Wednesday, 5 June 2013
Philosophy & Science, not versus.
A response written to a question posed by a Facebook group: "'There is no such thing as philosophy-free science' - Agree or disagree?"
Science is made up of disciplines separated by arbitrary human-constructed divisions. A world of chemicals behaving according to the Laws of Physics. Physics is the Real World application of Mathematics. Mathematics is a branch of philosophy.
Scientists deal with what is ‘real’, what is possible in the universe we live in and what is demonstrable. Some extrapolate what might also be possible elsewhere, and by doing so depart from empirical study for the realm of conjecture and ‘thought experiments’. They need only look about them to see how that space has long been occupied by philosophers, artists and writers. Unfettered human thought, free to wander in the ‘What If?’.
It is clear humans are not solely concerned with the possible, the real or the statistically likely. We spend inordinate amounts of time pondering the unlikely and the impossible. Potential is more important to us than what actually happens. Freedom is not the action of roaming where we want, but the possibility of doing so even when most of us choose not to. A cage is just a concept.
The ocean of all that may or may not be possible is far larger than the puddles of what we have discovered. Philosophy is the process that teases puddles from the ocean, precipitating ideas into the paths of the analytical. The nature of oceans is such that they cannot be contained, cannot be seen all at once, cannot be fully understood. But they can inspire. They can be experienced. They can be felt and tasted and swum in, in such ways that any manageable sample of them will never convey. Philosophers cannot draw conclusions from their ocean of possibilities, but that is not their intention.
Philosophy lacks the focussed restraint of science, but that is its strength, not its weakness. A feature rather than a glitch. Science is focussed. It sets boundaries to allow more accurate study within the fields it chooses to define as separate. That way the ocean can be portioned and understood one piece at a time. Each piece revealing another set of truths. That does not make the ocean itself any smaller nor any easier to describe well in dry academic language.
Without science, philosophy decays into idle speculation. Without philosophy, science stagnates from lack of inspiration.
Friday, 10 May 2013
You, in Perspective using numbers.
There are an estimated 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe, grouped in around 500 billion galaxies. Only some of those stars are in the ‘galactic habitable zone’, not too close to the centre nor too far away. It’s thought there are at least a hundred billion planets in the universe, probably far more, with wildly varying estimates of between 17,000,000,000 to 50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 potentially habitable ones. In the Milky Way alone, estimates are between 500 million to over 150 billion Earth-like planets in the ‘Goldilocks’ circumstellar habitable zone.
In our system, large gas giants patrol the outer reaches removing many of the asteroids and comets that drift into dangerous proximity with the Earth. Earth orbits ‘the right type of star’ at the right distance in a stable ellipse, and it formed long enough ago for complex life to evolve, yet not so long ago that the required molecules were yet to form within the earliest stars. Earth has plate tectonics and a large moon that’s not so close it causes devastating disruption; both factors contributing to successful development of life on Earth, without which nothing would live here but bacteria.
It’s likely hundreds of millions of distinct species have evolved on Earth in the last four billion years, and 99.9% of those became extinct. There are currently between 10 to 30 million species of insects and around one and a half million non-insect animals, something like five and a half thousand of which are mammals.
On average a man produces 80 to 300 million sperm per ejaculation, which is approx. 363,680,000,000 to 1,363,800,000,000 in a lifetime. The ovaries of a female foetus contain six to seven million oocytes, around 400 of which will produce fertile eggs in her lifetime. The average number of children, i.e. successful pairings of sperm and egg producing offspring, per family in the UK in 2012 was 1.7.
Approximately 107 billion people have lived since our species evolved. In 1950 the global population was two and a half billion, in 1995 over five and a half billion and currently at about seven billion.
The genus Homo have lived on Earth for about 2,400,000; our species Homo Sapiens for about 200,000 years. ‘Behavioural modernity’ has been going on 50,000 years or so. The Industrial Revolution began much more recently, around 250 years ago.
Arguably the England we know today began 669 years ago when Edward III founded the Order of the Garter on April 23rd 1344, later adopting the flag of St George as their banner. A dramatic development in European politics, this simple thing led to changes in the shape of the political map and allowed the English to step out from the shadow of France for the first time since 1066.
Soon after this time about 25 million people died in Europe of the Black Death, around 75 million world-wide. 30-40% of the population of England died within two years. At that time infant mortality rates were already perhaps 30% and average life expectancy even for the wealthy was no more than early forties. A lot of people were dying without having children and at one point the national birth rate was lower than the death rate, with many towns being left to ruin as the dwindling population moved elsewhere to find work.
World War I, while the estimated 17 million deaths is fewer than the Black Death, still had a big impact long-term as the majority of the deaths were young men. In World War II over 60 million died, more than 2.5% of the global population. The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920 killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide, 99% of them under 65. In the space of three and a half decades the world lost a very large number of young people.
In the last hundred years life expectancy and quality of life in Europe and most of the nations that began as European colonies have continued to dramatically improve, infant mortality rates continue to drop and disease rates have been considerably lowered by good sanitation and improved medical knowledge.
This doesn’t mean life is now easy. It isn’t and perhaps never can or should be. Life is unimaginably precious. Each one of us is here as the result of circumstances that occurred against astronomical odds on every level: the specific laws of physics at the universal scale, the rare circumstances that led to the Earth we know, the long line of survivors that preceded you, the fortunate survival of your human ancestors who lived through war, famine and pestilence long enough to bring successive generations into the world, that your parents met and spent enough time together to conceive you, that you yourself were the result of that particular combination of sperm and egg, one of approximately four billion ways your parents’ DNA could be uniquely combined, that made up the single cell that gave rise to your body, not to mention all the experiences and sensations occurring throughout your life that helped continue to shape you into the person reading this.
You are unique, but you are also part of something much, much bigger than yourself, in both Time and Space. There is no pressure to change the world single-handed and no need. Working together is more effective. We are part of a global family that blurs the arbitrary lines between species and has existed on Earth for aeons. We can’t all ‘win’ and shouldn’t see life in such a simple and ugly way. We’ve already won because we’re here.
Let’s not mess it all up for the generations of unique individuals that come along after us.
Monday, 18 February 2013
In Response to an Article About Margot Sunderland's New Book on Co-Sleeping
I recently read this:
http://www.drmomma.org/2009/07/co-sleeping-children-should-sleep-with.html
I’m highly wary of what I read and I feel I have to wade in with some counter arguments and questions.
