What I learned today: Random Astronomy Tidbits

OK, technically this was from last night but I had neither opportunity nor inclination to write it all down at the time. These bits are from the tail end of “Death by Black Hole and other Cosmic Quandaries.” One thing that was brought immediately to mind was the unscientific fact that it’s often much harder to read on a topic that you know something about than one about which you are a complete novice. Of all the sciences, my grounding in astronomy is pretty solid (I have a state champion medal from the Academic Decathlon to prove that much) so when I pick up these books on astronomy it is with no small trepidation. The last thing I need is yet ANOTHER retelling of how stellar spectroscopy works. This forces me into a bit of a pattern of random skimming which makes it hard to find the bits that may be new to me. In the end, nothing struck me as particularly new but it was interesting to be reminded of a few amusing facts about the universe we live in. Let’s begin…

Like a large man with a dermatological condition, the sun is constantly shedding. This is surely not surprising as the sun does put out a hell of a lot of energy. You’ve got the constant onslaught of the cosmic wind and all that heat and light. What may be surprising is the magnitude of the shedding. Yes, boys and girls, it is calculated that the sun sloughs off 4 Million TONS of mass every SECOND. Yes, that’s every second. Not a typo. This gives one a right and appropriate scale of just how BIG the sun is. Welcome to the universe. Two million pickup trucks just gone into the vapor every time the second hand on your watch ticks.

Gravity, in the realm of the four basic forces of the universe, is a complete wuss. The somewhat pathetic example that the book gives is that if by some physically impossible process the Apollo astronauts had brought back the electrons (and just the electrons) from a thimble-full of moon dust then the electromagnetic attraction between those electrons and their orphaned protons back on the moon would have been greater than the gravitational attraction of the entire planet.

Totally unrelatedly, the book goes into some small detail about the so-called fourth state of matter, plasma. In short, plasma is just uber-excited matter. If you heat anything up enough then it’ll fall all over itself and become plasma. To those of us bound to the Earth this is most typically expressed as lightning. When lightning strikes, the air around the discharge becomes plasma and behaves according to a wonderously new set of rules. In my book, plasma is boring. What we really want to talk about is the TRULY degenerate states of matter. Let’s start with the stuff of dwarf stars. Think back to high school physics and chemistry and imagine the model of the atom. You’ve got the happy nucleus with its boisterous cloud of rotating electrons. That’s the stuff of normal matter but think for a moment what happens at the heart of super-dense stars. Eventually these massive furnaces run out of fuel. When they do, then they begin to collapse. A typical star is a constant battle between the energy pouring OUTWARD from nuclear fusion and gravity pulling INWARD. I won’t go into the details here but when a star begins to run out of fuel, then gravity begins to win the battle and slowly the star compresses. Eventually, the compression becomes SO intense that the atom itself is compromised. Rather than being comprised of a nucleus and a cloud of electrons, imagine the empty space being crunched down to the point where even the electrons are bound together in the nucleus and the nuclei are stacked right on top of each other. This is the stuff of the dwarf star. All the empty space has been most rudely removed leaving a super-dense material that the sci-fi aficionados refer to as “Dwarf Star Alloy”. Super dense and super tough, this is the no-nonsense material of the universe.

In some cases though, we go even further. If a dwarf star becomes TOO dense then it condenses even more. Based on the description of dwarf stars though, you may ask “how can this possibly be? There’s nowhere else for the matter to go?” And this is exactly true. Dwarf stars are comprised of matter packed tightly together to the nth degree. There’s no empty space left. Neutrons and protons and electrons are stacked on top of each other like a child’s building blocks. Beyond a certain point, the very laws of physics themselves are compromised. Above a certain mass the dwarf star actually punches a hole in the very fabric of spacetime. Once this happens, the star has become a black hole. At this point, the star has collapsed into a quantum singularity, a location of infinite mass and yet no volume. The very laws of physics have been violated. This is the stuff of which quasars are made; perhaps a good topic for another post. The point is, quite simply, that when your physics teacher lectured on solids, liquids and gases, he or she skipped the most entertaining states of matter.

Lastly, the book made some interesting statements about the Earth’s ‘radio bubble’. This is the sphere around the Earth that which has been exposed to radio transmissions from the radio and television age of the planet. Going back to the earliest transmissions this bubble has a radius of about 100 light-years and includes about 1000 total stars; many of which have been shown to have planets in orbit around them. So from a purely technical standpoint, it is entirely possible that a civilization somewhere is enjoying the first days of television on our planet. The problem, however, is one of reception not distance. Simply to detect the carrier wave of our signals a civilization at 100 light-years distance would require a radio telescope 15 times the size of our largest, Arecibo. To actually decode anything would require a radio receiver 20 miles in diameter. Sadly, the omni-directional nature of our transmissions works against us in a major way here. In the popular culture on the subject we like to show alien’s listening in on our every move with ease but in reality they would have to be pretty damn determined to do so.

