Crazy

The first video is, for no particular reason, filmed outside:

Click to tweet: http://clicktotweet.com/qcK8A .  Part I is here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPjF54RAAik&list=PLGWy7AFv1dkIn3UbP1E7XpvTAnXZY2yzv&index=9 .

This is a "morning after" video like the ones about us being an arrogant species and superficiality and depth.

First of all, i'm a little concerned that we may have been discussing a caricature of the idea of political correctness because none of us there was prepared to defend the position, although of course i made some attempt yesterday.  We can, however, transcend that by saying that the definition of political correctness on which the argument was based was taken from Wikipedia and reads as follows:

a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent.

Leaving off the end of that sentence is fine, incidentally.  We believed it was excessive, but for the purposes of this video, you needn't accept that.

Firstly, political correctness involves an attempt to avoid over-generalisation and recognises the flawed and possibly fallacious nature of inductive thought.  However, induction has to be used in order to function healthily and to abandon it completely would indeed be psychotic - almost literally, "political correctness gone mad".  Induction exists because of biological and social evolution and has been selected for.

Secondly, political correctness is an attempt to quantify ethically and politically acceptable behaviour.  It enables one to account for behaviour to an authority which may have legal force, and to convince oneself that one has done the "right thing".  In doing so, however, it misses out the messiness of empathic interaction in everyday life and as such may be more about making oneself feel better about what one does than actually doing well.  It reminds me of the Pharisees, in fact.

Actually, the reason this was done in the woody bit next to the erstwhile Bowstring Bridge is that i had to fit a lot in this morning, being assaulted as i was by incessant urges to make and upload videos, and this was a way of fitting two in today without it making the day unbearably frenetic.  I did, however, have some difficulty finding a quiet spot sheltered from the wind.  I'm happy with how it turned out though.

I also feel i should say we pursued a notion of political correctitude which was probably rather simplistic.  However, so do many advocates of the idea.

The second video is the reason i've entitled this entry as above, but seems to be a bit screwed up, which is a bit problematic.

Stop press:  it's now sorted and here it is:

Click to tweet:  http://clicktotweet.com/0aUyW .  Most people would probably either believe in the Fall literally and be creationist, probably Young Earth Creationist, or see it as a metaphor or allegory of a process we all go through in early life and believe in evolution, or of course they might reject both and simply believe in evolution as non-Christians.  I hold a third position.  Although i agree with the allegorical understanding of the Fall, i also think that it may reflect a series of real events.  Whereas i do present a particular hypothesis here, i'm not attached to it and am prepared to accept that i'm wrong.  In the context of the Fall, this is the correct and humble thing to do.  It would be perverse of me to assert that in spite of my sinfulness, limitation and proneness to error and self-serving "rational" thought, this is the definitive, correct version of events.  It's more presented as an illustration of how believing in a literal Fall is compatible with evolutionary theory.  I doubt anyone else at all believes this, including Christian palaeontologists and palaeoanthropologists.

This is my hypothesis:

Back in the Miocene, there were many different species of ape (incidentally, the Aegyptopithecus zeuxis in the video was not an ape although it was, like apes, a catarrhine primate - sorry about the mistake).  The climate back then was somewhat more humid and warmer than today, and there were widespread rainforests.  Apes were found in Europe, Asia and Africa.  Then, at the close of the Miocene, the climate became more arid.  This was due to the build up of ice, possibly due to the diversion of the Gulf Stream northwards and the appearance of snow in high latitudes, or orogeny (mountain building).  The following epoch, the Pliocene, was therefore more arid and the rainforests shrank.  Hence our ancestors were forced to survive on the savannah, where food sources were scarcer and not ideal nutritionally for a species which had evolved in the rainforest.  As a result, they effectively suffered from malnutrition, since the phytoestrogens and MAOIs in their diet were missing.  Even today it's possible to tell we are not eating the ideal diet because we cannot produce our own vitamin C.  This diet along with the harsh environment jointly led to a situation where foetuses did not develop healthily in the womb due to brain and hormonal problems, and the harsh environment and impairment of development combined to brutalise the species.  By the time of recorded history, this vicious cycle had been going on for many millenia and we had come to believe it was natural.  This is the biological explanation of how sin entered the world - this is the Fall, a uniquely human problem.

It's crucial to recognise two things about this.  One is that every single neurotypical individual since this event has been confronted with the choice to avoid or commit sin, and with one single exception throughout the whole of the history of the human race, every single one of us has chosen freely to sin.