Where does the upper age limit of 5 come from for co-sleeping? The only reference in the article to age 5 is the seemingly unconnected study of cortisol rise in under 5s going to nursery, which I’ve read about before and it’s a dubious and misleading statistic.
There’s no follow-up study I’m aware of to show whether those same children have a corresponding drop in cortisol when they attend school or not (the first thing I’d look for), or whether 5 year olds who didn’t attend nursery get the same sort of rise in cortisol on their first days at school. I think most of us remember school being scary at first, and why wouldn’t it be? It still is as an adult!
The demonising of cortisol as a ‘stress hormone’ is misleading. Cortisol is released to *counter* stress and produce energy so we can run from danger or fight if cornered. We get a burst of it in the morning (if we’re lucky) to get us out of bed. Without it we struggle to lift the duvet. Producing cortisol while sitting in a car or at a desk is what leads to all the negative problems, but mixing up adult medical issues (occurring in unnaturally sedentary circumstances) with children is incorrect use of data and misses out the fact kids will run all that energy off. There’s too much correlation and not enough cause in these studies.
The main comparison seems to be with babies a few weeks old rather than, say, 2 or 3 years old. Or even 6 months old. Not enough longitudinal info there.
The data for SIDS needs to be cross-referenced with the number of infants squashed or smothered by parents in bed. Ateah and Hamelin’s 2008 survey of bed-sharing mothers in Canada found that 13% of the respondents recalled at least one episode in which someone had rolled onto or part way onto their infants. None were hurt and the sleeper was awakened before any injury occurred, but it can happen and there are high-risk groups, including parents who are very tired (Blair et al 1999) and that’s a group more likely to increase if they’re sharing a bed with a child every night for 5 years. Obviously the bigger ones are a lot safer, but some parents are pretty big too!
The studies on safety seem to indicate that socio-economic status is a major factor with many variables, including overcrowding of the house, condition of the mattress, whether anyone in the house smokes, etc.
http://www.parentingscience.com/bed-sharing.html
The correlation between women not comforted in childhood and having digestive problems as adults would have more impact if there wasn’t a massive change in diet over the last generation and the babies raised on Spock and Ford weren’t the same ones who grew up eating Norman Borlaug’s modified wheat (GM foods aren’t new. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his wheat, which has now been linked in some studies to IBS).
I’d like to see a study of women who *were* comforted and see how many of them have digestive problems. Why just women in the study I wonder?
“In China, where cosleeping is taken for granted, SIDS is so rare it does not even have a name.” – This is an interesting quote. China, the country where babies are routinely left to die on railway sidings and overpopulation and poverty is such a huge concern. Infanticide has been a problem there for a long time, originating before the ‘one child per family’ policy that was put in place in 1978 and having its roots in Confucianism, widespread poverty and lack of state pensions.
One could argue China hasn’t named SIDS because it’s not a big deal to the health authorities there, but mostly I suspect it’s because the possibility of cultural differences isn’t being taken into account. Maybe the Chinese don’t feel the need to label everything with acronyms and Latin ciphers to make their doctors sound all clever as they dish out meaningless platitudes. What does Sudden Infant Death Syndrome actually mean? Does it require a name? Isn’t it, when you think about it, just a placeholder that describes an observation yet infers no known cause? Why *would* the Chinese have a name for that? Why do *we* have a name for it?
Either way, China is not somewhere I will be taking parenting advice from.
http://io9.com/5948528/the-unintended-consequences-of-chinas-one+child-policy
Incidentally, using data from other countries without strict cross-referencing and allowing for confounding variables will give you some rather interesting ‘facts’, such as the drop in infant mortality rates in China between 1990 and 2008 from 64.6 infant deaths per 1,000 livebirths to just 18.5. The drop corresponds with the increase in the number of women giving birth in hospitals rather than at home, so I could, if I wanted to, say that babies born in hospital have a 71% greater chance of survival and that this has been shown conclusively by the Chinese, but I suspect the advocates of co-sleeping correspond closely with the advocates of home births, so this disinformation won’t be cherry-picked by Western authors as it won't sell many books.
My biggest concern with this article, though, is the blanket assumptions that no unforeseen negative factors will occur as long as we all make huge sacrifices for our children. This is not the world I live in.
Small children in the bed have a habit of preventing restful sleep for the other occupants. Babies do tend to be a bit safer in bed with parents (factoring out oversize, tiredness, secondary smoke factors, drug use, and socio-economic variables) because they can be checked more frequently, but 3yr olds will spend all night grabbing one parent while kicking the other in the face. The resulting lack of restful sleep in both parents can be a cause of huge stress and give rise to cortisol at home for the whole family. Articles like this tend to make parents feel inadequate so they go out and buy more books on parenting. I’m deeply, deeply suspicious of them. It goes beyond suspicion in this case though because it’s bad science and far more research needs to be done before anything claiming to be results can be weighed up properly.
Having looked her up, Margot Sunderland is someone I’m unsure about. This is her advice on handling a major tantrum:
“Visualise yourself as a lovely warm, calm blanket. Now envelop your child by holding him with his back to you (if he kicks, he will be kicking away from you) and folding your arms over his. If he is a bigger toddler, take an arm in each of your hands and cross his arms. You can also cross your legs over his to contain his legs and prevent kicking. Hold him calmly and use a gentle tone to say soothing words ('It's all right, I am going to hold you until you calm down'), allowing him to release his angry feelings. He won't be in any space to reason with and will, in any case, not be able to activate the reasoning part of his brain while he is distressed. As your tot calms, let him lie in your arms and cuddle until he is over his blow-out. Then offer him reassurance and a different, preferably quiet, activity."
So basically physically restrain them while telling yourself you’re a calm blanket. Have you ever tried to hold a tantrumming toddler ‘calmly’? The whole business is more like restraining an inmate and far from being a soothing comfort.
If a physicist tells me wrapping a magnet in copper wire will do ‘X’ I tend to believe them, because when you know one electron you know them all. When a psychologist tells me children will do ‘X’ I wonder why they’re assuming all children are the same. I’ve met a lot of psychologists and one common factor I’ve found (in many but thankfully by no means all) is a total lack of understanding of basic human behaviour and emotions. Unlike Richard Feynmann and Brian Cox, I believe psychology is a science, however I don’t believe many psychologists are scientists. I’ve seen too many of them just doing it wrong. Cherry-picking data, relying on correlates and omitting causes, failing to allow for confounding variables and patching together studies that need further research before they get used as foundations for new hypotheses is *not* good science.
http://www.drmomma.org/2009/07/co-sleeping-children-should-sleep-with.html
I’m highly wary of what I read and I feel I have to wade in with some counter arguments and questions.
