Shooting an AK-47 Underwater

Here in the US, we seem to be obsessed with guns, with our right to own them, and with the ridiculous fear that the government is going to try to take them away from us. Predictably, the people who are most vociferous on the issue are not exactly luminaries and scholars with a solid understanding of constitutional law and jurisprudence, which is really putting it mildly and generously...

But since this is a blog dedicated (for the most part) to sharing education and interesting ideas, why don't we take this obsession with guns to watch someone shoot an AK-47 underwater and, most importantly, to learn some fascinating principles of physics to understand what it is that we have just seen?

Explosions and physics... awesome!

Read More

John Searle - Our Shared Condition: Consciousness

Studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, and until only the last couple of decades, very few intellectuals (apart from philosophers and psychologists) dared to even think about how to try to understand it. But with the rise of new disciplines and technologies, consciousness is starting to become the hot topic among academics. One of the problems, however, is that we don't yet quite have a theory about what consciousness is, and without an answer to that question, it's not always clear what disciplines and methods are most appropriate to use to study it.

In the following TEDTalk presentation, philosopher of mind John Searle (famous among other things for his Chinese room thought experiment) makes the case for studying consciousness, and for his own understanding, not so much of what consciousness is, but of how to approach the question. In the process, he shoots down some of the most popular objections to try to study consciousness scientifically, arguing that regardless of its ultimate ontological status, it's a biological process with multiple levels of description.

Read More

Brian Cox - Wonders of Life - Expanding Universe

Our knowledge of the world comes from our experience of the world. And our experience is based on our sensory apparatus, but how do our senses work? What is it about the physical laws of the universe that make it possible for creatures like us to perceive anything at all?

In the following documentary, Brian Cox visits some interesting animals in the US (giant catfish, glowing scorpions, mantis shrimp and octopi, among others) to explore and understand how they, and we, are able to create mental representations of our environment through taste (chemicals), sound (air waves) and vision (light), and how it is that the gradual process of evolution through natural selection has slowly sculpted the amazing machinery of perception, by taking fish jaws, for instance, and slowly turned them into the ear bones that make hearing possible for you and me...

To catch that catfish, he didn't have to enlist the help of a scientist... he could have just told a redneck to go noodling :)

Read More

Flatland - Exploring Other Dimensions

Plato's myth of the cave is an allegory that tries to make the point that there may be more to reality than meets the eye, that our experience is simply of a very limited and lowly aspect of reality. Given the knowledge and technology of the time, Plato's use of puppets and shadows in his ancient writing is brilliant in conveying the difference between the real and the apparent, but in the 1800's, Edwin Abbott took this idea much further, and in a way more rigorously and convincingly, as he was able to tell it through a creative exploration of mathematical space:

Compare the experience of a creature from three-dimensional space against one from a two-dimensional world. Easy, and completely reasonable to understand why the two-dimensional figure was skeptical of "more" dimensions, even if it was wrong, right? Well, apply the same reasoning to the difference between four-dimensional space and the three-dimensional space we're all used to. Wouldn't the reasoning you applied in the first case also apply to this one? And just like that time we were introduced to these ideas by the irreplaceable Carl Sagan, when he tried to show us the projection of a tesseract, here's a fun little animation to inspire your imagination and help you explore the beauty of mathematical space that can be understood by the mind even if it cannot be always perceived by the senses :)

Now, are there 'really' more dimensions than the three spatial ones we're used to or is this just a fancy mathematical abstraction? That's a topic for another discussion :p

Read More

Open Access Explained, PhD Comics Style

As biological creatures, we are very adaptable. If we notice that some background condition remains relatively stable, we tend to ignore it after a while. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense, since we can't afford to devote all of our energy and attention resources to things that are unlikely to affect us in sudden ways. On the other hand, this makes us very susceptible to the status quo bias (failing to recognize better alternatives; failing to even acknowledge that there could be potentially better methods; perpetuating the current system as the solution to a problem that we often don't realize is the result of the very same system we use to 'fix' it; and even actively working against new possibilities, even while being fully cognizant of the problems and negative consequences associated with the systems currently implemented).

