The bill, proposed by Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, to strip government employees of their collective bargaining rights is now on a smooth road to passage. Similar, but less well-publicized, bills are on the table in Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Idaho, and other states.
The whole thing has been spun as a blow in favor of fiscal responsibility, to break the power of corrupt labor union bosses, and to allow administrators to fire inept workers without having to consider seniority. I'd like to cast the whole thing in a different light -- that these laws are bringing about a dangerous shift in the balance of power, and the results, especially for public schools, will be devastating.
First of all, let me state one thing up front; I have no lack of awareness of the fiscal situation. Between the recession, and years of poor management, many states are in dire situations. There's no doubt that some level of economic austerity is a necessity.
Stripping workers of their rights, however, isn't the way to accomplish this.
In my own school district, we've seen state revenue decline every year I've been here. We've had layoffs four years in a row, and are facing more this year. In New York State we are required to use a LIFO system -- last in, first out -- it can even come down to where your name fell on the school board agenda the day your hiring was approved. Fine, qualified teachers have lost their jobs because of this; but what other system would be fair?
"Merit, of course," is the usual response; but there the waters get deeper. Merit by whose standards? How do you quantify good teaching? Does the fact that currently in one of my elective classes, 30% of the students are failing, mean I'm a bad teacher? Does the fact that in the class immediately following that one, 100% of the students have a grade above 85%, mean that in the three-minute passing time between the two classes, I suddenly figured out how to teach well?
Standardized test scores clearly aren't the answer; any political correctness aside, you just can't expect equal scores, or even equal improvement in scores, in a poor, overcrowded, inner city school and a well-funded suburban school whose students come from wealthy, well-educated families. To put it bluntly: if you want to run schools like a factory, and would like a guarantee of equal quality in the product, you have to have equal quality in the raw materials.
So, the situation is as follows: 1) States are strapped for money, and property taxes are about as high as they can reasonably go. 2) Collective bargaining rights, and LIFO as a standard system for fair layoffs, are out the window, drastically shifting the balance of power away from teachers and into the hands of administrators. 3) Merit is difficult to establish, much less quantify, given the inherent inequities built into the system.
What happens now? I'd like to make a few predictions. I'm not, as a rule, given to prognosticating, but I think I can make a few guesses.
1) Schools, trapped between declining revenues and unfunded state mandates, will cut the budget in the only possible way; they'll cut staff. Without LIFO, they'll start laying off the most senior, and therefore most expensive, teachers first. This will benefit the budget in two ways -- it will give states the immediate result of a reduction in the money needed to pay salaries, and the lasting result of a reduction in the money those teachers are eligible for in retirement.
2) Class sizes will rise, and any non-"core" subjects -- music, the arts, and electives -- will be eliminated.
3) There will be a drastic reduction in the number of talented college students who choose to go into education.
Some people are predicting a backlash -- that the rise in pro-union sentiment because of Walker and his ilk will assure that they are one-term politicians. I don't know that that's necessarily true -- the anti-union rhetoric I'm hearing seems equally strong. But one thing I'm fairly certain of is that even if the pendulum eventually begins to swing the other way, it will be too late to prevent devastating consequences for public schools.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The valley of the shadow of uncanniness
Today in the news is a story about the creation of a robot named "Kaspar" at the University of Hertfordshire, whose purpose is to help autistic children relate to people better.
Kaspar is programmed not only to respond to speech, but to react when hugged or hurt. He is capable of demonstrating a number of facial expressions, helping autistic individuals learn to connect expressions with emotions in others. The program has tremendous potential, says Dr. Abigael San, a London clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society. "Autistic children like things that are made up of different parts, like a robot," she said, "so they may process what the robot does more easily than a real person."
I think this is awesome -- autism is a tremendously difficult disorder to deal with, much less to treat, and conventional therapies can take years and result in highly varied outcomes. Anything that is developed to help streamline the treatment process is all to the good.
I am equally intrigued, however, by my reaction to photographs of Kaspar. (You can see a photograph here.)
On looking at the picture, I had to suppress a shudder. Kaspar, to me, looks creepy, and I don't think it's just associations with dolls like Chucky that made me react that way. To me, Kaspar lies squarely in the Uncanny Valley.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley was first formalized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and it has to do with our reaction to non-human faces. A toy, doll, or robot with a very inhuman face is considered somewhere in the middle on the creepiness scale (think of the Transformers, the Iron Giant, or Sonny in I, Robot). As its features become more human, it generally becomes less creepy looking -- think of a stuffed toy, or a well-made doll. Then, at some point, there's a spike on the creepiness axis -- it's just too close to being like a human for comfort, but not close enough to be actually human -- and we tend to rank those faces as scarier than the purely non-human ones. This is the "Uncanny Valley."
This concept has been used to explain why a lot of people had visceral negative reactions to the protagonists in the movies The Polar Express and Beowulf. There was something a little too still, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something nonhuman pretending to be human, about the CGI faces of the characters. The character Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, however, seems to be on the uphill side of the Uncanny Valley; since he was played by a human actor, he had enough human-like characteristics that his android features were intriguing rather than disturbing.
It is an open question as to why the Uncanny Valley exists. It's been explained through mechanisms of mate selection (we are programmed to find attractive faces that respond in a thoroughly normal, human way, and to be repelled by human-like faces which do not, because normal responses are a sign of genetic soundness), fear of death or disease (the face of a corpse resides somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, as do the faces of individuals with some mental and physical disorders), or a simple violation of what it means to be human. A robot that is too close but not close enough to mimicking human behavior gets caught both ways -- it seems not to be a machine trying to appear human, but a human with abnormal appearance and reactions.