Where does the upper age limit of 5 come from for co-sleeping? The only reference in the article to age 5 is the seemingly unconnected study of cortisol rise in under 5s going to nursery, which I’ve read about before and it’s a dubious and misleading statistic.
There’s no follow-up study I’m aware of to show whether those same children have a corresponding drop in cortisol when they attend school or not (the first thing I’d look for), or whether 5 year olds who didn’t attend nursery get the same sort of rise in cortisol on their first days at school. I think most of us remember school being scary at first, and why wouldn’t it be? It still is as an adult!
The demonising of cortisol as a ‘stress hormone’ is misleading. Cortisol is released to *counter* stress and produce energy so we can run from danger or fight if cornered. We get a burst of it in the morning (if we’re lucky) to get us out of bed. Without it we struggle to lift the duvet. Producing cortisol while sitting in a car or at a desk is what leads to all the negative problems, but mixing up adult medical issues (occurring in unnaturally sedentary circumstances) with children is incorrect use of data and misses out the fact kids will run all that energy off. There’s too much correlation and not enough cause in these studies.
The main comparison seems to be with babies a few weeks old rather than, say, 2 or 3 years old. Or even 6 months old. Not enough longitudinal info there.
The data for SIDS needs to be cross-referenced with the number of infants squashed or smothered by parents in bed. Ateah and Hamelin’s 2008 survey of bed-sharing mothers in Canada found that 13% of the respondents recalled at least one episode in which someone had rolled onto or part way onto their infants. None were hurt and the sleeper was awakened before any injury occurred, but it can happen and there are high-risk groups, including parents who are very tired (Blair et al 1999) and that’s a group more likely to increase if they’re sharing a bed with a child every night for 5 years. Obviously the bigger ones are a lot safer, but some parents are pretty big too!
The studies on safety seem to indicate that socio-economic status is a major factor with many variables, including overcrowding of the house, condition of the mattress, whether anyone in the house smokes, etc.
http://www.parentingscience.com/bed-sharing.html
The correlation between women not comforted in childhood and having digestive problems as adults would have more impact if there wasn’t a massive change in diet over the last generation and the babies raised on Spock and Ford weren’t the same ones who grew up eating Norman Borlaug’s modified wheat (GM foods aren’t new. Borlaug won the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his wheat, which has now been linked in some studies to IBS).
I’d like to see a study of women who *were* comforted and see how many of them have digestive problems. Why just women in the study I wonder?
“In China, where cosleeping is taken for granted, SIDS is so rare it does not even have a name.” – This is an interesting quote. China, the country where babies are routinely left to die on railway sidings and overpopulation and poverty is such a huge concern. Infanticide has been a problem there for a long time, originating before the ‘one child per family’ policy that was put in place in 1978 and having its roots in Confucianism, widespread poverty and lack of state pensions.
One could argue China hasn’t named SIDS because it’s not a big deal to the health authorities there, but mostly I suspect it’s because the possibility of cultural differences isn’t being taken into account. Maybe the Chinese don’t feel the need to label everything with acronyms and Latin ciphers to make their doctors sound all clever as they dish out meaningless platitudes. What does Sudden Infant Death Syndrome actually mean? Does it require a name? Isn’t it, when you think about it, just a placeholder that describes an observation yet infers no known cause? Why *would* the Chinese have a name for that? Why do *we* have a name for it?
Either way, China is not somewhere I will be taking parenting advice from.
http://io9.com/5948528/the-unintended-consequences-of-chinas-one+child-policy
Incidentally, using data from other countries without strict cross-referencing and allowing for confounding variables will give you some rather interesting ‘facts’, such as the drop in infant mortality rates in China between 1990 and 2008 from 64.6 infant deaths per 1,000 livebirths to just 18.5. The drop corresponds with the increase in the number of women giving birth in hospitals rather than at home, so I could, if I wanted to, say that babies born in hospital have a 71% greater chance of survival and that this has been shown conclusively by the Chinese, but I suspect the advocates of co-sleeping correspond closely with the advocates of home births, so this disinformation won’t be cherry-picked by Western authors as it won't sell many books.
My biggest concern with this article, though, is the blanket assumptions that no unforeseen negative factors will occur as long as we all make huge sacrifices for our children. This is not the world I live in.
Small children in the bed have a habit of preventing restful sleep for the other occupants. Babies do tend to be a bit safer in bed with parents (factoring out oversize, tiredness, secondary smoke factors, drug use, and socio-economic variables) because they can be checked more frequently, but 3yr olds will spend all night grabbing one parent while kicking the other in the face. The resulting lack of restful sleep in both parents can be a cause of huge stress and give rise to cortisol at home for the whole family. Articles like this tend to make parents feel inadequate so they go out and buy more books on parenting. I’m deeply, deeply suspicious of them. It goes beyond suspicion in this case though because it’s bad science and far more research needs to be done before anything claiming to be results can be weighed up properly.
Having looked her up, Margot Sunderland is someone I’m unsure about. This is her advice on handling a major tantrum:
“Visualise yourself as a lovely warm, calm blanket. Now envelop your child by holding him with his back to you (if he kicks, he will be kicking away from you) and folding your arms over his. If he is a bigger toddler, take an arm in each of your hands and cross his arms. You can also cross your legs over his to contain his legs and prevent kicking. Hold him calmly and use a gentle tone to say soothing words ('It's all right, I am going to hold you until you calm down'), allowing him to release his angry feelings. He won't be in any space to reason with and will, in any case, not be able to activate the reasoning part of his brain while he is distressed. As your tot calms, let him lie in your arms and cuddle until he is over his blow-out. Then offer him reassurance and a different, preferably quiet, activity."
So basically physically restrain them while telling yourself you’re a calm blanket. Have you ever tried to hold a tantrumming toddler ‘calmly’? The whole business is more like restraining an inmate and far from being a soothing comfort.
If a physicist tells me wrapping a magnet in copper wire will do ‘X’ I tend to believe them, because when you know one electron you know them all. When a psychologist tells me children will do ‘X’ I wonder why they’re assuming all children are the same. I’ve met a lot of psychologists and one common factor I’ve found (in many but thankfully by no means all) is a total lack of understanding of basic human behaviour and emotions. Unlike Richard Feynmann and Brian Cox, I believe psychology is a science, however I don’t believe many psychologists are scientists. I’ve seen too many of them just doing it wrong. Cherry-picking data, relying on correlates and omitting causes, failing to allow for confounding variables and patching together studies that need further research before they get used as foundations for new hypotheses is *not* good science.