What I learned Today: Lagrangian Points

While reading “Death by Black Hole and other Quandaries” I was reintroduced to a REALLY cool concept referred to as a Lagrangian point. You can read the long-winded Wikipedia version of this concept here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrangian_point.

The short and sweet description of this concept is that if you put an object out in space at a Lagrangian point then it’ll quietly just sit there forever. On the surface, yeah, I admit, this is pretty unassuming but think about it. In the vast majority of locations in the solar system if you set an object down it’s going to slowly make its way toward SOMETHING. Usually that something is the sun and anybody who’s had a sunburn knows that THAT is no fun whatsoever. So a Lagrangian point is the universe’s version of Free Parking. If you fly a satellite and park it at such a point then it’ll hang out there for a long time which in the grand scheme is damn convenient. These points have been used already by NASA for various long-term missions which you can read about in the Wikiepedia entry.

Executive Summary: Lagrangian Points – Solar System’s version of Free Parking. Mega-cool.

Notes for “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives”

Unnecessary Disclaimer: The following is not intended to be a detailed summary of the book in question but instead merely an exposition of the high points as I saw them through the reading of the text. No attempt has been made to create a connected narrative. Readers who want one of THOSE should obtain the book. It should be noted that the facts are the sole property of the author. The poor wit is the sole property of me.

So now we begin…

Evolution is apparently no guarantee of success at even the simplest of tasks. When faced with a light which randomly blinks red or green, humans are regularly out performed by rats. If the light blinks green 75% of the time, rats and lower mammals will choose the food dispensing button linked to the green light every time, guaranteeing themselves success 75% of the time. Humans who take the exact same test tend to believe that they can perceive a pattern in the blinking of the lights and their attempts to outsmart the randomness results in a success rate of around 60%.

Humans are also easily fooled by the patterns of randomness in their daily lives. One example given is a group of Air Force pilots in training during World War II. Their flight instructor stated emphatically that his brutal methods of roundly and publicly criticizing his trainees when they did poorly was much more effective than praising them when they did well. His reasoning went something like this: When his pilots did well, if he praised them then the next time they went out they did much more poorly than the previous flight. If, on the other hand, he simply criticized them when they did terribly then their next flights were invariably better. What the instructor failed to realize was that the good and bad flights were merely statistical outliers. So if a trainee had an exceptionally good flight then chances are good that no matter what feedback he was given he would have a worse flight the next time. The same holds for the opposite case. This phenomenon is known as “Regression to the Mean”. As a general rule, exceptional outcomes are typically followed by more average ones.

The author is also obviously a big fan of sports and gives us several pleasant statistical tidbits from the sporting world:
* The odds that a player with Roger Maris’ career home run stats will break Ruth’s homerun record in any given year: 1/32. [So you Mantle fans can sit down a shush for a while]
* From a statistical viewpoint, the 7-game playoff series in many sports is woefully insufficient. If two teams A and B have a probability of winning 55% and 45% of their head-to-head games respectively then the inferior team will still win a 7-game series 40% of the time. You’d need a series of 269 games to really prove anything. Think your teams aren’t that closely matched? If the teams compete at 66% and 33% then the inferior team still wins 20% of the time and 23 games would be required to determine the true champion.
* Justin Wolfers analyzed the outcomes of 70,000 college basketball games and found that when compared against the point spread there was a significant surplus of games that ended just below the predicted point spread at the expense of those that ended just above the point spread.

The Greeks had no proper concept of the laws of probability and this may have at least partially had to do with the fact that they had no dice. Instead they have astragali, the heel-bones of sheep. To the Greeks, the result of every throw of the astragali was the direct will of the gods themselves. This belief persists in the NFL where every touchdown reception is still the direct result of divine intervention. [at least if the touchdown celebrations are to be taken at face value]

DNA evidence in the courtroom can identify a crime suspect with a probability of error of 1:1 Million to 1:1 Billion. What is not typically talked about is the fact that the incidence of laboratory error is 1%.

This author, like so many before him treats us to an exposition of the “Monty Hall Problem.” The issue goes something like this. You’ve given three doors with three prizes. Behind one is a brand new car and behind 2 are goats. You pick your door, it doesn’t matter which one and in response Monty opens one of the remaining two doors revealing a goat. So now there is one door with a goat and one door with a car. To make your chances of winning as high as possible, do you stay with your original door or do you switch? As it turns out, if you stay with your original door your chances of winning are 1/3. If you switch, however, your odds are an even 50/50. This result, to say the least, is TERRIBLY unintuitive. To make it clearer though, it’s useful to extend the example to 100 doors with 99 goats and 1 car. Just as before, you pick your one door and in response Monty opens up 98 doors revealing 98 goats. Now you’re left with your original door and the one tantalizing door that remains unopened. So do you switch in this situation? Hopefully the answer now is a “damn right you do.”

Geralamo Cordano (died 1576) was one of the founders of probability theory though like so many never really lived to see his work used or popularized. The technical bits of his work aren’t all that interesting but his life in general was an odd one. His mother was unwed at the time of his birth so she tried to abort him using an evil brew of wormwood, burned barleycorn and tamarisk root. This obviously failed making Garalamo a pretty lucky fellow (or his mother a pretty shitty pharmacologist). He died a pauper after his own son testified against him in some uninteresting civil matter or other just to get himself a plum job as a torturer with the inquisition.

