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First in the new series of In Our Time, on The Cell. Steve Jones as one of the panel of three enthusiasts talking about what they know best. Origins of life, via Schroedinger to RNA, DNA, membranes, mitochondria and chloroplasts and so forth on what cells are, how they came to be and how they work.

Early on, to illustrate the proportion of human cells to bacterial cells in a human body, Steve suggests; think of one leg filled-up to just below the knee with human cells – the rest is bacteria.

[Post note ; unconnected to this programme, but just now – two weeks later – I’m reading Stuart Kaufman’s “Reinventing the Sacred” and it majors on the wonders of cell complexity – how we have become hooked on the digital information simplicity of DNA/RNA/Genes /G/A/C/T/U et al and completely overlook the other self-organizing wonders of life in both evolution and individual ontogeny.]

Take a hint from Du Pont. (From Futility Closet with hat tip to BifRiv)

Interesting that the customer service contacts of these food companies all seem to use Google and Wikipedia to answer customer questions about sources and processes of their products.

Not sure we ever got to the “bottom” (beyond speculation in the broadcast material) of how the LGG Probiotic bacteria really are originally sourced, but no surprise they are factory cultured in production quantities thereafter.

The grapefruit processing is an eye-opener – not the blanching and manual peeling, but the hydrochloric acid and caustic soda treatments. Must use a lot of water too to wash away the chlorine / chloride by-products – and what about the natural citric acid, if processed to neutralisation?

None-too incisive journalism, but interesting first in a new series, with James and Martin of Brewdog as well as Kate Quilton and Matt Tebbutt.

Interesting to hear new Green Party leader Natalie Bennett responding do the standard scientistic questions from the Pod Mob. Knows the issues and handled them pretty well for the quick fire Q&A format – certainly didn’t dodge any. Sarah Palin with brains (and an Oz accent?) maybe.

The rest of the Pod is indeed deluded.

Really grown on me from this year’s “This is PiL” release. I don’t think I even mentioned it making any particular impression when I listed the setlist from Newcastle ? (Has the making of a future crowd-pleaser, I said in fact.)

When I try to explain to people why PiL are so worth seeing, some cannot get their minds beyond “that punk Johnny Rotten” – some albatross. Whilst John may now be a national treasure, the English eccentric, light relief on Question Time, what is beyond doubt is that John, Lu, Scott and Bruce are a top drawer band with top quality material, both lyrically / subject matter-wise and musically. Having seen this “best PiL ever” three times now I can also report that the live experience is second to none, and it’s not just the music, it’s the respect. John demands a little respect from his audience but it’s repaid in spades – the band returns passion and genuine appreciation for an audience that turns out to see them.

The setlist on Monday at the O2 Academy in Newcastle [Aug 16, 2012] had five numbers from the latest “This is PiL” album amongst the tried and tested mix of crowd-pleasers and personal favourites. (This is Not a Love Song, Deeper Water, Albatross, Reggie Song, Disappointed, Warrior, Flowers of Romance, Lollipop Opera, Death Disco, Bags / Chant and Religion, with Out of the Woods, One Drop, Rise and Open Up as the encores.)

The order seems to vary from gig to gig, but the collection seems to have crystallised around the set first aired in April 2012 at Heaven. Out of the Woods and One Drop have the makings of future crowd favourites, Reggie Song fits the set like a glove, and Warrior, Religion and Open Up remain magnificent; the irresistible, pile-driven arrangements so tight.

Can you resist dancing and singing along to these ?
Find out for yourself. You’d be mad not to catch them live on this tour.

Wonder if upcoming trips to US might provide an opportunity to catch them there ?

[PS One of the other reviewers that night mentioned the omission of Public Image itself from the set list. I found that weird too. It’s the blistering opening track on the 2011 Isle of Wight – Live Album – smashing through the lousy sound system feedback problems in the opening numbers – maybe what actually fried the monitor mixer – stunning, literally. It says something about PiL’s depth of material when they can leave out a number like this and still wow their audience.]

An excellent, short (10m), animation of a lecture by Iain McGilchrist.

(Hat tip to David Morey on Facebook for the link.)

Blogged several references to reading McGilchrist’s “The Master and his Emissary” but never wrote a complete review in one post – It so knocked me out, it led me into other connected readings immediately. The lecture animation covers the essential beauty of his view. The halves of the brain have forgotten who’s in charge – neither. The right brain appreciates why it needs to collaborate with the left, but the left has forgotten why it needs the right. And this is a “western” mental illness.

Or, in McGilchrist’s words (after Einstein)

We honour the servant / emissary (rational mind)
but have forgotten the gift / master (intuitive mind).

