Category Archives: Science And Society

General Science, Philosophy, Science And Society

How Smart Are Octopi?

18 Comments

A very interesting article:

…octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.

Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. “In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather. But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”

So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said. “It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

We probably won’t find more fascinating creatures to study until/unless we find extraterrestrial life.

[Via Geek Press]

Business, Economics, Education, Mathematics, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space

Where Have All The Chemists Gone?

9 Comments

Thoughts on STEM from Walter Russell Mead. Part of the problem is grade inflation in the softer courses and overemphasis on GPA as part of the faux credentialing of modern academics, which chases students away from real degrees and courses. And I agree completely with this comment with regards to engineering:

Engineering is difficult. And if you’re going to stay the course you really must want it in your gut with a passion not far from love. It helps if you were one of the kids who tinkered with radios or with automobiles or even blowing up “spare” stumps with strange concoctions. Experience made college easier. Those who got into it because daddy was an engineer and expected the son to be an engineer mostly didn’t make it. The fire in the belly was missing.

So what’s new today? Manufacturing in the US is a faint shadow of what it used to be. And computer aided design is doing away with the need for large teams just to build a small subassembly for a product like an airliner. You don’t need several passes trying to determine the proper airfoil for a Dreamliner. The computer performs an awful lot of the preliminary testing neatly and cleanly. The final product is then built and tested to confirm performance with little more than some computer drafting needed to tweak performance to specification. A small team can do what many larger teams did in the past.

Despite a long career in engineering I don’t recommend anybody get into engineering these days, particularly if they want to do it for the money. If you must get into engineering do it because you build things, love it, and want to understand how to build them better. Go into it because your hobby is engineering. Otherwise, don’t waste your time.

I’ve commented in the past that when I was growing up, engineering was what a lot of lower-middle class kids whose parents didn’t go to college went into as a way to step up in life, and they were the kids (mostly boys) who tinkered with radios and cars (my uncle was in this class). I think in the eighties, a lot of young women who were good at math steered into it, post-lib, but many of them didn’t have a natural affinity for it. But no one should go into it only with the expectation of financial reward — as other commenters note, most engineers who do really well financially go into management or become entrepreneurs.

I would also note that one of the things that drives New Space, and it’s dramatically lower costs, isn’t just the difference in incentives and business structure, but the fact that the tools available allow small teams to do what large ones used to.

[Update a few minutes later]

This is a good comment, too:

Being an engineer for over 50 years, I note the difference between the liberal arts and engineering grading systems. As was stated to me by Dr. R. F. Mehl, the engineering program does not grade on the curve. It uses real numbers. If you are driving cown the highway, you don’t want to cross a bridge built by an engineer that was graded on the curve. Grading an engineer on the curve can cause disasters later. However, grading a liberal arts student on the curve can only cause a social disaster like Obama. And the unintended result is that the liberal arts person feels so good about him/herself that they can’t be corrected.

Just like Obama.

[Late morning update]

Heh. “Hey, my major is ‘real,’ too.” It’s hard to tell initially whether or not it’s satire, but it becomes more clear as you get further into it.

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Latest Warm-Monger Scam

2 Comments

Some thoughts:

Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?

Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.

What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”

This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.

The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.

Media Criticism, Science And Society, Social Commentary

What To Do With The Halloween Candy

26 Comments

Just eat it.

I agree. I have sort of a sweet tooth, so that’s one of the things I’ve given up on this paleolithic diet, but I figure if I’m going to break the diet, I might as well do it whole hog and get it out of my system. As the dentist in the article says, it’s better for the teeth to eat all the candy at once than to have a steady diet of it for weeks. The same goes to the glycemic effects, I think. If I overdo it on salt or sugar in a single meal, I can get back to the routine within a day or two. Also, I bought dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses, which the kids might not like as much, but will be heart healthy for me if I have leftovers.

[Update, a while later]

It is dusk, and the streets are empty.

This just validates my long-standing thesis that Halloween has been taken over from the kids, who used to go trick-or-treating, and used to be free range, to the adult baby boomers, who don’t want to grow up.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The “Science”

5 Comments

…continues to be unsettled:

So we have an expert on birds guessing that white blobs on a photo are drowned polar bears.

That’s it.

That’s the science.

He called it a parsimonious explanation. I call it Rorschach.

I call it the deliberate raising of hysteria by lies, in the service of a leftist agenda. And the foremost liar, or deluded fool, is Al Gore.

[Update a few minutes later]

Another food fight breaks out in the climate “science” community.

[Update a while later]

Lying, cheating climate “scientists” caught lying and cheating again.

Science And Society, Social Commentary

Oh, Wow

14 Comments

Steve Jobs last words, according to his sister.

What I found interesting was this:

A middle-class boy from Los Altos, he fell in love with a middle-class girl from New Jersey. It was important to both of them to raise Lisa, Reed, Erin and Eve as grounded, normal children. Their house didn’t intimidate with art or polish; in fact, for many of the first years I knew Steve and Lo together, dinner was served on the grass, and sometimes consisted of just one vegetable. Lots of that one vegetable. But one. Broccoli. In season. Simply prepared. With the just the right, recently snipped, herb.

That is not a healthy diet. Broccoli is good for you but not just broccoli. He probably could have lived a lot longer if he’d understood nutrition better.

Business, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Wine Tasting

20 Comments

Why we can’t tell good wine from bad:

In 2001, Frederic Brochet conducted two experiments at the University of Bordeaux.

In one experiment, he got 54 oenology (the study of wine tasting and wine making) undergraduates together and had them taste one glass of red wine and one glass of white wine. He had them describe each wine in as much detail as their expertise would allow. What he didn’t tell them was both were the same wine. He just dyed the white one red. In the other experiment, he asked the experts to rate two different bottles of red wine. One was very expensive, the other was cheap. Again, he tricked them. This time he had put the cheap wine in both bottles. So what were the results?

The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white. In the second experiment, the one with the switched labels, the subjects went on and on about the cheap wine in the expensive bottle. They called it complex and rounded. They called the same wine in the cheap bottle weak and flat.

I’ve always suspected this. And it reminds me of this post from a couple years ago.