In 1995, the German lottery pulled 6 balls from a set of 49 as it always does each week. This would not normally be news except that the result was exactly the same as one week in 1986. The chances that a lottery of this sort will pull the same numbers twice in this time period: 28%.

Blaise Pascal gave up mathematics and went into religious seclusion near the end of his life, presumably after pondering an enigma termed “Pascal’s Wager”. It runs something like this. Assume there is no God. In that event the best you can do is to live a life of debauchery and then you die and it’s over. Contrarily, assume there IS a God. If you live a pious life then you have gained an infinite reward of an eternity in heaven. If you don’t, then all you got, again, was a brief life of pleasure. So, if one assumes there’s a 50% chance that God exists, the risk that he does NOT exist is dwarfed by the INFINITE reward you can receive if he DOES exist. Therefore, you should just assume that he does and thus at least take a shot at your life of bliss for all eternity. It’s obvious from Pascal’s behavior after this revelation which path he chose…

In 1992 the Virginia State Lottery offered a prize of $27,000,000. The lottery is configured to 6 random numbers from a pot of 44, a mere 7,000,000 possibilities. An investment group in Melbourne Australia got the bright idea to buy 7,000,000 tickets, one with each number combination. After a massive logistical nightmare, 1.4 million tickets filled out by hand, the group was almost too late. They managed to only get 5,000,000 of the numbers submitted in time but none the less did win the prize and collect the jackpot.

Joseph Jagger took his statistical prowess to Monte Carlo in 1873 to turn himself a tidy profit. He and six assistants took careful note of the outcomes on six roulette wheels over a 2-week period. At the end of that time, it was found that one of the wheels had a distinct bias towards certain numbers. A few days later exited with the equivalent of five million dollars in winnings. He was eventually foiled when the casino noticed his turn of luck and began reconfiguring the wheels at the end of each night.

The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. Zeno, yet another Greek philosopher, postulated that you can never actually go anywhere. His logic runs this way. In order to travel 1 meter, you must first travel half a meter. Before you can travel half a meter though, you must first travel a quarter of a meter and so on. Therefore, to travel any distance at all requires you to travel an infinite number of finite distances which would of course take an infinite amount of time. Zeno, it seems, was married to the Red Queen. You’ve got to run TERRIBLY fast just to stay where you are! The Greeks had far too much time on their hands it seems. [This Geeky Greek sandwich is known as ‘Zenos Paradox’]

Bernoulli originated the idea that in order to obtain a good estimate of something’s true value you must first obtain a large sample of data for analysis. Unfortunately, in practice his original formulae are a bit off and often require the ENTIRE dataset to be obtained before any certainty is obtained. [U.S. political polls under the original Bernoulli mathematics would require polling 80% of the houses in the country]. This concept is known as the Law of Large Numbers.

On the other side of the fence, Kahneman and Tversky coined the ironic Law of Small Numbers to describe the tendency of the human population to assign inappropriate significance to vanishingly small data samples.

People pay respect and homage to numbers when clearly they shouldn’t. One large example given was the business of rating wines. When asked about the system the editor of Wine and Spirits Magazine was quoted as saying, “On many levels the rating system is completely nonsensical.” His colleague at the Wine Enthusiast is no more enthusiastic as he states simply, “The deeper you get into this system the more misguided and misleading it is.” Apparently even at the aesthetic level things are no better. When subjects are presented with five bottles of wine whose contents are identical but have different labels and prices ranging from $10 to $90 they will invariably state that the $90 wine is significantly better. In a similar test, most can’t tell a red wine from a white wine that has food coloring added. Perhaps most damning of all, when wine experts were presented with three wines, two of which were identical, half the time they could not even determine which wine was which.

The human mind is very poor at detecting randomness even when it encounters it. In a string of 1,000,000 random 1s and 0s, for example, one should expect to find strings of hundreds of 0s or 1s in a row. Recently, Apple’s iPod received hoards of complaints about its shuffle feature. Customers complained that sometimes the same song was played twice in a row; statistically, a very normal occurrence even in large libraries. Apple has since revised their shuffle algorithm to be LESS random so that it’ll appear MORE random.

People have a fundamental and deep-seated problem with randomness because it messes with our need to be in control. Ellen Langer did a study with nursing home retirees. In one group the retirees were allowed to arrange their own rooms and pick a plant to take care of. In the other it was all done for them and they had no say in the arrangement of their rooms. After 18 months the mortality rate in the group that had no control over their rooms was DOUBLE that of those that got to pick their own room layouts. [This is a stunning conclusion but one that lends itself to sample-space bias. Sicker individuals are going to a priori be placed in the no-control group so this could be a total red herring.]

