insanities

I guess this kind of belongs in my other blog (it's kind of personal for this one), but it's crazy. This weekend two couples from my church got engaged (one girl younger than me), and my best friend from childhood. I don't know what's happening to the world. It makes me miss my boyfriend a lot, but more than that it makes me think people have truly lost their minds. We're so young! Us Mormons... marrying like rabbits. Wait, that doesn't make sense. Hmm...

I think I will just have to give up on medical school and go live on the streets in a cardboard box. So much for trying to help the people that live on the streets in cardboard boxes. If only I didn't panic whenever I saw a chemistry problem. Biology, verbal reasoning, and writing are all up to par. Physics is iffy, but I think I can get it there with some studying. Chemistry... chemistry and global poverty are the bane of my existence.

some folks, they never learn

This is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing I've seen in months. If I've claimed that before, I was lying. Here it is.
I was watching television with my father the other night when a commercial for these came on, and I must say I was appalled, especially by the woman that said, "now I can even smoke around my kids without giving them any secondhand smoke." Sure, it's important not to blow smoke in your kids' lungs. I agree. It's a step up. But how about providing a positive image? How about not smoking around your kids at all simply because it shows them that smoking isn't cool or normal, not something that should be part of their daily lives?

I don't get our society sometimes. If you're going to kill yourself, fine, do it with rolled up paper. Don't bother with electronics. Obviously you're not up with the era if you're smoking anyway because cigarettes do nothing but kill you quickly.

That's why I just don't get it when I see kids smoking at MIT. I mean, your IQ is probably above 140. Why are you coating your lungs in tar?

And Merry Christmas, by the way.

you know things are bad when...

1. you drop your lemonade in the dining hall and it shatters everywhere. as you go to clean it up in front of about forty (no exaggeration) gaping, stressed college kids, you realize your flip-flops have mu (coefficient of friction) of zero, and you fall on your butt in the pool of lemonade, emerging dripping in the sticky substance. Someone comes running with a broom and tries to shoo off the crowd by saying, "move on, move on, nothing to see here!" which is something we said in like second grade when someone fell off the jungle gym and scraped his knee. (true story of my evening.)

2. you forget to include the hallogen in the reagents for your alpha hallogenation reaction. (on the last test i forgot the reducing agent on my acylation reduction reaction. sad...)

4. the farther i get in my education, the more i realize that my most profound handicap is my inability to count in stressful situations.

after sleeping for three days, i've finally caffeinated myself enough to *start* studying for my chem test in nine hours.

i HATE finals. they always lower my grades significantly because i'm too burned out to push through it.

finals/stranger loops

Suppose you one day think about the statement, "only fools argue with fools."

there's some kind of strange loop in that.

i need to think about it

(inspired by my fortune in my fortune cookie: "never argue with fools." as i decided before i opened it that it was going to predict my success in finals this week, it was a little hard to interpret it. i interpret it as follows: the graders of my tests need not take any points off. it doesn't pay to argue with fools :-) ).

random connection

So I am probably slightly off on everything I'm about to say, but at least it's interesting, and I'm a bad enough scientist to say that's what matters:

1. So first off, I think that vast clumps of matter these days (galaxies in the like) are from quantum fluctuations that were massively stretched by inflation in the inflationary theory

2. Information coding in the hippocampus from the dentate gyrus to CA3 (and vice versa) is very sparse. The dentate gyrus (I think... if I were actually studying and not philosphizing maybe I would know)is responsible for pattern separation, or taking subtle differences in pattern and inflating them in the neural circuitry long enough for the brain to discern differences (ie did you park in row E or row F in the thirty-row parking lot?).

3. My idea: what inflation does to quantum fluctuations in the early universe (separates them into discernible fluctuations), the dentate gyrus does to information from CA3 in the hippocampus.

It's just an analogy, but it's at least more interesting than the enolization reactions I am vainly struggling to re-memorize.

Come on guys

Come on, Uganda. You're supposed to be one of the more progressive countries in Africa (never mind the LRA of course). This isn't the way to fight AIDS. Or do anything really.

a rose by any other name

I don't know why, but I was thinking about beauty today. What prompted it was looking at some of the images of nebulae etc, data translated from non-visual wavelengths to visual light by some (probably linear given that wavelength is a linear scale, isn't it?) transformation. Anyway, it got me thinking.

