes from Kai Krause, the legendary developer of graphics software. According to Kai’s Exactness Dilemma, “93.8127 per cent of all statistics are useless”. And who can argue?

Here's Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Punset's First Law: "If fully conscious, don´t trust your brain."

Gershenfeld's Law on Research: "Experiments take pi times longer than planned (no matter how many factors of pi you account for)."

Kai's Existential Dilemma: "I think....there....4a.m."

Bharucha's Law: "To understand what people are thinking and feeling, look beyond what they say." (Why are we men so horrible at this? Girlfriends have always seemed to know what's on my mind despite how well I tried to lie.)

Now who says scientists have no sense of humor or don't live in the real world?

Blinded Me With Science

While I was at my local coffeeshop the other day, another regular came in to get a cuppa joe to go. While I don't know her, I've been there several times when she was and I've noticed that she is a very friendly extrovert. Anyway, she makes a comment about the Mars lander and goes on to accuse NASA of having sent the roving robot to see if Mars could be another potential supply of natural resources we could exploit.

Earlier today I read the diary of a woman which was a list of questions directed at "evolutionists" by a "creation-scientist". The diarist is a born-again bible-basher so I assume that she agreed with the premise behind it all. And since directing a question like "Where did matter come from?" to an evolutionist is like asking a paraplegic about running a marathon.

These little instances demonstrate, to me anyway, a great distrust and ignorance of science. Rather than having a sense of wonderment that we've sent a machine some 48 million miles to another fucking planet and being in awe of the magnificent vistas of the Red Planet, all she can do is bitch. And rather than actually learn what evolution is and how science works, my fellow ODer just regurgitates the pieties of a lunatic.

Environmental conservation, agricultural science, medicine - they all have underpinnings in evolutionary biology. As Theodosius Dobzhansky said, "Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution." And I bet that woman at the coffee shop has no problem with the chemists that devised the materials of her clothes, the engineers whose work became her car, the people who formulated her hair care products, etc. Why do people distrust scientists so much yet run around enjoying all of the toys they create? Why do people think there's this cabal of cigarette-smoking scientists plotting evil?

I saw this program on the Science Channel this evening about the genetic disorder called progeria syndrome. It causes its victims - children - to age at a vastly accelerated rate and they usually die as teenager. Their faces become deformed and they have a whole host of medical problems. The show profiled a scientist who was studying children afflicted with the disorder so he could find a cure. THIS is the kind of thing that I think about when I think of science. Well, that and guys in lab coats ensconced underground ramming various sub-atomic particles into each other to shed light on string theory. Scientists don't oppress minorities, they spend years of their lives digging up dinosaur bones with paintbrushes and those things you use to rearrange your cuticles.

Learn about what scientists do and why they do it. Are there frauds and cheats? Sure, just like any other human endeavor. But, unlike, say religion, science is a self-correcting process. Check out last months Popular Science for a list of some scientists caught cheating. Have you ever seen the Church list the names of paedophiliac priests?

Does no one actually appreciate the work that goes into the things that make our lives easier and things that add pleasure and depth? Does anyone else have an appreciation for this wonderful world and its wonderful web of complexity? Science has given me a tremendous appreciation for life, for this world, and beyond. So instead of just talking out of your asshole, try learning so that you can at least make an informed criticism.

Thank You The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation

This just about guarantees the total collapse of Top 40 music into complete shite. From the NY Times Magazine.

Hit Song Science
By CLIVE THOMPSON

Published: December 14, 2003

When Norah Jones released her first album, she was a long shot at best. ''Come Away With Me'' was filled with mellow, sultry tunes -- precisely the opposite of the histrionic diva pop crowding the charts. Virtually no one expected Jones to score a major hit.

No one, that is, except for a piece of artificial intelligence called Hit Song Science, a program that tries to determine, with mathematical precision, whether a song is going to be a Top 40 hit. When the scientists fed Jones's album into that computer, alarm bells went off: the program predicted that eight tracks would hit the charts. ''We were like, whoa, that's funky,'' says Mike McCready, the C.E.O. of Polyphonic HMI, the Barcelona-based company that developed the software application. A few months later, Jones's album went multiplatinum -- and Hit Song Science had proved it could pick a hit as well as Clive Davis.

