Apathy Sketchpad

A bit ago, Randall changed the design of xkcd.com and in doing so very inconsiderately broke my xkcd Wallpaper Randomiser. Well, now I’ve updated it, so if you used to use it then you can download the new version and use it once more.

As before, the source code is available, so you can see just how little has changed and just how easily you could have done this yourselves, you lazy bottoms.

I just read this story on the BBC. The story itself, that a young boy died in a “prank that went wrong” presumed to be copying something he saw on TV, is obviously very sad, but I found the rest of the story very heartening. The report avoids fingering any particular shows or even blaming TV in general, the cause of death isn’t presented as an absolute, and the parents and reporter refrain from any knee-jerk demands to ban things or limit their availability, or censor them in any way. They specifically say “We don’t really know what happened but we think he was up to something because that was the type of boy he was.”

Instead, they used their small amount of access to the national press to say nice things about their late son. That’s a fantastic attitude, and they are to be commended for it. And then they’re having a funeral with brightly coloured clothes — something Sean would have wanted instead of something traditional.

More power to them. If we had more parents and reporters who took this kind of attitude we’d have a lot less tabloid-fuelled idiocy trying to push dumb legislation like Sarah’s Law onto the law books. And I bet they cope a lot better this way, too.

According to the BBC, via the Times, “exam boards in England are planning to put more simple questions in science papers”. This is in response to lowering science grades and corresponding drops in science A-level and university course uptake.

Okay. But might it also be an idea to put more science questions in there? Science is interesting, and if it was taught properly then students would get better marks and enjoy it more and uptake would increase.

You could also try putting more sensible ones on. Have a look at the exam paper The Times has for download. It’s mostly pretty good for avoiding the complaints of Wellington Grey, although that’s perhaps because it’s all multiple choice and as such it’s largely impossible to specify answers that can’t be guessed at or ask political “why..?” questions. But question three can be answered by someone who doesn’t understand any science at all. Someone who only knew one word of English could probably get it, providing that word was “between”. Question five is quite a good one in principle, but misses a key point of science: that we should assume that the stupid theory is wrong unless its advocates can prove otherwise. I’m sure it’s perfectly answerable, but the correct response to that question is “they shouldn’t bother”. Question seven is not about science. Question ten implies that Jupiter is a star. Question 20 is only debatably a science question, and has two correct answers (or none, depending on how you interpret them).

There’s a huge amount of science test papers and things on the AQA’s site, which is presumably more representative. I might have a look at some later.

I just want to point out that Windows Explorer, the basic file manager/shell programme which forms an integral part of Windows XP has managed to crash on me for the fourth time today. It is not even ten past twelve yet, and I’m not doing anything complicated with it. I can’t even think of anything complicated one could conceivably do with it..

I cannot even begin to fathom the institutional incompetence that would be required for one of the world’s richest companies to be able to produce such shitty software. It beggars belief, really it does.

Damn, I wish I could use Linux at work.

This is another sciencey post. If you want something more trivial, read Channel Flip, although lately I have been mostly discussing science there as well. I’ll try to blog about something trivial later on. If not, then hey, it’ll be September soon and I’ll need a new Religious Crackpot…

In the meantime, here’s a Clever Analogy. There are people, or at least Creationists, who are, apparently, quite prepared to accept “microevolution”, the idea that small changes within a species can be explained by natural selection, but not “macroevolution”, the idea that cumulative small changes can eventually cause large changes and speciation. This is foolish, andI have a Clever Analogy to explain why.

Also, many people think glass is a liquid. This is also wrong. They usually have some spurious evidence for the claim, but it’s still wrong. Glass is a glass. Rubber, on the other hand, is a rubber. According to molecular physics, there is no structural difference between a rubber and a glass. Both take the form of a tightly packed mess of long polymer molecules, which are much like the cables behind your computer, unless you use a Mac in which case I’d like to know why you lot insist on that ridiculous one button mouse. Except that the molecules in rubbers and glasses are interlinked, so the object keeps its shape. Hence, a good rubber band could be all one molecule, theoretically.