Thursday, 20 December 2012
Nevermind, It's Not the End of the World
#endoftheworld
The Mayans, just so you know, didn't predict anything.
New Agers have attached a 'transformational event' to a date in the Mayan calendar because that's what they do.
Doomsday predictors, having been proved wrong in 2003, then changed their prediction (let's look closely at that sentence) to 2012, also attaching their fantasy to a date in the Mayan calendar because that's what they do.
For some reason, dead Stone Age Mesoamerican cultures have an 'ooh!' factor when it comes to understanding the universe, despite not managing to invent the wheel.
The actual cataclysm being spoken of is a collision with 'planet Nibiru', which doesn't exist. The cataclysm was first mentioned in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, who says she receives messages from extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain.
She claimed 'Planet X', as she called it at the time, was going to collide with us while denying comet Hale-Bopp was real.
In 2003 Lieder had her own dogs put down so as to save them suffering during the cataclysm, and to provide herself with food in the chaos afterwards. She went on the radio in LA to advise everyone else do the same. Think about that for a minute.
In 1996 Lieder associated Planet X with planet Nibiru, which pseudo-scientist Zecharia Sitchin claimed was mentioned in ancient Babylonian texts but not one scholar has ever backed up.
Sitchin denied any connection between Nibiru and Lieder's claims. He said fictional Nibiru will pass us by in 2900AD. However, he did claim aliens called the Annunaki might come to Earth in 2090AD.
Here's some science to wash your brain clean.
The Mayans, just so you know, didn't predict anything.
New Agers have attached a 'transformational event' to a date in the Mayan calendar because that's what they do.
Doomsday predictors, having been proved wrong in 2003, then changed their prediction (let's look closely at that sentence) to 2012, also attaching their fantasy to a date in the Mayan calendar because that's what they do.
For some reason, dead Stone Age Mesoamerican cultures have an 'ooh!' factor when it comes to understanding the universe, despite not managing to invent the wheel.
The actual cataclysm being spoken of is a collision with 'planet Nibiru', which doesn't exist. The cataclysm was first mentioned in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, who says she receives messages from extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain.
She claimed 'Planet X', as she called it at the time, was going to collide with us while denying comet Hale-Bopp was real.
 |
| Nancy Lieder |
In 2003 Lieder had her own dogs put down so as to save them suffering during the cataclysm, and to provide herself with food in the chaos afterwards. She went on the radio in LA to advise everyone else do the same. Think about that for a minute.
In 1996 Lieder associated Planet X with planet Nibiru, which pseudo-scientist Zecharia Sitchin claimed was mentioned in ancient Babylonian texts but not one scholar has ever backed up.
 |
| That dot there, apparently. Except no. |
Sitchin denied any connection between Nibiru and Lieder's claims. He said fictional Nibiru will pass us by in 2900AD. However, he did claim aliens called the Annunaki might come to Earth in 2090AD.
Here's some science to wash your brain clean.
Friday, 7 December 2012
What Makes Star Wars Star Wars?
This is my checklist for the 2015 Star Wars sequel, the as yet unnamed Episode VII
What do we know and love about Episodes IV-VI? The story is simple, things are black and white. Ok, light and dark.
Bad Guys are cruel and come in two styles:
Oppressors:
English Nazis attended by American junior Nazis and faceless drones.
No one smiles unless their evil plan is about to succeed.
Their evil plans never succeed.
Scum & Villainy:
Revolting aliens, cool humans, scary monsters. Scruffy gangsters all. They laugh when others suffer.
“He’s the brains, sweetheart!”
Good Guys aren’t always so good, but they do the right thing:
Classic all-American heroes, short on schemes and long on courage.
Relaxed mavericks or zealous newbies, they all have some growing up to do. Luckily there are mentor types on hand to guide them, and then die.
Supported by trustworthy WW2 Allied forces, they fight against terrible odds and win.
Tech:
Well-used, covered in unfathomable ‘greeblies’, with no fixtures, fittings or fastenings in sight
Impossible to tell what button does what or even what a display screen is displaying. On the rare occasion a screen is visible, the display is very basic.
There are no Health & Safety considerations whatsoever!
There is a very cool spaceship.
Things that need to change:
There is only one person of ethnicity in the galaxy.
When women do appear they need rescuing.
What I definitely do not want to see:
• Roddy McDowell as a cloned Emperor Palpatine building a third Death Star which gets destroyed by two guys, their sidekick mutual girlfriend/sister and a big, non-speaking alien.
• A bunch of Force Ghosts hanging out, like the dead princes in Stardust.
• A blue alien in charge of what’s left of the Empire.
• Tattooine as the bright centre of the galaxy. Again.
• Anyone saying “Yippee!”
What I want to see:
• Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford.
• Jedi Master Luke Skywalker mentoring a Padawan. A female one would be good.
• The Millennium Falcon, patched up and still in service, used by the new heroes after Han Solo builds up their expectations then reveals the ‘hunk of junk’ he’s giving them to use.
• Chewbacca with grey fur.
• Leia as a Jedi.
• A film that is recognisably Star Wars and rooted in the original trilogy, true to their spirit and style (well, the first two anyway), but not just a re-hash of Episode IV.
Am I asking too much? No! Of course not! The producers and the director will be paid millions and, if the original cast are involved, I’ll bet Episode VII breaks all box office records. They have at least two years to get it right. It’s worth thinking it through properly and getting the fans on board. Yes, they will still make money. Do it right and they could make history too.
(Edit 21.12.2012)
Costume:
Let’s all first agree to forget the epic continuity error that was Ben Kenobi’s Tattooine desert peasant wear becoming the basis of the Jedi Order uniform in the prequels.
…
Actually, let’s just spend a little time with it first.
Ben Kenobi and Yoda go into hiding for 20 years…AND THEY STAY IN UNIFORM THE WHOLE TIME!
In the original trilogy the robes are seen on several non-Jedi. Uncle Owen dresses this way, as do several of the background characters in Mos Eisley. Even in the prequels many Tattooine residents are seen dressed in a similar fashion. Because light, cheap fabrics in voluminous layers is what poor people wear in deserts.
http://jimdavies.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-jedi-should-dress.html
This stupid costume decision wasn’t always the plan. George Lucas had other (better) ideas, but dropped them in favour of keeping the Jedi “instantly recognisable”. Follow this link for a chance to say “Oh for f…. Why didn’t he stick with the original plan???”
http://boards.theforce.net/threads/lucas-original-jedi-plan.50006663/
If Jedi costumes in Episode VII follow the same desert robe theme, as I suspect they will, it will at least be justified because Luke only encounters Ben and Yoda while they’re dressed in desert clothes (floor-length clothing in a swamp, Master Yoda? Is that such a good idea?).
