A plea to you "normal" visioned folks out there

When I was young, my parents discovered I was somewhat colorblind. For the most part it didn't interfere with my life much. (Recently I discovered it would preclude my joining the bomb-squad.) But while it was sometimes annoying, I guess I just never noticed it.



Some of the most annoying repercussions of color-blindness has been for me in the areas of scientific reading. Way too often I have had to spend a long time squinting and carefully trying to figure out what a scientific graph or chart was trying to plot or illustrate when the authors were too insensitive to consider that they should not use only colors that color-blind people are unable to distinguish. The point of colors in graphs are to make it easier to grasp a larger amount of information, not harder.



This site does some great advocating for this. I wish more people would take it seriously. The site also has some great simulations of how color-blind people see colors. I think I have had hundreds of people over the course of my life ask me what color their shirt was. If I am feeling playful, I'd just say that I can't see colors and so their shirt is transparent. Generally I just say that it is hard to answer since I do not know how see colors. Generally I ask people to imagine an old TV that doesn't have all the colors, not quite a black and white one, but an early color one where there weren't 16 million colors. That probably approximates it. But It is a bit hard to explain, and you should all look at this site before asking me what color yourshirt is.



(Hat tip: Joseph A Ross in Nature.)

Three articles

In today's NY Times there are three science-related articles that merit comment.

First, we have an article on facial recognition. The article perports to talk about humans and the fact that we tend to see faces in all sorts of things, like clouds, cinnamon buns and grilled cheese sandwiches. There was some talk about the neuro science behind the phenomenon and some minor remarks about the applications for facial recognition sofware. This article was praticularly light on the science, even by ScienceTimes standards. But the question I have, and I think this is a more important question is why are these so often religious figures who show up in toast, and not say, Jay Leno, or someone else equally recognizable. Where is George Bush? Where is Hitler? (Or Mohammed. (OK, we know why not him.)) Is it that these are the only ones that make the news that people look out for? Or is there a deeper connection? The fact that we tend to anthropomorphisize things is not surprising.

The second article is about Carl Sagan. Sagan was a great scientist and expositor of science. However, his widow is probably not a good expositor of anything. First, she wins today's award for "Most gratuitious reference to the US involvement in the Middle East". Here is a quote from the article:

In the wake of Sept. 11 and the attacks on the teaching of evolution in this country, she said, a tacit truce between science and religion that has existed since the time of Galileo started breaking down. “A lot of scientists were mad as hell, and they weren’t going to take it anymore,” Ms. Druyan said over lunch recently.

I am a bit confused. First, what does 9/11 have to do with teaching evolution? Is this a post hoc fallacy trying to get us to think they are related? Is it pointing out that the truce that existed in the Muslim world between science and religion till Galileo prevented terrorism? Is she saying that scientists were mad that religious fanatics flew jetliners in to the world trade center and they are mad as hell and not going to take that? (What have scientists done to protest that?) So in short, I have not idea what she is talking about. And if you think that this was just some random quote, read the whole thing. She keeps refering to the middle east, as if that was forefront on Carl Sagan's mind, and somehow science will save us from something.

Finally, there is an article about a young earth creationist who got a PhD in geosciences. Here is another case of the article missing the point, but is nontetheless interesting. The article clearly shows a debate regarding the qualifications of someone who fails to conform to the academic orthodoxy. Now, everyone knows, that writing a PhD is often an excercize in Uncle Tomming. (I am not including myself here. My PhD advisor might not be the most nurturing person in the world, but we do see eye-to-eye on my project, and he is pretty helpful.) Not all people in biology believe in every bit of evolutionary theory they are use in their dissertation. I have seen PhDs in bible studies that presuppose the documentary hypothesis where their author has personally told me they do not believe in it. I have spoken to people who write PhDs in ethics that no sane human can believe. But as a colleague has told me recently that 90% of a PhD is listening to your thesis supervisor.

It is clear that even the very debate on whether this person should be barred from teaching and stuff is hypocritical and academically self-righteous. The whole point of the system is not to perpetuate scientific dogmas, but to insure that the people who are granted research funds and podiums to teach, and lesiure time to pursue the research are qualified. Not only that, we constantly talk about diversity, and I can't imagine someone who will contribute more to the diversity of a geology department than someone who doesn't believe in it. Moreover, this person is undoubtedly qualified, and the system is designed to insure that he is eminently qualified. Every day when he walked in to his lab for the first year of his research, he was hit with jibes and softballs that he undoubtedly spent time thinking about and coming up with snappy comebacks to. By the second year, since he made it through that trial, when his labmates started to have to take him seriously as a geologist, they must have started with the harder and harder questions, forcing him to be better and better at presenting it, and refining his position and making him learn to argue for it better. That is how good research should get done.

