Why using bad languages is not offensive.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Friday, December 21, 2007
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Beastie Boys -- Intergalatic
Way before Eminem, 50 Cents, Kayne West and all those rappers, there was the Beastie Boys. Nope, they don't do gangsta rap, but I love them all the same. This is one of my favorite track.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
如何选购旅游纪念品
（刊登于联合早报四面八方版 ）
由于纪念品的用意将决定它的性质，因此在选购时必须考虑究竟是要自己收藏，或者是送朋友的。前者能让自己的旅游有回忆和经验以外的实质收获，而后者是为了履行某种社交礼仪。对于价钱的考量，前者多昂贵都无所谓，只要负担得起，而后者就得看彼此的交情了。私人收藏的纪念品可以随便买，只要自己喜欢就好。要送人的话就必须考虑对方的感受，如果不小心送了不合适的礼物，对方不仅不会感激，搞不好还会制造敌意。
当然，除了以上的考量，还必须留意所购买的纪念品是否标志着 “中国制造” (Made In China)的字眼。此状况在二十年前绝对不是问题，但近年来几乎所有的商品都有 “中国制造” 的字眼。德国著名的运动品牌？中国制造。令人垂涎的瑞士巧克力？中国制造。仔细想想，本应拥有浓厚地方性的旅游纪念品都可以中国制造了，还有什么不可以呢？
购买到中国制造的纪念品会有种被欺骗的感觉。所谓选择旅游地点就等同和那个地点签署某个不成文的合约：我到此处一游，你就必须用当地特产来招待我。如果我要中国制造的纪念品，难道我不会自己跑到中国去吗？如果纪念品是买给自己也就罢了，就当吃一次暗亏。如果是送礼的话，收到礼物的人大概会怀疑你的诚意。嗯，他应该是忘了给我买礼物，而此礼物是他在回国后随便在某个商店里购买的吧。更糟糕的是，有些人甚至会怀疑你是否有出国旅游。嗯，这个人搞不好只是打肿脸皮充胖子，到处跟人家说他到过许多国家，其实从来没有出过国吧？那些旅游照片多数也都是用电脑弄出来的合成照罢了。
好了，假设你已经确定纪念品是当地制造的，接下来必须决定的是应该买什么样的纪念品。 最普遍的纪念品是印有该旅游胜地图案的杯子、衬衫、帽子等商品。不过，这时你开始担心了。即使杯子底下的文字显示这是当地制造的，谁也不能保证这不是纪念品店的老板对中国厂商的要求，只为了制造当地性的纪念品。更何况，杯子、衬衫、帽子等商品在任何地方都可以买到，那些怀疑你吹牛的人说不定会认为这些纪念品都是你找人把从网路下载的图案印上去的。现在不是有很多照相馆都提供类似的服务吗？
仔细想想，所谓旅游纪念品不仅应该反映该地区的风土民情，更应该在若干年后你记忆有些衰退时让你想起此旅程的独特性和异国风情所给你带来的冲击和反思。或许你该到当地街坊走走，搞不好会找到独特和值得收藏的纪念品。然而，导游已经开始在催了，还有两个旅游胜地得去，没时间磨蹭了。因此，你只好随手拿起几个看起来还不错的纪念品，并且取出信用卡，走到柜台准备付账。
或许，如此笼统的纪念品最适合反映出如此走马看花的旅游经验。
由于纪念品的用意将决定它的性质，因此在选购时必须考虑究竟是要自己收藏，或者是送朋友的。前者能让自己的旅游有回忆和经验以外的实质收获，而后者是为了履行某种社交礼仪。对于价钱的考量，前者多昂贵都无所谓，只要负担得起，而后者就得看彼此的交情了。私人收藏的纪念品可以随便买，只要自己喜欢就好。要送人的话就必须考虑对方的感受，如果不小心送了不合适的礼物，对方不仅不会感激，搞不好还会制造敌意。
当然，除了以上的考量，还必须留意所购买的纪念品是否标志着 “中国制造” (Made In China)的字眼。此状况在二十年前绝对不是问题，但近年来几乎所有的商品都有 “中国制造” 的字眼。德国著名的运动品牌？中国制造。令人垂涎的瑞士巧克力？中国制造。仔细想想，本应拥有浓厚地方性的旅游纪念品都可以中国制造了，还有什么不可以呢？
购买到中国制造的纪念品会有种被欺骗的感觉。所谓选择旅游地点就等同和那个地点签署某个不成文的合约：我到此处一游，你就必须用当地特产来招待我。如果我要中国制造的纪念品，难道我不会自己跑到中国去吗？如果纪念品是买给自己也就罢了，就当吃一次暗亏。如果是送礼的话，收到礼物的人大概会怀疑你的诚意。嗯，他应该是忘了给我买礼物，而此礼物是他在回国后随便在某个商店里购买的吧。更糟糕的是，有些人甚至会怀疑你是否有出国旅游。嗯，这个人搞不好只是打肿脸皮充胖子，到处跟人家说他到过许多国家，其实从来没有出过国吧？那些旅游照片多数也都是用电脑弄出来的合成照罢了。
好了，假设你已经确定纪念品是当地制造的，接下来必须决定的是应该买什么样的纪念品。 最普遍的纪念品是印有该旅游胜地图案的杯子、衬衫、帽子等商品。不过，这时你开始担心了。即使杯子底下的文字显示这是当地制造的，谁也不能保证这不是纪念品店的老板对中国厂商的要求，只为了制造当地性的纪念品。更何况，杯子、衬衫、帽子等商品在任何地方都可以买到，那些怀疑你吹牛的人说不定会认为这些纪念品都是你找人把从网路下载的图案印上去的。现在不是有很多照相馆都提供类似的服务吗？
仔细想想，所谓旅游纪念品不仅应该反映该地区的风土民情，更应该在若干年后你记忆有些衰退时让你想起此旅程的独特性和异国风情所给你带来的冲击和反思。或许你该到当地街坊走走，搞不好会找到独特和值得收藏的纪念品。然而，导游已经开始在催了，还有两个旅游胜地得去，没时间磨蹭了。因此，你只好随手拿起几个看起来还不错的纪念品，并且取出信用卡，走到柜台准备付账。
或许，如此笼统的纪念品最适合反映出如此走马看花的旅游经验。
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Miracle... Again???
This is an article by Daniel Dennett in the Edge! magazine (found here) which discusses his near death experience. It is similar to the post below in the sense that Dr Dennett gave tribute to the team of medical specialists keeping him alive rather than some supernatural entity.
================================================
THANK GOODNESS!
There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder.
Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by c-t scan that I had a "dissection of the aorta"—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two—channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I'd had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life, since the tangle of scar tissue that had grown like ivy around my heart in the intervening years reinforced the aorta, preventing catastrophic leakage from the tear in the aorta itself. After a nine-hour surgery, in which my heart was stopped entirely and my body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping, I am now the proud possessor of a new aorta and aortic arch, made of strong Dacron fabric tubing sewn into shape on the spot by the surgeon, attached to my heart by a carbon-fiber valve that makes a reassuring little click every time my heart beats.
As I now enter a gentle period of recuperation, I have much to reflect on, about the harrowing experience itself and even more about the flood of supporting messages I've received since word got out about my latest adventure. Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?
Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.
To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.
Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day. Had I had my blasted aorta a decade ago, there would have been no prayer of saving me. It's hardly routine today, but the odds of my survival were actually not so bad (these days, roughly 33 percent of aortic dissection patients die in the first twenty-four hours after onset without treatment, and the odds get worse by the hour thereafter).
One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.
In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I'm not just talking about the standards 'at the top'—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I'm talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking "What if I'm wrong?" Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn't replicate his results because they just didn't share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.
What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends' remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: "I've been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK." The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.
But isn't this awfully harsh? Surely it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I'm not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about. For another, we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn't work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking. If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition; I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best. If you would even consider filing a malpractice suit against a doctor who made a mistake in treating you, or suing a pharmaceutical company that didn't conduct all the proper control tests before selling you a drug that harmed you, you must acknowledge your tacit appreciation of the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself, and yet you continue to indulge in a practice for which there is no known rational justification at all, and take yourself to be actually making a contribution. (Try to imagine your outrage if a pharmaceutical company responded to your suit by blithely replying "But we prayed good and hard for the success of the drug! What more do you want?")
The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come. Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science. Thank goodness for the music of, say, Randy Newman, which could not exist without all those wonderful pianos and recording studios, to say nothing of the musical contributions of every great composer from Bach through Wagner to Scott Joplin and the Beatles. Thank goodness for fresh drinking water in the tap, and food on our table. Thank goodness for fair elections and truthful journalism. If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world, or contribute in thousands of other ways to the manifest improvement of life on this planet now and in the near future.
