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......
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...
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?
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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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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.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Marilyn Manson -- The Beautiful People
Ok. I owned the Anti-Christ Superstar album by Marilyn Manson. Despite the fact that I think he sucked generally after this album, this remains one of my favorite shock-rock-metal album.
Nine Inch Nails -- Hurt
This is one of my favorite Nine Inch Nails song... even though now the lyrics might seem somewhat juvenile once you grow out of your teenage angst...
Saturday, November 10, 2007
South Park Tribute To Monty Python
This is a hilarious sketch from South Park, giving tribute to Monty Python.
The original Monty Python sketch:
The original Monty Python sketch:
A Humanist Talks About Atheism
This is an article from the New Humanist (here), where the author points out some flaws (or blemish) in the New Atheist Movement. While I agree with the points on Christopher Hitchens (I don't like his book as I thought it was tainted with bad logic), I think he missed the point about Richard Dawkins. If you read the article carefully, I don't think the writer made a valid criticism against Dawkins.
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Holy communion
Richard Norman
It's not been a good year for God. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great have been riding high in the international bestseller lists, while in the US Sam Harris has addressed his Letter to a Christian Nation and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell has explored the question of how to explain the irrationality of religious belief. Michel Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism has added a distinctively French tone to the assault, and AC Grayling’s latest collection of elegant English essays is Against All Gods. It’s not surprising that cultural commentators have identified a cultural wave, and given it a label: “The New Atheism”.
Then there has been the rush of responses. Alastair McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion and John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel have replied to Dawkins in particular, and John Humphrys has followed up his radio interviews of religious leaders with a book, In God We Doubt, which is subtitled Confessions of a Failed Atheist (he can’t bring himself to accept religious belief but he thinks it would be nice to be able to do so).
My intention here is to stand back a little from this parade of views and counterviews and ask about its implications for the humanist movement. What can we, as humanists in Britain now, learn from the debate around the New Atheism?
We should begin by recognising that the “New Atheism” is not really new. Its distinctive themes – religion as the enemy of science, of progress and of an enlightened morality – are in a direct line of descent from the 18th-century enlightenment and 19th-century rationalism. The “new” movement is better seen as a revival, a reassertion of the values of rational thought and vigorous argument. It has struck people as new because it has given new life to old disagreements and debates and done so with great panache and style. But we need to beware of fighting old battles in a world which has moved on.
What kick-started the New Atheism was, of course, the attack on the Twin Towers. That event, and subsequent acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism, reminded the world of the terrible deeds that can be performed in the name of religious fanaticism, especially if it is reinforced by dreams of immediate rewards in paradise. How to combat Islamist fanaticism is obviously a pressing question. At the same time, it would be foolish to let our attitudes to all religions and all religious believers be coloured by a small set of specific outrages.
A second development which no doubt reinforced the New Atheism was the resurgence of creationism, on a small scale in the UK and on a scarily large scale in the US. In the States it’s linked with the religious right and the malign influence of Christian fundamentalists on politics and government. Unsurprisingly, it’s in the US that the New Atheism seems to be taking shape as a cultural movement, not just a publishing success. Dawkins has launched the “Out” campaign, encouraging American atheists to “come out”. The success of these developments is sufficient evidence that they respond to a real need, and they reflect the extent to which American atheists have felt beleaguered. In some parts of the US it takes courage to come out as an atheist. But let’s be honest – in Britain today, for most of us, it’s a doddle.
This points to the danger of over-generalising about religion and about religious believers. By far the commonest criticism directed against the New Atheists is that they do over-generalise, and I think that the criticism is justified. To avoid being guilty of the same mistake myself, I’ll focus only on the two bestsellers, Dawkins and Hitchens, because their books have done most to generate the larger movement. They are quite explicit in their desire to generalise about religion. Dawkins says: “I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.”
And Hitchens is even more frank: his subtitle is “religion poisons everything”. That really is too simple. In the “religion” that Dawkins and Hitchens relentlessly attack I simply do not recognise the many good, sensitive, intelligent and sometimes wonderful religious people I know.