The idea of Confirmation Bias also tends to skew our view of events. If a situation arises about which we have pre-conceived notions then we will tend to fit the facts to meet our theory rather than viewing them with complete rationality. David L Rosenhan demonstrated exactly that when he sent 10 people, 5 of them doctors, into a psychiatric ward. He told them all to act completely normally but to claim only that they were hearing voices that were not there. All 10 were admitted to the hospital. After being admitted, the subjects dropped the pretence of insanity and went about their normal activities while in the mental ward. Despite the fact that the participants were acting perfectly normally the doctor’s notes for the patients reflected obvious psychosis. Every simple everyday action the subjects performed pointed at some mental condition or other. The subjects were eventually released from the hospital after an average of 19 days.

It’s not just enthusiastic wine enthusiasts who can’t make qualitative judgments on a consistent basis. In a recent music experiment 14,341 participants were given the chance to download 48 songs by bands they had never heard of. The test subjects were divided into 9 different groups. The first 8 groups could see the average rating of each song by previous downloaders and how many times it had been downloaded but only for subjects in their group. So what you ended up with was 8 distinct music microcosms that had no connection to each other. The 9th group rated the songs but they couldn’t see the ratings of anyone else. Ostensibly this was the group that was totally unbiased by the influence of other participants so these ratings were more akin to true musical quality. Unsurprisingly, the 9 groups differed wildly on their ratings for the 48 songs. One song in particular was a #1 smash in one group but a #40 bomb in another. The control group ranked it at #29. Apparently what happens is that some songs jump out to an early and random lead and this results in their popularity. The pop music charts have little to do with the actual quality of music it seems.

Our author also relates one anecdote that jives perfectly with my notion that Bill Gates is just a normal schmuck like the rest of us who happened to just get lucky. The story goes somewhat similarly to this. Back in the day IBM came to Gates and said they needed an OS for their new personal computer. Gates initially balked at the idea and sent them to someone else. Well, the someone else apparently didn’t impress IBM much so they came back to Gates. Gates in the mean time had heard of a bit of software that might do the trick so he brought it up to IBM. After what must have been a comical bit of shrugging and “what do we do now” Gates obtained the software for $50,000 from this unnamed source, modified it slightly and then licensed it to IBM. The rest, it seems, is history. Gates didn’t do anything special. He just happened to be a software nexus of sorts. I gotta get me a nexus.

Vodka, it seems, is a masterfully marketed product. Despite the fact that it’s intended to be non-distinctive and neutral every vodka out there seems to make some weird claim to be unique. Ironically, when the New York Times put 21 vodkas to a blind taste test, the winner was the bartender’s cheapest, Smirnoff.

Publishing too is no stranger to the laws of luck. When the Sunday Times of London took the first chapter from two winners of the prestigious Mann-Booker prize for fiction and submitted them to publishers, not only did the publishers not recognize the pieces, 19 out of the 20 publishers rejected the books for publication. Gotta get lucky in this world I guess. Or maybe just verbose…

Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition Chapter 2

I recently recommended Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation to someone and was reminded that I had Promiscuity waiting for me on the shelf upstairs. Over the next few posts I'll jot down a few notes and afterwards boil those down for your perusal along with a few of my personal observations. It should be noted that these posts will likely be extraordinarily graphic and thus not recommended for the faint of heart. That said, they should at least be interesting but don't expect it to hang together like a proper narrative since I'm just going over my notes, not retyping the whole text.

Chapter 2

Birds, it turns out, are total sluts. Studies indicate that 70% of bird species engage in sex outside their brooding partnership. A notable example is the purple martin; when given access to a multi-apartment birdhouse in the spring, the entire house will be first taken over by one male who will protect it fiercely until he attracts a mate. Once he has his mate in place and she's attending her nest he'll invite other males to join the household and when they do so he'll also have his way with their mates as well. Genetic studies show that the dominant male in fact fathers half the offspring in the entire complex. The amount of sluttiness (and the success of it) seems to be directly related to just how different the males look from the females. Apparently females need a particularly studly-looking guy to make it worth the effort.

On the flip side, monogamous females are relatively rare and when they do occur it's usually under somewhat unusual circumstances. Among some insect species which reside in dormancy underground before sexual maturity, males will actually dig up dormant females and copulate with them before they are fully developed. Some butterflies even go so far as to have a long, hard penis which can penetrate the female's pupal casing. Even more bizarrely, female angler fish support their tiny male counterparts for life. The male lodges himself inside the female and sucks her blood to stay alive ready at any moment to perform his function.

The Corydoras Catfish takes no chances with the father of her children. When mating the female places her mouth directly over the male's genitalia, sucks his sperm out and reissues it through her own genitalia seconds later to fertilize her eggs. Male seahorses and pipefish are similarly cautious since responsibility for the eggs lies with them. The female lays her eggs in the male's brood pouch and only after the eggs are secure does the male fertilize them by himself with a box of tissue and some hand lotion.