This problem is ubiquitous, and there are entire industries built upon the simple and great idea that for any given situation, there are probably better solutions than those that are currently being implemented. Unfortunately, some of these same industries, once they acquire a certain level of success and financial power, tend to re-affirm their own system instead of the original idea of constantly improving things. And if they have enough power and influence, they can actually become an impediment to improved efficiency. Professional academic journals, for all the wonderful work they do, have also fallen into this self-reinforcing pattern where their financial success has replaced the original idea for which they were created, and maybe it's time we start a dialogue to figure out how to make everyone better off...

Read More

Louis CK - If God Came Back...

After God created the heavens and the earth, he thought to himself:

Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Traditionally, this has been understood to mean that God created everything for the benefit of humans, and at the expense of everything and everyone else. Quite convenient for us, but what if what has been translated as "dominion" (in the sense of ownership) should really have been more accurately translated as "stewardship" (in the sense of "look after this for me till I come back, and don't fuck it up in the meantime!")?

Comedian Louis CK has a few thoughts on the subject...

I bet God is wondering how successfully He managed to make us in His image :p

Read More

The Humanities - The Heart of the Matter

We all like to make fun of English majors (and humanities students in general) from time to time (which is fine, no one should be exempt from a little mockery every now and then). The usual charge is that odious, unenlightened, ignorant, superficial, condescending question: what is a humanities major good for? Such a question implies that the only real value of an education is instrumental: what kind of job is it going to lead to? But this point of view gets it all backwards: money is good only insofar as it makes your life better and worth living, and living for the sake of money is to confuse the means for the end.

The slightly more respectable charge against the humanities, though still embarrassingly shallow, tends to come from those who espouse scientism, the idea that the only thing that matters is scientific knowledge. The reasoning in this case is that since the humanities do not lead to such knowledge, and the only kind of real knowledge is scientific, the humanities must be ultimately worthless. Now, I am perfectly well aware that, due particularly to the embarrassing intellectual and moral history associated with religious fundamentalism, many people are suspicious of questions of meaning, value, purpose and so on. And there really is something to be said for skepticism and suspicion with regard to these questions, but to deny the value of the humanities in general because one particular subject decided to take over the humanities for a long time, or even because some of its adherents tend to wax mystical and new-agey,  is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you wanted to get rid of a cockroach in your house, you wouldn't burn your house down, would you?

In any case, here are a bunch of people you may know and admire (actors, musicians, artists, film-makers, social commentators, documentary makers, writers, etc.) who have a little something to say about the personal and existential importance of the humanities, which is ultimately the heart of the matter...

"The sciences are the 'how,' and the humanities are the 'why.' -George Lucas.

With some reservations, I like that quote a lot.

Despite how much I like him, someone like Richard Dawkins might object and say that either why-questions are reducible to how-questions, or that why-questions are just silly questions. Of course, if you ask him WHY he thinks this, he would either tell you how the brain processes information (which is scientific, but irrelevant), or he would lead you to a question-begging infinite regress: if you ask him why that's a silly question, he would have to say, by his own reasoning: that's a silly question. But why is that a silly question? That's a silly question. But why is that a silly question? That's a silly question... The lesson, of course, is that at least some why questions are perfectly legitimate and meaningful, but if so, we're right back to having to agree that there must be some kind of value to the humanities...

And yes, sometimes there really can be reasonable disagreements about the difference between the humanities and social sciences, but still... :)

Read More

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

130 years ago today, in a world which no longer could be seriously understood as the effect or providence of the deliberate choice of a deity with a comprehensible, or even a coherent plan, one of the first men to viscerally understand and feel the essence of the absurdity of existence was born. His name was Franz Kafka. You may have heard of him...

Though not a philosopher himself, Kafka has become a literary icon and an inspiration to many philosophers, especially those of the existentialist persuasion. And to celebrate his birthday, here's one of his most famous and celebrated short works: The Metamorphosis

To get a sense of the absurdity of existence, you could hardly do better than stop by the Franz Kafka International Airport, previously described by The Onion as quite possibly the most alienating place in the world :)

Read More

Malcolm Gradwell - Her Way

What do you do when your best friend decides to marry someone who crushes his spirit, who loves him only on condition that he not be himself, who takes his sine qua non away from him, who makes him feel ashamed of the very things for which most people love him?

Well, if you're Malcolm Gladwell, apparently what you do is write a little ditty about it and perform it with your friends at the wedding reception :)

Most awkward wedding ever :)

Read More