10.27.07

‘Gone Baby Gone’ is worth watching

Posted in art, ethics, movies at 11:23 pm by nogre

Go see ‘Gone Baby Gone‘.  It’s got good acting, some twists and good ol’ fashion moral ambiguity.   The kind of ambiguity that was around before everything started feeling like a politically correct press release and is going to be around once again when we come to our senses.   And nothing against PR departments and carefully crafted images but I happen to like the areas in between what we we are comfortable with: when we can ask questions of ourselves and not have ready answers we may learn something about ourselves and possibly others.  I think of it like how Jefferson rationalized writing a constitution to protect the inalienable rights of citizens while sleeping with his slaves. Props to the Afflecks for making this movie, Ben direction, Casey lead;  Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris, and a slew of other excellent authentic performances.

Permalink Comments

10.25.07

Watson Out as Unit of Biological Mass

Posted in Relativity, biology, evolution, news, science at 10:33 am by nogre

I guess ‘Watson’ is out as a name for the unit of biological mass with James’ comments that people of African decent are intellectually inferior to people of European decent. It always amazes me exactly how idiotic smart people can be. Pride is the devil’s favorite sin and it is my suspicion that people like James Watson and the old president of Harvard Larry Summers are guilty of it. It seems that they believe since they got where they were first, as old white men, that other people are somehow inferior.

What’s worse is that if James Watson can make such a mistake, I shudder to think how many others make it and how many others will use these comments to propagate messages of hate.

For the record this is one type of thing that I am trying to head off with my recent writings. If you understand that evolution is relative then you won’t use biology as a reason to claim superiority. You just can’t do it without contradicting relativistic principles. (update: I think an ethics paper is in my future to flesh this out a tad)

And these comments, if anything, just go to show how stupid old white men can be.

Permalink Comments

Check out Spoonbuzz

Posted in internet, marketing, motivation, products at 12:01 am by nogre

Y’all should check out Spoonbuzz. It’s a blog dedicated to marketing in the best possible way: making your vision of yourself and your world a reality. I guess the way I think of it is a cross between motivational speaking and down and dirty marketing advice from a ‘I want to be in marketing for the next 40 years’ guy. And that is a direct quote because Josh is a buddy of mine. So go to his blog and sign up for the rss feed.

Permalink Comments

10.22.07

Blogged by The Philosophers’ Carnival #55, Sweet!

Posted in Relativity, fitness, internet, philosophy, science at 3:42 pm by nogre

The Philosopher’s Carnival picked up my Relativity in Evolutionary Biology! Completely cool. And I won the shortest description contest- take that all you people who write things that can be summarized. And hyphenation to boot. Props to the editor who used an archaic device to help me out in lieu of delving into unruly philosophy of science sure to scare people.

It’s all relative
Noah Greenstein has written a well-worth-a-peek post on ‘Relativity in Evolutionary Biology’ here.

Permalink Comments

10.19.07

General Relativity in Evolutionary Biology DRAFT

Posted in General Relativity, Relativity, Special Relativity, biology, fitness, philosophy, physics, science at 3:37 pm by nogre

DRAFT: DO NOT REFERENCE/QUOTE THIS WORK WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT PERMISSION- Noah Greenstein

 
I’ve discussed relativity in evolutionary biology with regards to uniform change but, as with the Special Theory of Relativity in physics, we want a theory that covers all change.

This means that insofar as relativity applies to biology under uniform motion, i.e. when a species is reproducing in a regular fashion, we want a theory of relativity that applies to biology even when a species is undergoing non-uniform motion, i.e. when the species reproductive cycle has undergone a serious change. 

It is a fundamental equivalence of evolutionary biology that the struggle for survival and natural selection yield the exact same results.  This relationship has yet to be interpreted.  If we consider a person in love, financially secure and who wants nothing more than to raise children for foreseeable rest of his life.  That person may view this situation as the culmination of his struggle to survive and replicate.  That person may equally view the situation to be nature selecting him as suitable to continue life. 

For what apparently are good reasons action at a distance is not allowed.  Struggle for survival does not occur at a distance; ‘struggle’ seems to inherently imply some local interaction.  Natural selection, however, is much more amorphous in nature: how exactly does nature select?  I suggest that we think of natural selection as a biofield that acts upon organisms. 

Inertial ‘fitness’ and Gravitational ‘fitness’

The fitness of a thing creates a (teeny) natural selection field.  The fitness of a species creates a (small) natural selection field.  The fitness of an ecosystem creates a (large) natural selection field. 

Permalink Comments

10.16.07

I just figured out general relativity for evolutionary biology

Posted in General Relativity, Relativity, Special Relativity, biology, philosophy, physics at 8:08 pm by nogre

so stay posted, it’s coming soon…

Permalink Comments

10.15.07

Nagging Questions about Evolutionary Drift and Preferred Reference Systems

Posted in Relativity, biology, fitness, philosophy, physics at 11:38 am by nogre

Usually when I think I’ve gotten something right I stop thinking about it. So it was irritating to start wondering if I had said enough about evolutionary drift. Oh well. Evolutionary drift is what we call it when a trait seemingly (and to the best of our knowledge, randomly) just ‘drifts’ into prominence. So can we tell what has happened due to natural selection and what is just drift? If we think that the trait provides some adaptive benefit we can argue on those grounds but many times we just don’t have enough data to back that claim up (think fossils). In ‘Consequences of Relativity in Evolutionary Biology‘ I argued that the phenomenon of drift was an artifact of relativity: we cannot tell in principle whether or not something is drift or naturally selected because what we count to be a mutation depends on our perspective. I believe this to be correct, but I think that others may be less convinced than I.