A monk in simple robes is a well known real world thing and it could add to an atmosphere of humility the Jedi badly need to hold onto in the sequels. It’ll probably be the ONLY token of humility, though, because Jedi are thugs.
In the prequels the Jedi rough people up, intimidate and manipulate them. They get their own way by strong-arm tactics supporting a corrupt and ineffective Republic while easily switching between roles as law enforcement and military commanders. If there is a New Republic, it will be interesting to see whether the Jedi will become the bullies they were before. If not, if they maintain a humble disposition as shown by Ben Kenobi in Episode IV and by Luke in Episode VI, even in the face of death, perhaps it will justify all that nonsense and slaughter after a prophecy said The Chosen One would ‘return balance to The Force’. Maybe the Jedi were on the wrong path and needed to be purged; the Sith were, according to George, like a cancer sapping life from The Force and needed to be removed. Seems a bit of a harsh way to do it though. So now what?
The problem is how to include the mandatory lightsabre battles without reviving the Sith and making an even bigger nonsense of the prequels. I predict at least one previously unknown former Jedi (like Count Dooku) who escaped the slaughter due to his (it will almost certainly be a man) inactive status. There’ll be a complex reason why he left the Jedi Order and why he now feels he can reappear with a red lightsabre and start a ruckus, but he may just appear in a black costume with a bad temper and we’ll get no further explanation. I think I prefer the second option.
So, on to the other costumes.
Arguably the most iconic things in the films are the legions faceless armoured minions. Stormtroopers quite possibly inspired a generation or two of film-makers and costume-makers to learn their trades. I know they were the main reason I became a costume prop-maker, along with several of my friends who still work in that field. Stormtroopers and TIE fighter pilots are my absolute favourite things about the original trilogy. I’ve wanted a Stormtrooper costume since I was eight. The 501st are a testament to the sustained popularity of the costumes.
http://www.501st.com/
Will there be Stormtroopers in Episode VII? I hope so, but I may be hoping for too much. Do we want a new type of minion or a familiar one? Will using the old ones make it look like they’re not trying? And that 40 years have gone by and the enemy are still in the same suits? This could be a deal maker or breaker for me, but I honestly don’t know what they should do.
I do want to see weird, complicated hairstyles on the women though!
What do we know and love about Episodes IV-VI? The story is simple, things are black and white. Ok, light and dark.
Bad Guys are cruel and come in two styles:
Oppressors:
English Nazis attended by American junior Nazis and faceless drones.
No one smiles unless their evil plan is about to succeed.
Their evil plans never succeed.
Scum & Villainy:
Revolting aliens, cool humans, scary monsters. Scruffy gangsters all. They laugh when others suffer.
“He’s the brains, sweetheart!”
Good Guys aren’t always so good, but they do the right thing:
Classic all-American heroes, short on schemes and long on courage.
Relaxed mavericks or zealous newbies, they all have some growing up to do. Luckily there are mentor types on hand to guide them, and then die.
Supported by trustworthy WW2 Allied forces, they fight against terrible odds and win.
Tech:
Well-used, covered in unfathomable ‘greeblies’, with no fixtures, fittings or fastenings in sight
Impossible to tell what button does what or even what a display screen is displaying. On the rare occasion a screen is visible, the display is very basic.
There are no Health & Safety considerations whatsoever!
There is a very cool spaceship.
Things that need to change:
There is only one person of ethnicity in the galaxy.
When women do appear they need rescuing.
What I definitely do not want to see:
• Roddy McDowell as a cloned Emperor Palpatine building a third Death Star which gets destroyed by two guys, their sidekick mutual girlfriend/sister and a big, non-speaking alien.
• A bunch of Force Ghosts hanging out, like the dead princes in Stardust.
• A blue alien in charge of what’s left of the Empire.
• Tattooine as the bright centre of the galaxy. Again.
• Anyone saying “Yippee!”
What I want to see:
• Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford.
• Jedi Master Luke Skywalker mentoring a Padawan. A female one would be good.
• The Millennium Falcon, patched up and still in service, used by the new heroes after Han Solo builds up their expectations then reveals the ‘hunk of junk’ he’s giving them to use.
• Chewbacca with grey fur.
• Leia as a Jedi.
• A film that is recognisably Star Wars and rooted in the original trilogy, true to their spirit and style (well, the first two anyway), but not just a re-hash of Episode IV.
Am I asking too much? No! Of course not! The producers and the director will be paid millions and, if the original cast are involved, I’ll bet Episode VII breaks all box office records. They have at least two years to get it right. It’s worth thinking it through properly and getting the fans on board. Yes, they will still make money. Do it right and they could make history too.
(Edit 21.12.2012)
Costume:
Let’s all first agree to forget the epic continuity error that was Ben Kenobi’s Tattooine desert peasant wear becoming the basis of the Jedi Order uniform in the prequels.
…
Actually, let’s just spend a little time with it first.
Ben Kenobi and Yoda go into hiding for 20 years…AND THEY STAY IN UNIFORM THE WHOLE TIME!
In the original trilogy the robes are seen on several non-Jedi. Uncle Owen dresses this way, as do several of the background characters in Mos Eisley. Even in the prequels many Tattooine residents are seen dressed in a similar fashion. Because light, cheap fabrics in voluminous layers is what poor people wear in deserts.
http://jimdavies.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/how-jedi-should-dress.html
This stupid costume decision wasn’t always the plan. George Lucas had other (better) ideas, but dropped them in favour of keeping the Jedi “instantly recognisable”. Follow this link for a chance to say “Oh for f…. Why didn’t he stick with the original plan???”
http://boards.theforce.net/threads/lucas-original-jedi-plan.50006663/
If Jedi costumes in Episode VII follow the same desert robe theme, as I suspect they will, it will at least be justified because Luke only encounters Ben and Yoda while they’re dressed in desert clothes (floor-length clothing in a swamp, Master Yoda? Is that such a good idea?).
A monk in simple robes is a well known real world thing and it could add to an atmosphere of humility the Jedi badly need to hold onto in the sequels. It’ll probably be the ONLY token of humility, though, because Jedi are thugs.
