Am I one of the Magi?

In the May of 2005, Milton Wainwright, the same guy who is investigating the self-replicating (at 300C) thermophile-like structures in the red rains of Kerala, wrote a letter to the Editor of Times Online:

Sir, Like many biologists, Richard Dawkins (Weekend Review, May 21) views the theory of intelligent design merely as an attack on evolution when, being essentially identical to the anthropic principle, it has far wider implications.

Such ideas should not be dismissed simply because they have been hijacked by creationists. Despite Dawkins’s relentless propaganda, rational criticism of evolution and a distaste for biological reductionism do not equate to religious fundamentalism; bigotry should be resisted from whichever direction it comes.

Yours faithfully,
MILTON WAINWRIGHT,
Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology,
University of Sheffield,
Sheffield S10 2TN.
May 21.

Andy C McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory, University of Leeds who is a widely popular supporter of the intelligent design wrote another letter to the same Editor:

Sir, By building a straw man of creationists (supposedly) misquoting Darwin and Lewontin, Professor Dawkins labels the lot as “ignorant” and skirts the big issue — there is no hard evidence for molecules-to-man evolution.

Dawkins has long touted stories on how the eye and other organs came into being by supposed slow evolutionary processes, but there is no experimental evidence, even if one did accept the fossils as a record of such changes. Any serious thinker knows that the fossils of the “Cambrian Explosion” period, near the base of the geological column, include some of the most sophisticated eyes ever known to have existed — the compound eyes of trilobites have double calcite lenses, which defeat any slow evolutionary explanation, and, what is more, they have no precursor in the rocks.

The non-evolutionist side of the argument is growing not because of ignorance, but because of the rise of knowledge about the real facts of science without the fairytale additions of evolutionism. A growing number of academics on both sides of the Atlantic are attracted to the straightforward logic of scientific reasoning.

The logical, coded machinery of DNA and the information system it carries shout design to an unprejudiced mind. Dawkins’s defence is based not on scientific facts, but on ideology. Evolutionary thinking is teetering as a way of looking at the evidence, not because of some isolated problems here and there, but because the whole structure is scientifically wrong.

Yours faithfully,
ANDY C. McINTOSH,
(Professor of Thermodynamics and Combustion Theory),
Energy and Resources Research Institute,
Houldsworth Building,
University of Leeds,
Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9JT.
May 23.

I don’t know what to believe. I am waiting for the String Theory to be proved wrong or right in the LHC. If String Theory is wrong meduso-anthropic principle may be right. Even if String Theory is right, it could still be possible that, another form of life, which happened to have evolved in this universe or somewhere else designed us, and deliberately misguided us into believing fallacies that lead to altruism in the species, so that we live through technological advancement without destroying ourselves. Anyways, if Bible has to be right, everything would have to be running on a computer, where, if I quote Morpheus: some rules are bent, others broken.

In many ways, I find me similar to the Magi who arrived late, because they where guided by knowledge instead of truth.

Do we need a lesson in humility?

In February 2005, 17 year old Saurabh Singh topped in NASA’s International Scientist Discovery exam. The exam was so hard that it was big news in many newspapers. But it turned out to be a fraud. But the story kept getting bigger and bigger with newspapers reporting that the Indian president had taken the exam in 1960 and ‘finished seventh’ while astronaut Kalpana Chawla had ’stood 21st in 1988′.

Follow these news links (given in their order of occurrence):

• The Tribune Online Edition publishes the scoop.
• Rediff News makes a follow up.
• The Times of India is too scared to be left out.
• Italian “la Republica” gets fooled by tips from India.
• Rediff News publishes that it is a fraud.
• Sify News publishes that it is a fraud.
• BBC News publishes the fraud.
• Some American Magazine analyzes the hoax.
• The Telegraph, Calcutta, India analyzes the hoax again.

The myth about divorces in India.

