As a biographical account of how he became an atheist, it sums up some of the most common arguments for disbelief.

A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist

(…)

I used to believe in God. The Christian one that is.

I loved Jesus. He was my hero. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like Him.

One day when I was about 8 years old, I was drawing the crucifixion as part of my Bible studies homework. I loved art too. And nature. I loved how God made all the animals. They were also perfect. Unconditionally beautiful. It was an amazing world.

I lived in a very poor, working-class estate in an urban sprawl called Reading, about 40 miles west of London. My father was a laborer and my mother was a housewife. I was never ashamed of poverty. It was almost noble. Also, everyone I knew was in the same situation, and I had everything I needed. School was free. My clothes were cheap and always clean and ironed. And mum was always cooking. She was cooking the day I was drawing on the cross.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when my brother came home. He was 11 years older than me, so he would have been 19. He was as smart as anyone I knew, but he was too cheeky. He would answer back and get into trouble. I was a good boy. I went to church and believed in God -– what a relief for a working-class mother. You see, growing up where I did, mums didn’t hope as high as their kids growing up to be doctors; they just hoped their kids didn’t go to jail. So bring them up believing in God and they’ll be good and law abiding. It’s a perfect system. Well, nearly. 75 percent of Americans are God-­?fearing Christians; 75 percent of prisoners are God-­?fearing Christians. 10 percent of Americans are atheists; 0.2 percent of prisoners are atheists.

But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

(continues…)

Keep reading on The Wall Street Journal »

This morning, while I was studying for my Logic class and since I was feeling fine I thought of writing myself a list of things to keep in mind next time I start to feel overwhelmed by everything around me. It served as an excuse to avoid studying, anyway.

• You don’t know what is going to happen. You despise pseudo-sciences so you might as well admit that you cannot tell the future. Stop pretending that you know that you’re destined to fail if you openly claim that the sole idea of ‘destiny’ is ridiculous and disgusts you.
• Remember how good it feels when you are calm. See how differently your thoughts can flow when you find yourself in a clear-thinking oasis. Get rid of your depression and anxiety and then try and refute your own depressive claims.
• Don’t compare yourself. The reason why successful people actually succeed is because they stay loyal to their own goals. After you get rid of whatever is clouding your thoughts set some goals and start achieving them. Don’t be afraid of revising them and change them if you consider them relevant. Try not to change them that often or you’ll be missing the point of having them.

• You like numbers and statistics, right? The chances of you being alone for the rest of your life are so low that it’s even laughable to point them out. As long as you don’t think of meeting that special someone every single day then most probably when you’re least expecting it Miss Awesome will make her entrance.
• Get some fresh air. I know you cried in public many times and the fact that people don’t seem to care freaks you out. Keep in mind that most of them are as afraid as you are of talking to strangers and they don’t even have a clue of what to say to some guy crying. But besides that, when you get so deep inside your head not even a rescue team would be able to get you out so… Get out of the house.
• Whenever you think people hate you, they don’t. Do the test: engage yourself in a conversation and see what happens. Oh you’re too afraid! Then maybe is not that they hate you bur rather that you’re using this as an excuse to avoid the issue.
• People most of the times is simply stupid. Even if you’d like to talk about genetics, technology, philosophy or the universe all the time and people can’t follow what you’re saying it doesn’t mean you’re not smart, it means they just don’t care (or just don’t have the brains to do so). While you’re around other philosophy students do the the test of randomly bringing out the topics of your interest but looking for nothing but random hallway conversations. I bet you’re going to be surprised.
• Even if the internet feels like a safe place, that’s not always the case. Let’s admit it: internet can be a hell of a time waster. Try using more of the time spent wandering online reading a book or doing something else. You know it feels good when you do that.
• Don’t hurt yourself. Instead of inducing any harm to yourself try doing something nice or getting something you’d like to eat. Be calm.
• It’s okay to hate someone else than yourself. Even when you’re tempted to blame yourself for everything that happens to you (and even if in good measure you could be held responsible for most of it) just remember that a lot of things escape your control and that some people deserve being hated. Don’t stop yourself from thinking how much you’d like someone to suffer but stop yourself from applying that suffering to yourself.
• Breathe.
• Don’t kill yourself. Living just because someone else would be sad if you died is a pretty bad reason. It’s true that you didn’t have the choice to avoid living but since you are alive, make the best of it. You will die soon enough and right before that you’ll realize you didn’t have enough time.
• Smile. Even when smiling makes you want to cry, just smile.