Questions:
1. I find these images of the nebulae etc beautiful. But they aren't something I or anyone can ever see, because they were just produced by a mathematical transformation of a bunch of numbers recorded by light-sensitive instruments. They aren't originally in the visual spectrum at all.
What is it that I find beautiful about these pictures: the visual representation, the underlying relationships that create the mathematical form of the data?

2. Say that someone took the most beautiful math in the world and used a transformational process to come up with numbers that could be translated into the auditory spectrum.
If the music sounded hideous, would you still listen to it? Would it be beautiful? What about if it was beautiful music? What would make it beautiful: the beauty of the underlying mathematics, or the beauty of the auditory representation, or the beauty of the idea of the 'artist'/'mathematician' who carried out the transformation?

3. Take for example the IUPAC pictures I enjoy making (see my last post which is wrong by the way; it should be 2-butanol not 3-butanol).
Are they beautiful? (I think they are.) What makes them beautiful? Is it the representation you see when you draw out the structures? The underlying IUPAC formula? The creativity of using chemical reactions to draw?

4. What about abstract art. For instance there's this painting I like at the MFA. The painting isn't that great, but it's supposed to be a painting of life, from birth to death.
Does knowing the artist's interpretation of the painting make it more beautiful? Does having your own interesting subjective interpretation of the painting make it beautiful, or does it have to be intentional from the artist? Could an ugly painting be beautiful if it is based on an interesting idea?

It seems there are instances of purely aesthetic beauty (ie I am obsessed with beautiful, harmonious chord transitions), which is subjective but mostly agreed upon. But these examples I've given are I think way more subjective interpretations of beauty. For me, I have a gut feeling for all of them, but it may be different from yours. In these examples I've given, you have to know more than the superficial or the aesthetic to fully grasp the situation (ie you have to know the music is from beautiful math, the pictures are from chemical reactions, the art is based on such and such idea, etc). My best friend in high school argued with me about this a lot. I found that learning more about the world and the causation between things made it more beautiful to me (knowing cosmology basics has made the universe infinitely beautiful to me). My friend is a violin performance major. An example of our disagreement is that I like Mahler even though he's not particularly pretty because the psychology behind his music is very interesting, while she likes Mendelssohn because he wrote pretty music. Another example is that I find music amazing because it is just one physical manifestation of a more ubiquitous phenomenon: wave vibrations, harmonics, etc. But if I tried to tell her about that, she'd get pissed off at me and tell me I was ruining it for her. It seemed I could at least see her aesthetic point of view (like with my chord transitions), but knowing the science/story behind things didn't enhance her perception of beauty at all. It was mostly face-value.

Just some stuff to think about. Now I really must go back to reading about the cosmic microwave background... test tomorrow on the math of the radiation dominated era of our universe and nucleosynthesis as well as the incorporation of the vacuum energy/cosmological constant.

Interesting ideas for the day:
1. I think it's bumblebees or something that can actual see in infrared. Trying to imagine seeing in infrared (or seeing another color) is like thinking about having multiple dimensions of time and three spacial dimensions, or a third sex. It doesn't mesh well. There are just these mental blockades. What I find is interesting is that the principles that go into these things are all quite conceivable; it's just the result that we can't seem to fathom.

2. To God (or a hypothetical being capable of observing our universe from another dimension of sorts), the universe must look mostly like a fractal. It's almost entirely homogeneous and isotropic (non-uniformities arising from quantum fluctuations and inflation). Thus, given that God is sufficiently far away from everything, or in another dimension or something, our spacial universe looks like a ?3? dimensional fractal of nested spheres (orbits swept out overtime). Planets revolve around stars, stars revolve around galaxy centers, and it's all homogeneous so it has to look the same the closer and farther you look (until you get to a distance small enough to show anistropies etc). Kind of a pretty idea. Probably wrong, but interesting.

man in top hat

1,3 dimethyl-3-butanol

mysticism

You know, I am all for freedom and diversity of religion, but there comes a point to which it just no longer works, for instance these African witch doctors that screw people over and make them kill other people and fuel wars like the LRC thing I was talking about. I bring this up again because of this article, on CNN today.