As i said this is an hypothesis, but i also believe there is some evidence for it.  One is the behaviour of chimpanzees compared to that of bonobos.  The relative harshness of the environment of chimps has led to them being more aggressive than bonobos.  They are examples of the kind of thing which went "wrong" in the Pliocene and led to "Adam and Eve" being "expelled" from the Garden of Eden.

It may be possible to test this hypothesis via the analysis of wear and tear on fossil teeth, dating the production and nature of stone tools and the isotope ratios of calcium and phosphorus in fossilised bones, but it probably isn't.

OK, so it sounds completely insane, but as i say i'm not 100% attached to this idea.  I'm just presenting it to show that evolutionary theory is compatible with a literal Fall.

This is a bit crazy of course, but it's not about the specific hypothesis so much as the principle that a scientific world view including belief in evolution is compatible with belief in the Fall.

Dinosaurs ain't what they used to be

Mind-melting time!

In Victorian times, dinosaurs were thought to look like this:

This is a Crystal Palace dinosaur, more specifically an Iguanodon.  It's scaly, rather recumbent, has horns on its nose (which were later moved to its thumbs) and gives me the impression of being rather like a crocodile or a big lizard.  The model was manufactured in the early 1850s for Crystal Palace in London, before the publication of Darwin's 'Origin Of Species'.  There are several other such sculptures, notably Megalosaurus, thus:

Both of these species were seen as quadrupedal at the time but were later interpreted as bipedal.  I find these depictions redolent of my own reconstruction of the Victorian Era:  sedate, plodding, cold-blooded and lizardy.  Of course, it may be that my very understanding of the Victorians itself is as inaccurate as these reconstructions of dinosaurs seems to me.


Another reconstruction of a sauropod dinosaur of the time has splayed limbs like a modern lizard or tortoise, and it was once quipped that it must have lived its whole life in agony, with every joint dislocated.  In other words, opinions were changing as to what dinosaurs were "really" like.


Later on, dinosaurs started to accelerate a bit.  Many were stood up on their back legs, they started to bite chunks out of each other in pictures and it was decided that they were living in hot and often steamy conditions, meaning that they were able to move a lot faster than was previously assumed.  Unfortunately I can't show you pictures of any more dinosaurs because unlike the ones above, these dinosaurs are copyright owing to the fact that the people who drew them haven't been extinct for very long, if at all.  However, any future nerd who grew up in the '60s and '70s worth their salt will remember what dinosaurs were supposed to look like at the time, often because they'd read the 'Giant Golden Book Of Dinosaurs', probably the ultimate dinosaur book for Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers.  There's an excellent page on it here, with illustrations:

http://reptilis.net/2008/06/30/the-old-grey-sauropod-just-aint-what-she-used-to-be/

Later still, they started to find fossils which were clearly very speedy indeed, notably Deinonychus, and realised that the structure of their bones was more like that of an animal which generated its own heat from within than a reptile (whatever that is - don't get me started!).  It was also noticed that their footprints were not accompanied by traces of a dragging tail, and they lost another point of contact with the ground with raised tails.  These are the dinosaurs of 'Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs' (http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Blooded-Dinosaurs-Adrian-Desmond/dp/0385270631) and 'The Dinosaur Heresies' (http://www.amazon.com/Dinosaur-Heresies-Robert-Bakker-Ph-D/dp/0806522607/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350136306&sr=1-1&keywords=the+dinosaur+heresies), where all dinosaurs were seen as hot, in a parallel to the way "cool" became "hot" during that decade before returning to "cool" more recently.  Reality had changed again.

Time marched on.  It was decided that dinosaurs were not all warm-blooded and that it was more like the big ones being like giant compost heaps from which the heat generated by their metabolism was unable to escape due to their low surface area.  Their tails stayed up though, and some of the sauropods developed whip-like abilities, making them the first animals to break the sound barrier, over a hundred million years before humans invented the bullwhip and Concorde.  By the turn of this century, dinosaurs were like this:

Note the curly, whip-like tails.  Incidentally, watch the dinosaur at 2:30 - it lifts its forelimbs off the salt flat.  Even these dinosaurs are more bipedal than they used to be.

The Diplodocus in the Natural History Museum also had its tail raised by then.

Then it was decided that many of the dinosaurs were feathered.  At first, this was just those closely related to birds.  However, it turned out that the other dinosaurs also sometimes had feathers, so it seemed, and the image of dinosaurs changed again.