Image taken from the “Wristcutters: A Love Story” poster, one of my favorite movies.

Are you sure you want to quit before finishing my story?

After I formatted my PC, installed Windows 7 (best decision I’ve ever made) and reinstalled Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (losing all my progress), I’m back on track with the game.

Although I’ve only completed 25% of the game, it’s the best game I’ve ever played.

The quote I chose is probably the most stupid one I could choose. It’s what the Prince tells you when you want to quit the game, but silly as it sounds, it made me think of tens of ways to use it in real life.
Like I could’ve told my ex girlfriend just that… “Hey… Don’t leave me… Are you sure you want to quit before finishing my story?”, although I could’ve changed “my” for “our”: after all, relationships are something you share and not something that’s exclusive to one of the parts.

.-

Although after the first read I couldn’t catch every concept on it, I’m hoping that after a few more readings I’ll be able to wholly understand it. You can read the whole text after the jump.

My Philosophy

by Woody Allen

[The following is chapter 4 of Getting Even, by Woody Allen, First Vintage Books Edition, Copyright 1978. Retrieved from ProfRon.net]

The development of my philosophy came about as follows: My wife, inviting me to sample her very first soufflé, accidentally dropped a spoonful of it on my foot, fracturing several small bones. Doctors were called in, X-Rays taken and examined, and I was ordered to bed for a month. During this convalescence, I turned to the works of some of Western society’s most formidable thinkers — a stack of books I had laid aside for such an eventuality. Scorning chronological order, I began with Kierkegaard and Sartre, then moved quickly to  Spinoza, Hume, Kafka, and Camus. I was not bored, as I had feared I might be; rather, I found myself fascinated by the alacrity with which these great minds unflinchingly attacked morality, art, ethics, life and death. I remember my reaction to a typically luminous observation of Kierkegaard’s: “Such a relation which relates itself to its own self (that is to say, a self) must either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another.” The concept brought tears to my eyes. My word, I thought, how clever! (I’m a man who has trouble writing two meaningful sentences on “My Day at the Zoo.”) True, the passage was totally incomprehensible to me, but what of it as long as Kierkegaard was having fun? Suddenly confident that metaphysics was the work I had always been meant to do, I took up my pen and began at once to jot down the first of my own musings. The work proceeded apace, and in a mere two afternoons — with time out for dozing and trying to get the two little BBs in to the eyes of the bear — I had completed the philosophical work that I am hoping will not be uncovered until after my death, or until the year 3000 (whichever comes first), and which I modestly believe will assure me a place of reverence among history’s weightiest thinkers. Here is but a small sample of the main body of intellectual treasure that I leave for posterity, or until the cleaning woman comes.

Critique of Pure Dread

In formulating any philosophy, the first consideration must always be: What can we know? That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable. Or have we simply  forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything? Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote , “My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.” By “knowable,” incidentally, I do not mean that which can be known by perception of the senses, or that which can be grasped by the mind, but more that which can be said to be Known or to possess Knownness or Knowability, or at least something you can mention to a friend.

Can we actually “know” the universe? My God, it’s hard enough to find your way around in Chinatown. The point, however, is: Is there anything out there? And why?   And must they be so noisy? Finally, there can be no doubt that the one characteristic of “reality” is that it lacks essence. That is not to say it has no essence, but merely lacks it. (The reality I speak of here is the same Hobbes described, but a little smaller.) Therefore the Cartesian dictum “I think, therefore I am” might be better expressed “Hey, there goes Edna with a saxaphone!” So, then, to know a substance or an idea we must doubt it, and thus, doubting it, come to perceive the qualities it possesses in its finite state, which are truly “in the thing itself,” or “of the thing itself,” or of something or nothing. If this is clear, we can leave epistemology for the moment.