Don't get me wrong; I'm thrilled that Kaspar has been created. And given that a hallmark of autism is the inability to make judgments about body and facial language, I doubt an Uncanny Valley exists for autistic kids (or, perhaps, it is configured differently -- I don't think the question has been researched). But in most people, facial recognition is a very fundamental thing. It's hard-wired into our brains, at a very young age -- one of the first things a newborn baby does is fix onto its mother's face. We're extraordinarily good at recognizing faces, and face-like patterns (thus the phenomenon of pareidolia, or the detection of faces in wood grain, clouds, and grilled cheese sandwiches, about which I have blogged before).
It's just that the faces need to be either very much like human faces, or sufficiently far away, or they result in a strong aversive reaction. All of which makes me wonder who first came up with the concept of "clown."
Kaspar is programmed not only to respond to speech, but to react when hugged or hurt. He is capable of demonstrating a number of facial expressions, helping autistic individuals learn to connect expressions with emotions in others. The program has tremendous potential, says Dr. Abigael San, a London clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society. "Autistic children like things that are made up of different parts, like a robot," she said, "so they may process what the robot does more easily than a real person."
I think this is awesome -- autism is a tremendously difficult disorder to deal with, much less to treat, and conventional therapies can take years and result in highly varied outcomes. Anything that is developed to help streamline the treatment process is all to the good.
I am equally intrigued, however, by my reaction to photographs of Kaspar. (You can see a photograph here.)
On looking at the picture, I had to suppress a shudder. Kaspar, to me, looks creepy, and I don't think it's just associations with dolls like Chucky that made me react that way. To me, Kaspar lies squarely in the Uncanny Valley.
The concept of the Uncanny Valley was first formalized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970, and it has to do with our reaction to non-human faces. A toy, doll, or robot with a very inhuman face is considered somewhere in the middle on the creepiness scale (think of the Transformers, the Iron Giant, or Sonny in I, Robot). As its features become more human, it generally becomes less creepy looking -- think of a stuffed toy, or a well-made doll. Then, at some point, there's a spike on the creepiness axis -- it's just too close to being like a human for comfort, but not close enough to be actually human -- and we tend to rank those faces as scarier than the purely non-human ones. This is the "Uncanny Valley."
This concept has been used to explain why a lot of people had visceral negative reactions to the protagonists in the movies The Polar Express and Beowulf. There was something a little too still, a little too unnatural, a little too much like something nonhuman pretending to be human, about the CGI faces of the characters. The character Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, however, seems to be on the uphill side of the Uncanny Valley; since he was played by a human actor, he had enough human-like characteristics that his android features were intriguing rather than disturbing.
It is an open question as to why the Uncanny Valley exists. It's been explained through mechanisms of mate selection (we are programmed to find attractive faces that respond in a thoroughly normal, human way, and to be repelled by human-like faces which do not, because normal responses are a sign of genetic soundness), fear of death or disease (the face of a corpse resides somewhere in the Uncanny Valley, as do the faces of individuals with some mental and physical disorders), or a simple violation of what it means to be human. A robot that is too close but not close enough to mimicking human behavior gets caught both ways -- it seems not to be a machine trying to appear human, but a human with abnormal appearance and reactions.
Don't get me wrong; I'm thrilled that Kaspar has been created. And given that a hallmark of autism is the inability to make judgments about body and facial language, I doubt an Uncanny Valley exists for autistic kids (or, perhaps, it is configured differently -- I don't think the question has been researched). But in most people, facial recognition is a very fundamental thing. It's hard-wired into our brains, at a very young age -- one of the first things a newborn baby does is fix onto its mother's face. We're extraordinarily good at recognizing faces, and face-like patterns (thus the phenomenon of pareidolia, or the detection of faces in wood grain, clouds, and grilled cheese sandwiches, about which I have blogged before).
It's just that the faces need to be either very much like human faces, or sufficiently far away, or they result in a strong aversive reaction. All of which makes me wonder who first came up with the concept of "clown."
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Weekend wrap-up
It was a busy weekend here for your investigative reporters at Worldwide Wacko Watch. So much so that we checked last night to see if it was a full moon, which it wasn't -- in our clear post-blizzard sky hung the faintest thin crescent. It's just as well, because here at WWW we don't believe in the whole phases-of-the-moon-causing-nutty-behavior thing, anyway.
But whatever the cause, it seems like in the last couple of days the loons have been migrating. A few examples follow.
1) A couple in Malaysia are claiming that a tree in their yard in Penang is giving forth showers of holy water.
Odd-job worker Abdul Ghani Mohammed Hussein, 41, who owns the tree, reports that he first felt the showers one afternoon when he was heading out to feed the chickens.
"My wife, Norhayati Abdul Karim, also felt the showers," Hussein states. "But there was no rain at that time."
Hussein goes on to say, "The clear water sprinkles are heavier at night and we collected about a pail of water over the past week."
Norhayati, 38, a housewife, said that she had no problem with people coming to collect the "holy water," and stated that many considered it a blessing to wipe their faces with it. However, if people didn't want to wait, she'd be happy to sell them some for RM5 (about $1.65) per cup.
Dr. Zaidi Mat Isa, an entomologist from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, has other ideas, however.
"It's cicada urine," Dr. Isa said. Apparently the cicadas, which are present in large numbers, drink the tree's sap in large enough quantities that some of it gets forced out of their nether regions, to fall as a gentle rain upon the upturned faces of the devout.
Alarmed by the fact that some of the enthusiasts were observant Muslims, the Malaysian State Islamic Religious Department has put up a sign warning Muslims against worshiping the tree. The sign threatens a fine of RM3000 (about $1000) and up to two years in jail.
Myself, I think that finding out that I'd just rubbed bug pee all over my face would be penalty enough, don't you?
2) Moving from being pissed on to being pissed off, from Salem, Massachusetts comes the story of a warlock who is angry at Charlie Sheen.
Salem, as I am sure you already know, was the site of the famed 17th century witch trials that resulted in the deaths of nineteen innocent men and women. The children who were responsible for the accusations recanted their testimony one and all within ten years of the executions, essentially stating that they'd made the whole thing up. Having thus demonstrated that witchcraft is nonsense, Salem of course became a mecca for people who claim to be witches and warlocks.