The difference between a glass and a rubber is in temperature. A glass is cold, and as such the molecules can’t move around much, so when you hit it, it can’t distort so it fractures. A rubber, on the other hand, is warmer, and can simply bend out of your way as the molecules flow over each other. The reason some things are glassy and some are rubbery is that different materials have a different glass transition temperature. If that’s above room temperature, it’s a glass, otherwise a rubber. If you dunk rubber in liquid nitrogen, it turns to a glass and shatters on impact. You’ve probably seen it done, which is good because anagloising an obscure process we can’t observe to another obscure process we can’t observe is a bit pointless.

But here’s the thing: it’s all about molecule speeds, so instead of making the molecules faster, you could just make the impact slower. If you hit a glass very slowly, you could get it to move like a rubber. Or, if you have a very slow metabolism then you might see things we think of as glasses acting as rubbers. Equally, if you hit rubber fast enough, you can make it shatter. In theory.

“Micro-” and “Macro-evolution” seem very different. They have very different results, although the underlying process is the same. But my point here is that a single process can produce dramatically different effects when viewed over different timescales. There’s absolutely no reason why that shouldn’t be the case.

It’s a common Creationist argument, but more than that I think it’s an important part of how evolution works that’s rarely explicitly addressed. If I can remove a mental block to understanding something as brilliant as the theory of evolution, I’d like to do that.

Last night when I was trying to get to sleep, the only book within reach was The Student Bible. So I randomly opened it and started reading. I figured if the book of Numbers was anything to go by then I ought to drop off to sleep nice and fast. Unfortunately, I opened it to the book of Job. This is a little worrying because it suggestive that my accusation against Hare Krishna propaganda manual Facts For Life, that it could reliably be opened at random and produce something preposterous, may be equally true of the Old Testament.

Seriously, if you’re of the opinion that God is not a mentalist you definitely should read Job, optionally with annotations. If you can’t be bothered, then I shall summarise it here. I’ll try to leave in all the important bits.

Job is a nice man who lives in somewhere called Uz. He has ten children, a lot of slaves, and a faintly ridiculous amount of livestock. He is big on God. One day, God and Satan are having what can only be described as a friendly chat, in which God bets that Satan can’t make Job curse God’s name. So God agrees to let Satan smash all Job’s stuff as long as he doesn’t touch Job personally. So Satan kills all Job’s sheep (which must have taken a long time), then kills his slaves, and then kills his children, all with God’s permission. And Job still loves God, so Satan loses the bet. That is the end of chapter one: like its sequel, The Da Vinci Code, the Bible has very short chapters, although they mostly don’t end in cliffhangers.

In chapter 2, Satan and God go double-or-quits (basically) that Job won’t curse God’s name even if Satan hurts him a lot. So Satan, with God’s blessing, inflicts a lot of nasty boils on Job, boils being the only disease in the Bible, other than leprosy. And Satan loses the bet again.

I stopped reading after that, because it was late and there was no cliffhanger I needed to resolve. But the moral of the story is clear: God is a bastard who will happily kill (or allow Satan to kill) your family and your sheep and oxen and your slaves (which you’re allowed to have) and then cover you in nasty boils, just to settle a bet, and you should praise him for this. Presumably, so should your family and slaves, at least up until the point where they’re murdered by a mythical being.

It’s lucky we have the Bible for moral guidance, isn’t it, or we’d probably all be horrid to each other the whole time.

A thread on the Bad Science forums has just directed me to this page, a parliamentary early day motion in favour of homeopathic hospitals, along with a list of the MPs who are stupid and/or ignorant enough to have signed it. Here’s the text of the motion:

That this House welcomes the positive contribution made to the health of the nation by the NHS homeopathic hospitals; notes that some six million people use complementary treatments each year; believes that complementary medicine has the potential to offer clinically-effective and cost-effective solutions to common health problems faced by NHS patients, including chronic difficult to treat conditions such as musculoskeletal and other chronic pain, eczema, depression, anxiety and insomnia, allergy, chronic fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome; expresses concern that NHS cuts are threatening the future of these hospitals; and calls on the Government actively to support these valuable national assets.

