The Prestidigitator

Inception was everything I hoped it’d be.  It was sufficiently complex (though nowhere near as complicated as Primer or even, Memento) and despite the 148 minute running time, very very engaging.

(Spoilers)

Then again, like all great films, Inception has its flaws and it’s not just the false narrative or the plot holes. Christopher Nolan has a set of rules for his world – rules that are essential in moving the plot forward; call it cinematic license, but it does feel like Nolan gets away with a little too much. I might be nitpicking but that’s what happens when you go in with great expectations.

Critics who’ve compared it to 2001: ASO or Blade Runner are only kidding themselves. Inception is more than just another great science fiction film – it’s about mathematics and engineering. The narrative is so tightly constructed that when scenes flit across the three (or four) ‘dream levels’, you cannot help but marvel at the genius behind it especially since time is supposed to be relative in all levels. A couple of years ago, the brother suggested I read Douglas R. Hofstadter’s wonderful book, Godel, Escher, Bach and after Inception, I find myself comparing the two. The film’s production design is certainly inspired by M.C. Escher’s art and some of the themes have been explored in other films. In fact, for a much more accurate interpretation of lucid dreams and more specifically, the concept of limbo, I’d recommend Richard Linklater’s underrated Waking Life.

Despite my reservations, I loved Inception. I find it oddly comforting that amidst all the crap that finds its way into cinemas, we can still count on someone to deliver a truly original blockbuster that you don’t have to switch your brain off for. And yes, I’ll be watching it again.

9/10

There’s an article in New Scientist that pretty much confirms something I’ve always suspected. If you buy into one kind of woo, the rest start looking pretty too.

Dan Kahan at Yale Law School has found that people’s views on social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage predict their position on climate science too. This, he argues, is because social conservatives tend to be pro-business and resist the idea that it is damaging the planet.

I’ve noticed that acquaintances who smugly declared back in school that the moon landing was a hoax tend to belong to the same school of thought as people who think vaccines are a scam, evolution is controversial, crystals have energy and that global warming was a story dredged up hippies.

Another not-so-surprising finding that explains the phenomenon that is Deepak Chopra.

… instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. “They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder“, he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. “Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory.”

(…)

Denialism has already killed. AIDS denial has killed an estimated 330,000 South Africans. Tobacco denial delayed action to prevent smoking-related deaths. Vaccine denial has given a new lease of life to killer diseases like measles and polio. Meanwhile, climate change denial delays action to prevent warming. The backlash against efforts to fight the flu pandemic could discourage preparations for the next, potentially a more deadly one.

If science is the best way to understand the world and its dangers, and acting on that understanding requires popular support, then denial movements threaten us all.

Also, watch this wonderful TED talk by Michael Specter.

While I don’t agree with Cory Doctorow on comic books (I rarely, if ever lend mine out), this is exactly why I won’t be getting an iPad.

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

(…)

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.

“The loss of religious faith is a slow and fragile process, like the raising of continents,” writes Darwin to his wife. That one line from the film resonates greatly with my personal philosophy and  is perhaps one of the few reasons I enjoyed this rather ponderous study of Darwin’s struggle with faith and evidence.

The more I think about the film, the more glaring the flaws seem. The film seems conflicted about what caused Darwin’s inability to complete his treatise, On the Origin of Species – the death of his daughter or his accommodationist views on Christianity.

Creationists have long argued, albeit with no documented evidence that Darwin recanted on his death bed. Creation, based on the book, Annie’s Box by Randal Keynes dispels the myth and portrays Darwin as a man with strong convictions even if he occasionally questioned them.

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

This is me, expressing sadness over an acquaintance’s decision to not vaccinate his child because of what he’s rightfully referred to as, media-fuelled skepticism.

Scratch sadness. Incredulity.

I’ve always been for representing both sides of an argument except when the arguments are, like Leonard Susskind would say, bogus. Case in point, intelligent design (an oxymoron if ever there was one). And now, you have a bunch of fringe lunatics promoting vaccine skepticism. Skepticism has never been a bad thing but misinterpreting reports and arriving at fallacious and often self-serving conclusions alway is.

To make matters worse, you have people like Oprah and Bill Maher giving a platform to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. Again, wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if the aforementioned celebrities did not wield such enormous power over the choices of a demography that include housewives and impressionable twenty somethings.

Thankfully, it’s not that hard to find scientific information, empirical data and responsible reporting when it comes to vaccines.

• How Safe Are Vaccines? – Time Magazine
• Michael Shermer’s Open Letter to Bill Maher
• How to Win Arguments About Vaccines – WIRED (Also, this)
• Drinking the Anti-Vaccine Kool-Aid – Neurologica Blog

I do get that the flames are mostly fanned by parents who’re genuinely scared for their children. But to quote Steven Novella, ”It’s not enough to mean well. You have to get the science right.”

My favourite podcast, SGU has a list of 20 common logical fallacies up on their website. It’s a brilliant list; you tend to come across quite a few of them in everyday arguments.