But how? At the heart of the program is a ''clustering'' algorithm that locates acoustic similarities between songs, like common bits of rhythm, harmonies or keys. The software takes a new tune and compares it with the mathematical signatures of the last 30 years of Top 40 hits. The closer the song is to ''a hit cluster,'' the more likely -- in theory -- that the kids won't be able to resist it. Yet the weird thing is, songs that are mathematically similar don't necessarily sound the same. The scientists found that U2 is similar to Beethoven, and that Van Halen shares qualities with the piano rock of Vanessa Carlton. Even more bizarrely, 50 Cent's throbbing rap tune ''If I Can't'' correlates with ''(There's) No Gettin' Over Me,'' a twangy country ditty by Ronnie Milsap.

This year, several record companies began using Hit Song Science to help pick which songs on an album to promote. Others are now using it in the studio, taking a rough mix of a new song, checking to see how hit-worthy it is, then tweaking it until it has ''good mathematics,'' as McCready puts it. He can foresee a day when most major hits will have been vetted by algorithms.

Which is, depending on how you look at it, either a wonderful breakthrough for science or an incredibly bleak statement about the music industry. Critics for years have complained that record labels produce only bland albums that mimic what's already popular. But Hit Song Science takes that trend to its logical absurdity: it does not merely aim at the middle of the road -- it calculates it, with scientific precision.

An Admonishment

Let me give you guys out there a word of advice: If you’re a poor sap like me, don’t ever read any books about the evolutionary psychology of sex. They are just too depressing. I’ve read two or three now and, after finishing each one, I have spiraled downwards past melancholy, past utter perdition, and straight to suicidal. This is because these texts lend scientific credence to what I have suspected all along, namely, that I am not particularly attractive to women.

These books all tend to say the same thing: “The idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder is basically a bunch of junk. Look. Genes are selfish and just want to be passed from one generation to the next. And evolution has instilled within us various methods for finding the best possible person with whom we can reproduce. These methods vary depending upon our role in the whole affair, i.e. – our gender.”

Women, for example, bear the burden of having an embryo develop in their wombs for nine months, risk life and limb in that dreadful business of childbirth, and then suffer with an infant suckling at their breasts for a stretch, causing them to become sore, etc. Men, on the other hand, don’t have wombs and thusly needn’t worry about some parasitic fetus gestating therein or its egress. Ergo, the only worry we have is getting frustrated for a time because we are forced to watch some wrinkly ball of skin take our place at the breasts of our goodly wife. We tend to think that those tits are ours and don’t like to see anyone else playing with them. Except, of course, if another woman is playing with them. (Or our wife is playing with her own tits.) Let’s face it here, we men just want to get laid. It wasn’t a bunch of women drooling over the release of the DVD director’s cut of When Larry Ate Sally or The Hunt for Pink October – it was men.

What this all boils down to is that women invest quite a bit in this whole sordid baby-making affair while we men ideally need only donate a single sperm and then bust out of Dodge. The spanner that gets thrown into our works is that we human beings take forever and a day to grow up and become self-sufficient. Other animals are out in the world kicking ass and taking names within a few months of birth while we humans are weighted down with lazy-ass, unemployed slugs who live in our basements well into their thirties. (You never see adult horses playing Nintendo in Mr. and Mrs. Ed’s stable, do ya? Sloth seems to be a uniquely human trait.) Ergo, human fathers need to hang around after meiosis.

“So what?” you ask. “The fact that men go out and try to get laid all the time while women seek commitment isn’t exactly news.” Fair enough. But I’m getting to my point. You see, these various roles dictate what we seek in a mate. When we say men primarily look at the physical beauty of women, we are really saying that men are looking for signs that a woman is healthy and can carry a pregnancy to term and beyond. Our male ancestors sought women with clear skin, long hair, good hips, etc. and so do the men of the 21st century. (Regarding the last item, there seems to be a universal preference for women whose hip-to-waist ratio is about 0.7.) While this may be the year 2003, our brains are still wired in the same way as those of men c. 40,000B.C. If a woman can’t grow a decent mop and her skin is all carbuncular, she probably ain’t long of this earth. And if her hips are too narrow, what are the odds of being able to squeeze out that eight-pound mini-me from her belly?