While the female is out seeking the attentions of others the male is working on a plan of his own to keep her faithful. The most common of these is 'mate guarding.' In many species the male will simply follow the female wherever she goes when he senses she is fertile. For insects, the last male to copulate with a female has an advantage over those who have come before so they tend to guard their females after the act. One extreme is the male dungfly who will hang on his mate's back for 20 minutes while she lays her eggs to ward off any latecomers. Alternatively, some species of shrimp have reproductive processes which favor the first male to copulate with a female. Males range far in wide in search of virgins and in some cases will go so far as to pick up an immature female and carry her around for several days until she's ready to be fertilized. Depending on the male to female ratio a male may cart around a woman for 9 whole days before he has his way with her and leaves her forever.

If a male can't guard his mate he may resort to just doing it with her over and over again. Giant water bugs have been known to copulate 100 times in 36 hours during periods of egg laying. Birds may do the act from 1 to 500 times over a single clutch of eggs.

Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition Chapter 1

I recently recommended Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation to someone and was reminded that I had Promiscuity waiting for me on the shelf upstairs. Over the next few posts I'll jot down a few notes and afterwards boil those down for your perusal along with a few of my personal observations. It should be noted that these posts will likely be extraordinarily graphic and thus not recommended for the faint of heart. That said, they should at least be interesting but don't expect it to hang together like a proper narrative since I'm just going over my notes not retyping the whole text.

Chapter 1

The Greeks, due to a surfeit of dead male soldiers to dissect had a really good idea of how the male member worked. The female form, however was a different story since dissection of a woman was strictly forbidden. Having observed various ob-gyns over 10 years of marriage it seems clear to me that not a lot has changed in the past 2000 years. The text admits, for example, that science currently doesn't know what physical function the clitoris performs. My wife, however, says SHE has a pretty good idea.

Erasmus Darwin introduced the concept that males in a species have secondary sexual characteristics such as large plumage displays or dangling wattles to attract females of the species in his 1792 text Zoonomia. In the 1960s, Bob Trivers postulated that the showiness of these displays is inversely proportional to the male's involvement with the young. To offer proof by anecdote, the peacock has a tremendous sexual display but his responsibilities end immediately after he inseminates the hen. Inversely, the male magpie invests heavily in his mate bringing her food throughout the entire brooding process and he is virtually indistinguishable from his hen.

In 1937 Geoff Parker introduced the idea that this competitiveness may even happen at the level of individual sperm. Parker examined dungflies, a species in which the female is approached by several males and noted that as a female approaches a patty several males wrestle for the opportunity to mate with her. It's in the female's best interest, Parker argues, to be inseminated by as many males as possible. Similarly, the male is best served who can not only inseminate a female but protect her from insemination by others. At the same time males who can fight through the attempts of other males to keep females to themselves have an advantage. What results is an arms race between males who attempt to protect their mates from intruders but also to overcome the defenses of others. Meanwhile the female benefits as long as multiple males assail her honor. And to help her make the distinction the female has evolved all manner of chemical and physical processes to put the competing sperm through the wringer to select only the best.

The Rise and Fall of the Human Empire

There’s a time bomb ticking in our species. With each passing generation, we draw closer and closer to our own demise. Ironically, the same processes that some people like to believe never take place at all are slowly unraveling humanity from the inside out.

Species respond to their environments. If the water supply diminishes gradually over generations, those individuals who for whatever physiological reason need less water will survive and thus give birth to offspring who require less water. Those who require more than the environment can provide will tend to die off. As the environment changes so do the creatures that live in that environment. In addition, the pressure the environment places on populations tends to weed out deviations that diminish rates of survival. If an infant is born with some horrible deformity in the wild, the harsh environment into which it was born takes care of the situation by making sure the deformity will not live to procreate.

But what happens when there IS no selection pressure within a species? What happens when every offspring is allowed to not only live out their lives but also to spawn another generation with the same problems? The answer to this is not yet certain, but it does suggest an interesting thought experiment.

The most obvious route for our experiment is to follow the recent advances in reproductive medicine. Conditions that would have kept our mother’s mothers from being able to conceive at all are now surmountable though medical procedures. Currently the leading cause of infertility in women is polycystic ovary syndrome. Recent research indicates that this disorder has a strong genetic component so what happens if we use medical technology to allow the 10% of women with this problem to pass along their genes to their offspring? With each mother we help conceive, we make the problem worse. Where before we had one person with the defective genes in two generations we have multiplied the issue manifold. After a few hundred years, we are left with a population in which no one can conceive without medical assistance.

The issue is not limited merely to infertility. In a way, each time we save anyone from any disease, we weaken ourselves as a whole. In 1950 the infant mortality rate was 29.2 per 1000 births. In 2003 it was 6.9. Doubtless the average infant is healthier due to improvements in pre-natal nutrition but the fact remains that we save babies who are weaker and in turn more likely to give birth to weaker children themselves and thus more likely to need medical assistance.