Of course the generalisations are not just crude prejudices, they are considered and they are defended, and we should examine the reasons Dawkins and Hitchens give. For Dawkins the problem is that all religious believers are committed to faith rather than reason. He is rightly appalled by the resurgence of creationism, by the fact that many people still reject neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory because it is incompatible with a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis. He knows perfectly well that the vast majority of Christians and other religious believers in Britain (though, worryingly, not in the US) are not creationists, but he thinks that, just by accepting the idea of “faith”, they have sold out. He says: “Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of young minds. Non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion may not be doing that, but it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children ... that unquestioning faith is a virtue.”
So for him the difference between the so-called moderate, sensible religious believers and the fundamentalists is a minor one. He thinks that the real divide is between science and religion, because science is based on reason and religion is a matter of faith. In other words it’s religion as such that is the problem.
Is that right? We need to be aware of the ambiguities of the word “faith”. In some cases faith is no more or less than a set of overarching beliefs with which people make sense of the world. All religions are faiths in the first sense, and so is humanism, though most of us would prefer not to use the word because of its other connotations. There’s no necessary opposition between faith in this sense and reason.
But faith can also refer to our readiness to accept beliefs on grounds which are not conclusive. This covers a range of cases, from a hunch which you think will be confirmed, to a well-founded expectation based on past experience. A creationist website links to a video clip of Dawkins saying that he has “faith” that fossils will be found to fill gaps in the fossil record. He didn’t mean faith in the creationists’ sense of believing it without evidence, but it’s a perfectly legitimate sense of the word – a belief backed by previous experience, for which further confirmation is sought. And though it’s not the creationists’ sense of the word, there are plenty of religious believers who would say that they have faith in this sense. They can’t prove that there’s a god, so their commitment goes beyond the evidence, but it’s not unsupported.
Faith is also a way of describing a commitment to a belief which has no rational basis. Are there religious believers with this sort of unmediated belief? Yes, I’m sure there are, though I suspect that they often play on the ambiguity between that version of faith and the more everyday manner in which we say that we have faith in a person, that we trust them. I’m thinking of the evangelical Christians who say things like “How can I doubt God, since he has saved me, I have this special relationship with him and I trust him with everything in my life.” But the general point is that faith means different things for different religious believers, and from the fact that they claim to have faith you can’t infer that they are all irrationalists who believe things on “blind faith” without any evidence and have therefore sold the pass to the creationists.
Take the case of the many people who both hold a religious belief and accept evolutionary theory. They value scientific method, they accept the scientific evidence, and they say that the origin of species through natural selection just is the process by which God has created all living things. The question they then have to answer is: if we’ve got the scientific account, why do we also need a belief in divine creation? They would probably say something like this: the theory of evolution explains how living things have come into existence, but it doesn’t explain why there existed, in the first place, a universe suited to lead to the evolution of life. Many Christians these days are keen on the so-called “fine-tuning argument”: that if the basic physical constants had been just slightly different, the Big Bang would not have led to the emergence of galaxies and suns and planets, including at least one planet with the right conditions for the evolution of life. The initial conditions had to be “just right”, and God is the best explanation of why they were.
Dawkins has an excellent reply to this argument. He argues that whatever the explanation of the initial conditions may be, God is not a good explanation, because the existence of a hugely powerful intelligence who knew all the physical constants and scientific laws is even more difficult to explain than the things it is supposed to account for. The essential point is one about “simplicity”. Philosophers like Richard Swinburne argue that the best explanation is the most economical one, and explaining the universe by divine intention is the preferred explanation because it is the simplest. Dawkins rightly points out that this is a confusion. The explanation in terms of a divine creator may be simply stated, but the entity which is supposed to do the explaining is a highly complex entity, not a “simple” one. I agree with Dawkins. The argument fails. But it is still an argument. As so often, deciding whether an argument succeeds is a matter of judgement – of faith, if you like, in the second sense. But a mistaken argument is still an argument, still an appeal to reason and evidence. For a great many religious believers, belief in a god is like that – faith, but not “blind faith”.
Dawkins also thinks that it is blind faith that leads to crazy acts of religious fanaticism. “Even mild and moderate religion,” he says, “helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.” He’s thinking, obviously, of suicide bombers and Islamist terrorists, not to mention Christian extremists who murder abortionists, Hindus who slaughter Muslims, and all the rest of the fanatics. It was the killing of 3,000 people in the World Trade Centre that was the initial spur for the New Atheism, and for Dawkins it demonstrated that it is not extremism, but religion as such, that is the problem.