In the prequels the Jedi rough people up, intimidate and manipulate them. They get their own way by strong-arm tactics supporting a corrupt and ineffective Republic while easily switching between roles as law enforcement and military commanders. If there is a New Republic, it will be interesting to see whether the Jedi will become the bullies they were before. If not, if they maintain a humble disposition as shown by Ben Kenobi in Episode IV and by Luke in Episode VI, even in the face of death, perhaps it will justify all that nonsense and slaughter after a prophecy said The Chosen One would ‘return balance to The Force’. Maybe the Jedi were on the wrong path and needed to be purged; the Sith were, according to George, like a cancer sapping life from The Force and needed to be removed. Seems a bit of a harsh way to do it though. So now what?
The problem is how to include the mandatory lightsabre battles without reviving the Sith and making an even bigger nonsense of the prequels. I predict at least one previously unknown former Jedi (like Count Dooku) who escaped the slaughter due to his (it will almost certainly be a man) inactive status. There’ll be a complex reason why he left the Jedi Order and why he now feels he can reappear with a red lightsabre and start a ruckus, but he may just appear in a black costume with a bad temper and we’ll get no further explanation. I think I prefer the second option.
So, on to the other costumes.
Arguably the most iconic things in the films are the legions faceless armoured minions. Stormtroopers quite possibly inspired a generation or two of film-makers and costume-makers to learn their trades. I know they were the main reason I became a costume prop-maker, along with several of my friends who still work in that field. Stormtroopers and TIE fighter pilots are my absolute favourite things about the original trilogy. I’ve wanted a Stormtrooper costume since I was eight. The 501st are a testament to the sustained popularity of the costumes.
http://www.501st.com/
Will there be Stormtroopers in Episode VII? I hope so, but I may be hoping for too much. Do we want a new type of minion or a familiar one? Will using the old ones make it look like they’re not trying? And that 40 years have gone by and the enemy are still in the same suits? This could be a deal maker or breaker for me, but I honestly don’t know what they should do.
I do want to see weird, complicated hairstyles on the women though!
Wednesday, 10 October 2012
Categories, Labels and Astronomy
Space moderators, you need to sort out your admin and classifications.
This morning a ‘science’ page on Facebook posted a thing saying there are 13 planets in our solar system, including 4 ‘dwarf planets’. But that’s misleading and shows a failure to grasp the basics of astronomy. This is roughly how the categories go -
Planets (8)
They’re big and round. They fall into 2 subgroups:
Rocky (4) - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
Gas Giants (4) - Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus.
Moons (lots)
They go round planets and minor planets.
Minor Planets (innumerable)
They’re NOT planets so it’s a very stupid name, and there are sub-groups which make it even more confusing:
Dwarf Planets, NOT planets, also known as Plutoids because a lot of people for no good reason are upset that Pluto isn’t classified as a planet anymore (do they own property there or something? Wtf?), (5) - Eris, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake
Asteroids (millions)
Trojans (loads and loads and loads), it’s complex and all about their orbit.
Centaurs (around 44,000), unstable and behave like both comets and asteroids.
Kuiper Belt Objects (over 100,000 with diameter >100km, and far, far more smaller ones)
More info on 'minor planets' here.
Saying “There are 13 planets” is wrong and misinformed. Ceres is a tiny little thing, much smaller than our moon. Like a Malteser next to a melon.
Just to confuse things further, outside the solar system there are Brown Dwarf stars that are like huge gas giant planets not quite massive enough to ignite and become a star. They’re a link between gas planets and stars and the only real difference is how much stuff is inside them.
Stars themselves are categorised as one family because they’re all on fire, but the differences between them are huge.
Have a look at this image showing the difference in size between our local star and CY Canis Majoris.
Here’s a chart of star types by colour...
...and the same star types (minus the tiniest two types) by size.
The categories will never be right and never be fixed because the universe is not here for our convenience. It is not ours to define, only to stick temporary labels on. In time those labels will fall off although nothing has changed except our perception. Why mention this at all? Because when we label something we stop thinking about it. We give it a name and a pigeonhole and we leave it there. Labels change the physical nature of our brain and shape how we think. The more fixed our categories the more stagnant our thinking.
“If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this universe into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it!”
Richard Feynman
“[The] obsession with order is contrary to the nature of ideas, and the world. Without constant reminders that categories are malleable inventions of convenience and not manifest in the world itself, the possibility of free thinking and progress is denied.”
Scott Berkun
“However much we divide, count, sort or classify [things] into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided.”
Alan Watts
Tuesday, 24 July 2012
The Meaning of Life
On my way to work I often pass the big, inviting glass double-doors of a church annex. Large, friendly banners are draped above and either side advertising The Alpha Course and displaying a cartoon figure struggling to carry a question mark almost as big as himself. The slogan offers a chance to explore the meaning of life.
I find the concept of a meaning to life to be without meaning. As a teenager I was desperate to understand things that I believed were obscured by esoteric and unfathomable mysticality. It seemed obvious to me that science was merely a way of measuring things, but that the occult offered a way to look deeper. Astrophysicists scratched their heads over quasars while UFOlogists brought the distant universe much closer. My physics teacher copied words from a text book onto an overhead projector and made no effort to teach us, yet mystics spanning centuries keenly bestowed their knowledge. Tarot seemed able to reveal more aspects of the human spirit than Freud could.
It took a long time, many years of reading and a bachelor’s degree in science for me to realise that the problem wasn’t with science, it was with me. I lacked sufficient knowledge to judge correctly and had taken a short path that gave quick rewards. The methodology was always out there for me to find but my guides in the sciences were woefully poor at introducing me to the concepts and values of empirical experimentation and the axiomatic language of maths that underlies reality and slowly, piece by piece, reveals its nature to us.
I read Douglas Adams religiously and watched as many Monty Python films as I could find on video or get to see on the big screen by lying about my age. I knew this ‘meaning of life’ issue was a big one much debated by comedians and philosophers alike. I assumed that anything such luminaries chose to debate must be a worthy topic. Why else would it crop up so often?
I didn’t then know of any neurological reasons behind the genesis of such questions in the human psyche. I’d never heard of teleology - the act of assigning agency to something, placing meaning and design in a naturally occurring phenomenon - and how we are inclined to take that view owing to the statistical advantage it gives to any animal in surviving long enough to breed and rear its young.