The upshot of all this is:  what makes today's dinosaurs any more real than yesterday's?  How do we know that our culture and history doesn't decide what dinosaurs are?  I'm not saying they never existed at all, but it seems that truth is genuinely a very slippery concept, and science in particular is not accurate.  This is not news, but it is disturbing and makes me feel like the rug is constantly being pulled out from under me.  Here's an older video of mine:

I make a reference in here to being a reed rather than a tree, by which i mean that if you allow yourself a little mental eccentricity, your mind will not break under pressure, unlike a rigidly rational mind, which i see as more susceptible to a breakdown.  As a result, i incubate little pet delusions, one of which is the belief that dinosaurs wiped themselves out in a nuclear war, although i have now modified that belief somewhat to the one that they were trying to steer an asteroid into Earth orbit, and this went wrong and they crashed it into the planet in a tragic accident.  However, all this is beside the point.

The second point i'm trying to make is this.  Dinosaurs are not these ancient, outmoded lizardy things which were superceded by mammals.  They dominated us for over 100 million years, except that that's not true either - there were some large mammals at the time and one of them probably even ate dinosaurs.  After the mammals started to diversify, i.e. after the dinosaurs' unfortunate tinkering with the asteroid which wiped them all out, dinosaurs came back as dirty great carnivorous birds which ate horses.  Even after these died out, there were giant reptiles which could easily have been mistaken for dinosaurs.  In Australia, one of these, Megalania, even survived until people got there, the biggest crocodile ever lived in the "Age of Mammals" and there were gigantic tortoises on islands into the Middle Ages.  Therefore, the image of the dinosaur as a pathetic antediluvian beast whose time has gone is false and unfair, and we would do well to remember that our time is fleeting and we're just lucky to be here, as well as being comparable to the dinosaurs ourselves.

Then there's the issue of the Neanderthals, but that's another story.

Here's the vid:

Not entirely happy with this one either, but there you go.

Creationism is blasphemous

Here is an annoying video:

The reason this video is annoying, apart from the fact that it's annoying, is that the file size is unnecessarily large and that there's a glitch in the middle of it.  It is of course also deliberately provocative.  I've uploaded it because the previous video on religious matters, "The Bible Is Not Pro-Life", was liked by various people (though not in the sense of people coming along and clicking on the thumbs-up sign).

I really do feel that people find two big things off-putting about Christianity.  One is that we are perceived as being negative about sex, and the other is that we are seen as antiquated in our attitude to science.  This needn't be so, and it's a barrier to evangelism.  Of course, it can and has been said that if something is true, we shouldn't just cave in to how the world sees it and accept it for the sake of popularity, which of course is the case, but on the matter of Creationism, the problem arises because people think taking the Bible seriously is the same as taking it literally.  In fact, Biblical literalism is a new idea, dating back only a couple of hundred years.  I haven't covered that in the video, but might do in future.

By the way, YouTube went mad providing me with relevant tags on this video in a way i'd never seen it do before.  I wonder what this means.

The next video will, I hope, be an interview with Holly about her bilingualism or the lack thereof.

Home made breasts and custard

As anyone who has spent more than a tiny amount of time there, the Halfbakery (my favourite ideas bank) has long been obsessed with custard.  There are custard-filled speed bumps, custard travelators, ustard (which becomes either custard or mustard depending on what you prefer), custard as a coolant and custard guns.  The main reason for this obsession is that custard is a non-Newtonian fluid.  Newtonian fluids are ideal and probably don't exist, but water is close to one:  the harder you hit it, the more it yields, on the whole.  Plot the stress rate against the strain rate on a graph and you get a straight line.

However, many fluids are non-Newtonian.  They may hit back when you hit them hard or start off not yielding but decide to do so later, or they may go the other way and yield less than expected when you hit them gently, or trickle out gradually as time passes.  Examples of non-Newtonian fluids are blood, ketchup (think of banging on the bottom of the bottle to get it out or turning it upside down back in the day), non-drip gloss paint, wet cement, silly putty, quicksand and, famously, custard.

Custard, or rather  a mixture of cornstarch and water called "oobleck" after a Doctor Seuss story, is an old home ed standby.  It's possible to jump on it without sinking in but not to walk on it in the same way.  This means, for example, that you can let your hand sink into a jug of oobleck and then lift the jug by raising your arm.

The soft, yielding parts of the human body are often also non-Newtonian, notably women's breasts.  Convincing artificial breasts are therefore not good if they're just made from balloons inflated with air or water.  It would be better to make them with custard:

That didn't go particularly well.  Nor did it go particularly badly.

Here's a second video on the evolution and social significance of breasts and breastfeeding:

Not sure how that went yet as i've not edited or watched it.  Anyway, the main point of this video is to talk about why humans have breasts and the evolution of breastfeeding, along with the significance of female breasts in Western culture.

More generally, i'm working on coming across more spontaneously, and that at least seems to be going well.