That’s also Hitchens’s view, and I turn to him now. His reason for generalising about all religion, for claiming that religion poisons everything, is primarily an appeal to the historical record. He has no difficulty compiling an appalling catalogue of all the terrible things done in the name of religion. The Old Testament is full of justifications for massacre and slavery. The Koran contains incitements to intolerance and the spreading of Islam by force. In the modern world, in the name of religion, rival groups have been slaughtering one another in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. People’s lives are blighted by repressive religious views and practices concerning abortion, contraception, masturbation and genital mutilation. And the length of the list demonstrates, for Hitchens, that religion poisons everything.
But it's a selective list, and it’s not enough to justify the generalisation, since it invites the response: “What about all the good things done in the name of religion? What about all the religious believers who have stood up against political repression, who have worked for peace and tolerance, who have campaigned for justice and against slavery and poverty, and have devoted themselves to improving the lot of their fellow human beings?” Hitchens’s answer is that if people do these things, it’s not really their religion that motivates them – “this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion”. The classic example is Martin Luther King, whom Hitchens rightly admires. King was a committed Christian who used the language of the Old Testament, the language of the “promised land”, to inspire the Civil Rights movement. Hitchens says that this is mere metaphor. Although King uses the image of Moses leading his people out of Egypt, there is nothing equivalent to Moses’s exhortation to massacre the other tribes in the land which God had promised to the people of Israel. King preached non-violence, and did not advocate revenge against white racists. Therefore, Hitchens infers, he was not a real Christian: “When Dr King took a stand ... he did so as a profound humanist and nobody could ever use his name to justify oppression or cruelty ... his legacy has very little to do with his professed theology. ... In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian.”
The circularity in Hitchens’s argument is obvious. Religion poisons everything. What about the good things done in the name of religion? If they’re really good, that just shows that they’re not really religious. The same circular argument appears in Hitchens’s discussion of the atrocities generated by secular creeds. He says of totalitarian societies that because their leaders are regarded as infallible, such states are theocracies and therefore essentially religious. So the counter-examples simply confirm, for Hitchens, that it’s religion that poisons everything.
Hitchens’s appeal to the historical record is what I call the “headcount” argument – “Your lot have killed more people than our lot.” It gets us nowhere. The fact is that human beings are capable of doing terrible things and they are capable of doing wonderful things. This is true of religious believers, it’s true of atheists, and it shouldn’t surprise us. Religion – here I agree with another of Hitchens’s persistent themes – is a human creation. It is, I suggest, a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected. Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty, revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.
For Dawkins and for Hitchens that is part of the problem. Religious believers cannot avoid cherry-picking. They select from their sacred texts whatever fits their prior agenda. The homophobes pick out the texts from Leviticus or the Koran which order the killing of gays; their opponents say that this is incompatible with the idea of a god of compassion and tolerance. The warmongers and jihadists pick out the injunctions to slaughter; the peacemakers appeal to the contrary texts. Religions are deeply contradictory, and the application of them will always be selective.
But that is precisely why we should not lump all religious believers together.
Humanism is more than atheism, it is about putting humanist beliefs and values into practice and trying to make the world a better place. And that is impossible unless we’re prepared to cooperate with others who share those values, including those for whom the values are inseparable from a religious commitment.
It goes deeper than that. For many humanists, religious believers are also friends, lovers, colleagues, neighbours, spouses and partners. The attitude that religion poisons everything is unlikely to be an auspicious basis for such relationships. We really do need something a bit more nuanced.
And this brings me to my practical conclusion. If we are serious about our humanist values, we should look for all those who share them, and work with them. If, according to Hitchens, that means that such people are really humanists after all, then call them that if you wish, but accept that they may also be committed Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or whatever. The labels don’t matter. If Christians are happy to defend science against the idiocies of creationism, let’s work with them. When the news broke that state schools in this country were teaching creationism as science, Dawkins and Richard Harries, then Bishop of Oxford, issued a joint statement of criticism. Dawkins has been accused of inconsistency in doing so but it doesn’t matter, it was the right thing to do and it was highly effective. After the most recent attempted suicide bombings in Britain, national newspapers carried a full-page advertisement by Muslim organisations condemning the bombings and dissociating themselves from them. What are we supposed to say? “You’re just as bad”? That would be madness. They need our encouragement, and we need their help.