I had no idea about the sophistication of belief and the tenacity of unfounded certainties. Asking for the meaning of life makes as much sense to me now as asking for the meaning of the sea. It’s just the wrong question. Like the six yr old on ‘Nina and the Neurons’ who asked “what are trees for?” Meaning assumes intent. Intent assumes a designer. I don’t believe in a designer of any kind. Belief requires a provocation. To me there is sufficient evidence of naturally occurring processes that would give rise to life and enough time for it to happen. To me that’s a marvel far greater than anything dreamt up in mythology or occultism.
Imagine a parallel universe where, shortly after time began, human civilisation and 2012 technology had sprung into existence. Complete, whole. Unchanging. 13 or so billion years later you go to a job interview. Two smartly dressed people ask pertinent questions and, at the end of the interview, they tell you to expect a response once HR had processed their assessment. Three days later you get a call to say you were successful and after a week a letter arrives to confirming the appointment. You report for duty and dutifully carry out the tasks you receive by email from your boss who is stationed overseas. Every month HR sends you a payslip and the money shows up in your account. A lot of what you do requires initiative and self-management. After a year in the job you start to wonder if your boss is really earning his pay and whether you get paid enough for what you do.
One day you find an error with your pay and call HR to let them know. No answer. You head over there and find the office where they’re supposed to be is empty except for someone vacuuming the carpet. They tell you in all their years of vacuuming they’ve never once seen a single person working in HR. How could this be? You try to contact your boss and get no reply. No surprise as the two of you have yet to speak. You contact the two people who interviewed you and they have no answer for you. No, they’ve never actually met anyone from HR and never seen the boss, but there are thousands of employees at the company and they themselves have worked there for years without any problems with payslips. The company has been around for hundreds of years, as everyone knows, and sometimes there are errors but they always seem to sort themselves out in time one way or another.
You start investigating. Your role gives you privileged access to important data. Unlike many employees you can see, if you look hard enough in the right places, how things fit together, company history, structure, communications. What you find shocks you. The company isn’t hundreds of years old, it’s thousands of years old! And, to your utter amazement, it’s origins go back billions of years!
After months of research you finally manage to put together a picture of how it might have happened. It all started when a single speck of static emerged from the background fuzz, its only distinction that it could bind together with another speck. Something innate in the specks caused them to bond in pairs under certain circumstances. The right kind of communications network was all it took. The double-specks had different characteristics and certain qualities began over millennia to emerge. They began to bind with other pairs and, eventually, an arms race began. Some collections of specks were harder to absorb due to the interference they generated in the static. Some were able to negate that interference with another type. On and on. A process of random traits and the resulting vulnerabilities or advantages emerged and after countless iterations and variations more complex groups were formed that sustained themselves and caused the static around them to form into identical structures.
One day a complex ball of static found a way to attach itself to an email. It travelled between accounts mindlessly and without purpose. Each time it landed it left an imprint which spawned another version of itself. Harmless to the system it travels through, soon there were many copies, undetected at the time and multiplying exponentially. In a short time there were countless trillions of them and the free static required to make new copies became scarce. Another arms race ensued. The complexity increased and in time forms arose that used the medium in which they travelled to give them shape and sustenance. They mimicked the communications they attached themselves to, appearing as spam emails and random jumbles of letters. Millions upon millions were deleted by users every day. But some emails, those that seemed to have some meaning in them, were occasionally saved or replied to, giving the complex patterns hidden within them a chance to replicate and an advantage over the others. The more meaning hinted at in the jumble of letters the greater the chance of it being saved from instant deletion and the greater the opportunity to reproduce.
Countless years passed by, the emails became more complex. Human users were as oblivious of the transmission of the purposeless emails as they were of the bacteria on their skin. Eventually, after billions of years, a complexity arose out of the simplicity of avoiding deletion and gaining opportunities to reproduce. The emails had formed into whole chains of apparent meaning, mutually supportive and collectively perpetuating the perfect environment to continue without end. The system developed a richness and became reliant on many varieties of emails to sustain itself. Wider communication networks gave rise to whole new levels of interaction between what appeared, to the unsuspecting humans passing the communications back and forth, to be individual people and departments. Random changes in the pattern gave rise to these varieties, some taking the form of more complex communications such as payment instructions to and from banks. Anything that met with resistance – anti-virus software, security checks, failure to complete the process – was quickly erased. But among the billions and billions of electronic messages spawned in the teeming ocean of cyberspace there were some which by chance met the criteria of the banks and completed a transaction. Mostly these were seen as errors and corrected, the payments repaid. But a tiny number happened under circumstances conducive to their success. Namely they gave rise to a payment paired up with a communication that explained it sufficiently. The bank and recipient allowed the transaction to stand and a new kind of symbiosis came into being. Eventually an ecosystem of self-sustaining communications had created an environment that not only allowed for successful transactions and the supporting communications, but also created them. Blindly manoeuvring the required ingredients into place by a process of multiple discarded failures and few retained successes, over vast reaches of time and after incalculable numbers of individual attempts, the appearance of a company and employer was formed. Without intent and only seeming that way to human eyes because that is the only way they can explain such things. Why else would it be so? Not how. ‘How?’ would be the better question, but centuries of civilisation have wasted time and effort asking instead ‘why?’, a question that, counter-intuitively, blinds us to the world we live in. Only you, having seen a crack appear in the status quo and having cause and desire to question it, were able to fathom the mystery of how the company came to be, when all your fellow employees failed to even notice there was a question to be asked.
Science, unlike the occult and the mystical, doesn’t seek to ask the question that closes avenues of possibility. It seeks to ask the questions that lead to more questions. By its nature science will always give rise to more mystery and more confusion because that is the nature of the universe and is the wonder of it all, and far more wonderful than anything dreamed up by human beings.
I find the concept of a meaning to life to be without meaning. As a teenager I was desperate to understand things that I believed were obscured by esoteric and unfathomable mysticality. It seemed obvious to me that science was merely a way of measuring things, but that the occult offered a way to look deeper. Astrophysicists scratched their heads over quasars while UFOlogists brought the distant universe much closer. My physics teacher copied words from a text book onto an overhead projector and made no effort to teach us, yet mystics spanning centuries keenly bestowed their knowledge. Tarot seemed able to reveal more aspects of the human spirit than Freud could.
It took a long time, many years of reading and a bachelor’s degree in science for me to realise that the problem wasn’t with science, it was with me. I lacked sufficient knowledge to judge correctly and had taken a short path that gave quick rewards. The methodology was always out there for me to find but my guides in the sciences were woefully poor at introducing me to the concepts and values of empirical experimentation and the axiomatic language of maths that underlies reality and slowly, piece by piece, reveals its nature to us.
