The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
[William Blake]
On Homework
The following is from Scientific American of October 1860 (yes you did read that right!) and reprinted in the October 2010 issue. Methinks some of my friends out there may appreciate it!
Against Homework
A child who has been boxed up six hours in school might spend the next four hours in study, but it is impossible to develop the child’s intellect in this way. The laws of nature are inexorable. By dint of great and painful labor, the child may succeed in repeating a lot of words, like a parrot, but, with the power of its brain all exhausted, it is out of the question for it to really master and comprehend its lessons. The effect of the system is to enfeeble the intellect even more than the body. We never see a little girl staggering home under a load of books, or knitting her brow over them at eight o’clock in the evening, without wondering that our citizens do not arm themselves at once with carving knives, pokers, clubs, paving stones or any weapons at hand, and chase out the managers of our common schools, as they would wild beasts that were devouring their children.
Things
Now here’s something for the nosey and the magpies amongst us.
The Wellcome Collection in London wants your Things. Yeah not very specific is it! Well that’s the point.
Henry Wellcome was one of the world’s greatest collectors. On display in [the] Wellcome Collection you will find more than 500 objects from his original collection of over one-and-a-half million, spanning centuries and continents.
And now the collection is running a “community project” (my expression, not theirs) to add a modern perspective to this collection.
The project runs from just Tuesday 12 October to Friday 22 October. You are invited to go along between these dates (except Monday 18 October; the Wellcome is closed on Mondays) to give or loan a “thing” as long as it is smaller than your head. If you can’t get there in person you can always send in a photograph of your “thing”.
Alternatively you can go along just to gawp at the trash exotica other people have given.
But what should you take along? Well anything as long as it is no bigger than your head (there are a few other sensible restrictions like no explosives; see the terms & conditions) although the advice is to take a “thing” which has meaning for you. It doesn’t have to be valuable, or beautiful, or collectable … just something with meaning for you. And if that means you can’t bring yourself to part with it then by all means loan your “thing”.
This sounds like a fun project, much in the spirit of Keri Smith’s How to be an Explorer of the World.
More details on the Wellcome Collection website.
Now to decide what I take along …
“Things” runs from 12-22 October (except Monday 18 October) at Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE. Opening hours: 1000-1800 (Thursdays until 2200; closed Mondays).
Cooking by Internet
No, not an original title! And if you read the post called Cooking by Internet from Douglas Adams (yes, he who created Dilbert) I think you’ll see it isn’t quite so daft.
Adams is out to lunch (pun intended) but at the same time he’s often fucking brilliant. This is so daft it is awesome.
As he says “Don’t lie. You’d pay extra for it.”! Hmmm…
Religion as a Self-Fulfilling Prophesy
Here’s one of those longer quotes I mentioned earlier. I leave it here, without comment, for your consideration.
Religions are always stridently opposed to the world of the Supernatural. Alleged paranormal events represent competition for the miracles [aka paranormal events!] necessary to any religious belief system and thus compete for the allegiance and contributions of their believers […]
We can observe many members of society who appear to be intelligent and rational in the pursuit of their daily life. However, on Sundays they go to their church or temple. There they participate in incomprehensible and irrational rituals involving magic, prayer and other activities demeaning to their rational minds. Their rational mind tells them that a god does not exist and yet, there they sit and pray to him […]
[…] people tend to associate in communities of like-minded people. Believers restrict their circle of friend and family to other believers. They surround themselves with mirror images of themselves.
If people wear blinders successfully, then the young and naïve among them hear nothing but the desired belief. No reputable person in his or her sphere of life ever disagrees with or objects to the tenets of their common belief system. As time goes on, people in a mentally incestuous society consider it normal that all seemingly intelligent people believe as the community believes […]
[…] the believer sees non-believers as abnormal and undesirable. Thus, religious belief maintains itself through self-affirmation, insulation and demonization of non-believers.
[cliffkirtley at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/]
Quotes of the Week
It’s been an odd week, apart from the fact I’ve been ill, with not many good quotes which are short enough for here, but lots of long ones. Maybe I’ll blog the long quotes in separate posts later, meanwhile here are a handful of short ones.