And now this weekend, a Salem warlock who is ironically named Christian Day has said that he is going to cast a spell on Charlie Sheen.
Apparently, the people in Day's coven are pissed because Sheen made a comment in an interview last week that he was a "Vatican assassin warlock." Evidently being the only people in the world who are taking anything Charlie Sheen says seriously, the coven declared Sheen's use of the word "warlock" offensive, and Day now says that his group is going to cast a "binding spell" on Sheen to prevent him from using the word in such a fashion again.
I'm doubtful that the whole operation will be effective, but hey, why not? If there's even a chance that it'll get Charlie Sheen to shut up, I'm all for it.
Day, however, is open to other solutions, and suggests that Sheen come to the coven for a "cleansing" of "him, his home, and his career."
Myself, I think that Sheen needs a little more in the way of detox than a magical cleansing, but I suppose it's a start.
3) In a recent post I commented upon the British Ministry of Defence(MoD)'s recent release of thousands of documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK, and I referred to the case of the bright lights seen over Bromley (Kent) in 2003 as one of the more interesting, and unexplained, cases.
Now Stephany Cohen, a "spiritual healer" in Bromley, has said that she knows why the aliens were there: they were coming to Earth to have sex with her.
The aliens, whom Cohen says are called "the Grays" and are from a planet called "Cirus D," appear only to those who believe. "They are very loving and intelligent, and will only present themselves to those who accept them," she told a reporter for the Kent News-Shopper this weekend. "They are a good race who only likes to help others."
She then goes on to tell how they helped her, in particular.
"Sometimes you get raptures like strong orgasms," she said, "and you don't know where it comes from. It is energies being passed down to their children on Earth."
The whole thing kind of puts a new spin on the phrase "the aliens are coming," doesn't it?
Roy Lake, chairperson of the group London UFO Studies, expressed interest in the Bromley case, but delicately declined to comment on whether it was good for him, too. "I believe they are already here," he said, at least agreeing with Cohen on that point. "All I can say is, keep a vigil, and keep looking up."
So, that's about it for now here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. Like I said, a busy weekend, but we're willing to put in the extra time and effort to keep you informed. "Ever vigilant," that's our motto. That, and "Keeping the world safe from bug pee, Charlie Sheen, and horny aliens." But it's hard to fit all that on a logo, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."
But whatever the cause, it seems like in the last couple of days the loons have been migrating. A few examples follow.
1) A couple in Malaysia are claiming that a tree in their yard in Penang is giving forth showers of holy water.
Odd-job worker Abdul Ghani Mohammed Hussein, 41, who owns the tree, reports that he first felt the showers one afternoon when he was heading out to feed the chickens.
"My wife, Norhayati Abdul Karim, also felt the showers," Hussein states. "But there was no rain at that time."
Hussein goes on to say, "The clear water sprinkles are heavier at night and we collected about a pail of water over the past week."
Norhayati, 38, a housewife, said that she had no problem with people coming to collect the "holy water," and stated that many considered it a blessing to wipe their faces with it. However, if people didn't want to wait, she'd be happy to sell them some for RM5 (about $1.65) per cup.
Dr. Zaidi Mat Isa, an entomologist from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, has other ideas, however.
"It's cicada urine," Dr. Isa said. Apparently the cicadas, which are present in large numbers, drink the tree's sap in large enough quantities that some of it gets forced out of their nether regions, to fall as a gentle rain upon the upturned faces of the devout.
Alarmed by the fact that some of the enthusiasts were observant Muslims, the Malaysian State Islamic Religious Department has put up a sign warning Muslims against worshiping the tree. The sign threatens a fine of RM3000 (about $1000) and up to two years in jail.
Myself, I think that finding out that I'd just rubbed bug pee all over my face would be penalty enough, don't you?
2) Moving from being pissed on to being pissed off, from Salem, Massachusetts comes the story of a warlock who is angry at Charlie Sheen.
Salem, as I am sure you already know, was the site of the famed 17th century witch trials that resulted in the deaths of nineteen innocent men and women. The children who were responsible for the accusations recanted their testimony one and all within ten years of the executions, essentially stating that they'd made the whole thing up. Having thus demonstrated that witchcraft is nonsense, Salem of course became a mecca for people who claim to be witches and warlocks.
And now this weekend, a Salem warlock who is ironically named Christian Day has said that he is going to cast a spell on Charlie Sheen.
Apparently, the people in Day's coven are pissed because Sheen made a comment in an interview last week that he was a "Vatican assassin warlock." Evidently being the only people in the world who are taking anything Charlie Sheen says seriously, the coven declared Sheen's use of the word "warlock" offensive, and Day now says that his group is going to cast a "binding spell" on Sheen to prevent him from using the word in such a fashion again.
I'm doubtful that the whole operation will be effective, but hey, why not? If there's even a chance that it'll get Charlie Sheen to shut up, I'm all for it.
Day, however, is open to other solutions, and suggests that Sheen come to the coven for a "cleansing" of "him, his home, and his career."
Myself, I think that Sheen needs a little more in the way of detox than a magical cleansing, but I suppose it's a start.
3) In a recent post I commented upon the British Ministry of Defence(MoD)'s recent release of thousands of documents relating to UFO sightings in the UK, and I referred to the case of the bright lights seen over Bromley (Kent) in 2003 as one of the more interesting, and unexplained, cases.
Now Stephany Cohen, a "spiritual healer" in Bromley, has said that she knows why the aliens were there: they were coming to Earth to have sex with her.
The aliens, whom Cohen says are called "the Grays" and are from a planet called "Cirus D," appear only to those who believe. "They are very loving and intelligent, and will only present themselves to those who accept them," she told a reporter for the Kent News-Shopper this weekend. "They are a good race who only likes to help others."
