Catmachine

I like to think I’m a rational person, but nevertheless I love a good ghost story. However I have noticed a tendency for some people to seize on rationalism as Something To Believe In which seems to miss the entire point of the mindset. I think of this viewpoint as Born Again Scepticism because it most often afflicts people who were really into Weird Shit when they were younger but became disillusioned by Weird Shit’s constant failure to deliver. Born Again Scepticism espouses a kind of knee jerk “because it doesn’t exist!” holier than thou attitude to anything that isn’t scientific canon and is evangelical about deploying it. Born Again Sceptics are usually not actual scientists. As I've mentioned before on this blog, Carl Sagan – who most definitely was a scientist – said: “No matter how unorthodox the reasoning process or how unpalatable the conclusions, there is no excuse for any attempt to suppress new ideas, least of all by scientists committed to the free exchange of ideas.”...

Exoplanets - planets circling other stars - are being discovered by the dozen these days. Back in the dark times of the eighties and earlier some scientists doubted whether any other stars were accompanied by planets at all. Now you begin to wonder whether there's even such thing as a planetless star. Since the discovery of the first one in 1988 the number of confirmed exoplanets now approaches 1,000 and given advances in observational technology can only grow at an ever increasing rate. As such the news of another discovery is hardly a matter for excitement any more. Except the latest one. They've found a planet in Alpha Centauri . Alpha Centauri! A system whose official stellar classification echoes down the annals of SF literature, film and TV like the name of an old friend. Everyone's heard of Alpha Centauri. It's not that remarkable a system in itself - just a bog standard double star each of which is approximately the same size and magnitude as our own sun,...

I am pleased to see that the Curiosity rover landed safely on Mars after such a long journey. And having seen simulations of the landing itself I'm impressed with the technology involved - the rover was winched down to the surface from a hovering descent section. That's a far more exciting and suitable example of unsupervised robotic drone technology than some I could mention. I hope we can look forward to at least five years of planetary trundling and would like to think that in my lifetime I'll see TV pictures of Curiosity being retrieved by the men and women of the first human mission. Of course every time something exciting happens in the space programme there is a backlash from people who think the money would be better spent curing disease and feeding the hungry. Whilst I  applaud and share the core sentiment - who doesn't wish the sick cured and the starving fed? - as soon as I start unpacking this assertion I find it's riddled with flaws. For a star...

"God does not play dice with the universe" Albert Einstein I find it astonishing in this day and age that the whole business of "should Creationism be taught in schools?" is even discussed. It's not an issue of religious freedom - people should free to believe in whatever they like however stupid it is. It's an issue of whether what should be taught in schools should make fucking sense. By all means teach people about religion in schools ( some people believe this whilst other people believe that and sometimes people kill other people for not agreeing with them ) but anything about the way the universe actually works should be based on facts or at least as close to facts as are currently available. When something is unknown that too should be made clear. But , argue the Creationists, Evolution's just a theory too, goldarnit! No. No it isn't. It's just logic. To be honest I don't even think it should be dignified with the epithet "t...

One of the criticisms levelled at vociferous atheists is that often they're just as bad as the godbotherers they're bashing, that science itself is as much of a "religion" as hard-core Islam or bible-belt Baptist. This is untrue and unfair. Whilst I don't define myself as an atheist (there are plenty of things I don't believe in aside from a god) I am a rationalist and can see that this argument just doesn't hold water. As far as debate is concerned it's about as sophisticated as playground name calling. " I know you are but what am I ?" I couldn't possibly repel this attack as well as Richard Dawkins does in the preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion . In it he says: "It is all too easy to mistake passion that can change its mind for fundamentalism, which never will." This is to say a scientist passionate about his beliefs nevertheless when presented with firm evidence to the contrary will - in fact ...