Eschatological Dialectics As a Means of Coping with Shingles

We can say that the universe consists of a substance, and this substance we will call “atoms,” or else we will call it “monads.” Democritus called it atoms. Leibniz called it monads. Fortunately, the two men never met, or there would have been a very dull argument. These “particles” were set in motion by some cause or underlying principle, or perhaps something fell someplace. The point is that it’s too late to do anything about it now, except possibly to eat plenty of raw fish. This, or course, does not explain why the soul is immortal. Nor does it say anything about the afterlife, or about the feeling my Uncle Sender has that he is being followed by Albanians. The causal relationship between the first principle “i.e., God, or a B wind) and any teleological concept of being (Being) is, according to Pascal, “so ludicrous that it’s not even funny (Funny).” Schopenhauer called this “will,” but his physician diagnosed it as hay fever. In his later years, he became embittered by it, or more likely because of his increasing suspicion that he was not Mozart.

The Cosmos on Five Dollars a Day

What, then, is “beautiful”? The merging of harmony with the just, or the merging of harmony with something that just sounds like “the just”? Possibly harmony should have been merged with “the crust” and this is what’s been giving us our trouble. Truth, to be sure, is beauty — or “the necessary.” That is, what is good or possessing the qualities of “the good” results in “truth.” If it doesn’t, you can bet the thing is not beautiful, although it may still be waterproof. I am beginning to think I was right in the first place that everything should be merged with the crust. Oh well.

Two Parables

• A man approaches a palace. Its only entrance is guarded by some fierce Huns who will only let men named Julius enter. The man tries to bribe the guards by offering them a year’s supply of choice chicken parts. They neither scorn his offer nor accept it, but merely take his nose and twist it until looks like Molly screw. The man says it is imperative that he enter the palace because he is bringing the emperor a change of underwear. When the guards still refuse, the man begins to Charleston. They seem to enjoy his dancing but soon become morose over the treatment of the Navajos by the federal government. Out of breath, the man collapses. He dies, never having see the emperor and owing the Steinway people sixty dollars on a piano he had rented from them in August.
• I am given a message to deliver to a general. I ride and ride, but the general’s headquarters seem to get farther and farther away. Finally, a giant black panther leaps upon me and devours my mind and heart. This puts a terrific crimp in my evening. No matter how hard I try, I cannot catch the general, whom I see running in the distance in his shorts and whispering the word “nutmeg” to his enemies.

Aphorisms

It is impossible to experience one’s own death objectively and still carry a tune.

The universe is merely a fleeting idea in God’s mind — a pretty uncomfortable thought, particularly if you’ve just made a down payment on a house.

Eternal nothingness is O.K. if you’re dressed for it.

If only Dionysus were alive! Where would he eat?

Not only is there no God, but trying getting a plumber on weekends.

Lately I’ve been thinking that it’s while facing everyday decisions that we put who we want to be to test. You define and redefine who you are with your every move.

Just some random Facebook wisdom I put out every once in a while.

Speaking of which, you can add me on Facebook over here.

.-

I was worried I couldn’t get my hands on this album, but luckily she went to one of the first gigs of the tour in Brooklyn and got to meet him outside the venue.

Thanks to her and Sondre for the special gift.

.-

Some days ago Sondre Lerche’s new song, “Heartbeat Radio” surfaced online.

This song, as a beautiful acoustic rendition, first appeared on his “Polaroid Pool Party EP” out last year that consisted of a homemade CD attached to a unique Polaroid picture signed by himself, making each copy unique.

The EP had 6 songs, all of them previously unreleased, that delivered the special feeling of having been recorded with just a mic and a computer. Just like in the good old days around the “Two Way Monologue” era when he released a few other EPs with this sort of demo-esque songs.

Here’s a short video for the EP, from Sondre’s YouTube channel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I guess now we can only wait for a new music video… Right, Sondre? ;)

Enjoy his new song, and make sure you buy the new album due this September.

Update!

06.07.09 – I uploaded two new songs thar Sondre posted to his Twitter account. Check out how big “Good Luck” gets as the song goes on and how beautifully the melody is delivered on “Easy to Persuade”, bringing a beat that makes you jump on your feet and dance.