Or you can thank God—but the very idea of repaying God is ludicrous. What could an omniscient, omnipotent Being (the Man Who has Everything?) do with any paltry repayments from you? (And besides, according to the Christian tradition God has already redeemed the debt for all time, by sacrificing his own son. Try to repay that loan!) Yes, I know, those themes are not to be understood literally; they are symbolic. I grant it, but then the idea that by thanking God you are actually doing some good has got to be understood to be just symbolic, too. I prefer real good to symbolic good.
Still, I excuse those who pray for me. I see them as like tenacious scientists who resist the evidence for theories they don't like long after a graceful concession would have been the appropriate response. I applaud you for your loyalty to your own position—but remember: loyalty to tradition is not enough. You've got to keep asking yourself: What if I'm wrong? In the long run, I think religious people can be asked to live up to the same moral standards as secular people in science and medicine.
================================================
THANK GOODNESS!
There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder.
Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by c-t scan that I had a "dissection of the aorta"—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two—channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I'd had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life, since the tangle of scar tissue that had grown like ivy around my heart in the intervening years reinforced the aorta, preventing catastrophic leakage from the tear in the aorta itself. After a nine-hour surgery, in which my heart was stopped entirely and my body and brain were chilled down to about 45 degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping, I am now the proud possessor of a new aorta and aortic arch, made of strong Dacron fabric tubing sewn into shape on the spot by the surgeon, attached to my heart by a carbon-fiber valve that makes a reassuring little click every time my heart beats.
As I now enter a gentle period of recuperation, I have much to reflect on, about the harrowing experience itself and even more about the flood of supporting messages I've received since word got out about my latest adventure. Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and insisted a few days later "what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief"), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?
Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say "Thank goodness!" this is not merely a euphemism for "Thank God!" (We atheists don't believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.
To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years, and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and the perfusionist, who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other's work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for his invention of the c-t scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who's counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.
Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That's easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day. Had I had my blasted aorta a decade ago, there would have been no prayer of saving me. It's hardly routine today, but the odds of my survival were actually not so bad (these days, roughly 33 percent of aortic dissection patients die in the first twenty-four hours after onset without treatment, and the odds get worse by the hour thereafter).
One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institutions I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one's options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.
In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I'm not just talking about the standards 'at the top'—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I'm talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking "What if I'm wrong?" Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn't replicate his results because they just didn't share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.
What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends' remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: "I've been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart [another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence] that you come through this OK." The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heart-warming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond "Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?" I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said "I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health." What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don't expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you, but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.
But isn't this awfully harsh? Surely it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I'm not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about. For another, we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn't work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking. If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition; I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best. If you would even consider filing a malpractice suit against a doctor who made a mistake in treating you, or suing a pharmaceutical company that didn't conduct all the proper control tests before selling you a drug that harmed you, you must acknowledge your tacit appreciation of the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself, and yet you continue to indulge in a practice for which there is no known rational justification at all, and take yourself to be actually making a contribution. (Try to imagine your outrage if a pharmaceutical company responded to your suit by blithely replying "But we prayed good and hard for the success of the drug! What more do you want?")
The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come. Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science. Thank goodness for the music of, say, Randy Newman, which could not exist without all those wonderful pianos and recording studios, to say nothing of the musical contributions of every great composer from Bach through Wagner to Scott Joplin and the Beatles. Thank goodness for fresh drinking water in the tap, and food on our table. Thank goodness for fair elections and truthful journalism. If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world, or contribute in thousands of other ways to the manifest improvement of life on this planet now and in the near future.
Or you can thank God—but the very idea of repaying God is ludicrous. What could an omniscient, omnipotent Being (the Man Who has Everything?) do with any paltry repayments from you? (And besides, according to the Christian tradition God has already redeemed the debt for all time, by sacrificing his own son. Try to repay that loan!) Yes, I know, those themes are not to be understood literally; they are symbolic. I grant it, but then the idea that by thanking God you are actually doing some good has got to be understood to be just symbolic, too. I prefer real good to symbolic good.
Still, I excuse those who pray for me. I see them as like tenacious scientists who resist the evidence for theories they don't like long after a graceful concession would have been the appropriate response. I applaud you for your loyalty to your own position—but remember: loyalty to tradition is not enough. You've got to keep asking yourself: What if I'm wrong? In the long run, I think religious people can be asked to live up to the same moral standards as secular people in science and medicine.
Miracle???
"That is a miracle." This is a comment that is often heard from people of faith who justify every "amazing" things that have occurred in their lives. Also, it is an opportunity for them to "thank the grace of god" with every chance they have. I remembered having this friend in NUS who would "thank god" for giving her good grades every time she did well on a test or exam. I tried to explain it to her once that wasn't her effort and work more of a reason why she did well on the test, and was chastised for being a cynic and someone who does not understand the mysterious workings of god.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
吾乡印象
（刊登于联合早报2007年12月9日）
每当告诉外国朋友我来自新加坡时，对话的内容接下来多数都会牵扯到鞭刑和死刑、或者是新加坡政府打压言论自由和进行政治压迫。甚至有许多朋友认为我一定讨厌在新加坡生活，因此当他们得知我打算在毕业后回国时都表示些许讶异。
当我听到这些误解时，都会尽量纠正朋友们的偏见。例如新加坡虽有鞭刑，不过有关当局并不会随便鞭人、或者我国也有民主投票制度，只不过方式异于其他国、或者我国虽然没类似美国宪法第一修正案的宪法保护自由言论，不过同时也不容许任何类似Ku Klux Klan的组织利用自由言论做为散播种族歧视言论的借口。
其实，我并不怪外国朋友对于新加坡有所误解，毕竟他们都没亲身体验我国民情。更何况，即使许多土生土长的新加坡人也对本地抱着同样的态度和见解。老实说，我在十年前也抱持着同样的误解和偏见，认为我国没言论自由和不是个真正的民主国家。为何当时会有此想法？大概是阅读许多歌颂西方民主和批评我国的文章，以及从媒体看到粉饰其他国家的画面而开始产生向往，所以才会觉得生活在新加坡不怎么样。
以上态度和看法有所改观是大学假期和朋友到亚洲其他国家背包旅行时所发生的事。看到了其他国家的不足，心里不禁默默承认有关当局至少在某种层面上采取了正确的政策和管理方式。当然，自己当时因为对本地的建国史和邻国与我国的历史关系感兴趣而阅读了许多学者不同的见解和意见。虽然要充分了解本地历史比了解学校灌输的那种一味粉饰本地历史的官方教材还要困难许多，不过其复杂性却让我对新加坡的历史地位有了更深一层的了解。
然而，虽然我的态度有所改观，不过还是认为新加坡在某种程度上有待成长，是个俗称work in progress的国家。跟发展中国家相比，咱们或许在多方面胜过它们，不过要是跟第一世界的西方国家相比，恐怕就孙色许多。我在大学时一直秉持此看法，直到近几年在国外生活后，更清楚地了解有关西方国家的民生状况和政治运作时，发现言论自由精神在美国也不完全被体现时，看法才再度改变。
最近，我的好友阿国来到美国陪同我到加州游玩，而我在他的身上看到了自己近年来态度改变的缩影。阿国上次到美国已经是很久以前的事了，不过他沿着高速公路看到许多简陋的建筑、感受到比本地更为逊色的电讯服务、在三藩市看到许多露宿街头的游民、得知美国惊人的医疗费用和没有公共医疗服务的消息时，不禁向我说其实美国并非他想象得那么好，而新加坡在许多方面都不会逊色于美国。至少，我们不会在乌节路上看到大票的游民四处游荡。
当然，我并不是一味粉饰新加坡的成就和认定这里是人间天堂，因为我认为本地还有许多地方可改善，例如公共医疗服务应该效仿法国和英国等国家完全不收费，或者有关当局应该区别充满暴力的示威和和平的抗议游行，或者有关当局对于许多社会现象能采取更开放和宽容的态度，或者新加坡能通过最低劳工工资的法令，或者有关当局能够对人民少一点管制和多一点信任，别老是把人民当成是长不大的小孩，而应该把我们当成决定这个国家发展方向的一份子。
我也并非秉持某种 “大新加坡主义” 的态度数落着其他国家的成就，毕竟他国有很多值得我们学习的地方。况且，要管理小国毕竟比管理大国还要简单，因此以上有许多比较是不公平的也说不定。我想说的是，我们常常听到对于新加坡的批评不仅只存在于本地，而尽管新加坡不是人间天堂，不过这个地方许多我们当成理所当然的东西在他国却不是理所当然。
应该这么说吧，吾乡印象在我随着时间成长、经验的累积和体验到其他国家不同的生活后，变得越来越清晰，也变得越来越自然和容易理解。
Steve Jobs Talk
This is Steve Job's speech at Stanford's 2005 Commencement ceremony. I have came across the transcript of this speech before, and has found it to be enlightening. I must say that when I was kind of ambivalent about whether to continue in graduate school or go work for a big company to earn more $$$, I read the line where he said "You want to do something you love. Don't live your life under someone else's dogma, but live your life to pursue what you love to do" (somewhat paraphrasing), and realized that even I am not earning big bucks now, research is what I enjoy doing. Hence, you can say that Steve Jobs indirectly influenced me to stay on as a graduate student doing research.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
Mazzy Star: Fade Into You
One of my favorite bands. Hope Sandoval's voice is just perfect for the somewhat haunting and melancholic atmosphere in this song.