Almost every word of that is wrong. Homeopathic hospitals cost money and don’t work; that is a negative contribution. “Complementary treatments” is a misleading term and does not refer to homeopathy alone and so the number attached to it is irrelevant and misleading. Complementary medicine cannot offer “clinically-effective” (which should not be hyphenated) solutions to any health problems (except possibly for psychosomatic ones). Threats to these hospitals’ futures is not a cause for concern, the government should not support them, and they are not “national assets”. That’s pretty bad for a single sentence.

It also links to this page which tells you who your local MP is and how to contact them, so that if yours is on the list (mine isn’t) you can let them know that the NHS should probably not be spending millions of pounds of your money on hospitals whose stated goal is to prescribe a nice cool glass of water for every known illness.

I shall add this motion to my long list of reasons not to like Ann Widdecombe. The only other name on there I know anything much about it Lembit Opik, and frankly I expect more from him. If he wants me to believe his asteroid science he could start by showing he understands that water cannot cure allergies. If someone who understands science tells me there’s a danger then I’ll worry. If someone who thinks homeopathy is clinically effective tells me there’s a danger then I’ll laugh.

There’s been a lot of talk lately, a great deal of it precipitated by Richard Dawkins, about the idea that people are becoming increasingly “anti-science”. This always seems to me to be a decidedly strange thing to be “anti-”. You never hear of people being strongly opposed to any other kind of human endeavour. You never hear of people who are “anti-mathematics”, shouting loudly that geometry is based on unproven assertions from some dead Greek guy. Or quacks preaching “pseudo-geography”, and claiming that all countries are really just one country, surrounded by one sea, and that you can travel between these apparent countries by aligning yourself with their various energies. Science, like maths and geography, is just a way of looking at an aspect of reality in a specific way. Science is just a fancy word for what we know about reality. There’s no way you can be against knowledge, one would think, but the odd thing about these anti-science types is that they appear to think that if they ignore reality pointedly enough then it will go away. They can probably convince themselves of this pretty well, but reality never goes away. It’s still there, in the background, and you can convince yourself all you like that there is no bus hurtling towards you, and perhaps you’ll succeed, but you’ll still die, only now you won’t know why you’re dead. This happens — every so often the media will report a case where someone has taken homeopathic ‘medicine’ instead of, well, medicine, and promptly dropped dead when reality butted in and politely pointed out that in real life you can’t cure serious diseases by having a nice glass of water.

In The Enemies Of Reason, Dawkins seemed oddly reluctant to accept that alternative ‘therapies’ were so much better at placebo effect than conventional medicine. Personally, this does not surprise me at all. By devising medicine that actually works, conventional medicine has allowed itself to be controlled by clinical trials and evidence, and so the placebo effect plays a remote second fiddle to actual physiological effects. Alternative ‘medicine’, on the other hand, is pure placebo (occasionally with the odd bit of active ingredient thrown in: every so often someone will analyse some old Chinese herb and prove that it contains some naturally occurring form of aspirin or whatever). It survives because people think it works. If people don’t think it works, then it won’t work even as well as other placebos, and then it will die out. Every so often someone will realise they can get more money or respect than other practitioners if they change the system a little, or even make up their own system, so they’re offering something unique. If this seems more convincing to the public it will prosper. Otherwise, it will fail. What you have there is like spawning imperfect copies of like and criteria for selection among those copies. That’s all you need for Evolution to happen. Essentially, gullible fools are the environment in which the memes of alternative ‘therapies’ must fight to survive. Alternative therapies are good at placebo for the same reason that fish are good at swimming: they simply wouldn’t exist otherwise. (Although right now I think they’re living in an environment of plenty where they can all survive with very little selection going on.)

You’d think he’d have thought of that.

This month’s Religious Crackpot Thereof award goes to a crazy monk whom I met some months ago now. What? Don’t look at me like that; the Nobel Prizes are awarded to stuff that happened years before the date on the certificate. Besides, he was a Hare Krishna, and whoever heard of Hare Krishnas bombing someone for saying bad things about them? This crazy monk, whose name alas I do not know, spotted me when I was some distance away. I knew he was going to talk at me, but I thought, what the hell, what’s the worst that can happen?

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