Heartbeat Radio

Good Luck

I wrote this song on the last day of 2007 after a complicated year that was to be followed by a slightly more complicated year. (Luckily most of the complications were of a practical nature). I’ve never felt in a position to complain but I did want to try and write a song of consolation for those who found themselves more seriously out of luck, and at the same time curse the idea that luck is related to some universal justice. Embarking on 2008 I drove my wife crazy recording the demo for this song in our old box-sized Manhattan studio apartment, repeating the same little guitar-solo part over and over for what must’ve felt like eternity. In order to get some feisty, unusual movements in the string arrangement we had jazz maestro Erik Halvorsen do all sorts of [piano] improvisations over the chorus chords, for us to cherry-pick the highlights and transcribe them to an arrangement for violin and cello that my co-producer Kato Ådland completed. — Sondre [source]

Easy to Persuade

[via 1 2 3 - Thanks! ]
.-

It took me a couple of weeks and it was a fun interview to do. Hope you enjoy it!

QUESTIONS:

What is the most important element/factor in your project?

I don’t know how accurate it is to say that a project really makes a difference. I believe that what people do with a project (or what they can take from it) is what really makes the difference.

The Proyecto Burbuja (or Bubble Project, as originally created by Ji Lee) depends on people for it to work: they give it a meaning.

What the Bubble Project proposes is to turn a long established monologue (advertising on public spaces or in general) into an open dialogue. This is accomplished by posting stickers that look like speech bubbles from comic strips, so that any given ad can look like a frame taken from a comic book. Once the bubbles are placed on ads, they are left blank so anyone that wants to make them say anything is now able to do so.

With this said, is just a matter of time until someone grabs a marker and makes a famous movie star say what they want them to say, or maybe make a young girl model from a poster wonder about her future (i.e. “What am I gonna do when I’m 23?”)

Although the message – or the lack of one – always matters, the most important thing about the Bubble Project is to give people the chance to say something, anything, intervening ads invading our public spaces.
The passers-by are at a disadvantage against ads: they shout at them, selling them things they not always need, sometimes almost swearing that the guy in the picture is going to save the country (and why not the world), they display pictures of happy people holding cell phones that obviously are the reason of their happiness…

We can all agree that advertising has reached a point where the message can go along any kind of visual presentation and it will still get the job done. I’m not saying that there was a time when advertising in public spaces was lucid but still… A pink bunny riding a bicycle on a field can be part of an ad for a shoes company to a pharmaceutical product to a new insecticide. It just wouldn’t matter.

But what happens when you place a bubble and no one fills it? It will probably become a part of the ad to the eye of the passerby caught off guard.

So in order for the Bubble Project to work, to have a purpose or to even exist, people are needed. People give the project a meaning by filling those bubbles and replying to the ads.
That’s why the most important element or factor regarding the Bubble Project is neither the ads nor the bubbles, is the people.

How is your project making a difference?

The Bubble Project isn’t meant to make a difference per se, as it doesn’t really try to make a message come through but rather work as a medium for messages to surface.

What the Project intends to do is to let people realize that they don’t have to necessarily accept or follow the messages that are being exposed to us, that they can in fact criticize their surroundings. Advertising in public spaces has done a great job altering the idea people have of those spaces. We see ads on the streets as if they were a natural part of the landscape, after all, we may be surprised if one day we walked around the city and didn’t find any of these accustomed images at the sides of the street.

As long as someone that looks an ad with a blank bubble and realizes that there is something happening there, the Project is making a difference.

As long as people realize that there’s really no reason why they have to take all the things advertising exposes to them, a difference is being made.

Instead of saying that some aspect of the project is in fact innovative, as I’m unaware of other similar initiatives, I think it’s best if I focus on what I consider innovative about Ji Lee’s Bubble Project.

First, I think that relying on people and their will to express themselves is one of the most important sides of the project. I think that one of the innovative aspects of the project is its tendency to be decentralized; anyone can place a bubble if they want and take a picture of it… After all that’s how the Proyecto Burbuja started: as a localized version of the original.

Anyone can start bubbling anytime they want!