I don't have time to write about it now, but it just makes me mad.

landfills, virtual water

I read in a magazine that the third biggest element of landfills is wasted food.

That's first of all ridiculous because there are people starving while food is rotting away in landfills. That's second of all ridiculous because food has a high virtual water content (ie water that goes into producing it), and we're going to run out of fresh water unless we reallocate resources.

It would also help if people in affluent countries quit eating so much meat, or became largely vegetarian (plug for vegetarianism). It seems inevitable that our world will run out of resources. But at least we can try to make it less painless for the people that are alive right now.

Anyway, landfills should *not* contain so much food. Don't waste food! I'm a college student. This is ingrained in my neocortex.

there are just some things i hope i never understand about the world

I'm reading a book right now by Peter Eichstaedt about child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda (mainly there anyway). This was after reading a book last year about the genocide in Rwanda. And while these kinds of atrocities may terrify me less than psychopathic killers, they disgust me more.

The book is of course just a long saga of kids getting kidnapped and forced to kill people for... no reason really. I mean, a long time ago there was a reason for the LRA, but it seems like these days the reason is just a tradition of warfare.

I don't know. It disgusts me that a man could give a boy a gun and tell him to shoot another little kid, tell him if he doesn't he'll be shot, and really mean it, really do it, or rape a little girl out of selfish sexual needs. It disgusts me that people in Rwanda could kill their neighbors for no reason other than ancient tribal feudalism ingrained by colonialists. It disgusts me that people in Germany could turn on the gas chambers and throw the bodies in the trenches (for what... religion? The Aryan race? Anti-semitic notions?). But it disgusts me more than there could be calculating men behind all of these things who know exactly what they're doing and do it anyway. From Hitler, Kony on down, all of those men (and women) that could make the decisions that they made in cold blood... that's one part of humanity that I pray I'll never understand.

long, hastily (and probably poorly) written paper about string theory

String Theory: Overview, Main Characteristics, and Problems

While the standard model paints a picture of particle constituents as isolated points in space, string theory views particles as composed of strings that occupy roughly a Planck length in one dimension. String theory posits that the properties of the particles we observe are bestowed by the different vibrational frequencies of these strings. For instance, lighter particles are composed of strings with fewer oscillations. String theory also explains constraints on particle masses: the number of possible heavy particles is limited by upper limits on vibrational frequency due to high string tension. Given this high string tension, unique particles in string theory are predicted to be too heavy to be detected in current particle accelerators, although the reopening of the LHC poses some hope for detection. String theory predicts both open and closed strings, although the nature of the parameter differs between the different subtypes of the theory. The essential sameness of the constituents of all matter allows string theory to unify all of the disparate particles in the standard model, and unlike the standard model, it provides reasons for the properties of those particles. Thus string theory claims to unify all forces at high energy levels, a feat required for a grand unified theory that can explain the universe from its more homogeneous origin.

The history of string theory has been fraught by both great excitements and great disappointments. It commenced in 1968 when the Italian physicist Gabriele Veneziano realized the Euler beta function described strongly interacting particles. In 1970, physicists Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, Holger Nielson of the Niels Bohr institute, and Leonar Susskin of Stanford refined Veneziano’s idea by announcing that if matter were made up of tiny vibrating strings, it could be described by the Euler beta function. This original version of string theory was specific to bosons, and it predicted a vibrational frequency corresponding to a particle dubbed the tachyon. The tachyon had a negative mass and thus traveled faster than the speed of light. Because this didn’t mesh well with special relativity, it was a great problem with the theory. Physicists Ramond, Neveu, and Schwarz solved this problem by suggesting that the strings were supersymmetric, or containing particle pairs that differed by a spin of ½. This allowed the theory to account for fermions, particles with a spin of ½. John Schwarz and Joel Schenk discovered in 1974 that the modified model also predicted a particle with a spin of 2 whose vibrational properties were consistent with a graviton, the force-carrying particle associated with gravity. This discovery made string theory a candidate for the unification of relativity and quantum theory. It was also discovered that supersymmetry only made mathematical sense (producing non-negative probabilities) in ten dimensions. Physicists Gross, Harvey, and Martinec further improved the theory with the idea of the heterotic superstring, a chiral theory that treated different wave directions differently and yielded more predictions. However, the theory only retained its chirality if the six non-visible dimensions were not curled up as supposed, an existent theory of manifold dimensions that dated back to Kaluza in the early 20th century. So in 1985 Philip Candelas, Gary Horowitz, Andy Strominger, and Edward Witten suggested that the dimensions are actually curled up in Calabi-Yau manifolds, more complicated six-dimensional structures. This first superstring revolution occurred from 1984 to 1986. The revolution was characterized by the exciting emergence of the standard model from string theory. However, the approximation methods used to complete the immensely complicated mathematics of the theory soon became insufficient. 1995 showed the beginning of the second superstring revolution, or rather the era of M-theory/brane-theory, an idea suggested by Edward Witten as a means to unite the differing string theories through dualism. Modern research in string theory consists in elucidating the implications of M-theory.