James Joyce fans in Dublin spend up to 36 hours reading Ulysses aloud every year on June 16.
[Times; 29 September 2010]When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
[Isaac Asimov]The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
[Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance]Life is change that we don’t attend to.
[Cory Silverberg at http://sexuality.about.com ]Our experience of sexuality is inseparable from our experience of life.
[Cory Silverberg at http://sexuality.about.com ]
Snailr Postcard
Yay! I’m one of the lucky recipients of a postcard from The Snailr Project, brainchild of Anna over at little.red.boat. The card arrived this morning having taken almost a month to get here from somewhere in Texas.
Anna’s idea was that as she was doing a long (like 2 week) circular train trip round the US she would send random postcards to random volunteers to build up a sort of travelogue – except any one person got only one snapshot. In Anna’s words:
One journey of almost 7000 miles, six new cities, eight trains, fifteen days, and every vignette, observation and fractured bitty-bit of the travelogue broken up and sent as status messages the old way. By postcard. To a bunch of random people who asked for one. Because travelling slowly is nice. And so is leaving a trail to see where we have been.
Anna used a standard postcard, so she could prepare them in advance and not rely on local supplies. She then customised each card with description, drawing, or whatever along the way and posted them whenever a mailbox hove into sight.
He’s the card Anna sent me from somewhere in Texas, just after they had been involved in a train crash on Friday 10 September!
The caption to the map (which shows Anna’s route in red and the location with a * and snail logo) says
the snailr project isn’t injured. At all. Not even for insurance.
And the main text reads:
After the train had juddered to a sudden halt, and we pulled to a stop with one
sidehalf of a big, silver, grain truck (the front half) on one side of the train, the back half on the other, the rush around to find out who, if anyone, was injured, began. What a dreadful sentence. Sorry. Basically, we were ordered back to our seats and eight sets of people – first Amtrak staff, then paramedics, fire fighters, policemen, walked through the train asking if everyone was OK. They said they were. But half an hour later when people started talking to each other about later claims, all manner of injuries started appearing.
You can find Anna’s pictures from the trip with some commentary at snailrproject.com and also on Flickr.
I’m looking forward to the book of the postcards of the journey!
Bullshitology
Having been laid up for the last few days with a nasty stomach upset I’ve been catching up on a bit of reading, and finally finished Bad Science by Ben Goldacre. As it says on the cover, this is probably “the most important book you’ll read this year”, and that’s if, like me, you’re a scientist. If you’re one of those weedy, innumerate humanities types it is probably the most important book you’ll read this decade. Your life will never be the same again!
In the book Goldacre takes the lid off the way in which quacks, Big Pharma and journalists mislead and misinform (deliberately or otherwise) in order to sell their product to the gullible public who have no understanding of the scientific method or how to analyse, interpret and present data meaningfully. Inter alia he digs the dirt on cosmetics, nutritionists, drug testing and the MMR vaccine scare, examining the way in which the data are misrepresented, misunderstood and outright fiddled. Goldacre is a practising doctor as well as writing the Bad Science column (and blog) in the Guardian, so he knows whereof he speaks.
You’ll get scared when I say he shows how we all misunderstand risk and the way it is presented, but don’t be! The book isn’t technical, there’s no nasty maths and lots of explanations and real life examples. And only a small part of the book is about risk and statistics, although it is a recurrent theme. You don’t need any maths beyond the ability to do simple arithmetic. Not only does Goldacre know his stuff he writes in a light readable style which keeps you engaged, incredulous and turning the pages. Some of it is truly fascinating; some truly horrifying.
If there is one important thing to take from this book it is the way in which risk is not understood and is misrepresented – by most of us and by the media. Indeed it is so important I’ll run through it here using a simple example I’ve just made up.