On the other hand and in the same vein that social networking website Twitter has proved to be useful, it displays almost instantly what are the tendencies in society. As seen in the many pictures that Ji has collected with political messages or social comments, Bubbles have proved useful as a friendly way to see what other people think. If we followed every ad on the street we would be thinking that almost every politician has a lot of people backing him or her up. We know that ads can be misleading and that what we see is not always what we get. When you are able to see ads that through bubbles display what people think about a particular subject, it can give a proper reference of what’s the word on the street.
Of course, politics and social commentaries are just one of the many subjects that people talk about while filling ads. The categories Ji originally established were Social Commentary, Media & Fashion, Sex & Drugs, Politics & Religion, Art & Philosophy, Humour and Personal Messages & Public Art.
Some of the best pictures on these topics can be seen in his book about the project, “Talk Back: The Bubble Project”

What has been successful in your project and how do you measure/evaluate it?

Having the bubbles widely recognized is probably a success, but the greatest one was being able to witness how people started to realize that blank bubbles where there for a reason and that they could be filling them with whatever they wanted.

I evaluate success according to the impact it has on other people.

As long as someone comes with an interesting question regarding advertising, the bubbles or consumer society, then I’m satisfied. After all, is questioning of what we assume as the established order what we want to encourage.

How do you evaluate the social impact your project has on the community/world?

The Bubble Project started in New York and a few years later expanded across the world, most notably Italy (progettobolla.com) and Argentina (proyectoburbuja.com, the one I lead). Starting last year, the Bubble Project, as commanded by Ji Lee, moved to the social networking website Facebook, encouraging bubblers around the world to make their own local “Bubble Groups” where they could post their pictures and establish with ease a direct contact with people interested in the project.

I think the impact the project has had on the community or the world can be evaluated by using its inspiration as a reference. It can be confirmed by the amazing reception it has received from all over the world.

As I mentioned before, as a result from globalization and its fierce presence in the whole world, ads have become a landmark of its expansion. People don’t notice them anymore. There’s a project from Germany that tries to prove it, “Hey Ad, What’s Up?” (http://www.graphical-wellness.de/index.php?whatsup), they’ve put strange looking (and sometimes nonsensical) ads using the most common advertising clichés.
Of course the responses have been varied, but it wouldn’t be surprising if someone didn’t notice anything strange on them after a first sight.

What I’m trying to say is that people don’t usually think of ads as a deliberate use of public spaces by companies but rather a simply aspect of our every day city landscape. It’s all about people recognizing those spots on their landscape, regaining the will to win them back and shush the corporate monologue. And as we have seen, it’s an effective way of getting our public spaces back, but also, doing it so in a witty way.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing today? How you do envision the future for your project?

It’s worth noting that the Bubble Project has a different success rate depending on the place the bubbles are spread. For example, it has enjoyed great success in New York City where it first originated and some European cities like Milano in Italy, but the situation in a country such as Argentina and even in a large city like Buenos Aires shows a strikingly different public reception.

I assume that is the result of each society’s history, which clearly affects its point of view (or worldview), what makes the way people interact with their environment show some differences for each country.
For instance, what I noticed in Buenos Aires is that people already think of the bubbles placed on ads as another type of advertising. So in a sort of protection of the ads, passersby tend to tear off the bubbles not realizing that a blank bubble means that they could fill them.

Another surprising reaction is that people look at the bubbles and just stare at them in the same way a person looks at a work of art in a museum.
I’m not going one step further and making any definite claims, since I realize that evidently it is particularly strange for people to look at something so out of place as a blank bubble on an ad.

Ji once wisely advised me on this subject, when I was starting to desperate over the lack of reaction to the bubbles, saying that once a bubble is placed, is a matter of time until someone fills it. Or in this case, sadly, tears it off.

Maybe is the idea behind the phrase “Don’t touch it or you’re going break it” what crosses their minds. As an extreme reaction, I was once caught placing a bubble by a traffic officer and he accused me of placing “communist propaganda” on ads… Obviously he never got the whole “corporate monologue” explanation I tried to give him, who could blame him for being so closed-minded, it’s not that you see someone placing a blank speech bubble on a poster every day.

Luckily, and maybe expectedly, young people are who engage in filling bubbles. The information era landscape has changed a lot in the last 10 years. A teenager or young adult that doesn’t have a cell-phone is a rare thing to see. Almost everyone uses text-messages, and is this relationship with information that can be seen within the so-called culture of the text message or SMS culture what I think changes the way we think of our environment. I think this constant information input (it’s 15° C outside, Julian just broke up with his girlfriend, the exam is now on Wednesday, my sister says I have to buy milk, the president just announced rise in the price of…) that finds its most significant example in what is called the “Friend Feed” of Facebook or the “Timeline” of Twitter where you can see what everyone is doing at every moment.