RX: Sunday Bloody Sunday
Another brilliant montage from RX, starring the biggest assholes and crooks in the world.
Friday, December 07, 2007
RX: The End Of The World
A collage of videos by RX, who mixes video clips with versions of "classic songs". See if you tell what the original song was (Hint: the band who played the original song can be spelled with three letters).
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Robot Chicken Star Wars Edition
Robot Chicken is a animation parody that airs on the AdultSwim Channel in USA. I quite enjoy the show and I always thought that if Gary Larson's Far Side Gallery was made into TV, it would look something like this.
Here is the recent "Star Wars" special edition of Robot Chicken, which parodies everything related to Star Wars.
Is The World Flat???
This is why I am fearful of religion. It breeds ignorance and make people say and do crazy freaking things. Below is an incident that happened recently on a talk-show in USA, where one of the co-host, Sherri Shepherd, said that she did not know if the world is flat or round. Wow. Are we in 1492???
Just in case anybody thinks that what she said was taken out of context, this is the entire segment of the original program where she says she doesn't know (and don't care) if the world is round.
And also, in another episode, the same woman shows that she is seriously in need of some history lessons.
Just in case anybody thinks that what she said was taken out of context, this is the entire segment of the original program where she says she doesn't know (and don't care) if the world is round.
And also, in another episode, the same woman shows that she is seriously in need of some history lessons.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
How To Kill A Chocolate Bunny
Found this rather disturbing(?) clip on YouTube... Probably not for bunny lovers.
Monday, December 03, 2007
Michael Moore On Norway
I have watched the movie Sicko and found it to be a very good movie, despite some of the flaws regarding data presentation. This little clip is from the bonus feature of the Sicko DVD. Although Michael Moore was comparing American society to Norway, we here in the little red dot can also look at how other people are running their country, and think of how we should run our own country.
Classical Conditioning, Office Version
Any psychology major would be able to tell you about classical conditioning. It is one of the most fundamental principles in psychology, especially in the learning and memory literature.
This is a clip from the TV show, The Office, where the theory of classical conditioning is put into good use by Jim on Dwight. And the scientist he was talking about was Ivano Pavlov.
Jon Stewart in 1996
Sadly, most of the stuff he addressed about Iraq and Israel are still relevant today...
The Power of Nightmares.
This is the opening sequence of the BBC documentary, The Power of Nightmares.
From Wikipedia:
The films compare the rise of the American Neo-Conservative movement and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and noting strong similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is in fact a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
I Love Macs!
I just switched from a PC to a MAC (which I have been threatening for the last few years, but now I saved enough money, hehe). And I must say that it is superb compared to a PC. Leopard OS rocks! It might help that I have some experience running MAC computers in the past, and that MAC OS now comes with bootcamp which allows me to run some important softwares (eprime and MATLAB and SPSS that I use for my work) that does not have MAC versions. It is like having two computers on one...
Below is a series of Apple Ads that have been showing in the USA which summarizes my sentiment towards my PC laptop for the last few years......
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Chan Tuck Soon 1913 - 2007
Frankly speaking, I have never gotten along with my grandfather. There are a lot of reasons, but I would put the main reason as due to our generation gap. He was born in the early years of the 20th century, and hence was indoctrinated from young the mindset from the late 19th century. The kind of ancient small Chinese village mindset that I have never understood. But there lies the root of our conflicts. He (and my grandmother) has never accepted my mother as 'part of the family', just because my mother's dialect is not Hainanese. Of course, we view this now as blatant racism, and of course being the son of my mother, I have never saw eye to eye with my grandparents due to their blatant discrimination. I remembered my dad telling me once that if you put everything in perspective, that both my grandparents were brought up in small communal rural villages in China, that this concept was the norm as it is very likely in those days that one would marry another person within the same dialect group. In some way I agreed with my dad (who bored the brunt of all family disputes throughout the years), but deep down I cannot help still feel animosity towards him. Together with the fact that he likes to put my mother (who is uneducated) down every time they get into an argument with the phrase "I was a principal! You are uneducated! What do you know!" (my grandfather was a principal of a primary school in Malaysia in some time of his life, apparently), my siblings and I cannot help but not like this man whom we think is too overbearing. In fact, partly because of this phrase, I have always vowed to myself that I will not put another person down because he or she receives less education than me (Of course, now I know better that my grandfather was committing a logical fallacy of subscribing to authority). Imagine the irony when he tried to use that trick on my mother a few years ago, and I came up with the snappy reply "So what? I am teaching in a university!"
When he was much younger and healthier (in his 80s) and when I was pursuing my undergraduate degree in Singapore, I have always half-jokingly told my friend that my family would be much better if my grandparents were not around. And every time when my friends asked about how my grandparents are recently, I would always comment "Well, they're not dead yet", which always drew the response that it was mean. However, at that time, I have always thought it was alright, because I still consider them the source of all strife that happens in my family.
Imagine to my surprise a few months back when my dad told me that the doctors found something in my granddad's lung, that instead of feeling "joyous", I actually felt kind of worried and sad. This surprised me more than anyone else, as I have always not seen eye-to-eye with this man, even though I probably share approximately one quarter of his DNA. Was this a general empathy that is present in all men, that you would not wish ill upon another individual even though you might not like him? Or was it because this was my grandfather that I actually felt this way? Or do I feel guilty (and partly 'responsible') for this because I have always been cursing him half-jokingly? I do not know.
Furthermore, after the conditions of my grandfather's health was revealed, I kind of reflected on the life of this man. Sure, he may not be perfect, but he did bring up my father, take them all the way from China to Singapore, which resulted in me. Sure, we may not have always seen eye-to-eye, especially in my teen years when I rejected his way of thinking, but I will always have this memory of him taking me out to the trails along Bukit Timah Hill (where he used to live) when I was very young, and watching me as I play with the mimosa plants. Sure, he might not have treated my mother very well, but she was the first one to forgive him when they knew about his condition, and the first to come to his defense when other extended family members wanted to prevent relatives from attending his plausible funeral a few weeks back in order not to have it clash with a wedding. That also surprised me. Did my mother feel the same way as I did? I don't know. What I know is that even for all the animosity and bad blood between me and my grandfather ever since I grew up, I still feel kind of sad now that he is gone.
My grandfather, Chan Tuck Soon, died on 23rd November 2007, 10pm. I was unable to be by his side as I was in the States. But according to my mother, the whole family was at his side when he expired. This photo above was taken when I went back to Singapore during the summer, a few months after the doctors have found something in his lung. I guess I have nothing more to say, except that I would miss his naggings and my quarrels with him. And even though we might not have liked each other a lot, he is after all still my grandfather.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Pranks from The Office
One of my favorite TV shows right now is The Office. I just love the ideas the writers come up with for the show, and I like its presentation styles. Most of all, I love the pranks and jokes played on the show. Here is a clip I found on YouTube on the Top Ten Pranks.
Friday, November 23, 2007
Moebius Transformations
I am not a mathematician, and my knowledge of mathematics is rudimentary (i.e. basic linear algebra + calculus) at best. However, I enjoy reading about mathematics because it fascinates me a lot, just like I enjoy reading up on scientific research.
This is a clip I found on YouTube on how sometimes complex mathematical concepts can be illustrated with the correct type of graphical presentation.
This is a clip I found on YouTube on how sometimes complex mathematical concepts can be illustrated with the correct type of graphical presentation.
Ricky Gervais Makes Fun of Creationism
Oh dear, here is another anti-religion posting from me... but at least it is funny...
Red House Painters - Katy Song
I've written about this song before(here), and when I found out that YouTube hosted a shitload of music clips, I was surprised that no one put this song up there. Well, I've taken the liberty of uploading the song, but don't expect too much with the MTV (i.e. I don't have time to do a good job).
Sea Lions Galore
Taken at Pier 39 at The Fisherman's Wharf. Apparently they are quite common around San Francisco waters.