To remedy this more needs to be said about preferred reference systems. A reference system is a point of view in physics and a preferred reference system is what it sound like: a preferred point of view. Relativity denies that there is a reference system that is better than any other. This means that there is no one way to look at the universe. So, if you want to, you are free to declare that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe. You are free to declare the sun to be stable. You are free to declare that whatever is at the center of the Milky Way is the stable center and you are free to declare whatever it is outside the Milky Way to be the actual unmoving center, etc. It all depends on you, though explaining certain phenomena becomes more difficult depending on your choice, e.g. believing the earth to be the center of the universe worked (and still works) pretty well for almost all applications that we ever engage in. It took careful astronomical measurements of the movements of the planets that could not be easily explained with the earth at the center that caused Copernicus to move the center of the solar system to the sun (which made all the movements easily explainable).  The scientists of the day had come up with elaborate epicycle schemes to explain the motions of the planets to some success. It was that Copernicus was so much more successful at accounting for more phenomena that his account was accepted.

Now when it comes to adaptation, fitness and the like most of us really only have one perspective: our own.  We believe we know what makes us successful, what makes us smart, why we are better than the other animals.  This inherently colors our perspective on the fitness of other animals: we didn’t realize bats used sonar to navigate until after we had discovered sonar in a lab.  I guess we just thought that bats flew around blind in the dark before our advent of sonar.  This is all to say that the majority of us are currently in a geocentric, or more accurately anthropocentric, view of the biological universe.

Now I do not want to be seen as saying everyone is this way.  I suspect that there are biologists that can ’see’ things from the perspective of other species.  The point is that when we study the changes in species most of us are limited in our perspective.  We are trying to figure out why certain mutations have occurred adding epicycles on epicycles to account for the data.  That is, we take some feature of a species, compare it to our own features, and then modify and tweak it to fit it in with what we already thought.  This isn’t wrong, but it is limited.  Recently I read a news story of a study that proposed a novel way in which birds can navigate: apparently birds can see Earth’s magnetic field . If this is correct, it would allow us to reinterpret features of birds in the same way that our discovery of sonar in bats affected our interpretation of their biology- as significantly different from our own.

Finally (again) drift: how are we to distinguish what is drift and what is natural selection?  I think the above discussion makes the distinction even harder to properly distinguish the two.  We have limited knowledge of ourselves and other species and some small change in an organism’s biology that at first glance looks irrelevant and a candidate for drift may yet enable some other feature that we are completely oblivious to. Birds see the magnetic field, squirrels’ tails heat to scare (only) predators who use heat sensing, who knows what’s next.  And who knows whether what we think one day is drift will not be natural selection the next depending on a new perspective.  But, again, this is nothing to worry about.

Permalink Comments

10.13.07

Biological Space (Biospace) Travel

Posted in biology, philosophy, physics at 2:22 pm by nogre

Yesterday I was walking though Chinatown and as I usually do when I am over there I stop by the Buddhist Temple and buy a fortune (and by the way, I am soooo happy that Fall has finally come to NY) . Now the fortunes that you buy in the Buddhist Temple are not your fortune cookie fortunes: Buddhist Temple Fortunes are 4-5 lines long, usually rhyme, give a probability of success or failure, and say something clever. So my fortune yesterday informed me that I should be concerned about designing a spaceship. Normally this might be seen as ridiculous, but seeing as I have pretty much defined biospace by giving dimension to mutation/generation, I am tasked with finding a way to travel through it to far away places. So long story short, biospace travel would be to take a person’s brain and somehow insert it into a different body. This is going from one location, one group of mutations, to another location – a different set of mutations. Sure this has been long discussed by academics, sci-fi writers and doctors, but now I get to couch it in my terminology: what we need is a spaceship for the brain. First we will try to get to low earth orbit and come right back (a brain removal and immediate replacement), then we will try to draw out the time that the brain can be out of the skull and then eventually we might get to the moon- a place that given enough resources could sustain the brain for a while. Eventually we will be able to get to other planets – other bodies – after enough time and effort. Long way off, but thanks Buddhist Temple Fortune!

Permalink Comments

Unit of Biological Mass Name Suggestions?

Posted in Relativity, biology, fitness, philosophy, physics at 1:57 pm by nogre

Since I have argued for an independent standard of measure for fitness, similar to the standard block of platinum iridium that is the kilogram, this has led me to wonder what to call the new measurement. In my mind whenever I had been thinking about fitness I just thought ‘mass_b‘ or ‘biological mass’. But this really isn’t the unit of measure, this is a description of what we are measuring. So what is needed is the name equivalent of the kilogram for a unit of biological mass. Since ‘Darwin’ is already taken, I am not immediately sure of a name. Perhaps ‘Watson’ or ‘Crick’ would do, but their names are more associated with genetics and not fitness per se (and I am unsure if I want to immediately associate fitness with genetics). Suggestions welcome

Permalink 1 Comment

10.11.07

Video Game design

Posted in Wii, design, products, technology at 4:33 pm by nogre

I’ve bought meself a Wii and I quite like it. But there needs to be some more killer games.. freaking mercury meltdown got delayed. So for some reason – this is a first for me – I thought of a video game design. Simply put it is a spy game. The interesting thing is that each level is composed of 2 parts: the first part is a ‘training’ program put on by the spy agency to train the spy in what needs to be done. This ‘training program’ will not make use of the Wii motion sensors but will feature classic style gameplay only. Then the spy is sent on the mission but now to do everything will require using the motion controls. This game design will specific highlight the immersion that the motion controls bring to the game by contrasting them with the classic controls for doing the exact same operation. Also, the game design is efficient by reusing aspects of the same level design twice, though with different art direction, and differences in the ‘training’ and ‘mission’ – due to ‘incomplete intelligence’ – will make for good surprises. Ok game makers, hop to.

Permalink Comments