Ad ignorantiam: The argument from ignorance basically states that a specific belief is true because we don’t know that it isn’t true. Defenders of extrasensory perception, for example, will often overemphasize how much we do not know about the human brain. UFO proponents will often argue that an object sighted in the sky is unknown, and therefore it is an alien spacecraft.

Argument from Personal Incredulity: I cannot explain or understand this, therefore it cannot be true. Creationists are fond of arguing that they cannot imagine the complexity of life resulting from blind evolution, but that does not mean life did not evolve.

Confusing association with causation: This is similar to the post-hoc fallacy in that it assumes cause and effect for two variables simply because they are correlated, although the relationship here is not strictly that of one variable following the other in time. This fallacy is often used to give a statistical correlation a causal interpretation.

False dichotomy: Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two. For example, evolution is not possible, therefore we must have been created (assumes these are the only two possibilities). This fallacy can also be used to oversimplify a continuum of variation to two black and white choices. For example, science and pseudoscience are not two discrete entities, but rather the methods and claims of all those who attempt to explain reality fall along a continuum from one extreme to the other.

Straw man: Arguing against a position which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.

The moving goalpost: A method of denial arbitrarily moving the criteria for “proof” or acceptance out of range of whatever evidence currently exists.

Check out the entire list. It’ll probably come in handy the next time you’re matching wits with someone as logically dissonant as Bill Maher.

Richard Dawkins’s new book is a strange animal. Marketed as a textbook to illuminate, it turns out to be a polemic of sorts and as a result, is bound to infuriate what should have been his core audience – deniers of evolution.

Being an avowed nontheist myself, I find it a little bothersome that Dawkins refers to creationists as ‘history deniers’ and often places them on the same allegorical boat as holocaust deniers. This is especially funny because Ben Stein and his ilk constantly draw parallels between evolutionists and the Nazis. Tangled web, this.

I’ve been a little wary of the ‘New Atheist’ movement spearheaded by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (with the occasional cracker-defilement by a certain tentacled professor) mostly because they tend to come across as a tad intimidating. Make no mistake; I greatly admire their writings and have spent hours in front of my computer listening to them bemoan the stupidity of our species. However, I’m of the opinion that if one can’t be convinced by reason and logic, he/she ought to be ignored. There is only so much that can be done for people who insist on finding meaning in silly stories. If you believe that virgins give birth or that you’ll be a ‘well-hung billionaire with wings‘ in your next life, you mostly likely spend a lot of your free time away from what we call, the real world. Let evolution take its course, I say.

(See what I did there?)

The book, however, does a lot of things right. Dawkins explains in painstaking detail how evolution and dating techniques really work and dispels myths about the absence of transitional fossils and other such media fuelled fallacies. Personally, I feel very strongly about this; what is at stake here is the grandest theory in history that provides an all encompassing view of life. Despite the abundance of information out there in the public domain, I was asked why a worm still exists (sic) if we evolved from it . Nevermind that I threw a fit at the mere insinuation, it is imperative that one possesses a rudimentary understanding of what one wants to argue against. And for that, this book is a brilliant start. It is informative and dare I say, entertaining.

Dawkins’s book is a clear and lucid case against anti-evolutionists though he does resort to name-calling once every ten pages. If you can overlook that, the book will provide hours of great science reading. Despite being such an elegant theory, Dawkins reiterates what makes evolution truly remarkable. It can be disproved. But it hasn’t. Not by anyone credible, anyway.

A week ago, I found out that I had actually misunderstood something as important as evolution; which is sort of sad because my personal philosophy hinges on it being an accurate description of how and why life exists as it is.

There’s a chapter in The Blind Watchmaker (Chapter 3: Accumulating Small Change) that beautifully showcases the elegance of Darwin’s seminal theory. I’ve been told many times that evolution was only a theory and that it could never be proven or even justified by observation. This chapter, if understood properly, should change people’s minds.

Dawkins takes a rather straightforward approach in explaining Cumulative Selection and goes on to describe (what is now my favorite algorithm ever) The Weasel Program. With this, he illustrates how the common notion that evolution is ‘random’ is wrong and that a given target can be achieved in fewer steps through cumulative selection. All very exciting stuff.

After a very animated discussion with this guy last evening, I managed to put together a very shoddy program in Python that mimicked The Weasel Program (very crudely) only to be sent a much simpler program (in Matlab) by my brother this morning.

It’s sad that despite the beauty and elegance of Darwin’s explanation, an overwhelming majority of people still choose to buy into myths and superstitions espoused by some guy in a silly hat who thinks condoms increase chances of STD contraction.

Strange times, these.

Update: We live to die another day.

The LHC gets switched on in a few hours and contrary to what lunatics may want you to believe, the world will not be swallowed by a black hole. What interests me more is as to what *will* actually come out of this 6 billion dollar science experiment. Will they find the Higgs boson? Or will Hawking win that wager?

In Carl Sagan’s Contact, governments cooperate to build this giant dodecahedron (after receiving step by step instructions from a very ambiguous extra-terrestrial intelligence). After spending trillions of dollars on a project that many believed would shape humanity’s future, remember what happened?

Nothing.