Golden Gate Bridge Up Close
I wasn't updating this blog for a week or so... Here is the reason why:
I have been getting a dose of the Californian sunshine for the past week......
I have been getting a dose of the Californian sunshine for the past week......
Writer's Strike
Recently, the writers for TV in America are in strike over the media corporation's refusal to pay them for content used on the internet. While one would not usually associate writers with blue collar workers, this whole incident seems to me to be another example of the greed of big corporations. Someone needs to keep them in check.
These are two clips by The Daily show and The Colbert Report (two of my favorite shows) writers on this issue. Funny and sharp as ever.
Not The Daily Show
Not The Colbert Report
These are two clips by The Daily show and The Colbert Report (two of my favorite shows) writers on this issue. Funny and sharp as ever.
Not The Daily Show
Not The Colbert Report
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Christmas Explained: Boondocks Style
I have never "got" Christmas, especially when it was celebrated in Singapore. I mean, it is not even winter and everybody was acting as if it was winter. I would understand more if someone was a Christian or lived in a place where there is winter, then celebrating Christmas will make more sense.
Or at least I thought so. This clip from Boondocks (an animated show in USA depicting the black culture... but check out the Japanese anime influence) suggests that even for Christians, there is probably no reason to celebrate Christmas...
Or at least I thought so. This clip from Boondocks (an animated show in USA depicting the black culture... but check out the Japanese anime influence) suggests that even for Christians, there is probably no reason to celebrate Christmas...
Friday, November 16, 2007
购物中心杀人事件
(刊登于联合早报2007年11月16日。刊登的是缩短的版本。这是原来的版本。)
当我们一起踏进这座新开的购物中心时，没有人可以预料到在两百四十个小时后，只有我一个人安全地离开。
我们有七个人：胖子奕迅、爱美的依林和她那个喜欢耍帅的男朋友杰伦、书呆子小春、猛爱健身的肌肉男德华、某个企业大总裁的千金大小姐志玲，以及毫不起眼的我。我们都是在本地某所大学上企业管理课程的同学，乘暑假来临时相约一起出来玩。由于市区新增添了一间购物中心，因此我们决定到这里来逛逛。
全世界最大的购物休闲中心 -- 广告牌是这样写的。与其说这只是间购物中心，不如说这是连接整个市区的购物场所的重要环节。由于有关当局为了促进旅游业而决定重新改造整个购物地带，因此他们在市区的某片原本是公园的空地上建了这座庞大的购物中心。这间购物中心的高度和容量不仅凌驾了其他旧的购物中心，而且它还以地下走道连接了整个市区里的购物中心、娱乐场所、酒店、餐馆，以及地铁站。整个购物的概念是消费者不需要离开室内也可以一直继续地购物。为了强调购物的非间断性质，某些餐馆和零售商店二十四小时不打烊。
或许这就是启动整个事件的元素吧。正当大家在讨论无聊的暑假应该怎么度过时，志玲突然灵机一动，说大家不如来个比赛，看谁可以在购物中心里待得最久不出来。规则非常简单，只要一直待在室内就算还没输，不过一踏出室外就等於输了。为了确保没有人做弊，大家都得待在一起。谁能够在购物中心里最久就算赢。无论是在那家购物中心都无所谓，只要没有走出室外就可以。为了鼓励大家认真地参与这个游戏，超级有钱的志玲还提供了丰厚的奖励：只要能够在购物中心里待超过一个星期，志玲就会招待那些人到五天四夜的豪华邮轮之旅。
我们就如此开始了这个购物中心的冒险之旅。起初的几个小时大家都兴致勃勃。每个人轮流选择一间自己想逛的店，然后大家都到那间店逛。我们先到了依林和杰伦想逛的服装店，然后到了小春想逛的书局，接下来就到了德华想看的健身器材店。喝过下午茶之后，我们到志玲选择的名牌服装店，然后到我想看的唱片行，接着就是奕迅带我们到超级市场去。晚餐之后，志玲决定要订一间酒店房间，以便大家可以过夜。我们整晚就在酒店房间里聊天和玩大老二，直到凌晨时分才入睡。
第二天醒来时，发现德华不见了。我们起初以为他回家了，因此想打电话去取笑他这么快就出局了。不过，他的手机怎么打都打不通。
“会不会是他到健身房去了？你知道德华嘛，只要有一天不健身就会全身不舒服。” 杰伦说。
於是我们决定到酒店的健身房去找他，可是却怎么都找不到。於是大家就决定德华已经出局了，暂时不要去理会他，反正他迟早也会跟我们联络。奕迅这时就开始吵着肚子饿了，於是我们都决定到购物中心内的某间快餐店去用早餐。
当我们从酒店的地下道走向购物中心时，途中的人潮比平时还来得拥挤，尽管已经超过了上班的繁忙时间。志玲揣测是因为大家对新开张的购物中心充满好奇心，所以才大早特早地来逛街。杰伦说是佳节快要来临了，所以大家大早就来购物了。这时小春就发表他对佳节的看法，认为所谓佳节只不过是商家为了促使消费者购买物品而制造出来的虚假东西。大家都没有去理会小春所说的话。不是因为觉得他说的话没有道理，而是因为不要因为显得赞同而让他沾沾自喜。没有人喜欢一个过于聪明的书呆子。
吃完早餐后，我们决定继续逛逛。然而，还没到午餐时间时，多数人都觉得有些累和有些沉闷了。虽然整个购物区的面积非常大，容纳了许多商店，不过很多商店都重复。例如，我们没走几步就看到另一家麦当劳，或者在两间不同的购物中心看到了同样的服装店。即使商店有时不一样，不过它们却卖着大同小异的商品。例如你走进任何综合式的运动休闲店，里头一定卖着Nike和Adidas的产品，而这些产品的款式也几乎相同。因此，大家会开始感到沉闷是在所难免的。最重要的是除了非常富有的志玲外，其他人就算看到一些自己感兴趣的东西，不过却因为没有钱而无法购买。这种感觉让人感到非常不好受。望梅止渴大概只会让一个人更加意识到周围没有水吧？
当然，志玲是唯一不感觉闷的人，因为她正在忙着购买物品。因为免费招待邮轮旅行的诱惑，所以大家表面上继续陪着志玲玩下去。我们在午餐和晚餐时尝试拨电话联络德华，不过手机就是一直打不通。然而，我们并没有认为情况有任何奇怪的地方，只是认定德华不是把手机弄丢了，就是忘记给手机充电。
最先注意情况有些不对劲的人是小春。
“我说你们不觉得奇怪吗？” 小春的语气有些担忧。
“有什么好奇怪的？” 奕迅口里啃着炸鸡腿问。
“现在不是已经快要晚上十店钟了吗？除了那些二十四小时不打烊的店外，其他的店铺应该关门了吧？可是你们看！没有任何一家店有准备关门的迹象。不只如此，你们不觉得这个购物中心里的人潮好像一直都没有减少吗？通常购物中心的人潮在晚上九点之后就会开始减少了，不过我们周围的人群好像都没有减少。” 小春解释。
