Nature of Man

… nothing that happens to Man is ever natural …

A quote from “Earth” by David Brin, otherwise an not-much-memorable book, too slow and too pointless at times. Reading this piece concided with a recent argument, about reading news and the applicability of a software filter against the “preset” and one-sidedly biased filter of a newspaper editor.

My argument was that you shouldn’t rely on the human editors of one or two newspapers, they are biased in a way that is rarely fitting your needs (how much of a newspaper DOES interest you?). Also, the quantity of daily generated information will soon overwhelm any human editor, your newspaper will cover scraps of scraps of information (or scraps of 2^nd order :).
To counter the argument that you need to have the news the other people around you are reading, so you can have a common social context (which is only arguably useful IMO), I put out that you can have the software model the behaviour of the editor of your choice (or indeed show you the EXACTLY same articles he chose)

I have highlighted some notable points.

“Good morning, Professor Wolling. During the last twenty-four hours there have been three priority-nine world news items, two regional alerts for Britain, and four on general topics from Reuters, your chosen neutral-bias news agency. None of the alerts were in categories listed by you as critical.”
Citizens had to subscribe to a minimum news-input or lose the vote. Still, Jen was anything but a public events junky, so her nine-or-greater threshold was set as high as allowed. She’d scan the headlines later.
“You have received six letters and thirty five-message blips from individuals on your auto-accept list. Sixty-five more letters and one hundred and twelve blips entered your general delivery box on the Net.
“In addition, there were four hundred and thirteen references to you, in yesterday’s scientific journals. Finally, in popular media and open discussion boards, your name was brought up with level seven or greater relevance fourteen hundred and eleven times.”
It was clearly another case of human profligacy–this typical turning of a good thing into yet another excuse for overindulgence. Like the way nations suffering from greenhouse heat still spilled more than five billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. A prodigious yield that was nevertheless nothing compared to the species’ greatest harvest–words.
And to think, some idiots predicted that we’d someday found our economy on information. That we ‘d base money on it!
On information? The problem isn’t scarcity. There’s too damned much of it!
The problem usually wasn’t getting access to information. It was to stave off drowning in it.
People bought personalized filter programs to skim a few droplets from that sea and keep the rest out. For some, subjective reality became the selected entertainments and special-interest zines passed through by those tailored shells.
Here a man watches nothing but detective films from the days of cops and robbers–a limitless supply of formula fiction. Next door a woman hears and reads only opinions that match her own, because other points of view are culled by her loyal guardian software.
To avoid such staleness, Jen had hired a famous rogue hacker, Sri Ramanujan, to design her own filter. “Let’s see what happens to that list,” she said aloud, “when we use threshold seven, categories one through twenty.”
“And the surprise factor, Professor Wolling?”
Jen felt in a good mood. “Let’s go with twenty percent.”
That meant one in five files would pop up randomly, in defiance of her own parameters. This way she asked Ramanujan to unleash purposely on her a little of the chaos his devilish virus-symbiont had once wreaked on thirteen million Net subscribers in South Asia–jiggling their complacent cyberworlds to show them glimpses of different realities, different points of view.

I “found” this forgotten in a folder, a piece from my youth, when “Nu-Metal” didn’t exist as a label, and we just picked for listening bits of anything that we liked. Having labels invites mislabeling.
Anyway, here is the piece. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand even the half of it. What little understanding I have, I used to place punctuation in the lyrics (maybe I shouldn’t have). And yet every word and every note manage to resonate within (me | the selfsame well from which my laughter comes), to carry emotions without understanding. This is art. Or just lies, fashioned with the images of angelic faces.

Downset - Forcing Permanent Days Unmoving

This minute is hard and it walks an unfit honest mile, alone.
The truth laid out to wait, rest well and die cold.
I know the method: lips drawn wide to turn and sway, to smile behind the biting tongue.
Each of us danced well in lies - the hand, the handle and the sword.

Lies…
There are those of us who will embrace lies,
and yet if it comforts us, we will do what lies do.
When I confess there is no truth, demons remain sleepless again in love with blood starved souls forgotten without sounds… Between birth and death lies will whisper deepest disintegrations before the living.
Lies fashioned with the images of angelic faces.
It grows into a stillness and we will respond lies.
Can I speak of deepest deaths unseen?
Pearl teardrops will fall from the faces of undeserved suffering…
Forcing permanent days unmoving…
Forcing permanent days unmoving…

Slicing clean, but not as deep, and what it equals, scars will tell.
Pain runs hard, hate runs clean… and on the floor your whitlings fell.
Because this monster begets the monster:
Myself and the thorn of fear that the selfsame well from which my laughter comes… would also bleed with my tears.