We have problems enough in the world. The threats of climate change, global poverty, war and repression and intolerance can never be countered unless we are prepared to work together on the basis of a shared humanity. Simplistic generalisations about religion don’t help. In Dawkins’s terminology, that means working with the “moderates” to counter the “extremists”, but it’s actually more complicated than that. Some of our allies against creationism may be deeply prejudiced against gays. Some of the best people working to combat global poverty may be Catholic anti-abortionists. Some of the Muslim allies we need to counter Islamist violence may have deeply sexist attitudes to women. It all demonstrates what a deeply contradictory phenomenon religion is. But we know that. And if religion is so contradictory, that’s probably because human beings are a deeply contradictory species.
====================================================================================
Holy communion
Richard Norman
It's not been a good year for God. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great have been riding high in the international bestseller lists, while in the US Sam Harris has addressed his Letter to a Christian Nation and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell has explored the question of how to explain the irrationality of religious belief. Michel Onfray’s In Defence of Atheism has added a distinctively French tone to the assault, and AC Grayling’s latest collection of elegant English essays is Against All Gods. It’s not surprising that cultural commentators have identified a cultural wave, and given it a label: “The New Atheism”.
Then there has been the rush of responses. Alastair McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion and John Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel have replied to Dawkins in particular, and John Humphrys has followed up his radio interviews of religious leaders with a book, In God We Doubt, which is subtitled Confessions of a Failed Atheist (he can’t bring himself to accept religious belief but he thinks it would be nice to be able to do so).
My intention here is to stand back a little from this parade of views and counterviews and ask about its implications for the humanist movement. What can we, as humanists in Britain now, learn from the debate around the New Atheism?
We should begin by recognising that the “New Atheism” is not really new. Its distinctive themes – religion as the enemy of science, of progress and of an enlightened morality – are in a direct line of descent from the 18th-century enlightenment and 19th-century rationalism. The “new” movement is better seen as a revival, a reassertion of the values of rational thought and vigorous argument. It has struck people as new because it has given new life to old disagreements and debates and done so with great panache and style. But we need to beware of fighting old battles in a world which has moved on.
What kick-started the New Atheism was, of course, the attack on the Twin Towers. That event, and subsequent acts of Islamist-inspired terrorism, reminded the world of the terrible deeds that can be performed in the name of religious fanaticism, especially if it is reinforced by dreams of immediate rewards in paradise. How to combat Islamist fanaticism is obviously a pressing question. At the same time, it would be foolish to let our attitudes to all religions and all religious believers be coloured by a small set of specific outrages.
A second development which no doubt reinforced the New Atheism was the resurgence of creationism, on a small scale in the UK and on a scarily large scale in the US. In the States it’s linked with the religious right and the malign influence of Christian fundamentalists on politics and government. Unsurprisingly, it’s in the US that the New Atheism seems to be taking shape as a cultural movement, not just a publishing success. Dawkins has launched the “Out” campaign, encouraging American atheists to “come out”. The success of these developments is sufficient evidence that they respond to a real need, and they reflect the extent to which American atheists have felt beleaguered. In some parts of the US it takes courage to come out as an atheist. But let’s be honest – in Britain today, for most of us, it’s a doddle.
This points to the danger of over-generalising about religion and about religious believers. By far the commonest criticism directed against the New Atheists is that they do over-generalise, and I think that the criticism is justified. To avoid being guilty of the same mistake myself, I’ll focus only on the two bestsellers, Dawkins and Hitchens, because their books have done most to generate the larger movement. They are quite explicit in their desire to generalise about religion. Dawkins says: “I do everything in my power to warn people against faith itself, not just against so-called ‘extremist’ faith. The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves, are an open invitation to extremism.”
And Hitchens is even more frank: his subtitle is “religion poisons everything”. That really is too simple. In the “religion” that Dawkins and Hitchens relentlessly attack I simply do not recognise the many good, sensitive, intelligent and sometimes wonderful religious people I know.
Of course the generalisations are not just crude prejudices, they are considered and they are defended, and we should examine the reasons Dawkins and Hitchens give. For Dawkins the problem is that all religious believers are committed to faith rather than reason. He is rightly appalled by the resurgence of creationism, by the fact that many people still reject neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory because it is incompatible with a literal reading of the first chapter of Genesis. He knows perfectly well that the vast majority of Christians and other religious believers in Britain (though, worryingly, not in the US) are not creationists, but he thinks that, just by accepting the idea of “faith”, they have sold out. He says: “Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of young minds. Non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion may not be doing that, but it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children ... that unquestioning faith is a virtue.”