经过小春一说，我们这时才发现情况确实如此。
“会不会是有什么特别的促销活动，所以才会有这么多人呢？” 依林问。
“可是，我们并没有听到有关任何促销活动的消息啊。如果真的是促销活动的话，你不觉得购物中心内一定会贴满很多宣传海报吗？我们走了一整天都没有看到任何海报。” 我说。
“说得也是……”
这时，志玲突然惊叫：“嘿，那不是德华吗？”
“在哪里？”
“就在那间零食店那里！”
我们快速地跑向那间挤满了人的零食店。然而，我们抵达零食店的大门时却看不到德华的身影，只看到一位产品促销员正在热情地向在店里的顾客们介绍新出炉的产品。
“各位，这可不是普通的巧克力，而是咬起来有炸薯片的香脆口感，不过入口后就好像上等的巧克力一样浓厚，入喉时就好像冰淇淋一样爽口。各位，快来尝一口！”
“或许德华到了隔壁的店吧。不如我们去哪里找找。” 志玲建议。
“呃，你们先走吧。我等一会儿再来找你们。” 奕迅看着产品促销员提供给顾客免费品尝的食物，蠢蠢欲动地说。
“天啊，奕迅，别这么贪吃了！快去找德华吧！”
“我尝一口就走了。别担心，德华又不是三岁小孩。况且，说不定你看错了呢？他不是已经回家了吗？” 奕迅不理会志玲，走进了零食店铺里，大步走到了促销员的面前，毫不害臊地伸手从促销员手中的盘子抓了满手的零食，然后二话不说地将它们塞入口中。
“天啊，奕迅，太恶心了吧？” 依林说。
奕迅并没有回答依林，只是继续地咀嚼口中的零食。从他脸部的表情，可以看得出他正陶醉在美食当中。这时，杰伦把手机从口袋拿出来，而大家的视线都从奕迅转移到他身上，因为我们猜测杰伦大概是要拨电话给德华。
“德华的电话依然打不通。” 杰伦很酷地说，然后把手机收回口袋里。
突然，我们听到了哽噎的声音，转过头去看，只见奕迅满脸通红地抓着自己的喉咙。
“怎么了？哽到了吗？” 志玲慌张地问。
“快点，有谁会使用海姆利克氏操作法？” 小春叫了出来。
“海什么利什么法？”
“海姆利克氏操作法！就是帮助食道哽住的人把食物弄出来的方法！” 小春慌张地解释。
“我又不是急救人员，怎么知道！”
“天啊，你们别吵了，快来帮帮奕迅吧！” 志玲尖叫。
然而，当我和杰伦试图上前解救奕迅时，周围的人突然围了上来，也同时伸手从盘子拿走免费的零食，使到我们和奕迅的距离拉开了。由于围上来的人很多，因此奕迅也突然从我们的视线消失了。
“嘿，别挡路，你们没看到有人需要帮忙吗？” 我大声地喊着。
“让开！” 杰伦比我更不客气地喊了出来。
奇怪的事再度发生了。当那些围上来的人听到我们大声喊叫而让开时，我们却又看不到奕迅的身影了。店里除了促销员和摆满产品的橱柜外，就没有其他人。刚才的哽噎声也完全消失了。
“奕迅呢？” 杰伦傻傻地问。
“不知道。” 我也傻傻地回答。
“不见了。” 小春说。
“就像德华一样。” 依林说。
“别闹了，不可能的。嘿，刚才那个气管哽住的人呢？” 志玲走上前问那个促销员。
“我不知道。刚才这么多人挤上来，我什么也没有看见。” 促销员回答。
“说不定是奕迅跟我们开的玩笑吧？” 依林说。
“不可能吧？奕迅不像是那种会开玩笑的人。况且，你不觉得他刚才的反应完全不像是在装的吗？” 小春分析。
“那么他现在到底在哪里？” 我问。
“我也不知道。” 小春回答。
这时，杰伦什么也没说，只是再度把手机从口袋拿出来，拨了电话。大家又再度围着他。只见他的表情从非常耍帅变得有些惊慌失措。
“真邪门。现在奕迅的手机也打不通了。” 杰伦说。
尽管大家沉默不语，不过我相信每个人现在一定毛骨悚然。
过了一会儿，志玲说：“报警吧。”
“那么应该怎么跟警方说呢？哦，我们的朋友就这样消失了吗？警方不把我们当白痴看待才怪。” 小春说。
“别管这么多了。现报警再说吧。” 志玲说。
杰伦拨了手机，过了一会儿后不可思议地看着我们，说：“也打不通。”
“干！你的手机坏了吧？我来打！” 我不耐烦地说。
不过，从我手机传出来的声音也是无法拨通的预录通告。
“试试别的电话号码吧！”
无论我们打什么电话号码，所传回来的都是无法拨通的预录通告。
“该怎么办呢？” 依林慌张地问。
“别管这么多了，我们直接到警察局去报案吧。” 志玲说。
於是我们走向了购物中心的大门去。然而，当我们抵达大门时，却发现它已经上锁了。小春建议我们去问问购物中心里的保安人员，叫他帮我们开门。不过，不管我们怎么找，都无法找到任何一位保安人员。这时依林建议我们利用连接着其他购物中心的地下走道，从别的购物中心离开。然而，我们发现这些地下走道不是因为施工而被封住了，就是铁栅门被拉下来了。就连我们今早从酒店走过来的地下走道，以及连接地铁站的地下走道也被堵住了。
“真他妈的，这到底是在搞什么嘛！” 杰伦懊恼地叫了出来。
“我真的觉得有些不对劲了。你看，我们为了找出口在这里已经兜了两个小时了，不过却没有半家店关门，而购物中心里的人也并没有减少。天啊，现在已经超过午夜了，还这么多人，你们不觉得奇怪吗？！” 小春几乎歇斯底里地说。
“冷静点！别这么慌张！这一定有合理的解释。” 我试图稳住大家的情绪。
“对，大家别慌。先让我们想想有什么办法离开。” 志玲说。
“办法？我们不是都试过了吗？电话打不通。出口被封住了。还能够怎么样？这都是你的错，要不是你出什么笨主意，我们就不会沦落到这种状况了！” 依林歇斯底里地说。
“好了，冷静吧。其实要离开这里没这么困难啦，别这么激动了。” 小春说。
“没这么困难？你有什么办法？” 志玲问。
“其实我们只要用硬的东西把用玻璃做的大门砸开不就得了？顶多赔偿他们大门的费用，没什么困难吧？” 小春说。
“哦，对啊，我怎么没有想到。” 志玲说。
“那就别犹豫了，咱们走吧！”
然而我们并没有到达购物中心的大门，也没有机会利用硬物把玻璃门砸开。就好像被磁铁吸引的铁打一样，依林在前往大门的途中突然甩开了牵着她的杰伦的手，然后独自往某著名服装店的方向走去。
“嘿，依林，你要去哪？” 杰伦惊讶地问。
依林没有回答，只是继续地走。由于担心她会出事，因此大家无可奈何地放弃走向大门的计划而尾随着依林。然而，尽管我们几乎在奔跑了，不过却无法跟上她的步伐。当我们追上她时，她已经在服装店里拿着许多新衣服在试了。
“依林，你疯了吗？现在试衣服？” 志玲问。
“对啊。我们今天经过这家店这么多次了，你也试过了很多衣服了，难道你还不满意吗？” 我问。
“对啊，宝贝，我们走了啦。” 杰伦恳求。
然而，依林却好像中了邪一样，完全不理会我们，只是继续站在镜子面前试着她的衣服。她一边穿着华丽的新衣，一边自言自语着每件衣服的优缺点。例如刚才穿的红色裙子不配她的鞋子，或者紫色的上衣使她看起来太胖了。她试衣服的速度非常快，有时上衣件衣服还没有脱下来，就已经穿上了另一件新衣。渐渐地，依林已经被几件衣服包裹住了，就如同一颗刚熟了的果实。
“宝贝，你应该把刚才试过的衣服脱下先吧？” 杰伦说。我们其他人大概也有同样想法吧，只是有些吓得说不出话来了。然而，依林却不理会杰伦的话，继续把衣服往她自己的身上套。
“快阻止她！” 我的脑子里这么想，而我相信大家也如此。然而，不知道怎么了，我的身体就是无法弹动。依林的身躯就在我们面前如此透过一层层的衣服膨胀着，就好像一颗随时会爆炸的汽球一样，直到我们渐渐看不到她本人了。
就在这时候，那堆在我们面前的衣服停止膨胀了。
应该是杰伦最先反应吧？反正当我回过神时，我已经和其他人一样在帮忙杰伦把一层层的衣服拔下。然而，当我们把所有的衣服都拔掉后，却找不到依林了。
跟奕迅一样，依林消失了。
我们当时感觉非常害怕。志玲吓得哭了出来。小春一直在原地发抖。我只是傻傻地坐在地上。就连平时非常酷的杰伦也不知所措。
突然，小春大声地叫喊着：“我受不了了！我要离开这个鬼地方！”
然后，他就奔出了服装店，往大门的方向跑去。我们还来不及追上他时，就看到小春又突然改变了奔驰的方向，跑进了一间书店去。当我们回过神而追到那间书店时，只看到书店的正中央有一堆杂乱无章的书本。其他的购物者都在对着那堆书本指指点点。
尽管我们没看到，不过却大家已经猜测到小春已经被埋在那堆书本底下了。因此，我们才会二话不说地走向那堆书本，把书本们一本一本地移开。尽管我们在移开那些书本时都沉默不语，不过我想大家的心里多少应该有数，即使把书本都移开，大概也找不到小春吧。就如同奕迅和依林一样。也如同德华一样吧。虽然我们不知道他发生了什么事，不过陆续看到了发生在这三个人身上的事，我想德华大概也遭遇类似的事了。他大概是第一位受害者吧。
果然，当我们把书本完全移开时，地面上是空荡荡的，完全看不见小春的身影。然而，没有人因此而惊讶，大概已经在预料之中了吧。我们只是无话可说地看着彼此，因为我们还在试图消化和了解这一连串所发生的恐怖和怪异的事件。
先打破沉默的人是志玲：“太恐怖了。我们是在做梦吗？”
“或许吧。当我不觉得这是梦，因为我所做的梦都没有这么长。” 杰伦说。
“你们知道为什么会这样吗？” 我问。
“不知道。不过我却发现了一件事。” 杰伦说。
“什么事？”
“我发现依林和小春都是在我们有离开这个购物中心的念头时才消失的。或许…....”