Women, on the other hand, are thinking, “If that son of a bitch doesn’t want to stick around, I will just have to make him.” One of the ways they do this is by concealing the fertile time in their menstrual cycles. Unlike female chimpanzees, our closest genetic relatives, women don’t find their labia turning pink when in estrus, however funny that would be. Instead, women merely undergo a small change in temperature. Although I’d be willing to give it a shot, I suspect that most women would be turned off by some Neanderthal wielding a thermometer during foreplay. Thusly, we men are compelled to stick around to ensure that the offspring we raise are our own and not the milkman’s.

Anyway…So what do women seek in a partner? Since women invest so much of their time and physical effort into the production of progeny, they, not surprisingly, seek men who can materially invest in them and their children. Hence, women seek men of stature and material abundance. Joe Six-Pack may be a nice, handsome guy, but if he’s poor, what will he be able to provide to his offspring? The Aztec Sun-King didn’t have a harem of 1,500 nubile, young women because he blew his paycheck every Friday night down at the tavern.

Women look for men with power and with stuff. And it is for precisely this reason that I am unattractive to women and thusly get depressed. I may have a basement full of stuff, but it ain’t the stuff women are looking for. I haven’t amassed piles of wealth nor do I have armies of men who obey my every word. As Hank Kissinger observed, “Power is a great aphrodisiac.” And, being a lowly Help Desk Analyst, I ain’t got none.

About the only thing I’ve got going for me, say the evolutionary psychologists, is my above-average height. If someone is bigger than we are, it is natural for us to feel at least some initial intimidation. Our brains equate physical size with power. This probably accounts for why men tend to make $3000 a year above the norm for every inch of height they are above the average. This also probably explains why I’ve gotten laid in the past. My height sort of fools women for a time, they go temporarily insane. But it wears off eventually and they leave.

If you think this is all bullshit, sit back and ponder it for a while. Did the hot chicks in high school date the A students or the jocks? You don’t see groupies hanging out backstage after the performance of a symphony orchestra. They’re looking to hook up with a rich rock’n’roll star. Do you think Anna Nicole Smith married that old geezer because she thought he resembled Brad Pitt? Fuck no! He was rich and powerful. Did I mention he was rich and powerful?

Despite how positive my mother says it is that I am a nice and intelligent young man, neither of these traits has gotten me very far. After all, nice guys finish last. Rich and powerful guys finish first, however. (And most rich and powerful people are assholes.) This being the case, in the interest of my sperm, I have decided to forsake my niceness and become a jerk. $$ + power = pussy. When I’m in public, I’ll have a gorgeous babe on my arm featuring a slender gynecoid figure and its attendant 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. She’ll be nice and hypermammiferous too. I’ll be able to buy her collagen injections for her lips so they’ll look like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I don’t care if she’s only after my money because I am only after her snatch. True love is a myth, people! And since I’ll be so rich, I will be able to afford to hire someone to keep an eye on her. Yeah, you heard me right. Men have always felt that way – witness eunuchs, chastity belts, and female circumcision – we just have gotten to the point of using less gruesome methods of making sure the pussy stays put. I ain’t footin’ the bills for some other guy’s genes getting passed on down the line.Despite how positive my mother says it is that I am a nice and intelligent young man, neither of these traits has gotten me very far. After all, nice guys finish last. Rich and powerful guys finish first, however. (And most rich and powerful people are assholes.) This being the case, in the interest of my sperm, I have decided to forsake my niceness and become a jerk. $$ + power = pussy. When I’m in public, I’ll have a gorgeous babe on my arm featuring a slender gynecoid figure and its attendant 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio. She’ll be nice and hypermammiferous too. I’ll be able to buy her collagen injections for her lips so they’ll look like she could suck a golf ball through a garden hose. I don’t care if she’s only after my money because I am only after her snatch. True love is a myth, people! And since I’ll be so rich, I will be able to afford to hire someone to keep an eye on her. Yeah, you heard me right. Men have always felt that way – witness eunuchs, chastity belts, and female circumcision – we just have gotten to the point of using less gruesome methods of making sure the pussy stays put. I ain’t footin’ the bills for some other guy’s genes getting passed on down the line.

So, if I seem a bit glum, know that it’s only because I am all-too aware of my brackish countenance. And if I seem a bit quiet, know that it’s only because I am plotting away to become rich and powerful. My goal is to put as many copies of myself on this planet as possible.