Conservatives of any sort face the same pressures in political theory as creationists do in biology departments, or meat eaters in philosophy departments, or sane people in performance art. The list goes on. The academy should be a place where one's credentials speak for themselves. It should not be a place where we look to your religion, sexual orientation, or beliefs about anything. Sure the research that the person will do for the rest of his career might be unorthodox, and any university hiring him might want to ask "what sort of research will you be pursuing?" and "will it embarrass us" or "will any of it actually get in to academic journals?" or "will you be teaching anything non-standard as part of lower level classes in geology?" but that is it. I would of course ban him from teaching high-schools, as there the goal is to disseminate the scientific orthodoxy. Teaching "alternate theories" of science is for a place of research, like a university, where everyone understands the standard account.

I frequently worry about what I can present to my colleagues. I am sure I think quite differently than many of them. And of course when I look for a job I will have to kiss-up to the Man. But the very idea that people would think it makes sense to deny a sopt in a PhD program to a qualified applicant solely on the basis of weird beliefs about the going paradigm strikes me as antithetical to the core of honest scholarship.

speaking of kosher

No there is kosher porn.

The new Whole Food???

Now they think they are going to get everyone eating this stuff? Then again, it doesn't taste worse than most of that health food stuff.

Review of Williams' The Origins of Field Theory

L. Pearce Williams' The Origins of Field Theory is a good book on the history of how Field Theory in physics grew from its Newtonian beginnings to it form in Maxwell's equations. The Newtonian model is nicely laid out. Then it moves on to a discussion of electromagnetism using the naturalphilosophie of the time, especially the Kantian critique of Newton. (This was a lot more important than I had realized) Schelling's critique and then Oersted's contributions are then addressed. Finally, we come to the hero of Field Theory - Faraday. Faraday's electrostatic and magnetic lines of force, and their difficult births and acceptance, make up a good chunk of the book. It then concludes with a discussion of Maxwell famous synthesis and mathematization of Faraday's work which ultimately turned it in to the Orthodoxy of its time.
It was a good read. There were a few places I wish the author would have spent a bit more time working out the experiments for us. I forgot what some the apparatus that Faraday used was like. But beside this, it is a good simple read if you are interested in this sort of thing. There are practically no equations or anything to scare away the intelligent curious layperson, like me.

Jewish thinkers and the philosophy of history

Sometime in late 2003 I was walking around Jerusalem and wandered in to the old used book store near Machne Yehuda. I picked up a few books that were somehow very tangentially related to stuff I was interested in for my own research. They were books about the positivist account of history, historical laws, and historical explanations - they were from the 1950's. I bought them, and I only noticed when I got home that two of them were well marked up, and they had the signature of "Emil Fackenheim" on the inside cover. He had just died, so I guess someone sold off his library. Fackenheim was a formidable philosopher. He is most known for his "11th commandment post-holocaust" philosophy.

I then began to notice that there was a lot of interest in the philosophy of history at the time that Fackenheim was writing. He himself wrote a lot about Jews and their place in History, and things like that. What is more interesting though is that there were a whole lot of Jews at that time worrying about the same thing. Morris Raphael Cohen, another important Jewish intellectual at City College wrote a book on the philosophy of history - a book he thought was his most important. Berkovitz too was interested in the role Jews play in history.

This is something that I clearly don't have time to research, but there was an interesting moment in Jewish intellectual history where the most influential philosophical Jewish minds were concentrating on the same problem. I wonder why. Clearly many might have been thinking post-holocaust thoughts. Fackenheim and Berkovits were deeply interested in this. The question of Jewish existence and their role in the bigger scheme would have interested them. I suppose there was something of that question in the general intellectual zeitgeist when people like Dray and Gardinier were thinking about these things.

New Year Resolutions I forgot to post

1) Finish my dissertation.
2) Take fun trip as a reward to self for (1)
3) Give more charity to worthy causes
4) Work on other writing projects
5) Work on learning another language
6) Try to make some job moves (mil. and acad.)
7) Learn something about investing the little money I have

Review of Garfinkel's Forms of Explanation

Alan Garfinkel's Forms of Explanation is a bit dated and I am not sure what to make of it.