She then goes on to tell how they helped her, in particular.
"Sometimes you get raptures like strong orgasms," she said, "and you don't know where it comes from. It is energies being passed down to their children on Earth."
The whole thing kind of puts a new spin on the phrase "the aliens are coming," doesn't it?
Roy Lake, chairperson of the group London UFO Studies, expressed interest in the Bromley case, but delicately declined to comment on whether it was good for him, too. "I believe they are already here," he said, at least agreeing with Cohen on that point. "All I can say is, keep a vigil, and keep looking up."
So, that's about it for now here at Worldwide Wacko Watch. Like I said, a busy weekend, but we're willing to put in the extra time and effort to keep you informed. "Ever vigilant," that's our motto. That, and "Keeping the world safe from bug pee, Charlie Sheen, and horny aliens." But it's hard to fit all that on a logo, so we'll stick with "Ever vigilant."
Monday, March 7, 2011
Live your dream! Unless it's the one where you're naked on the bus.
Last night I had the strangest dream, but it wasn't about a girl in a black bikini (sorry if you're too young to get that reference). One of my coworkers was going to be interviewed on public television by Yoko Ono. I won't mention who the interviewee was, but trust me, if there was a list of people who were likely to be interviewed by Yoko Ono, this woman would be near the bottom. So anyway, I was being driven to this event by our school psychologist, but we were going to be late because he had the sudden overwhelming need to find a grocery store so he could buy a bag of potato chips.
I won't go any further into it, because at that point it started to get a little weird.
It is an open question why people dream, but virtually everyone does. During the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, there are parts of the mind that are as active as they are during wakefulness. This observation led brain scientists to call this stage "paradoxical sleep" -- paradoxical because while the body is usually very relaxed, the brain is firing like crazy.
Well, parts of it are. While the visual and auditory centers are lighting up like a Christmas tree, your prefrontal cortex is snoozing in a deck chair. The prefrontal cortex is your decision-making module and reality filter, and this at least partly explains why dreams seem so normal while you're in them but so bizarre when you wake up and your prefrontal cortex has a chance to reboot.
The content of dreams has been a subject of speculation for years, and all available evidence indicates that the little "Your Dreams Interpreted" books you can buy in the supermarket checkout lines are unadulterated horse waste. Apparently there is some thought that much of our dream content is involved with processing long-term memories; but equally plausible theories suggest that dreaming is a way of resetting our dopamine and serotonin receptors, or a way of decommissioning old neural pathways (so-called "parasitic nodes"). Probably, it aids in all three. Whatever it is, however, it's important -- all mammal species tested undergo REM sleep, some for as much as eight hours a night.
It's interesting that there is a fairly consistent set of content types in dreams, regardless of your culture or background. Some of the more common ones are dreams of falling, being chased, fighting, seeing someone who has died, having sexual experiences, being in a public place while inappropriately dressed, and being unable to attend interviews by Yoko Ono because of searching for potato chips.
A few well-documented but less common dreamlike experiences include lucid dreams (being aware that you're dreaming while it's happening), hypnogogic experiences (dreams in light sleep rather than REM), and night terrors (terrifying dreams during deep sleep). This last-mentioned is something that is found almost exclusively in children, and almost always ceases entirely by age twelve. My younger son had night terrors, and the first time it happened was truly one of the scariest things I've ever experienced. At 11:30 one night he started shrieking -- I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall like a fury, to find him sitting bolt upright in bed, trembling, eyes wide open, and drenched with sweat. I ran to him and said, "What's wrong?" He pointed to an empty corner of the room and said, "It's staring at me!"
I should mention at this point that I had just recently watched the movie The Sixth Sense.
When I finished peeing my pants, I was able to pull myself together enough to realize that he was having a night terror, and that there were in fact no spirits of dead people staring at him from the corner of his bedroom. When I got him calmed down, he went back into a deep sleep -- and the next morning remembered nothing at all.
I, on the other hand, required several months of therapy to recover completely.
Whatever purpose dreams and other associated phenomena serve, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are "supernatural" in any sense. Precognitive dreams, for instance, most likely occur because you dream every night, about a relatively restricted number of types of events, and just by the law of large numbers at some point you'll probably dream something that will end up resembling a future event. There is no mystical significance to the content of our dreams -- it is formed of our own thoughts and memories, both pleasant and unpleasant; our fears and wishes, our emotions and knowledge; so they are at their base a reflection of the bits and pieces of who we are. It's no wonder that they are funny, scary, weird, complex, erotic, disturbing, exhilarating, and perplexing, because we are all of those things.
So, next time you're in the midst of a crazy dream, you can be comforted by the fact that you are having an experience that is shared by all of humanity, and most other mammals as well. What you're dreaming is no more significant, but also no more peculiar, than what the rest of us are dreaming. Just sit back and enjoy the show. And give my regards to Yoko Ono.
I won't go any further into it, because at that point it started to get a little weird.
It is an open question why people dream, but virtually everyone does. During the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, there are parts of the mind that are as active as they are during wakefulness. This observation led brain scientists to call this stage "paradoxical sleep" -- paradoxical because while the body is usually very relaxed, the brain is firing like crazy.
Well, parts of it are. While the visual and auditory centers are lighting up like a Christmas tree, your prefrontal cortex is snoozing in a deck chair. The prefrontal cortex is your decision-making module and reality filter, and this at least partly explains why dreams seem so normal while you're in them but so bizarre when you wake up and your prefrontal cortex has a chance to reboot.
The content of dreams has been a subject of speculation for years, and all available evidence indicates that the little "Your Dreams Interpreted" books you can buy in the supermarket checkout lines are unadulterated horse waste. Apparently there is some thought that much of our dream content is involved with processing long-term memories; but equally plausible theories suggest that dreaming is a way of resetting our dopamine and serotonin receptors, or a way of decommissioning old neural pathways (so-called "parasitic nodes"). Probably, it aids in all three. Whatever it is, however, it's important -- all mammal species tested undergo REM sleep, some for as much as eight hours a night.