Many people I have met in India have told me that Arranged Marriages are the reason why there are a few divorces in India. I think they are/were right about less divorces, but for a different reason:

I think these very same hippies who make it look awkward to marry someone out of love; makes it a taboo to get a divorce. That is why there are less divorces in India. Divorced couples are treated like outcasts by the society. I have personally experienced that social excommunication is a greater pain than to have your bone out through your skin. So people naturally choose not to get a divorce, out of fear.

Soon, as more and more people will get to live away from their parents and relatives, in societies where such matters are taken lightly, they will naturally choose to get a divorce because, they will have no fear of becoming an outcast.

By the way, I am against divorces. I believe there is strong evidence for the fact that many criminals were children of divorced parents.

There is no good shepherd

How clever it was for sheep to acquire shepherds? Think of what this gave them: They could outsource all their problems. Protection from predators, food finding, health maintenance, the only cost is a loss of free mating.

How clever of sheep, you might say, except of course it wasn’t the sheep’s cleverness. We all know, sheep are not exactly game theorists, they are not very smart. It wasn’t the cleverness of the sheep at all, they were clueless. But it was a very clever move. Whose clever move was it? It is a clever move of natural selection itself acting on the sheep. The wild cousins of sheep are still a minority because they don’t have shepherds to aid survival.

Human Beings are much better. We do not need a shepherd to help us to protect us from predators, food finding, health maintenance. We are the shepherds. We have always been.

In John 10 Jesus repeats “I am the shepherd… I am the good shepherd”. But with mass acceptance of the technologies that facilitate mass communication, we can clearly see how the “good shepherd” let millions of people die in tsunamis and earthquakes. The North Korean Kim makes children starve and commit cannibalism, and the “good shepherd” does nothing about it.

Oh, these things are meant to happen in these end of days you say. But what about the super disasters in the past (even before Christ)? Can we be sure that not a single innocent man died against of his own will (i.e. not a martyr) in natural disasters & disease? The great thing is that, there is no such thing as an innocent man, and hence everyone can be blamed for something or the other, and hence his/her involuntary death could be ruled out as God’s punishment.

I like to think religion is a pseudo-logical escapist framework to craft reasons for everything and God is an abstract shepherd that exists in our minds.

I was watching the “Apocalypto” the other day. Sure; modern religions did do their “good shepherding”; e.g. Christianity cured Mayan culture of its custom of human sacrifices; but now, it is time to switch shepherds.

Kalam asks: What should we do about terrorism?

Nobody wants to die for a martyr’s cause. Only the martyr wants to die for his cause. But terrorism happens when the cause the martyr is dying for also requires the death of a person who does not share a belief in the martyr’s cause. So as long as there are people who does not share the martyr’s beliefs there will be terrorism.

The only way out of this vicious circle is to let people realize how fleeting and valuable life truly is. Nobody realizes the great fortune of having been born, the fortune of existence as an intelligent & healthy human. Religion, Poverty & Discrimination makes it even harder. I am not saying religion has to be abolished, but people must be shown that to be alive is truly something precious & worth living for.

There must be education, movies & documentaries that show how great, real (not ordinary) lives can be. The media shouldn’t give false high hopes for a better life that only a few people get to live (e.g. that kid’s honeymoon in Switzerland spending his rich dad’s money). The media must focus on how great, cool & sexy a life that everyone gets to live can be(e.g. from homeless to Harvard). I remember a Hindi movie which depicted Amir Khan as a womanizer & a terrorist. That made it sound among my friends as though it is kinda cool to be a terrorist with personal ideologies for which others who dint care should die for.

I think if people can have a sheer desire to live a non-Bollywood-movie life and can find that life extremely cool, there would be no revolution of rising expectations. Rising expectations from religion (e.g. heaven for terrorists) & culture (e.g. only healthy people can be happy etc.) may spawn a small number of people who are willing to kill others for their beliefs.

Is this evidence good enough?

In this post I asked why couldn’t God come up with a verse in the Bible that had trillionth digit to the the trillion and tenth digit in the decimal expansion of pi, as an evidence of his Godliness, so that the men of science could believe in him.

Apparently, there seems to be something close in the Bible 1 Kings 7:23 that speaks of Pi being equal to 3.