So for him the difference between the so-called moderate, sensible religious believers and the fundamentalists is a minor one. He thinks that the real divide is between science and religion, because science is based on reason and religion is a matter of faith. In other words it’s religion as such that is the problem.
Is that right? We need to be aware of the ambiguities of the word “faith”. In some cases faith is no more or less than a set of overarching beliefs with which people make sense of the world. All religions are faiths in the first sense, and so is humanism, though most of us would prefer not to use the word because of its other connotations. There’s no necessary opposition between faith in this sense and reason.
But faith can also refer to our readiness to accept beliefs on grounds which are not conclusive. This covers a range of cases, from a hunch which you think will be confirmed, to a well-founded expectation based on past experience. A creationist website links to a video clip of Dawkins saying that he has “faith” that fossils will be found to fill gaps in the fossil record. He didn’t mean faith in the creationists’ sense of believing it without evidence, but it’s a perfectly legitimate sense of the word – a belief backed by previous experience, for which further confirmation is sought. And though it’s not the creationists’ sense of the word, there are plenty of religious believers who would say that they have faith in this sense. They can’t prove that there’s a god, so their commitment goes beyond the evidence, but it’s not unsupported.
Faith is also a way of describing a commitment to a belief which has no rational basis. Are there religious believers with this sort of unmediated belief? Yes, I’m sure there are, though I suspect that they often play on the ambiguity between that version of faith and the more everyday manner in which we say that we have faith in a person, that we trust them. I’m thinking of the evangelical Christians who say things like “How can I doubt God, since he has saved me, I have this special relationship with him and I trust him with everything in my life.” But the general point is that faith means different things for different religious believers, and from the fact that they claim to have faith you can’t infer that they are all irrationalists who believe things on “blind faith” without any evidence and have therefore sold the pass to the creationists.
Take the case of the many people who both hold a religious belief and accept evolutionary theory. They value scientific method, they accept the scientific evidence, and they say that the origin of species through natural selection just is the process by which God has created all living things. The question they then have to answer is: if we’ve got the scientific account, why do we also need a belief in divine creation? They would probably say something like this: the theory of evolution explains how living things have come into existence, but it doesn’t explain why there existed, in the first place, a universe suited to lead to the evolution of life. Many Christians these days are keen on the so-called “fine-tuning argument”: that if the basic physical constants had been just slightly different, the Big Bang would not have led to the emergence of galaxies and suns and planets, including at least one planet with the right conditions for the evolution of life. The initial conditions had to be “just right”, and God is the best explanation of why they were.
Dawkins has an excellent reply to this argument. He argues that whatever the explanation of the initial conditions may be, God is not a good explanation, because the existence of a hugely powerful intelligence who knew all the physical constants and scientific laws is even more difficult to explain than the things it is supposed to account for. The essential point is one about “simplicity”. Philosophers like Richard Swinburne argue that the best explanation is the most economical one, and explaining the universe by divine intention is the preferred explanation because it is the simplest. Dawkins rightly points out that this is a confusion. The explanation in terms of a divine creator may be simply stated, but the entity which is supposed to do the explaining is a highly complex entity, not a “simple” one. I agree with Dawkins. The argument fails. But it is still an argument. As so often, deciding whether an argument succeeds is a matter of judgement – of faith, if you like, in the second sense. But a mistaken argument is still an argument, still an appeal to reason and evidence. For a great many religious believers, belief in a god is like that – faith, but not “blind faith”.
Dawkins also thinks that it is blind faith that leads to crazy acts of religious fanaticism. “Even mild and moderate religion,” he says, “helps to provide the climate of faith in which extremism naturally flourishes.” He’s thinking, obviously, of suicide bombers and Islamist terrorists, not to mention Christian extremists who murder abortionists, Hindus who slaughter Muslims, and all the rest of the fanatics. It was the killing of 3,000 people in the World Trade Centre that was the initial spur for the New Atheism, and for Dawkins it demonstrated that it is not extremism, but religion as such, that is the problem.
That’s also Hitchens’s view, and I turn to him now. His reason for generalising about all religion, for claiming that religion poisons everything, is primarily an appeal to the historical record. He has no difficulty compiling an appalling catalogue of all the terrible things done in the name of religion. The Old Testament is full of justifications for massacre and slavery. The Koran contains incitements to intolerance and the spreading of Islam by force. In the modern world, in the name of religion, rival groups have been slaughtering one another in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia, the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. People’s lives are blighted by repressive religious views and practices concerning abortion, contraception, masturbation and genital mutilation. And the length of the list demonstrates, for Hitchens, that religion poisons everything.