It's interesting that there is a fairly consistent set of content types in dreams, regardless of your culture or background. Some of the more common ones are dreams of falling, being chased, fighting, seeing someone who has died, having sexual experiences, being in a public place while inappropriately dressed, and being unable to attend interviews by Yoko Ono because of searching for potato chips.
A few well-documented but less common dreamlike experiences include lucid dreams (being aware that you're dreaming while it's happening), hypnogogic experiences (dreams in light sleep rather than REM), and night terrors (terrifying dreams during deep sleep). This last-mentioned is something that is found almost exclusively in children, and almost always ceases entirely by age twelve. My younger son had night terrors, and the first time it happened was truly one of the scariest things I've ever experienced. At 11:30 one night he started shrieking -- I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall like a fury, to find him sitting bolt upright in bed, trembling, eyes wide open, and drenched with sweat. I ran to him and said, "What's wrong?" He pointed to an empty corner of the room and said, "It's staring at me!"
I should mention at this point that I had just recently watched the movie The Sixth Sense.
When I finished peeing my pants, I was able to pull myself together enough to realize that he was having a night terror, and that there were in fact no spirits of dead people staring at him from the corner of his bedroom. When I got him calmed down, he went back into a deep sleep -- and the next morning remembered nothing at all.
I, on the other hand, required several months of therapy to recover completely.
Whatever purpose dreams and other associated phenomena serve, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are "supernatural" in any sense. Precognitive dreams, for instance, most likely occur because you dream every night, about a relatively restricted number of types of events, and just by the law of large numbers at some point you'll probably dream something that will end up resembling a future event. There is no mystical significance to the content of our dreams -- it is formed of our own thoughts and memories, both pleasant and unpleasant; our fears and wishes, our emotions and knowledge; so they are at their base a reflection of the bits and pieces of who we are. It's no wonder that they are funny, scary, weird, complex, erotic, disturbing, exhilarating, and perplexing, because we are all of those things.
So, next time you're in the midst of a crazy dream, you can be comforted by the fact that you are having an experience that is shared by all of humanity, and most other mammals as well. What you're dreaming is no more significant, but also no more peculiar, than what the rest of us are dreaming. Just sit back and enjoy the show. And give my regards to Yoko Ono.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Sending pucks to Bolivia
In yesterday's post, I made the claim that men don't necessarily always think only about sports or sex, that sometimes we think about other things, such as quantum mechanics. This caused a couple of my female readers to snort with derision, and remark that they've never seen evidence of any such thing. Just to prove that my statement was true, today's subject is: quantum mechanics.
Actually, I've been thinking about quantum mechanics a good bit lately, as I've been re-reading Brian Greene's awesome and mind-blowing book The Fabric of the Cosmos, surely one of the most lucid, readable books ever to be written on the subject of how completely freakin' weird the universe is. No offense to Stephen Hawking, but it beats A Brief History of Time by about a megaparsec. Even the illustrated version.
I think the thing that strikes me the most, every time I think about such things, is that our perception of the objects in our lives as ordinary misses how strange even everyday objects actually are. I have no claims to be an expert -- despite the "B. S. Physics" on my diploma, I was a lackluster physics student at best, and most of what I understand about such things has come in the last fifteen years when I really started reading up on the subject -- but what I do understand about it rocks my world.
Here are a few bits of physics weirdness, just to turn your Sunday morning inside-out. Please keep in mind as you read this that all of this isn't speculation -- it's hard science, experimentally verified over and over.
1) You never see the present. Everything you've ever seen is in the past. Even these words you're reading right now. You are seeing your computer screen as it was about a billionth of a second ago, when the light left the screen. The further away something is, the further back in time you're looking. You see the moon as it was three seconds ago; the sun as it was nine minutes ago; and the closest star (Alpha Centauri) as it was 4.3 years ago. If Alpha Centauri vanished at 8:00 this morning, you would have no way of knowing it for another 4.3 years.
2) What the word "now" means isn't the same for everyone. Einstein did away with that notion. Not only does relativity predict that individuals traveling relative to each other experience differences in the rate at which time passes, they don't even agree on whether two events were simultaneous or not. So if I snap my fingers, and at that moment Steve and Joe were the same distance away from me but Steve was moving toward me and Joe was moving away from me, by Steve's clock the snap would have occurred earlier than it would by my clock, and by Joe's clock it would have happened later... and we'd all be correct. Further, if (by my perspective) Steve and Joe both snapped their fingers simultaneously, neither Steve nor Joe would think those two events were simultaneous at all -- both Steve and Joe would perceive his own snap as coming first! Three different measurements of the same events -- and once again, all three perceptions would be 100% correct.
3) Particles aren't hard little billiard balls. Remember the protons, neutrons, and electrons your chemistry teacher drew on the board, looking like little dots? Forget that. They don't exist. Or at least, that's not the most fundamental reality. Electrons aren't particles, they're fields of probabilities -- a smear of likelihoods that the electron is in one place or the other. It's convenient to say that "an electron is here" -- but what this really means is that "here" is the location where the probability field has its highest value. Now, don't misunderstand this; physicists aren't using "probability" to mean "it's definitely either here or there, and we just happen not to know," in the same sense that I could say that the probability of rolling a four on a fair die is 1/6, and that (even if I can't see the outcome) it either is or isn't a four. No, it's weirder than that: the electron is the probability field. If I use a detector, I can pinpoint its location for a moment, but before that moment and after it, the electron really is a spread-out haze of probabilities. The experimental confirmation of this idea, revolving around the mind-boggling principle called Bell's Inequality (after the brilliant Irish physicist John Bell), showed that until it hits a detector, an electron flying from a source takes all possible paths to get there. It's as if when Joe Nieuwendyk winds up for a slapshot, the puck travels between his stick and the net by all possible trajectories at the same time, including pathways that went from stick to net via Bolivia, Mars, and the Andromeda Galaxy. What we see -- that the puck goes straight from stick to net -- is just the average of all of the possible pathways!