Of course we aren’t going to notice the extreme amount of advertising on the streets… Wouldn’t it be strange if we didn’t receive so much information from the walls all the time? It wouldn’t be strange; it would be kind of awesome ;)

In the coming years I hope more and more people sum to the Project and make it even more known, making it even more fun to place bubbles and take their pictures. More and more people sign up to our Facebook page, so we know that a lot of people is interested, and the comments we receive are very gratifying, letting us realize that a lot of people, most of them young, have pretty interesting critics of our reality. A lot of people are willing to put their opinion out there and see if they can help improve and change our world.

–

While starting the study, I observed that there exist 6 main categories for social design  projects:

- Prospective/Envisioning

- Education/Knowledge

- Community (raising awareness, citizenship etc.)

- Facilitating collaborative actions/projects

- Social Enterprise (business)

- Human Interaction/Behaviours (campaigns, studies… )

1.  Which of them can you relate to most strongly? Why is this the case?

I guess I can relate mostly to the Community and Human Interaction/Behaviours categories. As I mentioned before, it’s a way for the community to do something with the advance of ads on public spaces (sometimes even seen as unstoppable, due to the lack of proper laws), and to put out their opinion. Also, if we do not have any voice in what the government does with our spaces, why not have fun in their expense. Bubbles often take the seriousness away from such mundane ads displaying perfect looking models making a sweater ad look like the fate of our lives depends on buying it. A bubble sometimes puts our feet back on the ground: it’s just an ad.

Human interaction is the communication between human beings, and after all, messages, opinions, or any form of written information is a way to communicate. The Bubble Project shows how human interaction works in an unconventional way.

2. Do you experience specific benefits or ethical dilemmas getting involved with activities relating to these categories?

I do. Anything I do that involves other human beings and the expression of their opinions in the form of dialogues fills me with joy. To engage in interesting and fulfilling discussions is always “great for the soul”, by listening to each other we grow as humans. That’s why it’s so important to do something with the monologues (sometimes even two-way monologues that do not count as dialogues when none of the parts is able to listen), turn them into active dialogues. There’s really no reason why in the current course of the history we should be putting up with whatever someone tries to print on our brains. Maybe that depicts a too science fiction-esque image, but it isn’t as farfetched as we may think ;)

These sorts of experiences help me in creating my own opinion of the world and my environment. The Bubble Project has brought me closer to other people working on similar projects, in my country and the world, giving me the opportunity to learn more and more about what is now known as Social Design. Whether if it’s through stickers or stencils, or even through the spread of “good rumours”, anything that encourages dialogue and discussion of the way we live in our world draws my attention.

I’m glad I came across the Bubble Project 3 years ago and received such a great response from Ji Lee thanks to his work and his encouragement on translating and starting the Project here, on the other side of the world. Thanks to my involvement with the Bubble Project I realized that, as the premise on the Social Design Site reads: we cannot not change the world.

– Valentín Muro – Proyecto Burbuja

MATHEMATICS: CATASTROPHE THEORY, STRANGE ATTRACTORS, CHAOS

The following points are made by Nigel Calder (citation below):

1) Go out of Paris on the road towards Chartres and after 25 kilometers you will come to the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques at Bures-sur-Yvette. It occupies a quite small building surrounded by trees. Founded in 1958 in candid imitation of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, it enables half a dozen lifetime professors to interact with 30 or more visitors in pondering new concepts in mathematics and theoretical physics. A former president, Marcel Boiteux, called it “a monastery where deep-sown seeds germinate and grow to maturity at their own pace.”

2) A recurring theme for the institute at Bures has been complicated behavior. In the 21st century this extends to describing how biological molecules — nucleic acids and proteins — fold themselves to perform precise functions. The mathematical monks in earlier days directed their attention towards physical and engineering systems that can often perform in complicated and unpredictable ways.

3) Catastrophe theory was invented at Bures-sur-Yvette in 1968. In the branch of mathematics concerned with flexible shapes, called topology, Rene Thom found origami-like ways of picturing abrupt changes in a system, such as the fracture of a girder or the capsizing of a ship. Changes that were technically catastrophic could be benign, for instance in the brain’s rapid switch from sleeping to waking. As the modes of sudden change became more numerous, the greater the number of factors affecting a system.

