The case for reality...

I care about the truth a great deal. I cannot knowingly accept a fantasy. My drive to make sure that my beliefs jive with reality stems from this predisposition.

But is a predisposition all this is? Is my striving for truth just a personal choice?

The standard argument for seeking truth and against fantasy is the harm that believing comforting fictions can cause. Our beliefs affect our actions, and when beliefs are disconnected from reality, it is all to easy for toxic beliefs to thrive, ending in atrocities like 9/11 and the Holocaust.

The harm caused by magical thinking, superstition and pseudoscience is not always on such a grand scale, however. Much of the harm done occurs on the personal level, where it slips past headlines for the most part. Conspiracy theories divert attention away from real social issues. Bogus psychics offer comfort to grieving families, and do not deliver. Alternative medicine remedies offer hope to the terminally ill, and do not deliver.

But what if the psychic pretends to speak to a dead relative, and the family goes away satisfied, believing the fantasy? What if a patient takes a fake homeopathic remedy and feels better (the placebo effect being what it is)? Why hate on horoscopes, when no one really believes them anyway? Is there anything objectively bad about believing in fairy tales and reassuring fables, when such fables do no harm?

My response is that allowing this kind of thinking to flourish in our discourse may not be dangerous in itself, but will provide cover for the more verminous, dangerous and extreme superstitions. If reason is in exile, then all kinds of superstition will thrive, not merely the fluffy, garden variety woo that people like to believe in.

But all these arguments are based in the consequences of allowing fantasies to grow unchecked. Is there any properly basic reason to search for the truth in and of itself, rather than as a means to an end (i.e. a better, friendlier society)? I don't know, though I would be overjoyed if I discovered one.

In lieu of this, I must appeal on human terms.

I feel that it is sentimental and childish to embrace comforting fables when the truth is out there. No matter how comforting a fable is, there is also comfort and awe to be found in the world as it really exists, we don't have to demean it with pathetic fairy tales. If only we could get past our fear of being tiny, we could appreciate the vast wonder to be found in knowing the actual circumstances of our existence.

We are only here for a short time. And we are, shall we say 'blessed', with a tremendous opportunity. Our civilisation has progressed to such a degree that the tools to find the truth are at our feet. All we need do is show our maturity by picking them up.

So I have a camera now.

The FZ45 is what they call a bridge camera, in that it has manual settings and some other advanced settings, but lacks the optical viewfinder or interchangeable lens you'd expect from a proper SLR. My plan is to see how this goes, then switch to a better model in a year or so.

I have a bag and lens cleaning kit, awaiting the delivery of a tripod and lens filters.

Oh yes, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Don't kill people

Some things are complicated. This isn't.

There is no reason to kill apart from self-defence. Full stop. Whatever justification you think you have means exactly nothing.

This is a pitifully simple dictum, and yet it proves elusive on even a casual survey of the Google News homepage. Headlines like;

Ivory Coast: UN warns attack could reignite civil war

Teenager shot dead by gang

Two Christians killed in wave of Baghdad bombings

I am in general optimistic for us, as I have said before, but there are times when I feel like disowning my species. Surely, I think, I can't be cut from the same genetic stock as those who maim and slaughter like it's the norm? I know I am not alone in this.

The human mind, as a rule, is fickle and easily manipulated. As much as we would love to believe that our mind is a temple which no other may enter, it really isn't true. Ideology, social pressures and pathology can overcome even the most deep-seated aversions and principles. Perhaps if more people were aware of how easily they can be controlled they would be more equipped to fight against it.

Regardless of what we might like to believe, us humans are quite fragile organisms. A bullet, a stab wound, a particularly nasty fall or a particularly violent infection is all it takes to end us. All the more reason to take extra care.

It isn't naive to cherish life.

Faster than the speed of light

The concept of exceeding the speed of light has been dead since 1905, when a fellow named Einstein published a paper called 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies'. And yet, the idea persists.

Pretty much every Hollywood sci-fi story since the genesis of the genre includes it. Even so-called 'hard' sci-fi which attempts to retain a veneer of scientific plausibility makes an exception for the fabled FTL drive.

Turns out, you may never reach or exceed 299,792,458 metres per second in this universe. This commandment is often qualified with 'unless you have infinite energy'. But since there is no such thing as infinite energy in this universe, that is a pointless qualification. Just like you may not adjust the gravitational constant, just like you may not adjust the mass of the electron, you may never reach or exceed the speed of light. Full stop. Deal with it.

There is no reason to presume that reality will yield to us simply because we wish it.

Einstein gave us an out in the form of time dilation - relativistic speeds allow you to travel great distances in comparatively short subjective times. Say you travel a distance of ten light years at 99.5% of the speed of light. To an outside observer, the journey will take a little over a decade, but to you, it will seem to take only a year. At 99.5% of the speed of light, nine tenths of the objective journey time is not experienced by the subjective observer.

At greater fractions of the speed of light the effect becomes even more pronounced. At a constant acceleration of ten metres per square second (approximately the same as acceleration due to gravity at the Earth's surface), you could reach Alpha Centauri in under two and a half years, the centre of the galaxy in eleven years, the Andromeda galaxy in fifteen years, and the edge of the observable universe in twenty-four years.

I'll let that sink in. The edge of the frakking universe in under three decades. Nothing Star Wars or Star Trek dreamt up could do that.

It seems more than a little childish to throw a tantrum about not being able to travel faster than light when reality allows you to cross the universe in mere years of subjective time. Yes, you'd need a beefy energy source to do this, but it's not as though exceeding the speed of light wouldn't need a similarly energy-dense medium, even if it were possible.

Atomic Rockets provides a very good elaboration on these points.