The exact function of the “molten sea” is not stated, though it seems most likely that it was a container for water used in the various rituals. The interesting point is that its upper rim seems to be circular in shape with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits. This is impossible, for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter (a ratio called “pi” by mathematicians) is given here as 30/10=3, whereas the real value of pi is an unending decimal which begins 3.14159… If the molten sea were really ten cubits in diameter it would have to be just under thirty-one and a half cubits in circumference.

The explanation is, of course, that the Biblical writers were not mathematicians or even interested in mathematics and were merely giving approximate figures. Still, to those who are obsessed with the notion that every word in the Bible is infallible (and who know a little mathematics) it is bound to come as a shock to be told that the Bible says that the value of pi is 3.

I am a fan of Lee Smolin

I think science is going places where it can’t survive. Scientific method relies on evidence, but what happens when science will have to wait for evidence for a 1000 years of technological advancement? It becomes worser than faith.

Proponents of string theory gets far too much attention and money, despite a complete lack of evidence. String Theory is a system of belief in science, something that people must believe in, and invest a billion dollars and a hundred years of their life for experimental evidence. If String Theory is right, atheists like me will be happy, because it supports the idea that the fundamental physical constants of this universe seem just right for life because this universe is one among many universes in a much larger multi verse. And that this universe is just right for having people like us in it asking why we exist.

But String Theory is still a belief, and they could be wrong. Consider another theory “The fecund universes theory” advanced by Lee Smolin. In this view, a collapsing black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the “other side”, whose fundamental constant parameters (speed of light, Planck length and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe therefore gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. (Thus the theory contains the evolutionary ideas of “reproduction” and “mutation” of universes, but has no analogue of natural selection.)

If this theory is correct, the odds strongly favor this universe being not the first to ever exist, but a descendant of many that have existed through time. And, since a universe with conditions favoring production of many ‘child’ universes, i.e. favoring black hole creation, would have many more ‘children’ than one that did not, it is reasonable to expect a late universe to have ‘evolved’ towards conditions favoring black holes.

Some critics have claimed that this theory is not falsifiable, and therefore unscientific. By definition, existence of “other universes” cannot be verified by scientific tools working within the time-space and physics laws of our universe. Smolin’s counter-argument is that an observation of very many black holes in the known universe would be evidence for this view, while if black holes are rare or unusual, it would be quite strong evidence against; and since the hypothesized evolutionary process would be expected to find local maxima in fecundity, were a small change in cosmological parameters found to give rise to a universe favoring black hole production more than ours, this too would provide evidence against the theory.

I am a fan of Lee Smolin because I like to think String Theory is all hype with no experimental evidence or even a suggested method to find evidence. The discovery of “dark energy,” which seems to be pushing the universe apart faster and faster, isn’t explained by string theory and is proving troublesome for that theory’s advocates. Physicists are making the mistake of searching for a theory that is “beautiful” and “elegant” instead of one that’s actually backed up by experiments.

What if Lee Smolin’s Theory of Fecund Universes is right?
Louis Crane a supporter of Lee Smolin’s ideas has proposed a meduso-anthropic principle, which suggests that universes could be fine-tuned for life by intelligent beings themselves manufacturing new universes. He argues that the destiny of highly evolved intelligence (perhaps our distant progeny) is to infuse the entire universe with life (similar to what Ray Kurzweil proposed in The Singularity is Near, eventually to accomplish the ultimate feat of cosmic reproduction by spawning one or more “baby universes,” which will themselves be endowed with life generating properties.

If Lee Smolin is right, I may have to reconsider the questions about the existence of God…

Why are people so stupid? (Part 2)

Why are the skeptics a minority? Why is rational thinking a precious commodity? Surely, there must have been an evolutionary advantage for superstitious & pseudo-scientific people.