But it's a selective list, and it’s not enough to justify the generalisation, since it invites the response: “What about all the good things done in the name of religion? What about all the religious believers who have stood up against political repression, who have worked for peace and tolerance, who have campaigned for justice and against slavery and poverty, and have devoted themselves to improving the lot of their fellow human beings?” Hitchens’s answer is that if people do these things, it’s not really their religion that motivates them – “this is a compliment to humanism, not to religion”. The classic example is Martin Luther King, whom Hitchens rightly admires. King was a committed Christian who used the language of the Old Testament, the language of the “promised land”, to inspire the Civil Rights movement. Hitchens says that this is mere metaphor. Although King uses the image of Moses leading his people out of Egypt, there is nothing equivalent to Moses’s exhortation to massacre the other tribes in the land which God had promised to the people of Israel. King preached non-violence, and did not advocate revenge against white racists. Therefore, Hitchens infers, he was not a real Christian: “When Dr King took a stand ... he did so as a profound humanist and nobody could ever use his name to justify oppression or cruelty ... his legacy has very little to do with his professed theology. ... In no real as opposed to nominal sense, then, was he a Christian.”
The circularity in Hitchens’s argument is obvious. Religion poisons everything. What about the good things done in the name of religion? If they’re really good, that just shows that they’re not really religious. The same circular argument appears in Hitchens’s discussion of the atrocities generated by secular creeds. He says of totalitarian societies that because their leaders are regarded as infallible, such states are theocracies and therefore essentially religious. So the counter-examples simply confirm, for Hitchens, that it’s religion that poisons everything.
Hitchens’s appeal to the historical record is what I call the “headcount” argument – “Your lot have killed more people than our lot.” It gets us nowhere. The fact is that human beings are capable of doing terrible things and they are capable of doing wonderful things. This is true of religious believers, it’s true of atheists, and it shouldn’t surprise us. Religion – here I agree with another of Hitchens’s persistent themes – is a human creation. It is, I suggest, a mirror which humanity holds up to itself and in which it sees itself reflected. Human beings attribute to their gods all their own human qualities – cruelty, revenge and hatred, but also love and compassion and mercy. That’s why you can find a justification for anything, good or bad, in religion.
For Dawkins and for Hitchens that is part of the problem. Religious believers cannot avoid cherry-picking. They select from their sacred texts whatever fits their prior agenda. The homophobes pick out the texts from Leviticus or the Koran which order the killing of gays; their opponents say that this is incompatible with the idea of a god of compassion and tolerance. The warmongers and jihadists pick out the injunctions to slaughter; the peacemakers appeal to the contrary texts. Religions are deeply contradictory, and the application of them will always be selective.
But that is precisely why we should not lump all religious believers together.
Humanism is more than atheism, it is about putting humanist beliefs and values into practice and trying to make the world a better place. And that is impossible unless we’re prepared to cooperate with others who share those values, including those for whom the values are inseparable from a religious commitment.
It goes deeper than that. For many humanists, religious believers are also friends, lovers, colleagues, neighbours, spouses and partners. The attitude that religion poisons everything is unlikely to be an auspicious basis for such relationships. We really do need something a bit more nuanced.
And this brings me to my practical conclusion. If we are serious about our humanist values, we should look for all those who share them, and work with them. If, according to Hitchens, that means that such people are really humanists after all, then call them that if you wish, but accept that they may also be committed Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists or whatever. The labels don’t matter. If Christians are happy to defend science against the idiocies of creationism, let’s work with them. When the news broke that state schools in this country were teaching creationism as science, Dawkins and Richard Harries, then Bishop of Oxford, issued a joint statement of criticism. Dawkins has been accused of inconsistency in doing so but it doesn’t matter, it was the right thing to do and it was highly effective. After the most recent attempted suicide bombings in Britain, national newspapers carried a full-page advertisement by Muslim organisations condemning the bombings and dissociating themselves from them. What are we supposed to say? “You’re just as bad”? That would be madness. They need our encouragement, and we need their help.