(Drat, I slipped back into talking about sports, didn't I? And I was doing so well, up until that point.)
Again, recall that this is not just some metaphorical way of talking about things; this is the reality of the universe, experimentally confirmed every which way from Sunday. Even our conventional perception of objects as solid is an illusion -- most of matter is empty space, and the feeling of solidity when you give a passionate kiss to your significant other is just because you're feeling the mutual repulsion between the electrons in your lips and the electrons in your sweetheart's. Your lips never really touch, as peculiar as that sounds.
(Admit it: after I slipped up with sports, you knew I'd have to work in sex, as well.)
I wish I knew more about this subject (quantum mechanics, not sex). I find it fascinating that our simplistic understanding through classical physics can be simultaneously so useful and so wildly incomplete. I, for one, enjoy having my mind blown occasionally, to see that the world is amazing and beautiful and bizarre. Or, as J. B. S. Haldane once said, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine."
Actually, I've been thinking about quantum mechanics a good bit lately, as I've been re-reading Brian Greene's awesome and mind-blowing book The Fabric of the Cosmos, surely one of the most lucid, readable books ever to be written on the subject of how completely freakin' weird the universe is. No offense to Stephen Hawking, but it beats A Brief History of Time by about a megaparsec. Even the illustrated version.
I think the thing that strikes me the most, every time I think about such things, is that our perception of the objects in our lives as ordinary misses how strange even everyday objects actually are. I have no claims to be an expert -- despite the "B. S. Physics" on my diploma, I was a lackluster physics student at best, and most of what I understand about such things has come in the last fifteen years when I really started reading up on the subject -- but what I do understand about it rocks my world.
Here are a few bits of physics weirdness, just to turn your Sunday morning inside-out. Please keep in mind as you read this that all of this isn't speculation -- it's hard science, experimentally verified over and over.
1) You never see the present. Everything you've ever seen is in the past. Even these words you're reading right now. You are seeing your computer screen as it was about a billionth of a second ago, when the light left the screen. The further away something is, the further back in time you're looking. You see the moon as it was three seconds ago; the sun as it was nine minutes ago; and the closest star (Alpha Centauri) as it was 4.3 years ago. If Alpha Centauri vanished at 8:00 this morning, you would have no way of knowing it for another 4.3 years.
2) What the word "now" means isn't the same for everyone. Einstein did away with that notion. Not only does relativity predict that individuals traveling relative to each other experience differences in the rate at which time passes, they don't even agree on whether two events were simultaneous or not. So if I snap my fingers, and at that moment Steve and Joe were the same distance away from me but Steve was moving toward me and Joe was moving away from me, by Steve's clock the snap would have occurred earlier than it would by my clock, and by Joe's clock it would have happened later... and we'd all be correct. Further, if (by my perspective) Steve and Joe both snapped their fingers simultaneously, neither Steve nor Joe would think those two events were simultaneous at all -- both Steve and Joe would perceive his own snap as coming first! Three different measurements of the same events -- and once again, all three perceptions would be 100% correct.
3) Particles aren't hard little billiard balls. Remember the protons, neutrons, and electrons your chemistry teacher drew on the board, looking like little dots? Forget that. They don't exist. Or at least, that's not the most fundamental reality. Electrons aren't particles, they're fields of probabilities -- a smear of likelihoods that the electron is in one place or the other. It's convenient to say that "an electron is here" -- but what this really means is that "here" is the location where the probability field has its highest value. Now, don't misunderstand this; physicists aren't using "probability" to mean "it's definitely either here or there, and we just happen not to know," in the same sense that I could say that the probability of rolling a four on a fair die is 1/6, and that (even if I can't see the outcome) it either is or isn't a four. No, it's weirder than that: the electron is the probability field. If I use a detector, I can pinpoint its location for a moment, but before that moment and after it, the electron really is a spread-out haze of probabilities. The experimental confirmation of this idea, revolving around the mind-boggling principle called Bell's Inequality (after the brilliant Irish physicist John Bell), showed that until it hits a detector, an electron flying from a source takes all possible paths to get there. It's as if when Joe Nieuwendyk winds up for a slapshot, the puck travels between his stick and the net by all possible trajectories at the same time, including pathways that went from stick to net via Bolivia, Mars, and the Andromeda Galaxy. What we see -- that the puck goes straight from stick to net -- is just the average of all of the possible pathways!
(Drat, I slipped back into talking about sports, didn't I? And I was doing so well, up until that point.)
Again, recall that this is not just some metaphorical way of talking about things; this is the reality of the universe, experimentally confirmed every which way from Sunday. Even our conventional perception of objects as solid is an illusion -- most of matter is empty space, and the feeling of solidity when you give a passionate kiss to your significant other is just because you're feeling the mutual repulsion between the electrons in your lips and the electrons in your sweetheart's. Your lips never really touch, as peculiar as that sounds.
(Admit it: after I slipped up with sports, you knew I'd have to work in sex, as well.)
I wish I knew more about this subject (quantum mechanics, not sex). I find it fascinating that our simplistic understanding through classical physics can be simultaneously so useful and so wildly incomplete. I, for one, enjoy having my mind blown occasionally, to see that the world is amazing and beautiful and bizarre. Or, as J. B. S. Haldane once said, "The universe is not only queerer than we imagine; it is queerer than we can imagine."
Friday, March 4, 2011
The UFO files
Yesterday, the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced that it has declassified and released 8,500 pages of reports on UFO sightings in the United Kingdom.
As usual, it's a mixed bag. There are a few there I'd like an explanation for, most notably the "zigzagging lights" seen by more than one person in 2003, over Bromley, Kent. They were seen by a number of people, including a helicopter pilot - but they didn't show up on radar, and were never satisfactorily accounted for.