One of the reasons I have heard of for the abundance of superstition & magical thinking in people is from the realm of group selection. Superstitions or in other words, a common belief, often aid a cohesion in the group. So the group/tribe unified in one decision, would act to attain common goal. The less unified tribe with no cohesion would be less successful at survival. The tribe that would make a better decision, will survive and find their beliefs more reliable (because it helped them to survive), and hence indoctrinate the next generation on the same beliefs. Children are genetically hard wired to believe their parents because children (human or fish) who disobeyed their parental guidance got killed (e.g. by wandering off into the jungle alone) and could not pass on the genes to disobey as a child. So the mechanism that aids belief-in-tradition gets re-enforced from a number of different levels.

Obviously, truth a.k.a knowledge-of-reality is the “superstition” with the most survival value, but evolution (memetic & genetic) is only tending towards it as we speak. Skeptics & the rational people (S&RP) are the spin-offs in this new paradigm shift in evolution. S&RPs understand the reality that morality is independent of faith. In fact morality is just a side-effect of evolution. Most of us don’t kill everyone around us because we know we need others to survive. We scratch the others back because we hope to get scratched on our back. We are willing to forgive if a friend doesn’t scratch our backs even after we scratched their backs, because we are willing to give them a second chance. A society without morality does not exist because there is faith, but simply because such societies did not survive.

I think S&RPs are the next level of survivors in this new paradigm of evolution. If you have carefully noticed, it could be seen that S&RPs get better women, they are richer, they are more moral.

Bloody Ear Wax is Gone Now

Last Wednesday morning, I started experiencing a partial deafness in my right ear. Doctors at the Tampines 24-Hour Clinic told me it was hardened ear wax and gave me Docusate Sodium to soften it. By friday, the softened wax started to bother me, so I tried to take it out myself. But I was unsucessful, so I went back to ask them to flush it out. The otoscope at the Tampines 24-Hour Clinic was damaged so they asked me to get it done somewhere else. I went Tampines Polyclinic and they wanted me to continue on more ear wax softeners. So I told them that I was already done with Cerumenolysis, and I asked them to flush it out for me. They tried to flush it with a small syringe with water. But the water was not strong enough to clean the wax out. A major blob of wax remained. I was still deaf, and they said the remaining wax would go away on its on.

By yesterday, more wax started clogging my ear and I was getting more deaf by the minute. Today morning I narrated the whole story to a doc at the Raffles Medical branch in Tampines. Raffles are costliest repair shop in town. He used to a really powerful syringe to flush it and a LOT of wax came out and I am alright! And all they charged me was a dollar more than the Polyclinic!

Lesson learned: Never value health services by their relative costliness. Costly repair shops are better and they get everything done as promised.

Is this a stab at Apple’s Leopard & Yahoo?

Recently Microsoft decided to take out standard HTML emails out of Outlook 2007. They use a MS Word 2007 based HTML instead. That means Microsoft is using the monopoly they have in the desktop email client market to make sure everybody sends emails without HTML. Nice looking emails can only be generated by MS Word. Of course, very simple HTML mails can be made using any of HTML editors but they can only be validated using MS software which they provide.

I like to think this is a stab at Apple & Yahoo. Gmail won’t be affected because they have POP3 & SMTP servers which can be used with Outlook. Apple & Yahoo will be in deep trouble because the only way for those users to get un-mangled email newsletters from their partner companies would be by adopting MS email software like Windows Live Mail, Outlook 2007 or Windows Mail in Vista. Apple Mail 3 application in Mac OS X Leopard promised a lot of great looking email templates which would look the same everywhere. Now all of that is good for nothing because Apple based them on standard HTML.

I remember a lot of governments and organizations saying there is no compelling reason to switch from XP to Vista and now: there you have it. Just what you asked for. You may want to buy Outlook 2007 on Windows XP or you can consider the cheaper option, use Vista, if you need to get proper looking emails.

This is not Microsoft bashing. Standard HTML and CSS are better technology than MS Word HTML but we are all forced to stick to older & inferior technology because they say so.

It is a shame that most of the hippies from the 1970s who practically run the world these days are slaves for Microsoft. It is an even greater shame that the younger generation admires the shrewd tactics of Microsoft.

I guess I have to exit the Microsoft bandwagon. I would have loved them & their tactics, if they had been more concerned about better technology than maintaining monopoly.