BMX Jab Doubles Wobbly Cancer – Mothers Demand Ban says the tabloid headline. Maybe the BMX vaccine does double the risk of Wobbly Cancer, but what does this really mean? And are the mothers right to demand a ban? BMX protects children against Cox-Strokers Disease, a nasty infectious illness which leaves 10% of those infected (boys and girls) either blind or infertile or both. That’s 1 in 10 of those who get the disease become blind and/or infertile, so for 1000 cases there are 100 children with their lives ruined. Cox-Strokers is endemic in this country with thousands of cases a year and the government insists every child is vaccinated before they start pre-school. But mothers want the vaccine banned because the preventative vaccine puts their kids at double the risk of Wobbly Cancer. Should they worry? How much Wobbly Cancer is there? The data show that the likelihood of any child getting Wobbly Cancer is 1 in 100,000 per year. BMX doubles that rate so for every 100,000 vaccinated children there would be 2 cases of cancer each year – or one extra case (remember there is one anyway!). But if we don’t vaccinate the kids for every 100,000 there will be 10,000 (or 1 in 10) cases of blindness and/or infertility. Now you decide which risk you’d choose for your child – and whether the tabloids are scaremongering!
Even as a scientist I hadn’t fully appreciated the significance of how risk was being (mis-)presented – and I’m supposed to know! One thing this book has done for me is to stop me reading health and science articles in the mainstream media unless from a reputable science-qualified writer. Better to keep up with science through blogs written by scientists who do understand and can correctly interpret what data and risk mean.
You really should read this book!
A la recherche du temps perdu
I just must reblog this. Click the image to go to the full version.
It is a brilliant theory of time which complements my theory that time passes at a variable rate. Intuitively we know time passes at a variable rate. Remember how some morning you get up and go through your normal routine only to find you’re 20 minutes late leaving for work? But the next day you do exactly the same and you’re 15 minutes early? See, the passage of time is variable. Worse it is locally variable; ie. varies differently for me and you. Why can scientists not prove this? Because observing something is known to disrupt that which is being observed; the effect only happens if we’re not specifically looking at it.
Well that’s my crackpot theory anyway! 🙂
Nobel Prize for Medicine
This year’s Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. In general the Nobel Committee makes good decisions on who deserves recognition in the sciences and it isn’t often that I would quarrel with their choice. I’m not really competent to judge when it comes to the Literature prize. And it seems to me the Peace prize is always something between the doings of the court jester and a political football.
The first of this year’s prizes, announced on Monday, was the prize for Medicine which was awarded to Prof. Robert Edwards who devised (and with Prof. Patrick Steptoe developed) IVF.
I apologise in advance if my view upsets anyone (I know it will some) but this is one science award I will quarrel with. In my view IVF should have been strangled at birth.
I take a basically “egalitarian” view of our relationship with Nature: “Nature must be interfered with as little as possible. There are no safe limits so we must always show caution. Nature is fragile. Any risk is unacceptable.” (OK like all these generalisations that is a slight exageration of the detail of what I believe, but I certainly tend more towards the “egalitarian” view than any other.)
In consequence I feel that if a couple are unable to have children naturally then Nature has some good underlying reason for this and perhaps we should not be playing God. To me IVF is not a step forward but something which we should not be meddling in; it is the medicalisation of a normal part of normal life. Not being able to have children isn’t a life-threatening, debilitating or even disfiguring disease. Compare it with, for instance, on the one hand elective cosmetic surgery and on the other type 1 diabetes. (It is also the first step on the path to eugenics, but that’s a completely different argument which we won’t go into here.)
As such to me IVF is not something worthy of a Nobel prize. That is in no way to belittle Prof. Edwards’ and Prof. Steptoe’s undoubted medical and technical skills and their vision of how to solve the problems from which much has indeed been learnt. (For example, Prof. Steptoe was a pioneer in the development of laparoscopy as a surgical technique.) But just because we have the technology to do something does not mean we have to do it.
Prof. Edwards is on record as saying “The most important thing in life is having a child. Nothing is more special than a child.” All I can say is that if he thinks that putting another mouth to be fed on this planet is the most important thing ever, well I despair. Where are his ethics? Where was his Ethics Committee? Oh, hang on, back in ’60s and ’70s when the work was being done there probably wasn’t an Ethics Committee. Hmmm.