As each succeeding generation passes, we slide further and further into dependence on our technology just to survive the world in which we live. At some point, the choice will have to be made and we will slide into Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

The Measure of a Man

Earlier this week I passed a personal milestone. Yes, that’s right, I finally finished that book in Spanish that I told you about and then suddenly deleted all reference to. For the first time in a very long time, I’ve accomplished some tangible portion of one of my inane personal goals. This sort of thing hasn’t happened since years ago when I finally got my world banknote collection all nicely sorted out. Subsequently of course I’ve tried maddeningly to rid myself of that same collection but at least it was finished… for a while.

Banknote tangents aside, this Spanish thing brought me around to the usual depressing thoughts that accompany any of my rather arbitrary goals. The first is the usual ‘Why?’ which I covered at length in my ‘Empty Erudition’ post from April of this year. The question remains a valid one but one that I’m happy to ignore for the moment. The question that really bothers me is how one measures any of this. Obviously, slogging through an entire book in Spanish can’t be hurting my grasp of the language but is it really doing any good? Would I be better served to go sit in a Mexican restaurant at lunch hour or religiously read a few dozen Spanish blogs? I’m a simple man with simple needs and one of those needs is to have at my disposal a set of several thousand real-time metrics that measure my mental acuity in a multitude of subject areas.

It is ironic that for all of mankind’s efforts to measure, quantify and explain the universe around him, his own mind is almost completely unknown to him. Mankind has absolutely no reliable tools to assess the human mind… well, except for one. More on that later. In general, people believe that tests exist which will plumb the depths of human knowledge. The SAT, IQ Tests and a myriad of others attempt to determine exactly what you know and reduce your knowledge to a simple integer value but despite all the hubbub and the allure of such tests, they’re nothing more than humbug.

Take the SAT as an example; it measures mathematical and verbal skills for students heading for a University education. Its testing base is relatively broad and is widely accepted as THE test to take if you’re going on for more education after High School. The problem with this is that people cheat the system. They don’t write the answers on their arms but they study materials directly related to the content of the test. In any bookstore you can find a plethora of books whose sole purpose is to help you improve your SAT scores. Worse than that, many schools focus their curricula on the content of standardized tests. Because of all this outside influence on the minds being tested, these tests aren’t a measure of your aptitude so much as a measure of your ability to buy and study a book. It has always been my decided opinion that studying for any test is a form of cheating. The test was intended to measure what you learned or what you know, not your ability to cram a litany of facts into your short-term memory. This is as true of the SAT as it is of the final exam in Mr. Shilling’s calculus class.

As a supplement and formalization of the testing procedure that society uses to measure our intellects we now have hundreds of certifications and degrees that are aimed at proving just how intelligent we are. In the computer trades especially, there is a wide range of tests and certifications designed to quantify technical intellect and reduce it to a three or four letter abbreviation. You can be an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) or an OCP (Oracle Certified Professional) and for each of these esteemed positions there’s a test (or tests) and of course for each test there’s a big $50 book to study. Personally, I find these tests utterly laughable. All the really good engineers I know don’t bother with such certification and those who have them always seem to be the most intellectually vacuous. But yet this process is supposed to be the main basis by which we hire and promote people in the technology sector? Pish.

So a few hundred words back I mentioned a wonderful and objective tool that would help us to really measure our own intellect. Obviously from my previous ranting it’s not in the form of any test so what is it? Well, unfortunately, it’s complicated, it’s not objective but it is wonderful. The only tool anyone can use to estimate the breadth and depth of a person’s psyche is another human psyche. As humans, we’re REALLY good at assessing each other. We do it instantly without even trying. If I went up to a native speaker of Spanish and tried to address her in her native tongue she’d be able to tell me more about my level of skill in 10 seconds than hours and hours of standardized testing. The same goes for just about every facet of human knowledge plus or minus the much practiced art of ‘bullshit’ most commonly seen in job interviews and used car sales.

Ultimately though, even that tool does us little good. Brains are good at comparing but they lack good points of reference. I can say “I know more about calculus than Joe” and Joe can say “Rob knows more about calculus than I do” but that’s about it. Without any absolute measure of intelligence we both run the risk of being total idiots relative to someone who really knows what they’re talking about. Beyond meaningless relativistic measures of intelligence with no grounding in anything strictly quantifiable the problem is completely insolvable. I suppose I’ll have to be content in the knowledge that my Spanish is at least better than the local car dealer who proudly displays the sign:

“Seablamos hespañol.”

But yet probably worse than the average Madrid-born 6th grader’s. C’est la vie. Crap. Wait, that’s not even Spanish. Hrmph.

Machine Gun versus Bazooka

Sometimes, it’s not just the size of the gun that matters but the ammunition. The fairy wren, for example, delivers bit time when it has sex. Each time this little tiny bird ejaculates he fires a monstrous 8 billion (yes, with a b) sperm. That’s 45 times more than the average human who puts out a piddling 180 million in each delivery.

So didn’t Bateman’s principle state that being a guy was the cheap end of the garter belt? What could possibly be cheap about 8 billion sperm and why would a bird less than 2 inches long need THAT many sperm? The answer, as you might guess, goes back to competition. Female fairy wrens are incredible sluts. Despite the fact that males assist in child rearing, genetic testing has indicated that chances are good that most of the chicks in a nest don’t actually belong to the male helping out. Because of the female’s behavior, males find themselves in the midst of an incredible arms race. Each sperm is a lottery ticket and the more lottery tickets the better.