Chapters 1 and 2 are certainly worthwhile reading. They offer the beginnings of an interesting discussion of contrastive explanations and one account of what it is to be a reductive explanation. There are actually many more kinds than Garfinkel describes, but no matter. His is interesting enough. Chapter 3 peters out to some warmed over naive Marxism/Rawlsian stuff. There for some reason he pulls a fast one and pretty much tells you he is going to conflate explanations and justifications, and you should live with it. I suppose one can't argue with that.

Chapter 4 he builds up to a position that can probably be paraphrased as "given that we live in a society (with relations between individuals) you can't explain the relations in society by appealing only to individuals.

The book ends with what we'd now call a pragmatic account of explanation. Garfinkel was probably not aware of the work by people like Achinstein on this very notion, or he just didn't bother mentioning it. And the real statement of pragmatic explanations was published about a year before by van Fraassen, and he was most likely not aware of that either.

I am hesitant to recommend this, but the book is about the question of explanation in the philosophy of the social sciences. There is not all that much out there on this topic and you can do worse, but perhaps skipping chapter three would make it less annoying to read.

three museums

Today "D" and I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Natural History, and the Science Museum. Long day. I'm tired.

London

So I've been spending the past few days doing family-related things in London. My cousin got married to a girl from Goulders Green.



It has been interesting so far. I got to see the chassidic side of my family a lot, and I got to see a bit of London as well. I was quite excited to finally see the Rosetta Rock, and other things in the British Museum, as well as the Science Museum. Hopefully I'll get to take in a bit more tomorrow and Monday.

Busy Week

It has been a prety busy week, and I have not had much time to put in New Year resolutions, or other stuff. I am now in London for a cousin's wedding. I'll keep the world posted on my adventures here as they happen. So far I got in (with D) and we slept and then hit up the Science Museum and wandered around Oxford Circus (it is not a real circus, more like a traffic CIRCLE). I am struch by how much like New York London is. It is easy to see the cultural similarities and between us. If it weren't for the fact that London has such nice buildings, I'd swear I was in New York or Boston.

Conference in our nation's capitol

I'm now in boring professional conference in Washington DC. Those of you who have been here must be struck by the difference of culture that exists inside the beltway and the culture of other big cities. I wonder what it is? Anyone know what percentage of Washington DCers were born and raised here, and how many are transplants? I wonder if that makes a difference.



Meanwhile, I will just enjoy my professional conference and listen to talks that can possibly interest a handful of people on the planet, me being one of them.

Now its twice

This is now the second time I've been declared the person of the year by Time magazine. The first was in 2003, as you may recall. I really wish they'd give someone else a chance.

It didn't happen

Personally I am skeptical that there really was a holocaust denial conference in Iran this week.

Well maybe there were a few people in "Iran" who got together to talk about not liking Jews. And everyone knows that Iranians exaggerate their numbers just to advance their anti-Zionist agendas. And everyone also knows that Iran simply doesn't have halls big enough to hold all the holocaust deniers.

Borat, who was allegedly at the conference is widely believed to be fictional. It is also unclear if Iran actually exists. I understand there is a conference pending about that. Americans and Israelis, and miscellaneous "Jewish" conspiritors who were allegedly at this perported conference have no legal way of actually getting to Iran.

So one wonders what the Persian agenda is here. Why pretend to hold a conference about a subject so unpopular in the west? Moreover, why pretend to hold a conference when it is probably just as east to just actually hold one. Faking conferences seems like more trouble than it is worth.

Review of Lewis' What Went Wrong

As usual, Bernard Lewis produces a great piece of writing. What went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response is a well-told tale of the relevant bits of Islamic history leading up to their poor position in the world today.

Islam, once a real force in culture and science and even justice, has been reduced to an almost negligible space in the intellectual, financial, economic, moral, and scientific outlook of the planet. Their ownership of fossil fuels being their only positive contribution to the rest of the planet. After the 15th century Islam stopped

The book talks about many things that hindered Islam's inability to modernize. The ones that stick out in my mind are Islam's inability to separate between church and state - a big impediment to modernization. Islam's lack of interest in anything that was not religious seems like a problem too. Real efforts to modernize seemed to have been spurned on by their need to win wars, something they have not been doing lately. (From being controlled by the secular Ottomans to the British and French, to the loss against Israel. . .)

My only gripe about the book is that I wish it was clearer about what went wrong. It does a good job at looking at the history, and the title made a promise that it did not deliver on, namely what went wrong. The conclusion chapter made some strides in this direction, but the reader is left to put the pieces together for himself.

Otherwise a pretty good read.