4) Fascinated colleagues included Christopher Zeeman at Warwick, who became Thom’s chief publicist. He and others also set out to apply catastrophe theory to an endless range of topics. From shock waves and the evolution of species, to economic inflation and political revolution, it seemed that no field of natural or social science would fail to benefit from its insights.

5) Thom himself blew the whistle to stop the folderol. “Catastrophe theory is dead,” he pronounced in 1997. “For as soon as it became clear that the theory did not permit quantitative prediction, all good minds… decided it was of no value.”

6) In an age of self-aggrandizement, Thom’s dismissal of his own theory set a refreshing example to others. But the catastrophe that overtook catastrophe theory has another lesson. Mathematics stands in relation to the rest of science like an exotic bazaar, full of pretty things but most of them useless to a visitor. Descriptions of logical relationships between imagined entities create wonderful worlds that never were or will be.

7) Mathematical scientists have to find the small selection of theorems that may describe the real world. Many decades can elapse in some cases before a particular item turns out to be useful. Then it becomes a jewel beyond price. Recent examples are the mathematical descriptions of subatomic particles, and of the motions of pieces of the Earth’s crust that cause earthquakes.

8) Sometimes the customer can carry a piece of mathematics home, only to find that it looks nice on the sideboard but doesn’t actually do anything useful. This was the failure of catastrophe theory. Thom’s origami undoubtedly provided mathematical metaphors for sudden changes, but it was not capable of predicting them.

9) When the subject is predictability itself, the relationship of science and mathematics becomes subtler. The next innovation at the leafy institute at Bures came in 1971. David Ruelle, a young Belgian-born permanent professor, and Floris Takens visiting from Groningen, were studying turbulence. If you watch a fast-moving river, you’ll see eddies and swirls that appear, disappear and come back, yet are never quite the same twice.

10) For understanding this not-quite-predictable behavior in an abstract, mathematical way, Ruelle and Takens wanted pictures. They were not sure what they would look like, but they had a curious name for them: “strange attractors”. Within a few years, many scientists’ computers would be doodling strange attractors on their monitors and initiating the genre of mathematical science called “chaos theory”.

11) To understand what attractors are, and in what sense they might be strange, you need first to look back to the pictures of Henri Poincare (1854-1912). He was France’s top theorist at the end of the 19th century. Wanting to visualize changes in a system through time, without getting mired in the details, he came up with a brilliantly simple method.

12) Put a dot in the middle of a blank piece of paper. It represents an unchanging situation. Not necessarily a static one, to be sure, because Poincare was talking about dynamical systems, but something in a steady state. It might be, for example, a population where births and deaths are perfectly balanced. All of the busy drama of courtship, childbirth, disease, accident, murder and senescence is then summed up in a geometric point. And around it, like the empty canvas that taunts any artist, the rest of the paper is an abstract picture of all possible variations in the behavior of the system. Poincare called it “phase space”. You can set it to work by putting a second dot on the paper. Because it is not in the middle, the new dot represents an unstable condition. So it cannot stay put, but must evolve into a curved line wandering across the paper. The points through which it passes are a succession of other unstable situations in which the system finds itself, with the passage of time. In the case of a population, the track that it follows depends on changes in the birth rate and death rate.

13) Considering the generality of dynamic systems, Poincare found that the curve often evolved into a loop that caught its own tail and continued on, around and around. It is not an actual loop, but a mathematical impression of a complicated system that has settled down into an endlessly repetitive cycle. A high birth rate may in theory increase a population until starvation sets in. That boosts the death rate and reverses the process. When there’s plenty to eat again, the birth rate recovers — and so on, ad infinitum.

14) Poincare also realized that systems coming from different starting conditions could finish up on the same loop in phase space, as if attracted to it by a latent preference in the type of dynamic behavior. A hypothetical population might commence with any combination of low or high rates of birth and death, and still finish up in the oscillation mentioned. The loop representing such a favored outcome is called an “attractor”.