Not all males who produce a lot of sperm do so because their women are sleeping around. Sometimes, high sperm counts are the result of just how hard is to get a sperm from the male to the egg. Many trees, for example, are pollinated by the action of the wind. They rely on the capricious actions of the weather to make sure that boy meets girl. These plants produce pollen by the bucketful because they’re literally at the mercy of chance. Others trees have the advantage of relying on active pollinators which carry pollen directly from one tree to the next. These species get away relatively cheap but make up for it to an extent since they must produce some gift in the form of nectar to attract the insects and birds that do the work of playing sexual middlemen.

In many higher species, the reason for higher sperm counts is even more bizarre. In humans, sperm counts are astronomical because the female’s anatomy is actually hostile to sperm. The human vagina is exceptionally acidic and it alone kills off 90% of the sperm deposited therein. 90% of the remainder are culled out by the mucus of the cervix and the rest are subject to the immune response of the female. White blood cells respond within minutes and start killing sperm by the millions. In traversing less than 12 inches within the female, 180 million sperm have been reduced to a few hundred. This overtly hostile environment helps to assure that only the healthiest sperm have a chance to fertilize the egg. An arduous 10-month gestation is, after all, a terrible thing to waste on some guy’s second-rate sperm.

Bibliography

Judson, Olivia, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex advice to all creation,
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2002.

If you must go out, go out with a bang

I often wonder how different the world would be if human males were more like male honeybees. Most male bees never actually get to have sex at all. They wander around looking for queens to inseminate for their entire lives. In this way, they are a lot like some human males. There are also the lucky bees though. These lottery winners of life actually find a woman, get to have sex, ejaculate, tear off their own penises, leave it stuck in the female’s vagina and then explode with an audible POP.

The obvious question in the reader’s mind will no doubt be a resounding and audible “Ewwwww, WHY?” Well, when your species doesn’t afford a lot of opportunity for you to have sex, this makes perfect sense. Most males never find a mate so when they do get that lucky, any act, no matter how self-destructive, can help their genes have a better chance of fathering the next generation of bees. Having a disembodied penis broken off in your vagina does have a definite negative effect on a female’s ability to accommodate the next lucky guy.

Only problem with this is that the female objects to this attempt at enforced monogamy. She only mates for a short time during her youth and after that she just uses sperm from that one fling to create an entire hive of bees. She’s got a lot invested in that one fling so if she only gets to mate with one male and that male happens to be genetically incompatible with her then she’s in deep trouble. She could spend the rest of her life turning out complete duds.

The other ‘only’ problem of course is the thousands of other male bees that want to have sex with the queen. Until they can figure out how to defeat the dismembered penis of suitor #1, they’re out of luck. Well, luckily for all involved, they’ve evolved an answer to the conundrum.. The male honeybee’s penis has an apparatus on it that happens to be just the right size and shape for prying a little tiny penis out of a female’s vagina. So suitor #2 simply approaches the queen, does a little light cleaning and then proceeds with copulation. It’s just the sort of odd foreplay that we’ve no doubt come to expect from the animal kingdom.

Luckily for humans, most other animals have less explosive devices for promoting their sperm over those of the ‘other’ guy. Many rodents produce a rubbery plug which they inject into the female to seal up the entrance after they copulate. To counteract this process, some species have evolved a prehensile penis to remove the plug (which they then eat to get a tasty pre-sex snack) and clear the way for his own sperm. Any attempt to apply these images and techniques to your own sex life is most strongly not recommended.

Bibliography

Judson, Olivia, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex advice to all creation,
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2002.

You and Your Penis

You can tell a lot about a person by his penis. The complexity of the penis seems to be related to the competition for females. Bushbabies and many other small primates have obscenely complex and fanciful penises with knobs, spikes, bristles and other accoutrements designed to stimulate the female to accept his sperm more readily. Competition for females among these groups is quite intense and any competitive advantage is worth the effort. Compare this to the male gorilla. He presides more or less unchallenged over a harem of females and as a consequence this 500 pound behemoth has a penis only 2 inches long. So much for the big-shoes/big-wang theory.

As usual though, the insect world has the world of mammals beaten by a mile. Damselflies have inflatable penises with horns and bristles that it uses to clean the female’s vaginal opening before copulation. Now that’s “washing that man right out of your… well, not hair…” Others have genitals so complex that females will forcibly eject the sperm of other suitors when a new male comes to mate, but only if he’s got “the right stuff.”

Sadly, most birds lack penises entirely. They must be content to just rub themselves together and deliver sperm that way. Nonetheless, males have devised ways to get rid of his rival’s sperm. Some will perform oral sex on the female to remove her other lovers sperm and some species have even evolved a ‘fake’ penis that it uses to scrape out the vagina before copulation. I guess all this explains the male obsession with tools.