A good article by Richard Joltes.

One of the fundamental reasons for the ongoing conflict between the religious and scientific communities involves differences in terminology and word usage. Having heard many lay people scoff “evolution is only a theory” or refer to “the theory of Intelligent Design,” it seems prudent to discuss differences in usage and understanding, as Creationists are misusing the understanding of this and other scientific terms by the average individual to further their own aims.

In science, the word “theory” is not used in the manner understood by most people, i.e. I have a theory that if I do X, Y will result or perhaps my theory is that man was created by divine intervention. They equate the word with “conjecture,” “supposition,” or at worst “guess.” However, phrases such as these fall under the heading of “hypothesis” or “hunch” for the purpose of scientific enquiry. In a scientific context, the word theory is reserved for ideas that have been repeatedly tested experimentally under very rigorous conditions and confirmed to behave as expected.

And here’s the place to throw in a thought I read somewhere else:
Most ID proponents seem to think that scientists support “their theory” out of professional pride or whatnot, while in fact any savant would sell his grandmother for a chance to disprove any theory, let alone one of the major ones in science. And let me tell you, this doesn’t happen often, Einstein was just lucky ;) (In case you don’t get it, he “disproved” Newtonian gravity with his Special Theory of Relativity) No, it’s simply that any effort towards disproving a settled theory is burdened with the weight of the amassed evidence, a weight that ID proponents choose to ignore, instead of incorporating it in a plausible alternative hypothesis.

Another take on the Bunny Suicide meme, this time in a form of game. It’s the simplest game ever - you have ONE button to use - press space to make the bunny jump. And hey, you suicidal bunnies out there, remember this: if you happen to fall on a fluffy sheep - try, try again!

Version 1
Version 2 (No sheep, but with extra sharp objects)

Ever since the Renaissance, savants and artists have tried to apply rational thought on the problems of defining beauty. Golden ratio, Vitruvian Man, you name it. Some attempts have been made also to enumerate (and name, in a progressively ridiculous way) the “sexiest” points on the female body. (The arithmetic analysis of female nature is beyond the scope of this article). Here we present a modern take on the problem, applying simple calculus techniques.

A traditional modern (oxymoron not intended) measure of “sexyness” of the female body is the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), obtained by dividing the circumference of the waist with that of the hip (“ideal” value is supposed to be 0.7). WHR is inherent in the currently used unscientific notation (i.e. 90-60-90).

Assuming that the cross-section of the body in these two points is an ellipsoidal curve with a constant eccentricity (width/height ratio), we can get rid of the extra dimension and instead of the circumference use the visual width of the torso. We talk about width, i.e. size when standing up, as the body takes a non-symmetric shape when lying on its side. For ease of presentation, we will depict the upright body in a 90 degree widdershins rotation so we can view the curvature as an algebraic function (with the zero point at the central line of the body — the one that passes throught the nose and the navel). The waistline and the hipline are the local min and max points of the curve.

Looking at it this way it is easily seen why WHR is not an adequate measure. Have a look for example at this other function (blue line) with the same min and max values (i.e. same ‘waist’ and ‘hip’ measures), but with a significally different “sexyness”. Therefore, we need another measure to add, so we can unequivocally define the exact shape of the pelvic region.

Intuitively, we feel that the important thing to measure should be related to the angle of the body curve (an angle of a curve in a point is defined as the angle of the tangent in that point). A natural choice of such a point is the zero of the second derivative of the curve (the zeroes of the first derivative we already have - these are the min and max values). The zero point of the second derivative is the place where the curve stops being concave and flexes towards convexity (or vice versa) - here marked by the blue spot.

The angle of the tangent in that point (i.e. the value of the first derivative in the point where the second derivative is zero) gives us a better measure of sexyness (well, maybe we’ll need the min and max values too). Going back to the blue curve two paragraphs above, we can see that the tangent to that curve in the zero of the second derivative will be much steeper, even though the min and max values are the same.

The said point is thus another important “sexy” point (as well as the points on the hip and waist), and I hereby name it the P”Z-point (P[elvic]“[second derivative]Z[ero] - point). Likewise we also have P’Z_min and P’Z_max points, which are used in the already popular waist and hip measures.

As a preliminary result of this article, we propose that female proportions are noted as a four-dimensional vector <x₀, x₁, x₂, x₃>, where x₀, x₁ and x₃ are the familiar breast, waist and hip measures, while x₂ is the angle α, in radians. In a non-formal manner we can write x₀-x₁-x₂-x₃ (i.e. 90-60-0.56-90, instead of the non-specific 90-60-90). We also post as an open problem in front of the scientific community the matter of defining in a better way the shape of the female breast.