We have problems enough in the world. The threats of climate change, global poverty, war and repression and intolerance can never be countered unless we are prepared to work together on the basis of a shared humanity. Simplistic generalisations about religion don’t help. In Dawkins’s terminology, that means working with the “moderates” to counter the “extremists”, but it’s actually more complicated than that. Some of our allies against creationism may be deeply prejudiced against gays. Some of the best people working to combat global poverty may be Catholic anti-abortionists. Some of the Muslim allies we need to counter Islamist violence may have deeply sexist attitudes to women. It all demonstrates what a deeply contradictory phenomenon religion is. But we know that. And if religion is so contradictory, that’s probably because human beings are a deeply contradictory species.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Thursday, November 08, 2007
Pavement -- Shady Lane
Even though "Summer Babe" and "Cut Your Hair" was the more popular Pavement songs when I started listening to them, this was the first song to grow on me.
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Larry Bird Video Clips
One of my favorite players. This guy can't jump. He is not fast. Yet he plays with so much intelligence.
Hall of Fame Induction Video
Clutch Shots and Buzzer Beaters
Trash Talking
Hall of Fame Induction Video
Clutch Shots and Buzzer Beaters
Trash Talking
Cognitive Dissonance in Monkeys?!?
This is an article from The New York Times (see here). It talks about how monkeys are somewhat cognitively similar to human beings. For more regarding cognitive dissonance, see here.
===================================================================
Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.
By JOHN TIERNEY
For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — while our friends and family are saying,
“Well... ”
This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”
If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.
The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm, carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor radio.
Then they were given a choice between two items they considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away), they were asked to rate all the items again.
Suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.
So, apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.
Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.
The monkey seemed to be coping the same way humans do. When you reject the toaster, you could spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, and that phenomenon, much less common, is called buyer’s remorse. (For more on that, go to www.tierneylab.com).
But in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.
Of course, when you see others engaging in this sort of rationalization, it can look silly or pathological, as if they have a desperate need to justify themselves or are cynically telling lies they couldn’t possibly believe themselves. But you don’t expect to see such high-level mental contortions in 4-year-olds or monkeys.
As the Yale researchers write, these results indicate either that monkeys and children have “richer motivational complexity” than we realize, or our ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance are “mechanistically simpler than previously thought.” Another psychologist, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests it’s the latter.
“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” he says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”
The new results jibe with those of a dissonance experiment that Dr. Lieberman and colleagues did with amnesiacs, people with impaired short-term memories, who were asked to rank an assortment of paintings. Then they chose among selected ones and ranked the whole group again. By the second time they ranked the paintings, they couldn’t consciously recall their earlier rankings or their choices, so they presumably didn’t have a psychic need to rewrite history.
Yet they showed as much new disdain for the paintings they’d rejected as did a control group with normal memories. Apparently, the rejections registered in some unconscious way, so that the amnesiacs rationalized their decisions even though they couldn’t remember them.
The compulsion to justify decisions may seem irrational, and maybe petty, too, like the fox in Aesop’s fable who stopped trying for the grapes and promptly told himself they were sour anyway. But perhaps Aesop didn’t appreciate the evolutionary utility of this behavior for humans as well as animals.
Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal.
And if you are the owner of a yellow gas-guzzler, you might as well convince yourself that the sensible blue car you passed up was an ugly bore. Aesop may call it sour grapes; you can call it moving on. Maybe your unconscious realizes you don’t have time for buyer’s remorse. You’ve got car payments to make.
===================================================================
Go Ahead, Rationalize. Monkeys Do It, Too.
By JOHN TIERNEY
For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage? The brain keeps sending one message — Yesss! Genius! — while our friends and family are saying,
“Well... ”
This self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance, has been demonstrated over and over by researchers who have come up with increasingly elaborate explanations for it. Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.”
If so, capuchin monkeys are a lot more complicated than we thought. Or, we’re less complicated. In a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at Yale report finding the first evidence of cognitive dissonance in monkeys and in a group in some ways even less sophisticated, 4-year-old humans.
The Yale experiment was a variation of the classic one that first demonstrated cognitive dissonance, a term coined by the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In 1956 one of his students, Jack Brehm, carted some of his own wedding gifts into the lab (it was a low-budget experiment) and asked people to rate the desirability of things like an electric sandwich press, a desk lamp, a stopwatch and a transistor radio.