Bibliography

Judson, Olivia, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex advice to all creation,

Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2002.

Bateman’s Principle

In 1948, A.J. Bateman established a concept in the sexual sciences that has made its way into popular thought and stayed there. He argued simply that sperm was cheap. So cheap and easy to manufacture in fact that men were born to spread their cheap seed as widely as possible and ignore all else. Females, on the other hand, had to pick their mates carefully. Since they have to carry the children and care for them, they have to be very careful who they mate with to get the best and healthiest babies. The women choose, he claimed, while the men simply flit about trying to pollinate every female they can find.

This concept has been accepted even in non-scientific circles to explain all manner of male behavior including the tendency to philander. The simple argument was made that men are simply carrying out the programmed response of evolution. Men are SUPPOSED to spread their genes as far as they can; it’s as nature intended.

Sadly for Bateman and the philanderers, he was, in fact, mostly wrong. Bateman had been studying a particular species of fruit fly, drosophila melanogaster. The females of this particular species do behave as Bateman describes in his theory but they’re a rare exception. Other species within this genus and in fact insects and animals in general exhibit exactly the opposite behavior. Typically, it’s the female who seeks out as many mates as she can while the males are desperately trying to protect their genetic heritage.

In fact, the more mates a female has, the more healthy offspring she will produce. This competition between males (and between their sperm) ensures that her eggs are not only fertilized, but fertilized by the fittest and strongest sperm from a wide variety of sources. This process also safeguards against the loss of an entire breeding season because she has chosen a mate who is infertile or simply genetically incompatible. With a wide range of sperm from many different males competing for her eggs, she raises the chances that each attempt at reproduction will be a successful one.

So as it turns out, women are really the ones programmed to sleep around. Enjoy!

Bibliography

Judson, Olivia, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex advice to all creation,
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2002.

Willful Ignorance

As I sit here typing away, I’m frankly and completely flummoxed. Someone has had the audacity to call me, ME of ALL people Willfully Ignorant. ME?!?!

http://tatteredthread.blogspot.com/2006/02/cosmic-landscape-chapter-7.html#c114089489860259182

The background is somewhat long and drawn out but to summarize, the commenter and I disagree on the Anthropic theory of the Universe. He has invested a lot of time and energy in learning all about the current thinking on the origin of the universe and applying his own interpretation. I can respect that and I heard him out in previous comments (which can still be found on the respective posts) and even spent a significant amount of time trying to understand what he was talking about. In the end, I was relatively unsuccessful but despite his interruptions, the review of the text that started this whole thing, “The Cosmic Landscape” continued.

Apparently, at some key point in the text, my comments on the text disagreed with something he held to be true. Specifically, the Anthropic theory of the universe. At the moment, it really does appear that this theory is yet another attempt by the religious to slip their mythology into our lives in the guise of science. Is this the case? I have no clue, I haven’t had time to finish the book yet. Maybe it doesn’t but as of chapter 6 it certainly appears to be the case. I’m open-minded (despite the claims of certain commenters) and await further developments in the rest of the book.

At this juncture, I am forced to conclude that the person in question is simply a religious fanatic of some sort. Of course that’s his right but I will say that no religion I’m aware of would consider his behavior appropriate. Insults and name-calling are certainly not a Christian ideal. He’s entitled to his opinion and is free to post it as commentary on my blog. I have no problem with people hearing every side of every story. There is no higher ideal than the truth. It’s important to remember, however, that the truth is seldom delivered by people who hurl epithets at their opposition.

More than the irritation at my disagreement though, I’m amazed that anyone could call me willfully ignorant. My highest goal in life is to know as much about everything as possible. I don’t want to be ignorant of anything. To call me Willfully Ignorant is simply astonishing. In this specific instance especially, I don’t see how the argument can be made. The commenter can only be complaining about one of two things that I’m apparently refusing to learn about:

It’s possible he/she believes that I’m not trying hard to enough to learn about physics. To this, I’ll simply point out that I’m reading the book. I’ve read half a dozen others throughout my life and any ignorance of physics (which is considerable) is not willful. Willfully ignorant people don’t read books on the things they’re trying to remain ignorant of.

The other possibility is that he/she believes I’m ignorant of religion. If he or she really is a religious zealot, then the argument would simply be that I’m trying to evade his or her arguments so that I can continue to deny the existence of his or her choice of deity. If that’s the case, it’s just silly. I’ve spent more time reading the Bible than the average Christian and more time with the Qur’an than 99.9% of other non-Muslims so I’m far from ignorant of religion. I’m not denying the existence of anyone’s deity. I don’t subscribe to any deities personally but as I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the universe I can’t speak as to where yours is.

In any case, to those who disagree, please disagree. But do not post disagreements of the form “you’re a ___” or “what a ___” as they’re just going to get deleted. Back your disagreements with facts, not insults. If I’m wrong I’ll happily admit it, I love to change my mind and do so often. Do not, however, expect me to just change my mind because you said so. In the end, we all have ultimate dominion over our own minds.