Even as a young child I was very interested in astronomy. One of the most irritating things about this was when an indulgent adult would patronizingly ask me what I was interested in. "Astronomy." "Really? Astrology? How interesting. What sign are you then?" Even as a five year old I knew the difference between the two. Astronomy was the science of stars, moons, planets, telescopes, galaxies, lunar modules, comets and all the interesting stuff. Astrology was, not to put too fine a point on it, bollocks. And it still is, isn't it? Russell Grant 's star may not be in the ascendant as much any more but there still seems to be a mass market for delusion. Many newspapers still carry horoscopes, including the Metro which is supplied free to the commuters of the UK on a daily basis. Does nobody ever question the fact that the central idea of these predictions requires 5 million other people across the country to share their fate diurnally? Oh but it's just...

It's very rare that I read a non-fiction book and agree with virtually everything therein. Even popular science books (of the more philosophical type that I read - I'm not for a moment suggesting that I would take issue with the theory of acids and bases) sometimes express opinions or hypotheses that I'm not 100% convinced by. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is different. Reading through it I couldn't find a single fact or well reasoned argument I disagreed with. That's not to say I think it's a fantastic book - it has many flaws, but thinking about them I have come to the conclusion that a lot of them are unavoidable and come about as a direct result of having to deal with the subject matter. Firstly, the tone can come across at times as rather shrill and overemotional rather than measured and calm. But have you ever accidentally got embroiled in a so called discussion with fundamentalist godbotherers? There are only so many times you can coolheadedly s...

All that talk of the Rockwell 8R that I indulged in last time reminded me of something I discovered way back then but never really shared with anyone until now. The next model of calculator up from mine was the Rockwell 18R which was a very similar device except that it had the benefit of a memory . Imagine that. Only the rich kids in school had calculators with memories . You'd have thought that what with my four function calculator being my proudest possession (aside from my clunky LED digital watch) I'd have treated it with kid gloves, but far from it. I was always obsessed with taking things to pieces. I'm not sure why - it's not as if prying the back of most machinery would have given me any insight into how it worked, but I used to do it anyway. Once I was convinced that if I swapped the connections for the aerial and the loudspeaker on an old valve radio I'd have built myself a radio transmitter. Anyway, I pulled the front off my calculator and was surpri...

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C Clarke My old iPod broke down irretrievably the other day. Well, I say irretrievably, but I'm sure someone out there knows how to replace the hard drive for a tidy sum, but in the meantime it's quicker and easier (and probably not that more expensive) for me to buy a new one. After all I've had it nearly five years - that's an eternity for a modern gadget. It was good to finally have a proper reason to visit the new Apple store in Churchill Square. It had been sitting there between River Island and the Build A Bear Workshop for a few months now, a tempting technological candy store for the kid in me. And now I was finally going shopping there. I decide to go for the middle of the range iPod Touch. With a capacity just over that of my previous iPod, I decided that it probably had what it takes for all my music and podcast listening needs. What I didn't realise was how many o...

Well it's now December which means it's time to look back on not taking part in NaNoWriMo . Any regular readers of this blog may recall that I said despite not taking part, I was going to use all the inspiration in the air to try and write great swathes of my novel . I didn't manage that but did fill in a lot of the gaps, managing in total I would guess around 4,000 words. What with the 8,000 words of blog written during the month it comes to around 12,000 words, which isn't too shabby. Maybe next year, eh? During this time I also finally completed reading Daniel Dennett's " Consciousness Explained ", a book which took me a long time to finish but which provided a lot of inspiration and information for many of my blog entries about the mind and brain. I was surprised by the ending - it turns out the Central Meaner did it in the Cartesian Theatre with the lead piping... But seriously I did find the ending a pleasant surprise. I was expecting, what with hi...

'I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling. They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback--of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash.' H G Wells, The Time Machine Let us assume that our Temporal Copernicus has indeed put us straight. The present is NOT at the centre of time, and it is arrogant and humanocentric to assume that it is, although just like his astronomical forebear, he is unable to go out there and prove it. It was not until over four centuries after the publication of De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium that human beings were finally able to look back at the Earth and know that Old Metal Pants was right. It'll be a while then before the crew of the temporal equivalent of Apollo 8 take a trip around the back of a-week-last-Tuesday, returning with pictures that will change forever the way we see time. But they will one day. Co...