Distinct but also vitally important point – the interconnection between the two (the corpus callosum under control of the frontal lobes) is inhibitive – permissive management control – that preserves the necessary distance between the two halves. [Very consistent with the view of free-will actually being free-wont.] There is actually more in the book than the lecture too, naturally.

[Post Note – 4th March 2013 – see also this Dr. Dave NPT Interview with Iain McGilchrist. Also hat-tip to David Morey. Biggest new point discussed – ~35:30 – is the gender differences !!! Women have “broader” corpus-callosum structures than men, so the connection / inhibition balance is significantly different – because women have different evolutionary survival needs from men – women are more robust and less expendable than riskier men. Don’t recall reading that in the book? The reference to Julian Janes too “Breakdown of the Bi-Cameral Mind” – no, but yes – not so much breakdown or loss of the divided brain, more an exaggeration of the division, coupled with an increasing emphasis on using the left, and to ignore the “voices of the gods” coming from the right. A breakdown of the optimal, balanced and enlightened functioning of the increasingly bi-cameral mind. Characterised as behaviour you’d only expect to see in autism – another recurring theme. Interesting Dr Dave also admits to being “blown away” by McGilchrist’s work too – so “knocked-out” I said. Full 55 mins interview plus additional 20 mins discussion by Dr Dave and commenters. Really, really good stuff.]

[Post Note – that lecture includes my whole agenda – scary – HOW DO WE “join up the dots” between this thinking and the narrow “simplisticated” view that objective rationality is everything – rather than the definition of its own limitations. Say, in the naive but very public – faith vs science wars, the global economic & environmental “crises”, art and science funding, education, education, education, or crime & morality, responsibility & punishment debates. Some dots worth joining: Pirsig’s Quality before Objects, Nick Maxwell’s Scientific Neurosis, Alan Rayner’s Natural Inclusion, Iain McGlichrist’s Master and Emissary, Jill Bolte-Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, Dave Snowden’s Cynefin Framework, Dr. James Willis’ Scylla and Charybdis, Daniel Wegner’s Free Will as Free Won’t, Mary Parker-Follet’s Integration not Compromise – will do for now – ignoring many of the more explicitly philosophical and metaphysical resources.]

Dave Gurteen has a stream of daily quotes on KM subjects, and this one from Dave Snowden always catches my eye when it comes round.

“The way we know
is not the way
we report what we know.”
Dave Snowden

That is so true, and pretty fundamental to the Psybertron agenda “What, why and how do we know?” The way we know things is invariably complex, but we inevitably express it (or are expected to communicate it) in rational objective terms.

BBC Magazine piece on the recent US poll on religious belief comprising (mainly) two comments by religious conservative Ron Dreher and moderate atheist David Dickerson.

I’m constantly baffled that sexual orientation and marriage is a central issue on both sides – surely it takes all sorts, and normal is a numbers game that needn’t be a judgement, just fact that “abnormal” has to be a minority by definition. Fidelity to norms – conservatism – is as fundamental to evolution as the fecundity of new opportunities. Just not even contentious. More to the point, surely we have bigger moral fish to fry?

Some interesting interpretations of the numbers – now and in the direction of youth becoming the future population. Good to see the atheist pointing out that the new atheist / four horseman effect is probably minimal and not representative of majority atheist positions – hear hear.

What’s more, as a person who has read Harris and Dawkins�”who both treat saying grace at dinner as if it were morally adjacent to slapping Galileo�”you can hardly claim that the New Atheists have mounted an unusually empathetic charm offensive. I give them credit for a 1% atheism bump, max. Maybe two.

Absolutely. My mantra – constant fighting “against” doesn’t win friends and influence people – evolving constructive long-lasting added-value.

It was only when three of my friends came out of the closet in one month that I was forced to look at the consequences of my theology. It was “The Literal Bible As I Understood It v My Friends”, and my friends won. Historically, friends always win.

Or as I say “What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?”

(The source of the survey is David Kinnaman’s book “unChristian“.)

[Post Note :]

Woodrow Wilson (1919)
“Friendship is the only cement that will ever hold the world together.”
“We are citizens of the world. The tragedy is that we do not know this.”

Paul Ryan genuinely fell out of love with Rand …. and that comes with age.

“Atlas Shrugged was a very exciting book to read when you’re young but then you grow up …. she massages the egos of juveniles.”

Same message as the last mention.