The released documents also contain the reports which led to a discussion in the House of Lords in January 1979 regarding whether aliens had visited the Earth -- the only such discussion, I believe, that has ever taken place in the governing body of a country. The subject was introduced by the amusingly-named Brinsley LePoer Trench, Lord Clancarty, who was a prominent UFOlogist and a general crank. Clancarty was a champion of the Hollow Earth Theory -- that there were highly advanced civilizations living inside the Earth, which is hollow (as you'd undoubtedly already gathered from the name of the theory), and those civilizations are able to exit through holes at both poles. Clancarty himself claimed to be descended from aliens, and was able to trace his lineage back to 63,000 BC. So you can imagine that with such impressive credentials, when Clancarty demanded that the House of Lords examine the evidence and come to an official answer as to whether aliens had visited Earth, they complied. (The answer the House of Lords came to was, "No.")
Also in the files are descriptions of the 1967 incident in which six small flying saucers were discovered in locations along a straight line in southern England, prompting a response by the RAF, firefighters, bomb disposal units, various local constabularies, and the British Intelligence Agency. They turned out to be the results of a project by engineering students at Farnborough Technical College.
Then, there's the guy who got up in the middle of the night for a glass of milk, and was terrified to see a huge, cigar-shaped UFO whose engines rattled the house. Afterwards, he reported that he had "gained a whole hour" and suspected that the aliens had beamed him up and made his biological clock, and his actual watch, lose track of the correct time.
MoD officials informed the man that because it was October, Britain had gone off Daylight Savings Time that evening, so everyone in Britain had experienced the same time discontinuity.
There are also drawings. My favorite is this one:
It shows how the updraft from a UFO could create crop circles, thus giving us information on two different phenomena at the same time. My first thought on seeing this photo was, "Why would aliens from another world have images of Kenny from South Park painted on the side of their spacecraft?" But maybe that's not what those are. Maybe they're supposed to be the aliens themselves, arms wide open in a gesture of welcome. Or maybe the aliens have hung their yellow rain slickers out to dry. I don't know.
In any case, if you're curious, the MoD is putting the documents online, available for the public, on a website (here). I encourage you to peruse them. I know I will.
As usual, it's a mixed bag. There are a few there I'd like an explanation for, most notably the "zigzagging lights" seen by more than one person in 2003, over Bromley, Kent. They were seen by a number of people, including a helicopter pilot - but they didn't show up on radar, and were never satisfactorily accounted for.
The released documents also contain the reports which led to a discussion in the House of Lords in January 1979 regarding whether aliens had visited the Earth -- the only such discussion, I believe, that has ever taken place in the governing body of a country. The subject was introduced by the amusingly-named Brinsley LePoer Trench, Lord Clancarty, who was a prominent UFOlogist and a general crank. Clancarty was a champion of the Hollow Earth Theory -- that there were highly advanced civilizations living inside the Earth, which is hollow (as you'd undoubtedly already gathered from the name of the theory), and those civilizations are able to exit through holes at both poles. Clancarty himself claimed to be descended from aliens, and was able to trace his lineage back to 63,000 BC. So you can imagine that with such impressive credentials, when Clancarty demanded that the House of Lords examine the evidence and come to an official answer as to whether aliens had visited Earth, they complied. (The answer the House of Lords came to was, "No.")
Also in the files are descriptions of the 1967 incident in which six small flying saucers were discovered in locations along a straight line in southern England, prompting a response by the RAF, firefighters, bomb disposal units, various local constabularies, and the British Intelligence Agency. They turned out to be the results of a project by engineering students at Farnborough Technical College.
Then, there's the guy who got up in the middle of the night for a glass of milk, and was terrified to see a huge, cigar-shaped UFO whose engines rattled the house. Afterwards, he reported that he had "gained a whole hour" and suspected that the aliens had beamed him up and made his biological clock, and his actual watch, lose track of the correct time.
MoD officials informed the man that because it was October, Britain had gone off Daylight Savings Time that evening, so everyone in Britain had experienced the same time discontinuity.
There are also drawings. My favorite is this one:
It shows how the updraft from a UFO could create crop circles, thus giving us information on two different phenomena at the same time. My first thought on seeing this photo was, "Why would aliens from another world have images of Kenny from South Park painted on the side of their spacecraft?" But maybe that's not what those are. Maybe they're supposed to be the aliens themselves, arms wide open in a gesture of welcome. Or maybe the aliens have hung their yellow rain slickers out to dry. I don't know.
In any case, if you're curious, the MoD is putting the documents online, available for the public, on a website (here). I encourage you to peruse them. I know I will.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Rapture watch
I just took a look at the Rapture Index site (here) to find out how long it's going to be until the Rapture, the moment predicted in the Book of Revelation at which all of the righteous are bodily assumed up into heaven, and all of us godless heathens will be left behind to throw big parties and to finally be able to teach evolution in the schools without fear of harassment and/or death threats, or, by some accounts, to be submitted to agonizing tortures by the Antichrist, the Beast, Satan, and other Cosmic Bad Guys.
Of course, the Rapture Index site itself has a disclaimer that it's not trying to predict the Rapture. That's god's provenance, after all. Matthew 24:36 says, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Which is a pretty clear and unambiguous statement, unlike most of the apocalyptic prophecies in the bible. In any case, the Rapture Index takes world news and attempts to distill it down to events which might have some place amongst the predictions in Revelation, and assigns a number to how serious those events are. The Rapture Index is the sum of all of the individual numbers, and the higher it is, the closer to the End Times we're supposed to be. (Anything over 160 is interpreted as "Fasten your seatbelts." I didn't just make that up, it's right from the site.)
Currently, we're at 177.