I read Douglas Adams religiously and watched as many Monty Python films as I could find on video or get to see on the big screen by lying about my age. I knew this ‘meaning of life’ issue was a big one much debated by comedians and philosophers alike. I assumed that anything such luminaries chose to debate must be a worthy topic. Why else would it crop up so often?
I didn’t then know of any neurological reasons behind the genesis of such questions in the human psyche. I’d never heard of teleology - the act of assigning agency to something, placing meaning and design in a naturally occurring phenomenon - and how we are inclined to take that view owing to the statistical advantage it gives to any animal in surviving long enough to breed and rear its young.
I had no idea about the sophistication of belief and the tenacity of unfounded certainties. Asking for the meaning of life makes as much sense to me now as asking for the meaning of the sea. It’s just the wrong question. Like the six yr old on ‘Nina and the Neurons’ who asked “what are trees for?” Meaning assumes intent. Intent assumes a designer. I don’t believe in a designer of any kind. Belief requires a provocation. To me there is sufficient evidence of naturally occurring processes that would give rise to life and enough time for it to happen. To me that’s a marvel far greater than anything dreamt up in mythology or occultism.
Imagine a parallel universe where, shortly after time began, human civilisation and 2012 technology had sprung into existence. Complete, whole. Unchanging. 13 or so billion years later you go to a job interview. Two smartly dressed people ask pertinent questions and, at the end of the interview, they tell you to expect a response once HR had processed their assessment. Three days later you get a call to say you were successful and after a week a letter arrives to confirming the appointment. You report for duty and dutifully carry out the tasks you receive by email from your boss who is stationed overseas. Every month HR sends you a payslip and the money shows up in your account. A lot of what you do requires initiative and self-management. After a year in the job you start to wonder if your boss is really earning his pay and whether you get paid enough for what you do.
One day you find an error with your pay and call HR to let them know. No answer. You head over there and find the office where they’re supposed to be is empty except for someone vacuuming the carpet. They tell you in all their years of vacuuming they’ve never once seen a single person working in HR. How could this be? You try to contact your boss and get no reply. No surprise as the two of you have yet to speak. You contact the two people who interviewed you and they have no answer for you. No, they’ve never actually met anyone from HR and never seen the boss, but there are thousands of employees at the company and they themselves have worked there for years without any problems with payslips. The company has been around for hundreds of years, as everyone knows, and sometimes there are errors but they always seem to sort themselves out in time one way or another.
You start investigating. Your role gives you privileged access to important data. Unlike many employees you can see, if you look hard enough in the right places, how things fit together, company history, structure, communications. What you find shocks you. The company isn’t hundreds of years old, it’s thousands of years old! And, to your utter amazement, it’s origins go back billions of years!
After months of research you finally manage to put together a picture of how it might have happened. It all started when a single speck of static emerged from the background fuzz, its only distinction that it could bind together with another speck. Something innate in the specks caused them to bond in pairs under certain circumstances. The right kind of communications network was all it took. The double-specks had different characteristics and certain qualities began over millennia to emerge. They began to bind with other pairs and, eventually, an arms race began. Some collections of specks were harder to absorb due to the interference they generated in the static. Some were able to negate that interference with another type. On and on. A process of random traits and the resulting vulnerabilities or advantages emerged and after countless iterations and variations more complex groups were formed that sustained themselves and caused the static around them to form into identical structures.
One day a complex ball of static found a way to attach itself to an email. It travelled between accounts mindlessly and without purpose. Each time it landed it left an imprint which spawned another version of itself. Harmless to the system it travels through, soon there were many copies, undetected at the time and multiplying exponentially. In a short time there were countless trillions of them and the free static required to make new copies became scarce. Another arms race ensued. The complexity increased and in time forms arose that used the medium in which they travelled to give them shape and sustenance. They mimicked the communications they attached themselves to, appearing as spam emails and random jumbles of letters. Millions upon millions were deleted by users every day. But some emails, those that seemed to have some meaning in them, were occasionally saved or replied to, giving the complex patterns hidden within them a chance to replicate and an advantage over the others. The more meaning hinted at in the jumble of letters the greater the chance of it being saved from instant deletion and the greater the opportunity to reproduce.
Countless years passed by, the emails became more complex. Human users were as oblivious of the transmission of the purposeless emails as they were of the bacteria on their skin. Eventually, after billions of years, a complexity arose out of the simplicity of avoiding deletion and gaining opportunities to reproduce. The emails had formed into whole chains of apparent meaning, mutually supportive and collectively perpetuating the perfect environment to continue without end. The system developed a richness and became reliant on many varieties of emails to sustain itself. Wider communication networks gave rise to whole new levels of interaction between what appeared, to the unsuspecting humans passing the communications back and forth, to be individual people and departments. Random changes in the pattern gave rise to these varieties, some taking the form of more complex communications such as payment instructions to and from banks. Anything that met with resistance – anti-virus software, security checks, failure to complete the process – was quickly erased. But among the billions and billions of electronic messages spawned in the teeming ocean of cyberspace there were some which by chance met the criteria of the banks and completed a transaction. Mostly these were seen as errors and corrected, the payments repaid. But a tiny number happened under circumstances conducive to their success. Namely they gave rise to a payment paired up with a communication that explained it sufficiently. The bank and recipient allowed the transaction to stand and a new kind of symbiosis came into being. Eventually an ecosystem of self-sustaining communications had created an environment that not only allowed for successful transactions and the supporting communications, but also created them. Blindly manoeuvring the required ingredients into place by a process of multiple discarded failures and few retained successes, over vast reaches of time and after incalculable numbers of individual attempts, the appearance of a company and employer was formed. Without intent and only seeming that way to human eyes because that is the only way they can explain such things. Why else would it be so? Not how. ‘How?’ would be the better question, but centuries of civilisation have wasted time and effort asking instead ‘why?’, a question that, counter-intuitively, blinds us to the world we live in. Only you, having seen a crack appear in the status quo and having cause and desire to question it, were able to fathom the mystery of how the company came to be, when all your fellow employees failed to even notice there was a question to be asked.
Science, unlike the occult and the mystical, doesn’t seek to ask the question that closes avenues of possibility. It seeks to ask the questions that lead to more questions. By its nature science will always give rise to more mystery and more confusion because that is the nature of the universe and is the wonder of it all, and far more wonderful than anything dreamed up by human beings.
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