Disappointed in finishing Krauss’ “A Universe From Nothing”. He makes some good points (see previous post) but nothing entirely new – quantum fluctuations, big bang, matter asymmetry, inflation, flatness, cosmological constant, CMBR distribution – and most of the newer stuff is very speculative. If this is new to you then he is a strongly recommended read. (An updated Charlesworth & Gribben’s 1990 “Cartoon History of Time” for me; it’s proven hard to beat despite the amount of reading since.) He is a witty read, a cosmologist eyeing the funding of particle physics:

Particle physicists are way ahead of cosmologists. Cosmology has produced only one totally mysterious quantity: the energy of empty space about which we understand virtually nothing. However particle physics has not understood many more quantities for far longer!

The fact that a credible scientist takes anthropic indications seriously without dismissing them as mere truisms is a major leap forward. Of course as a good scientist, he’s always looking for the plausible speculations that may suggest or be suggested by empirical tests, however indirect, and obviously at these levels “evidence” is a hugely accumulative, constructed concept with the occasional empirical landmark. But, the bad taste is that the agenda is so clearly intentional and directed towards the anti-God agenda. Totally unnecessarily IMHO. The breathless afterword and sleeve notes from Dawkins, Harris and more compound the impression. Perhaps Larry is angling to be the 5th horseman, to replace Hitchens who died before he could write a foreward. Even philosopher Anthony Grayling describes it as

” … a triumph of physics over metaphysics (and theology) … “

Only Martin Rees (the “quisling” according to Dawkins, remember) is more neutral

” … deeply fascinating speculations … “

Ultimately, despite constantly saying he is talking about something from literally nothing, his nothing is a field of energy potential, a “quantum haze” – neutral zero energy “essentially”, as he keeps qualifying it, with balancing quanta and anti-quanta popping in and out of existence, blurred to “essentially nothing” within quantum time-scales. This “nothing” is inherently unstable, hence the existence of something other than this nothing. Whilst he liberally quotes heroes of science Feynman (his) and Bronowski (mine) his philosophy doesn’t progress beyond Plato and Aristotle. His faith (which I share) that science will constantly push back the boundary of where the first cause within physics can be described, however speculatively, is not a reason to deny the existence of the literally nothing boundary as a logical, metaphysical starting point. In fact he is effectively saying, it’s just not an interesting stance to take – it doesn’t tell you very much. True. In fact that’s a large part of my agenda, that there is little to argue about here. It’s just not contentious. So why turn it into an argument …. against …. anything else?

The real debate is what it means for a “universe” to “start” and what kind of universe you’re talking about, and the core of this question is how you respond to the anthropic “fine-tuning” in this universe. (That or radically non-intuitive models of causation and time.) If we’re talking totally disconnected (zero-inter-communicating) multiverses, where each may have totally independent physical laws, constants and boundary conditions – then we’re in the realms of pure metaphysical speculation as far as this universe is concerned. We just happen to be in the universe we are in, which happens to be the one in which we can come to exist, and the others just provide us with the convenient statistical population. (It still leaves first cause unanswered or any mechanisms outside any one universe that explains / causes the individual universes.) If we’re talking causally connected universes as part of one super-multiverse with common physical laws with constants and boundary conditions set by historical causality, then we have a meaningful physics story as to how universes arise each with their particular properties. (Still no first cause of course, which is why this is a separate non-science question.) This is Peter Rowlands stance in “From Zero to Infinity”

Again, we must reject the idea that a single cosmic creation event has structured the laws of physics in a particular way, and that they could have been different in different circumstances. The idea could, in principle, be true, but then we would have no abstract subject of physics, no generality, no absolute mathematics, and no meaningful concept of conservation, the process which makes physics universal. The very idea that we could discover a unified theory of physics is impossible in such a context. Physics is fractured in the very act of creation. In addition, such explanations have the habit of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. We simply refer difficulties to special conditions that occurred in the ‘early universe’, and deprive ourselves of understanding fundamental physical phenomena which ought to be valid at all places in all epochs.

[Update April 2014]

Taking a snip from the NYT review of Krauss book (linked by Rick in the comment below) confirms the view that not only is something from literally nothing a preposterous claim for science, but the act of writing the book, and acquiring hyperbolic endorsements from fellow horsemen simply exposes how utterly puerile their Science vs God agenda really is.

… it seems like a pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, …. to think that all that gets offered to us now, by guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy accusation that religion is, I don’t know, dumb.

Agreed. Dumb and dumber. The pity as I said is, that as a read in terms of popularising bleeding edge physics it does have some excellent content and style, marred by disingenuous claims, a puerile publishing agenda and a denial of the actual (scientific) questions raised.

[Post Note 2018: A 2012 Piece by Sean Carroll summarising the “kerfuffle” around criticisms of Krauss here. Starts from the same NYT review mentioned here.]