In case you were wondering, I am still wading through psychology and philosophy textbooks in an effort to find out what makes us tick and what, in fact, we actually are . Sometimes it's uphill work. This stuff starts out couched in friendly comprehensible language but often gets bogged down in technical terms very quickly. It seems not everyone has the skill of Stephen Hawking; I found A Brief History of Time entertaining and comprehensible. One thing I'm picking up from my current reading material, and anyone who's read this blog before may recognise the topic, is the battle between materialism and dualism . I may have been sitting on the fence before but recently I fell off into the materialist garden. I suddenly realised that it was, if you'll pardon the pun, a no brainer. When trying to describe the mechanism of the mind, the consciousness, dualists postulate a mysterious non-physical spirit controlling the brain. This is fair enough in itself but in order to p...

Copernicus could have got in a lot of trouble when he suggested that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. Somehow he managed to avoid getting embroiled in controversy (perhaps by dedicating his book to the Pope - what a creep) and it was poor old Galileo that took the heat the following century and was the focus of the church's wrath and ended up spending the last ten years of his life under house arrest like a seventeenth century Salman Rushdie. The church's reaction to the geocentric scientific beliefs of the day being challenged seems a bit over the top. What had it got to do with them anyway? It seems that they were getting ideas above their station, interfering in scientific circles, but of course back then you couldn't get a higher station than the church, and what's more they had the might to back it up. But, putting the church poking their oar in aside for the moment, you can understand why the old Ptolemaic system, whereby the Earth is immobile and...

Quite why anyone would actually want to go back in time and shoot their own grandfather is beyond me. It's said so glibly and yet I'm forced to think that even if I possessed a time machine and a desire for grandpatricide, I would have absolutely no idea how to go about procuring a gun. Nevertheless this rather bloodthirsty scenario is often cited as a clinching proof of the impossibility of time travel. I'm not so sure. I feel sure it could be solved given the application of Many Worlds Theory (MWT). Broadly put, Many Worlds Theory states that everything that can happen, did happen. That is not to say that the universe is watching and decides to split in two every time you toss a coin; it's more that at a very basic quantum level everything happens. We can work upwards from that. This means that Schrödinger's famous cat is alive in one universe and dead in another - no spooky co-existence in both states until observed is necessary. Mind you, I wouldn't be ...

I haven't yet read enough to start wresting with my consciousness again this morning, but rest assured I will. However, whilst reading and rereading what I have so far, it's interesting to note the differences in attitude between people on different sides of the debate. In the red corner we have the Dualists who believe that the mind and the body are separate; that the mind is in some way an incorporeal entity which is currently occupying the body. And in the blue corner we have the Physicalists who believe that you are your body alone and that the mind is simply a property or even just a byproduct of an operational brain. Seconds away, round one. Ding . I quite like getting splinters in my bottom so I'm still sitting on the fence. I find the Dualist stance more interesting and appealing, but as someone with a scientific background I can't help feeling that the Physicalist position is far more likely. The way they behave whilst arguing their corner also tends to sway ...

It's been a while since I've been anywhere with really dark skies. There's too much light pollution around. Sometimes when I've been up in Scotland the skies have been moderately impressive, but I haven't seen terrifying numbers of stars since being somewhere on the Norfolk Broads in the mid-nineties. Do you know what I mean by terrifying stars? Too many to count in a pitch black sky; the Milky Way as plain as a pikestaff. It's deep space and it's right there. It makes me want to rush inside to hide and yet at the same time it's strangely compelling - I want to lie flat stare up into the sky and go mad. It's almost like Asimov's Nightfall . I am not sure why such a sight should be so alarming; perhaps it's the vast numbers and distances involved. Our minds are not accustomed to dealing with such things and now we no longer have the gods to blame everything on, there's no one in charge. Just like the very small, the arena of the very...