Then they were given a choice between two items they considered equally attractive, and told they could take one home. (At the end of the experiment Mr. Brehm had to confess he couldn’t really afford to give them anything, causing one woman to break down in tears.) After making a choice (but before having it snatched away), they were asked to rate all the items again.
Suddenly they had a new perspective. If they had chosen the electric sandwich press over the toaster, they raised its rating and downgraded the toaster. They convinced themselves they had made by far the right choice.
So, apparently, did the children and capuchin monkeys studied at Yale by Louisa C. Egan, Laurie R. Santos and Paul Bloom. The psychologists offered the children stickers and the monkeys M&M’s.
Once a monkey was observed to show an equal preference for three colors of M&M’s — say, red, blue and green — he was given a choice between two of them. If he chose red over blue, his preference changed and he downgraded blue. When he was subsequently given a choice between blue and green, it was no longer an even contest — he was now much more likely to reject the blue.
The monkey seemed to be coping the same way humans do. When you reject the toaster, you could spend a lot of time second-guessing yourself, and that phenomenon, much less common, is called buyer’s remorse. (For more on that, go to www.tierneylab.com).
But in general, people deal with cognitive dissonance — the clashing of conflicting thoughts — by eliminating one of the thoughts. The notion that the toaster is desirable conflicts with the knowledge that you just passed it up, so you banish the notion. The cognitive dissonance is gone; you are smug.
Of course, when you see others engaging in this sort of rationalization, it can look silly or pathological, as if they have a desperate need to justify themselves or are cynically telling lies they couldn’t possibly believe themselves. But you don’t expect to see such high-level mental contortions in 4-year-olds or monkeys.
As the Yale researchers write, these results indicate either that monkeys and children have “richer motivational complexity” than we realize, or our ways of dealing with cognitive dissonance are “mechanistically simpler than previously thought.” Another psychologist, Matthew D. Lieberman of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggests it’s the latter.
“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” he says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”
The new results jibe with those of a dissonance experiment that Dr. Lieberman and colleagues did with amnesiacs, people with impaired short-term memories, who were asked to rank an assortment of paintings. Then they chose among selected ones and ranked the whole group again. By the second time they ranked the paintings, they couldn’t consciously recall their earlier rankings or their choices, so they presumably didn’t have a psychic need to rewrite history.
Yet they showed as much new disdain for the paintings they’d rejected as did a control group with normal memories. Apparently, the rejections registered in some unconscious way, so that the amnesiacs rationalized their decisions even though they couldn’t remember them.
The compulsion to justify decisions may seem irrational, and maybe petty, too, like the fox in Aesop’s fable who stopped trying for the grapes and promptly told himself they were sour anyway. But perhaps Aesop didn’t appreciate the evolutionary utility of this behavior for humans as well as animals.
Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal.
And if you are the owner of a yellow gas-guzzler, you might as well convince yourself that the sensible blue car you passed up was an ugly bore. Aesop may call it sour grapes; you can call it moving on. Maybe your unconscious realizes you don’t have time for buyer’s remorse. You’ve got car payments to make.
一天到晚爬行的乌龟
除了吞噬摆放在篮子里的果菜以及每隔一两天拉一堆屎撒一泡尿之外，它们所懂的，就只是爬。
有时只需要十分钟稍微不留意搁放在房间一隅的那塑胶篮子里的两只褐色的乌龟，它们就能展示它们爬行的“功夫”，从篮子里消失，而最后需要在床下或者橱后才能找到它们。即使把它们捉回来，放进篮子里，不需一会儿的功夫，它们又重操旧业，在塑胶篮的两侧以短小的后腿撑着，想再次爬过矮小的障碍，然后便可以肆意地在我房间的地上爬行。
其实仔细想一想，会不会觉得它们很笨？即使能爬出篮子，那又如何？还不是要在房子里寻找出路？即使能爬出房子回到大自然又如何？还不是爬不出自然界的循环、爬不出生命的框框。
我也许应该笑它们愚蠢、笑它们无知，但我始终没有，只因为那份愚蠢无知中的执著使我这个高它们一等的生物也不禁凛然了。
Monday, November 05, 2007
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Evolution Schmevolution
This is a funny segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart two years ago, when the debate in Kansas broke out as to whether to teach Intelligent Design (i.e. creationism) in science class. I like the part where he talks about creation myths and how they were just an excuse for a group of people to kill another.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - The Most Trusted Name in Fake News
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart - The Most Trusted Name in Fake News
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