15) In many cases the ultimate attractor is not a loop but the central dot representing a steady state. This may mean a state of repose, as when friction brings the swirling liquid in a stirred teacup to rest, or it may be the steady-state population where the birth rate and death rate always match. Whether they are loops or dots, Poincare attractors are tidy and you can make predictions from them.

16) By a strange attractor, Ruelle and Takens meant an untidy one that would capture the essence of the not-quite-predictable. Unknown to them an American meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, had already drawn a strange attractor in 1963, unaware of what its name should be. In his example it looked like a figure of eight drawn by a child taking a pencil around and around the same figure many times, but not at all accurately. The loop did not coincide from one circuit to the next, and you could not predict exactly where it would go next time.

Projection of trajectory of Lorenz system in phase space with “canonical” values of parameters r=28, ? = 10, b = 8/3

17) When mathematicians woke up to this convergence of research in France and the USA, they proclaimed the advent of “chaos”. The strange attractor was its emblem. An irony is that Poincare himself had discovered chaos in the late 1880s, when he was shocked to find that the motions of the planets are not exactly predictable. But as he didn’t use an attention-grabbing name like chaos, or draw any pictures of strange attractors, the subject remained in obscurity for more than 80 years, nursed mainly by mathematicians in Russia.

18) Chaos in its contemporary mathematical sense acquired its name from James Yorke of Princeton, in a paper published in 1975. Assisting in the relaunch of the subject was Robert May, also at Princeton, who showed that a childishly simple mathematical equation could generate extremely complicated patterns of behavior. And in the same year, Mitchell Feigenbaum at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico discovered a magic number. This is delta, 4.669201…, and it keeps cropping up in chaos, as pi does in elementary geometry. Rhythmic variations can occur in chaotic systems, and then switch to a rhythm at twice the rate. The Feigenbaum number helps to define the change in circumstances — the speed of a stream for example — needed to provoke transitions from one rhythm to the next.

19) Here was evidence of latent orderliness that distinguishes certain kinds of erratic behavior from mere chance. “Chaos is not random: it is apparently random behavior resulting from precise rules,” explained lan Stewart of Warwick. “Chaos is a cryptic form of order.” During the next 20 years, the mathematical idea of chaos swept through science like a tidal wave. It was the smart new way of looking at everything from fluid dynamics to literary criticism. Yet by the end of the century the subject was losing some of its glamor.

20) Exhibit A, for anyone wanting to proclaim the importance of chaos, was the weather. Indeed it set the trend, with Lorenz’s unwitting discovery of the first strange attractor. That was a by-product of his experiments on weather forecasting by computer at the beginning of the 1960s. As an atmospheric scientist of mathematical bent at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lorenz used a very simple simulation of the atmosphere by numbers, and computed changes at a network of points.

21) He was startled to find that successive runs from the same starting point gave quite different weather predictions. Lorenz traced the reason. The starting points were not exactly the same. To launch a new calculation he was using rounded numbers from a previous calculation. For example, 654321 became 654000. He had assumed, wrongly, that such slight differences were inconsequential. After all, they corresponded to mere millimeters per second in the speed of the wind.

22) This was the “Butterfly Effect”. Lorenz’s computer told him that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil might stir up a tornado in Texas. A mild interpretation said that you would not be able to forecast next week’s weather very accurately because you couldn’t measure today’s weather with sufficient precision. But even if you could do so, and could lock up all the lepidoptera, the sterner version of the Butterfly Effect said that there was enough unpredictable turbulence in the smallest cloud to produce chance variations of a greater degree.

23) The dramatic inference was that the weather would do what it damn well pleased. It was inherently chaotic and unpredictable. The Butterfly Effect was a great comfort to meteorologists trying to use the primitive computers of the 1960s for long-range weather forecasts. “We certainly hadn’t been successful at doing that anyway,” Lorenz said, “and now we had an excuse.”

Adapted from: Nigel Calder: Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science. Oxford University Press 2003, p.133. More information at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198507925/scienceweek

Taken from ScienceWeek

I found this interesting read earlier this morning almost by chance on the RichardDawkins.net Twitter feed… I just finished reading it and although it doesn’t give the complete explanation about this so-called Agenticity it made me think different about certain ideas we have about some behaviors of beliefs.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=skeptic-agenticity

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns
in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

(Read on…)

[ Seen on RichardDawkins.net ]