“不过，奕迅和德华却不是在这种情况下消失的。尤其是奕迅，我们当时还很愉快地逛街啊。” 志玲指出。
“你是指你很愉快地逛街吧？你大概没留意到吧，不过我们当时每个人都感觉非常无聊了。或许当时奕迅在脑子里有离开这个购物中心的念头，所以才会发生事情。或许德华不见时也是想离开吧。” 杰伦说。
“那么按照你的说法，我们只要想要离开这个地方，就会好像其他人一样莫名其妙地消失？” 我问。
“大概吧。”
“那么怎么办？我们也不可能一直待在这里吧？” 志玲颤抖地问。
“也未必。我有一个假设，不知道正不正确。” 杰伦说。
“什么假设？” 我问。
“记得我们约定要在这里待上一个星期吗？或许当时有什么超自然力量同时诅咒了我们，使得我们不得不遵守这个约定。想要提早离开的人就会遭遇不幸的事件。或许我们得在这里待上七天以上才可以离开。” 杰伦说。
“这个假设也未免太荒谬了吧？” 志玲不可思议地问。
“今天发生在我们身上的事还有什么是合乎常理和逻辑的吗？” 杰伦反问。
志玲和我都没有回答。
“反正就是这样子，我们从现在开始就不可以有想要离开这个购物中心的念头，直到过了一个星期为止。要不然的话，谁也不知道会发生什么事。” 杰伦说。
“可是要没有离开的念头，那很困难吧？在这里时间一长，脑子里难免会想东想西的，很容易就会不小心产生要离开这个购物中心的念头。” 我说。
“这个容易啊。这不是购物中心吗？就逛街啊，这样就不会闷了吧？” 杰伦说。
“可是只逛不买的话，也会闷的吧？就好像今天早上一样……”
“那么我们买东西不就得了？每个人到每家店都得买一件东西。这么，我们就可以为了选择要买什么东西而不去胡思乱想了。” 杰伦建议。
“对啊，这样就不会沉闷了。如果害怕不够钱的话，可以用我的卡刷。你们也不需要担心要还我钱。老实说，这整件事是因为我的无聊主意所引起的，所以这大概是我可以帮助大家唯一的方法吧？” 志玲说。
“那么我们现在要到哪间店去逛呢？”
於是，我们就按照杰伦的计划行动。每到了一家店就会买东西。饿了就到食阁吃饭。累了就到家俱陈列室里的床上睡觉。想要大小便就到公共厕所去。想洗澡就到建于室内的健身房的浴室。买的东西太多了就把它们安放在家俱店的橱柜里。奇怪的是，竟然没有人将我们所放在橱柜里的那些商品拿走。反正我们也不管这么多。我们只是继续消费，继续呼吸，继续避免自己去想不该想的东西，继续等待第七天的来临。然而，我们三个人的心里却有种莫名的恐惧，害怕谁不小心想到有关逃离这个购物中心的事，就会导致我们其中一个人莫名其妙地消失。
很讽刺的，下一个消失的竟然是想出这个应对计划的杰伦。
那是发生在第六天的事。那时我们在手机店里，而杰伦正在找一架手机来买。问题是这个家伙每次都来手机店里，因此可以买的款式都被他买光了。就连同样款式但不同颜色的手机也一样被买了。
“看来是没有什么东西可以买了。” 杰伦对着我和志玲说。
就当杰伦说出这句话时，店里所有摆设的手机突然都一起响起来。我们被这突如其来的声音吓着了，因此转过头四处张望。然而，我们却没看到什么奇怪的东西，而就如同它们突然响起一样，所有摆设的手机又突然停止响了。不过，当我和志玲回过头来时，就已经不见杰伦的身影了。
“杰伦也消失了。” 志玲不自觉地发抖。她满脸苍白，看起来非常恐怖。
“别担心，还有一天，我们一定可以熬过去。” 我安慰着说。
我们最后的一天渡过得非常紧张，完全都不敢去做任何多余的事。在志玲的建议下，我们从药房买了安眠药，然后就跑到平常睡觉的地方，吃下安眠药就在哪里睡了。因为睡觉时不会胡思乱想，所以这大概是最好的方法吧。就算搞不好突然消失，也不会感到任何恐惧，因为已经失去意识了。
当我苏醒时，已经是第七天的早上了。我反射地往旁边的床看。志玲还在那里。我摇醒了她。
“第七天了。” 志玲说。
“还有一个小时左右才满七天。不如乘现在去吃个早点吧？”
“好啊。”
於是我们到了最高级的餐馆里去，点了菜单上最贵的食物。食物来时我们吃得津津有味。然而，当侍应生把账单拿过来时，却发现志玲身上的信用卡却无法使用。
“真奇怪了，怎么不可以用呢？” 志玲纳罕地问。
“再试一次吧？” 我说。
“对不起，小姐，根据银行的纪录，这张卡已经不能用了。” 侍应生说。
“没关系，我还有。”
然而，志玲的每一张卡片都无效。这时，我们开始感觉有些紧张了。
“怎么回事？这些卡片都是我父亲帮我办的，应该没有问题啊！” 志玲慌张地说。
这时，我留意隔壁桌的客人留下了一份昨天的报纸，报纸上的头条人物看起来有些眼熟。我走了过去仔细一看，结果头条新闻让我吃了一惊。
“志玲，你来看！这不是你父亲吗？！”
报纸上是这么写的。由于志玲的父亲被怀疑虚报账目，向投资银行谎报他所领导的企业的盈利，因此被警方逮捕，而所有资产都被冻结。根据报章的报道，其实那个企业在上次的金融风暴已经亏了很多钱，已经面临破产的局面了，只不过许多执行董事利用伪造的文件把这件事遮掩过去。
志玲读了报道后，整个人无力地坐在椅子上。我把自己的信用卡拿出来，付了早餐的钱后，然后半拉半扶着志玲离开了餐馆。
“别想这么多了，安全就好。我们先离开这个地方吧。” 我对志玲说。她只是面无表情地点了点头。这几天发生的事已经对她造成了莫大的压力了，现在又承受这种打击，看来志玲的精神快要崩溃了。
就在这时，志玲突然整个人变得很有精神，甩开我的手，然后快步向银行走去。我错愕了一会儿，然后一边赶紧跟上去，一边看了看自己的手表。嗯，已经过了七天了，志玲大概不会消失了吧？那么她为什么会到银行呢？只见她停在提款机面前，然后一张一张卡插入提款机里。可怜的志玲，她大概还无法接受自己父亲已经破产的事实吧。我站在十公尺外的地方等她。当然，提款机一确认志玲所插入的卡式属于被冻结的户头，就会毫不客气地将它吞噬。我从十公尺外的地方看着信用卡一张一张被吞噬。当所有的信用卡被提款机吞噬后，志玲只是非常气愤地用拳头捶了提款机一下。
然后奇怪的事又发生了。虽然我直视着志玲和那架提款机，不过当我回过神时，志玲就这么不见了。我慢慢走到提款机前，只看到志玲的皮包留在那里。莫非志玲被提款机也吞噬了？我看了看自己的手表。明明已经超过七天了。杰伦的假设是错误的。
接下来的三天，我独自在购物中心里游荡。虽然有几次想就这样冲出大门，不过却没有足够的勇气。反正饿了就到食阁吃饭。累了就到家俱陈列室里的床上睡觉。想要大小便就到公共厕所去。想洗澡就到建于室内的健身房的浴室。
直到第十天，我终於不能忍受了。我慢慢地往大门的方向走去，准备自己随时被某种奇妙的力量捉去，或者意识就突然消失了。然而，我却安然无事地走道大门去。不过，大门依然是上锁的。就在我还在犹豫是否要用砖块把玻璃门砸碎时，我看到几个搬运工人很不费吹灰之力就把其中一个玻璃门打开了。我连忙赶到那个玻璃门去，然而发现我却无法打开。门依然上了锁。
我转过身去，看到有另几个搬着货品想要出门的搬运工人。於是我跑上前去问他们：“你们在搬运什么东西呢？”
“哦，这些都是打折扣的过时商品。”
“为什么要搬走呢？不能在这里卖吗？” 我问。
“这些都是过时的廉价货了。这座购物中心所卖的东西都必须是最好和最新的，才能够符合这里的消费理念。至於这些过时的商品，我们就贴上这些折扣商标的贴纸，然后拿到其他的廉价店去卖。”
我听了这些话后，灵机一动地撕下了其中一张折扣商标的贴纸，然后忐忑不安地走向玻璃大门去。我把手放在大门上轻轻一推。
大门打开了。
我连忙冲了出去。
当然，我事后有试图寻找其他人的下落，不过他们却好像人间蒸发似的，怎么找也找不到。当然，他们的家人也报了警。由于志玲的父亲的关系，因此媒体非常关注这件事，甚至有人还揣测是志玲因为父亲破产而承受了过大的打击，把几个好朋友谋杀了，然后自己自杀。然而，却没有人可以找到他们的尸体。根据警方的调查，他们最后都出现在那间购物中心里，然而无论警方怎么翻怎么找都找不到他们。当然，警方也有来盘问我，因为我跟他们的关系原本就很好，但我却没有将发生的事告诉警方。如果我都说的话，他们大概会把我关在疯人院吧？反正，我可以装糊涂就装糊涂。反正警方也无法认定我干了什么非法勾当，而我的行为也几乎和往常一样，因此他们也没有理由怀疑我。
几乎和往常一样？对了，只有某个行为是与发生这件事之前有些不同吧。我想你们大概也猜得出来，就是我已经不再去购物中心了。如果需要什么，就拜托其他人买，或者透过网络来订购。发生过这种事，我不可能完全不受影响吧？尽管这代表我可以购物的地方减少了很多，不过我却不在乎。虽然是没有根据的想法，不过我认为其他六个人一定在某个购物中心的某个角落等待着我，然后待我稍微不留神时，就伸手把我拉进他们现在所属的异度空间里去。
我想，自己其余的人生也只能够像背负着某种烙印的动物一样继续地生活下去吧。
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Swarm Behavior
This is an article from the New York Times (here) that talks about swarm behavior in animals and maybe humans?