We got bumped up a couple of notches by the recent earthquakes and the unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. A few of the individual indexes are understandable, based even on my admittedly slim knowledge of biblical prophecy -- the focus on happenings in the Middle East, any stories about anti-Christian stuff, and so on. A few of them are peculiar, however, and one has to wonder how they're measured. How, for example, do you measure "The Mark of the Beast" (index #32)? Many of the indexes are annotated, but that one isn't, and it's hard to fathom why they assigned that one a 3. Did they go around looking for people with the number 666 tattooed on their foreheads, or something? "Beast Government" (index #33) at least has an annotation, but it isn't especially enlightening; it's also given a 3, and they state, "Europe is facing its worst economic crisis." Which, I suppose, is rather beastly, but I don't think that's how they meant it. I know that a lot of the Beast Stuff has to do with one-world government and so on, so maybe they figure that the European Union is a sign of the End Times.
Most of it seems to be random numbers assigned to things that are hardly, um, revelations to most of us. "Crime Rate" (index #17) is given a rating of 4, because "Violent crime dominates the news," but when doesn't it? It's not like that's a big change, or anything. Also from the Teachings of St. Obvious of Duh comes index #30, "The Peace Process," in which we are told that "The Israelis and the Palestinians are not talking to each other." They even rank "Date Settings" (index #35) at 3 because "There is a huge increase in the number of books focused on 2012 AD." So we now have the Mayan nonsense mixing in with the fundamentalist nonsense to create a whole new, synthetic brand of nonsense.
Another peculiar one is "Civil Rights" (index #39), which is given a 4. There's no annotation, so we're left wondering if civil rights are a good thing or a bad thing, Rapture-wise. I think that would be worth knowing, don't you? How else would we know if it's okay to discriminate or be racist or bigoted?
Although 177 is quite high, you may be interested to know that it's not the highest the Rapture Index has ever been. It reached a record high of 182 on the 24th of September, 2001, right after 9-11, the day that then-President Bush froze the assets of hundreds of suspected terrorists and took the first steps toward the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite that, the Righteous are still with us. So I guess Matthew 24:36 was right, they really don't knoweth the hour.
Sitting where I am, it's kind of hard to worry much about this. What with all of the social unrest, economic problems, and climate chaos, we have enough things to keep us up at night already. (Although we're told, under "Climate," index #43, that "Record cold temperatures have put the freeze on the global warming hype.") So my philosophy is a little like the one on the bumper sticker, have you seen it? A few years ago, fundamentalist-types started putting bumper stickers on their cars that said, "Come the Rapture, this car will be empty." Which triggered a response -- bumper stickers that said, "Come the Rapture, can I have your car?"
Of course, the Rapture Index site itself has a disclaimer that it's not trying to predict the Rapture. That's god's provenance, after all. Matthew 24:36 says, "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." Which is a pretty clear and unambiguous statement, unlike most of the apocalyptic prophecies in the bible. In any case, the Rapture Index takes world news and attempts to distill it down to events which might have some place amongst the predictions in Revelation, and assigns a number to how serious those events are. The Rapture Index is the sum of all of the individual numbers, and the higher it is, the closer to the End Times we're supposed to be. (Anything over 160 is interpreted as "Fasten your seatbelts." I didn't just make that up, it's right from the site.)
Currently, we're at 177.
We got bumped up a couple of notches by the recent earthquakes and the unrest in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. A few of the individual indexes are understandable, based even on my admittedly slim knowledge of biblical prophecy -- the focus on happenings in the Middle East, any stories about anti-Christian stuff, and so on. A few of them are peculiar, however, and one has to wonder how they're measured. How, for example, do you measure "The Mark of the Beast" (index #32)? Many of the indexes are annotated, but that one isn't, and it's hard to fathom why they assigned that one a 3. Did they go around looking for people with the number 666 tattooed on their foreheads, or something? "Beast Government" (index #33) at least has an annotation, but it isn't especially enlightening; it's also given a 3, and they state, "Europe is facing its worst economic crisis." Which, I suppose, is rather beastly, but I don't think that's how they meant it. I know that a lot of the Beast Stuff has to do with one-world government and so on, so maybe they figure that the European Union is a sign of the End Times.
Most of it seems to be random numbers assigned to things that are hardly, um, revelations to most of us. "Crime Rate" (index #17) is given a rating of 4, because "Violent crime dominates the news," but when doesn't it? It's not like that's a big change, or anything. Also from the Teachings of St. Obvious of Duh comes index #30, "The Peace Process," in which we are told that "The Israelis and the Palestinians are not talking to each other." They even rank "Date Settings" (index #35) at 3 because "There is a huge increase in the number of books focused on 2012 AD." So we now have the Mayan nonsense mixing in with the fundamentalist nonsense to create a whole new, synthetic brand of nonsense.
Another peculiar one is "Civil Rights" (index #39), which is given a 4. There's no annotation, so we're left wondering if civil rights are a good thing or a bad thing, Rapture-wise. I think that would be worth knowing, don't you? How else would we know if it's okay to discriminate or be racist or bigoted?
Although 177 is quite high, you may be interested to know that it's not the highest the Rapture Index has ever been. It reached a record high of 182 on the 24th of September, 2001, right after 9-11, the day that then-President Bush froze the assets of hundreds of suspected terrorists and took the first steps toward the invasion of Afghanistan. Despite that, the Righteous are still with us. So I guess Matthew 24:36 was right, they really don't knoweth the hour.
Sitting where I am, it's kind of hard to worry much about this. What with all of the social unrest, economic problems, and climate chaos, we have enough things to keep us up at night already. (Although we're told, under "Climate," index #43, that "Record cold temperatures have put the freeze on the global warming hype.") So my philosophy is a little like the one on the bumper sticker, have you seen it? A few years ago, fundamentalist-types started putting bumper stickers on their cars that said, "Come the Rapture, this car will be empty." Which triggered a response -- bumper stickers that said, "Come the Rapture, can I have your car?"
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