The Cyclotrope

Sorry about the recent lack of entries, but I've been buried grading finals and term papers. Now, while I continue the grueling ritual of reading students' work, I thought I'd share something to mess with your noodle...

The cyclotrope is a cycle of sequential images spun at a particular speed such that the frame rate of the camera filming it produces the illusion of spirits and objects coming to life. The background music makes me think cartoonish Native Americans...

You know what I'm talking about, right?

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Lecture 4 - Cartesian Dualism & the Mind-Body Problem

There are all sorts of psychological reasons why people tend to believe that we have an immaterial soul that can somehow overcome the physical limitations of the body (think out-of-body experiences, misinterpretation of brain quirks and our tendency for promiscuous projection of agency, to say nothing of religious indoctrination).

When it comes to actual reasoned philosophical arguments, Descartes is, for the most part, still the man to go to, but as Professor Millican explains in this fascinating lecture (that explores the mind-body problem and the fallacies one can commit when trying to derive metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises), that doesn't mean that substance dualism doesn't face some seriously problematic challenges...

Click here to see the class slides, and remember that the problems for substance dualism don't end there...

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Figures Palin would claim it was a "Lame-Stream Media Gotcha Moment"

I wish I could consider myself a prophet, since I called it, but sadly the truth is much more mundane: this woman is too petty and too predictable.

I don't actually have much of a problem with ignorance. It's simply a lack of information which can be easily fixed. Arrogance, on the other hand, and the refusal to own up to one's mistakes (despite an ocean of evidence proving you wrong) makes me go bat shit insane because it's an insidious attitude contrary to the ideals of a lover of wisdom.

And that's exactly what Sarah Palin has done after her history lesson kerfuffle: she insists Paul Revere rode in the dark of midnight to warn the British that they were going to get ambushed the next morning. Yes, because when I think surprise attack, I always think 'let's warn the enemy ahead of time.' Luckily, Jon Stewart has something to say on the issue:

The Daily Show - Sarah Palin's Folksy Word Salad
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But since her followers have tried to "fix" the Wikipedia page on Paul Revere to fit in with what this bimbo believes, I guess she must be right...

Here's Stephen Colbert trying to prove Revere could have ridden a horse while ringing a bell and firing multiple shots from a front-loading musket:

The Colbert Report
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I stand corrected... and possibly sterile...

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Everything and Nothing - Everything

You may find this hard to believe, but we've known about the true size of the universe for only about 100 years. When Copernicus proposed his revolutionary heliocentric model, for instance, he still believed in the existence of a perfect celestial sphere where all the stars revolved around the sun in a perfect circle. That belief would be slowly chipped away with the observation of a Super-Nova explosion in 1572.

It wasn't until the 1920's when Edwin Hubble, thanks to a brilliant idea proposed by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, was able to measure the distance to a Cepheid variable in what was suspected to be either a weird part of the Milky Way, or an altogether different galaxy. The measurements made it clear that the universe was orders of magnitude larger than we had suspected.

Could it, in fact, be infinite? Does space go on forever? Or does it have to have an edge? If it has an edge, what's on the other side? More universe? And if it's infinite, and there are an infinite number of stars, why isn't the night sky as bright as it is during the day?

In the following documentary, Professor Jim Al-Khalili traces the history and the science behind these and other similarly fascinating questions that scientists, especially with the help of brilliant minds like Gauss, Reimann and Einstein, are just beginning to solve.

I would have thought that a finite amount of stars would solve the problem much more easily, but maybe Professor Al-Khalili hasn't heard of Ockham's Razor? :)

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Sarah Palin's History Lesson on Paul Revere

You'd think a tea-bagger who professes to love America and who decides to travel through every state with her family to "celebrate" our traditions, landscapes, institutions and history, would read up on the basics of our history...

Of course, if the tour is really just a back-alley way to secure funding for her as-yet-undeclared presidential run (because once she does declare her candidacy, she'd have to reveal all financial contributions, especially those of corporations bent on reducing taxes for the rich while screwing the rest of us), then the fact she has no freaking clue what the hell she's talking about should be no surprise to anyone...

Here is Sarah Palin's revisionary history on the significance of Paul Revere and his Midnight Run, which she declared while visiting... wait for it... the focal point for Paul Revere's ride!!!

So, he warned the British to protect our Second Amendment before we even had a Second Amendment... or a First, or a Constitution, or even a Declaration of Independence?

Anyway, if you need a reminder of Paul Revere's story, listen to this:

I wonder if Sarah Palin will characterize this latest failure as yet another "lame-stream-media gotcha moment"...

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Earth Rotating Time Lapse

Apropos of Foucault's pendulum and the illusion it produces (namely, that it's the pendulum that rotates, when in fact it's the Earth rotating below it), I came across a video that has just emerged on the interwebs, and which helps with this shift in perspective.

If you've seen any of the previous incredible star-gazing time lapse videos I've posted before, you may have had something of a necker-cube experience: most of the time you experience the universe rotating around us, and every now and then you might experience us doing the rotating. This shift is usually involuntary and tends to be short-lived (at least for me).

To solve that problem, the people who created this video have taken some typical time-lapse footage, but fixed the video on the stars instead of Earth. The result is truly impressive.

Check out all sorts of awesome time lapse videos.
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Lecture 4 - Skepticism of the External World

As you read this blog, you're probably working under the assumption that some guy, a so-called philosophy monkey, wrote this entry. You may not know who he is, but you're pretty sure he's not you. You probably think this because you're not aware of writing for this blog, so if you're not aware of something being done, then it's not you who did it. Of course, if we allow for the possibility that this is all just a dream you're having, or even a dream within a dream (your 'waking up' this morning proves nothing), then all bets are off...

Welcome to the skeptical problem of solipsism (or at least one version of it): the idea that it may be impossible to tell the difference between a real mind-independent external world (what you're probably used to believing) vs. a completely realistic dream, or a hallucination, or a situation in which you are just a brain in a vat fed information by a scientist just messing with you through a super computer, or a world in which all that exists is you and your ideas and perceptions, or being stuck in something like The Matrix.

Can we have knowledge of a mind-independent external reality that's really "out there"? In the fourth lecture in this series, Professor Millican explores the history of this problem, starting with Descartes' skeptical arguments, as well as some of the possible solutions offered over the years, especially G.E. Moore's Defense of Common Sense.

Click here to see the course slides
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