====================================================================================
November 13, 2007
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm
By CARL ZIMMER
If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.
Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.
Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.
“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”
The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
“No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.”
To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action.
Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. “In the next 10 years there’s going to be a lot of progress.”
He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. “He’s been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together,” Dr. Grunbaum said. “He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”
In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects.
What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision.
Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible.
It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes.
To test this model, Dr. Couzin and Nigel Franks, an ant expert at the University of Bristol in England, filmed a trail of army ants in Panama. Back in England, they went through the film frame by frame, analyzing the movements of 226 ants. “Everything in the ant world is happening at such a high tempo it was very difficult to see,” Dr. Couzin said.
Eventually they found that the real ants were moving in the way that Dr. Couzin had predicted would allow the entire swarm to go as fast as possible. They also found that the ants behaved differently if they were leaving the nest or heading back. When two ants encountered each other, the outgoing ant turned away further than the incoming one. As a result, the ants headed to the nest end up clustered in a central lane, while the outgoing ants form two outer lanes. Dr. Couzin has been extending his model for ants to other animals that move in giant crowds, like fish and birds. And instead of tracking individual animals himself, he has developed programs to let computers do the work.
The more Dr. Couzin studies swarm behavior, the more patterns he finds common to many different species. He is reminded of the laws of physics that govern liquids. “You look at liquid metal and at water, and you can see they’re both liquids,” he said. “They have fundamental characteristics in common. That’s what I was finding with the animal groups — there were fundamental states they could exist in.”
Just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, animal swarms can also change abruptly thanks to some simple rules.
Dr. Couzin has discovered some of those rules in the ways that locusts begin to form their devastating swarms. The insects typically crawl around on their own, but sometimes young locusts come together in huge bands that march across the land, devouring everything in their path. After developing wings, they rise into the air as giant clouds made of millions of insects.
“Locusts are known to be around all the time,” Dr. Couzin said. “Why does the situation suddenly get out of control, and these locusts swarm together and devastate crops?”
Dr. Couzin traveled to remote areas of Mauritania in Africa to study the behavior of locust swarms. Back at Oxford, he and his colleagues built a circular track on which locusts could walk. “We could track the motion of all these individuals five times a second for eight hours a day,” he said.
The scientists found that when the density of locusts rose beyond a threshold, the insects suddenly began to move together. Each locust always tried to align its own movements with any neighbor. When the locusts were widely spaced, however, this rule did not have much effect on them. Only when they had enough neighbors did they spontaneously form huge bands.
“We showed that you don’t need to know lots of information about individuals to predict how the group will behave,” Dr. Couzin said of the locust findings, which were published June 2006 in Science.
Understanding how animals swarm and why they do are two separate questions, however.
In some species, animals may swarm so that the entire group enjoys an evolutionary benefit. All the army ants in a colony, for example, belong to the same family. So if individuals cooperate, their shared genes associated with swarming will become more common.
But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.
Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.
“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”
This collective movement causes the crickets to form vast swarms. “All these crickets are on a forced march,” Dr. Couzin said. “They’re trying to attack the crickets who are ahead, and they’re trying to avoid being eaten from behind.”
Swarms, regardless of the forces that bring them together, have a remarkable ability to act like a collective mind. A swarm navigates as a unit, making decisions about where to go and how to escape predators together.
“There’s a swarm intelligence,” Dr. Couzin said. “You can see how people thought there was some sort of telekinesis involved.”
What makes this collective decision-making all the more puzzling is that each individual can behave only based on its own experience. If a shark lunges into a school of fish, only some of them will see it coming. If a flock of birds is migrating, only a few experienced individuals may know the route.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have built a model of the flow of information through swarms. Each individual has to balance two instincts: to stay with the group and to move in a desired direction. The scientists found that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively. They do not even need to send any special signals to the animals around them. They create a bias in the swarm’s movement that steers it in a particular direction.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right information, though,” Dr. Couzin pointed out.
Two leaders may try to pull a swarm in opposite directions, and yet the swarm holds together. In Dr. Couzin’s model, the swarm was able to decide which leaders to follow.
“As we increased the difference of opinion between the informed individuals, the group would spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority,” Dr. Couzin said. “They can make these decisions without mathematics, without even recognizing each other or knowing that a decision has been made.”
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have been finding support for this model in real groups of animals. They have even found support in studies on mediocre swarmers — humans.
To study humans, Dr. Couzin teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds. They recruited eight people at a time to play a game. Players stood in the middle of a circle, and along the edge of the circle were 16 cards, each labeled with a number. The scientists handed each person a slip of paper and instructed the players to follow the instructions printed on it while not saying anything to the others. Those rules correspond to the ones in Dr. Couzin’s models. And just as in his models, each person had no idea what the others had been instructed to do.
In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock. In another version, one person was instructed to head for a particular card at the edge of the circle without leaving the group. The players quickly formed little swarms with their leader at the head, moving together to the target.
The scientists then sowed discord by telling two or more people to move to opposite sides of the circle. The other people had to try to stay with the group even as leaders tried to pull it apart.
As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, the human swarm made a quick, unconscious decision about which way to go. People tended to follow the largest group of leaders, even if it contained only one additional person.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues describe the results of these experiments in a paper to be published in the journal Animal Behavior.
Dr. Couzin is carrying the lessons he has learned from animals to other kinds of swarms. He is helping Dr. Naomi Leonard, a Princeton engineer, to program swarming into robots.
“These things are beginning to move around and interact in ways we see in nature,” he said. Ultimately, flocks of robots might do a better job of collecting information in dangerous places. “If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally.” The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies. Dr. Couzin is working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish.
“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.
====================================================================================
November 13, 2007
From Ants to People, an Instinct to Swarm
By CARL ZIMMER
If you have ever observed ants marching in and out of a nest, you might have been reminded of a highway buzzing with traffic. To Iain D. Couzin, such a comparison is a cruel insult — to the ants.
Americans spend a 3.7 billion hours a year in congested traffic. But you will never see ants stuck in gridlock.
Army ants, which Dr. Couzin has spent much time observing in Panama, are particularly good at moving in swarms. If they have to travel over a depression in the ground, they erect bridges so that they can proceed as quickly as possible.
“They build the bridges with their living bodies,” said Dr. Couzin, a mathematical biologist at Princeton University and the University of Oxford. “They build them up if they’re required, and they dissolve if they’re not being used.”
The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.
By studying army ants — as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals — Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so well. Those rules allow thousands of relatively simple animals to form a collective brain able to make decisions and move like a single organism.
Deciphering those rules is a big challenge, however, because the behavior of swarms emerges unpredictably from the actions of thousands or millions of individuals.
“No matter how much you look at an individual army ant,” Dr. Couzin said, “you will never get a sense that when you put 1.5 million of them together, they form these bridges and columns. You just cannot know that.”