2000 vs. 2010

Saw a really interesting graphic on io9 yesterday.

It's quite sobering to realise that over three quarters of the world's population now has access to a mobile phone, and nearly a tenth has broadband internet access. These numbers are pretty good metrics of ease of social connectedness, and can only go up as time goes on, with phones and computers getting cheaper and more disseminated.

The environment section is also quite telling. Global warming skeptics/deniers have never exactly been well-endowed in terms of evidence, but the data is right there in easily digested visual form. Average global temperature has risen nearly a degree in a decade. Not good. The figures for endangered species and impacts of natural disasters aren't exactly endearing either.

Even when the data is right there, people still have difficulty placing facts above their pet ideology. If there's something we need to teach in school, it's deference to the truth. No matter how much you would like us not to be held accountable for our destruction of Earth's environment, it just isn't so.

If only we had politicians who could grasp the concept of long-term only gains, then we would get along much better.

Ainwa in hindsight

As we might have expected, everything was perfect. The Undying Maker, in wisdom, has seen fit to install us in a beautiful valley. Our settlements have been prepared for us on the side of the valley, on a gentle incline. A stream flows at the bottom of the valley, weaving through the foliage, no doubt following a path carved expertly by the Maker to sustain our thirsts.

Our new home valley runs parallel to the path of the star. We have not yet seen the star disappear below the horizon yet, since it has been mere esks since we awoke in this place. As I write, it is nearly overhead, and casts a gentle red incandescence over us.

At the time of our arrival, the star was low in the air, and it's unobtrusive, yet friendly glow, Maker be blessed, was nearly obscured by the trees through which it infiltrated. These trees, we noticed later under better light, are part of a larger population; a forest which seems to cover the entire valley on one side of our position.

The Maker's servants direct us to name this direction 'west', so we do so. By analogy, they explained before their departure, the opposing direction must therefore be 'east'. In the terminology of the Maker's servants, which we faithfully adopt as our own, the star has spend the last ten esks rising in the sky from the west, and will, if the Maker approves, continue downward to the east.

The orbs of Bottled Light with which we are already acquainted are already dotted around our fine settlement. We about twenty of the blessed spheres against the dim sky, up on the ridge of our valley, and have sent parties to retrieve them before the inevitable stardown. We expect, as the star dips below the horizon, that they will exhale their gathered light to sustain us through the dark, just as the Maker intends.

The servants have left us now, having journeyed west into the forest. We did ask the Maker's servants, as we awoke and looked onto surface of this new surrogate Home, what is wished of us, yet we received replies we are not intended to comprehend. The Maker, in wisdom, will certainly reveal the meanings of these answers in time, once we have proved ourselves by proliferating through this new world, this surrogate Home, this Ainwa.

The Machinery grafted to the being of each one of our number did warm as we stepped onto Ainwa for the first time. We take this as a sign of good things in the future, as we establish ourselves as the Maker wishes. We, the People, earnestly thank the Undying Maker for such grace. We also earnestly hope that we may prove ourselves worthy to return Home once our time on Ainwa comes to a close.

From the Book of Testimonials, a part of the Collected Texts of the Circle of Three Gifts

-------

Or at least that was how it was meant to be.

The Maker no longer answers our cries, of course. The once-blessed orbs of Bottled Light have been extinguished. Our expansion is over, and the faithful are returning to the most holy place where we first set foot on Ainwa. This valley will become full over the next few esks, as our People return to the place we all came from.

My own Machinery is more of a burden than a blessing. It failed me several days ago, and is mere dead weight upon my person. The Healers testify that they can safely remove the Machinery, but I would sooner rip out my own soul before I allowed one of them to touch me. I still have hope that the Maker will return to us, though the knowledge that the Healers have not yet procured a living subject to test their procedure does not endear me to them either.

There are whisperings that perhaps our time on Ainwa is coming to a close. Some in the Circle maintain that the Maker wants us to go Home, and suggest that we expedite the process ourselves, before the Machinery fails all of us.

So of our three Gifts, Light and Machinery have now failed. What of History?

Singing mice

Get a group of mice, tailor their genomes for increased rate of mutation, selectively breed for novel traits and let go. It's evolution writ fast in an artificial environment, and it's what Japanese biologists at the University of Osaka did in a nice bit of open-ended research.

Some of the mice ended up with longer limbs, odd tails, but they've had at least one surprising result. One sub-population of the mice can now sing - video here.

Aside from the core appeal of the idea of a mouse that sings (or chirps, as the case may be), these mice might help further our knowledge of how structured sounds (eg. birdsong), language and even the capacity for speech can evolve, especially in terms of the genes involved.

The researchers are quoted as claiming that the discovery may lead to discoveries on how human speech developed, but this seems just a tad too far-fetched for me. Mice and humans may be just too distant, phylogenetically speaking, for there to be any guarantee of a connection between the genes responsible for human speech and these mice singing.

The mice were genetically modified so that they were prone to DNA replication errors, improving the probability of mutations arising, some of which would then lead to interesting, novel traits. When the researchers identified novel traits, they would selectively breed the mice to carry the traits forward. It is a matter of semantics whether this deserves to be called accelerated evolution, since some would argue that natural selection must be involved for the term 'evolution' to be appropriate, and there is only artificial selection at work here.

In this case however, I'm happy with using the term accelerated evolution to quickly convey what was done, even though many writers have misused the idea of accelerated evolution to refer to something that happens to individuals (i.e. "he's evolving"), rather than populations over generations.

It is also intriguing to think of what applications this technique might have in creating novel traits in future. Who knows what kinds of traits could be imbued in future engineered pets or lifestock animals?

The lead scientist on the project: "I know it's a long shot and people would say it's 'too absurd'... but I'm doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day."