To get a sense of swarms, Dr. Couzin builds computer models of virtual swarms. Each model contains thousands of individual agents, which he can program to follow a few simple rules. To decide what those rules ought to be, he and his colleagues head out to jungles, deserts or oceans to observe animals in action.
Daniel Grunbaum, a mathematical biologist at the University of Washington, said his field was suddenly making leaps forward, as math and observation of nature were joined in the work of Dr. Couzin and others. “In the next 10 years there’s going to be a lot of progress.”
He said Dr. Couzin has been important in fusing the different kinds of science required to understand animal group behavior. “He’s been a real leader in bringing a lot of ideas together,” Dr. Grunbaum said. “He has a larger vision. If it works, that’ll be a big advance.”
In the case of army ants, Dr. Couzin was intrigued by their highways. Army ants returning to their nest with food travel in a dense column. This incoming lane is flanked by two lanes of outgoing traffic. A three-lane highway of army ants can stretch for as far as 150 yards from the ant nest, comprising hundreds of thousands of insects.
What Dr. Couzin wanted to know was why army ants do not move to and from their colony in a mad, disorganized scramble. To find out, he built a computer model based on some basic ant biology. Each simulated ant laid down a chemical marker that attracted other ants while the marker was still fresh. Each ant could also sweep the air with its antennas; if it made contact with another ant, it turned away and slowed down to avoid a collision.
Dr. Couzin analyzed how the ants behaved when he tweaked their behavior. If the ants turned away too quickly from oncoming insects, they lost the scent of their trail. If they did not turn fast enough, they ground to a halt and forced ants behind them to slow down. Dr. Couzin found that a narrow range of behavior allowed ants to move as a group as quickly as possible.
It turned out that these optimal ants also spontaneously formed highways. If the ants going in one direction happened to become dense, their chemical trails attracted more ants headed the same way. This feedback caused the ants to form a single packed column. The ants going the other direction turned away from the oncoming traffic and formed flanking lanes.
To test this model, Dr. Couzin and Nigel Franks, an ant expert at the University of Bristol in England, filmed a trail of army ants in Panama. Back in England, they went through the film frame by frame, analyzing the movements of 226 ants. “Everything in the ant world is happening at such a high tempo it was very difficult to see,” Dr. Couzin said.
Eventually they found that the real ants were moving in the way that Dr. Couzin had predicted would allow the entire swarm to go as fast as possible. They also found that the ants behaved differently if they were leaving the nest or heading back. When two ants encountered each other, the outgoing ant turned away further than the incoming one. As a result, the ants headed to the nest end up clustered in a central lane, while the outgoing ants form two outer lanes. Dr. Couzin has been extending his model for ants to other animals that move in giant crowds, like fish and birds. And instead of tracking individual animals himself, he has developed programs to let computers do the work.
The more Dr. Couzin studies swarm behavior, the more patterns he finds common to many different species. He is reminded of the laws of physics that govern liquids. “You look at liquid metal and at water, and you can see they’re both liquids,” he said. “They have fundamental characteristics in common. That’s what I was finding with the animal groups — there were fundamental states they could exist in.”
Just as liquid water can suddenly begin to boil, animal swarms can also change abruptly thanks to some simple rules.
Dr. Couzin has discovered some of those rules in the ways that locusts begin to form their devastating swarms. The insects typically crawl around on their own, but sometimes young locusts come together in huge bands that march across the land, devouring everything in their path. After developing wings, they rise into the air as giant clouds made of millions of insects.
“Locusts are known to be around all the time,” Dr. Couzin said. “Why does the situation suddenly get out of control, and these locusts swarm together and devastate crops?”
Dr. Couzin traveled to remote areas of Mauritania in Africa to study the behavior of locust swarms. Back at Oxford, he and his colleagues built a circular track on which locusts could walk. “We could track the motion of all these individuals five times a second for eight hours a day,” he said.
The scientists found that when the density of locusts rose beyond a threshold, the insects suddenly began to move together. Each locust always tried to align its own movements with any neighbor. When the locusts were widely spaced, however, this rule did not have much effect on them. Only when they had enough neighbors did they spontaneously form huge bands.
“We showed that you don’t need to know lots of information about individuals to predict how the group will behave,” Dr. Couzin said of the locust findings, which were published June 2006 in Science.
Understanding how animals swarm and why they do are two separate questions, however.
In some species, animals may swarm so that the entire group enjoys an evolutionary benefit. All the army ants in a colony, for example, belong to the same family. So if individuals cooperate, their shared genes associated with swarming will become more common.
But in the deserts of Utah, Dr. Couzin and his colleagues discovered that giant swarms may actually be made up of a lot of selfish individuals.
Mormon crickets will sometimes gather by the millions and crawl in bands stretching more than five miles long. Dr. Couzin and his colleagues ran experiments to find out what caused them to form bands. They found that the forces behind cricket swarms are very different from the ones that bring locusts together. When Mormon crickets cannot find enough salt and protein, they become cannibals.
“Each cricket itself is a perfectly balanced source of nutrition,” Dr. Couzin said. “So the crickets, every 17 seconds or so, try to attack other individuals. If you don’t move, you’re likely to be eaten.”
This collective movement causes the crickets to form vast swarms. “All these crickets are on a forced march,” Dr. Couzin said. “They’re trying to attack the crickets who are ahead, and they’re trying to avoid being eaten from behind.”
Swarms, regardless of the forces that bring them together, have a remarkable ability to act like a collective mind. A swarm navigates as a unit, making decisions about where to go and how to escape predators together.
“There’s a swarm intelligence,” Dr. Couzin said. “You can see how people thought there was some sort of telekinesis involved.”
What makes this collective decision-making all the more puzzling is that each individual can behave only based on its own experience. If a shark lunges into a school of fish, only some of them will see it coming. If a flock of birds is migrating, only a few experienced individuals may know the route.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have built a model of the flow of information through swarms. Each individual has to balance two instincts: to stay with the group and to move in a desired direction. The scientists found that just a few leaders can guide a swarm effectively. They do not even need to send any special signals to the animals around them. They create a bias in the swarm’s movement that steers it in a particular direction.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean you have the right information, though,” Dr. Couzin pointed out.
Two leaders may try to pull a swarm in opposite directions, and yet the swarm holds together. In Dr. Couzin’s model, the swarm was able to decide which leaders to follow.
“As we increased the difference of opinion between the informed individuals, the group would spontaneously come to a consensus and move in the direction chosen by the majority,” Dr. Couzin said. “They can make these decisions without mathematics, without even recognizing each other or knowing that a decision has been made.”
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues have been finding support for this model in real groups of animals. They have even found support in studies on mediocre swarmers — humans.
To study humans, Dr. Couzin teamed up with researchers at the University of Leeds. They recruited eight people at a time to play a game. Players stood in the middle of a circle, and along the edge of the circle were 16 cards, each labeled with a number. The scientists handed each person a slip of paper and instructed the players to follow the instructions printed on it while not saying anything to the others. Those rules correspond to the ones in Dr. Couzin’s models. And just as in his models, each person had no idea what the others had been instructed to do.
In one version of the experiment, each person was instructed simply to stay with the group. As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, they tended to circle around in a doughnut-shaped flock. In another version, one person was instructed to head for a particular card at the edge of the circle without leaving the group. The players quickly formed little swarms with their leader at the head, moving together to the target.
The scientists then sowed discord by telling two or more people to move to opposite sides of the circle. The other people had to try to stay with the group even as leaders tried to pull it apart.
As Dr. Couzin’s model predicted, the human swarm made a quick, unconscious decision about which way to go. People tended to follow the largest group of leaders, even if it contained only one additional person.
Dr. Couzin and his colleagues describe the results of these experiments in a paper to be published in the journal Animal Behavior.
Dr. Couzin is carrying the lessons he has learned from animals to other kinds of swarms. He is helping Dr. Naomi Leonard, a Princeton engineer, to program swarming into robots.
“These things are beginning to move around and interact in ways we see in nature,” he said. Ultimately, flocks of robots might do a better job of collecting information in dangerous places. “If you knock out some individual, the algorithm still works. The group still moves normally.” The rules of the swarm may also apply to the cells inside our bodies. Dr. Couzin is working with cancer biologists to discover the rules by which cancer cells work together to build tumors or migrate through tissues. Even brain cells may follow the same rules for collective behavior seen in locusts or fish.
“One of the really fun things that we’re doing now is understanding how the type of feedbacks in these groups is like the ones in the brain that allows humans to make decisions,” Dr. Couzin said. Those decisions are not just about what to order for lunch, but about basic perception — making sense, for example, of the flood of signals coming from the eyes. “How does your brain take this information and come to a collective decision about what you’re seeing?” Dr. Couzin said. The answer, he suspects, may lie in our inner swarm.
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