One of the techniques used to make string theory consistent is super symmetry. Super symmetry is the idea that particles come in different spins, i.e. that for each vibrational frequency there are two particles with spins differing by ½. Since no known particles fit the characteristics of these predicted particles, there must be as-yet unobserved super-symmetric partners to all observed particles. Super symmetry is suggested by cancellations that occur in the quantum mechanical contributions of fermions and bosons. These cancellations can be explained by adjusting parameters in the standard model, but they can be more cleanly explained by super symmetry. Super symmetry can also modify the strength of forces at small distances, allowing for unification between these forces, an ever-present goal of physics. Super symmetry seems to bring physics closer to the tantalizing goal of unification. The more compelling reasons for the implication of super symmetry, however, were already briefly mentioned: super symmetry allows for spin ½ particles (by predicting pairs of particles that differ by spin ½), and it also eliminates the prediction of the tachyon. Thus there are compelling arguments for super symmetry both outside of and within string theory.

Another important characteristic of string theory is the requirement for extra dimensions. Extra dimensions within string theory allow for more directions of vibration necessary for the diversity of predicted particles. It also contributes to symmetry by making a choice of coordinates on the world sheet swept out by the string through time equivalent to any other choice. Additionally, without extra dimensions, string theory math would yield negative probabilities. The idea of extra dimensions began with Kaluza and Klein in 1919. They suggested a tiny, curled dimension, or manifold, in addition to the three spatial dimensions and the time dimension. Additional modifications of this theory use spheres or the donut-shaped torus for the manifolds. The specific geometry of these manifolds predicts the properties of particles in string theory. When the general Kaluza-Klein model didn’t fit with the chirality of the heterotic string or the properties of observed particles, Calabi-yau spaces were suggested. Calabi-yau manifolds are six-dimensional shapes whose physical properties yield the properties of the particles that we observe. Thus extra dimensions were necessary in string theory to explain the properties of our universe and make the string theory mathematics consistent.

Despite all of the predictions and promises of string theory, it also contains a lot of problems. Perhaps the largest problem is that there are many worlds consistent with string theory, and the actual constants that arise in our universe are arbitrary within the theory. String theory gives us a landscape of possibilities rather than predicting our exact universe. This can be countered with the anthropic principle, the idea that there are other worlds but we just happen to be in this one, but that is a weak scientific argument with little explanatory power. Additionally, there are multiple ways of incorporating super symmetry into string theory, partially creating the different subtypes of the theory. There is also the issue that super symmetry itself is not observed in our low-energy universe, but if it is considered broken, then string theory predicts the cosmological constant inaccurately (predicting that it is non-positive when it is experimentally shown to be positive). Along the same lines, there are many possible parameters for the Calabi-yau spaces, and the selection of these parameters also seems arbitrary. The number of dimensions is also chosen in order to make the theory consistent rather than for any physical reason. Another problem is that string theory doesn’t explain the vacuum energy that accounts for the slow acceleration of space. It also doesn’t predict dark energy, discovered in 1998. Finally, it lacks a method of empirical proof, although there is some putative evidence that could arise at LHC.

The modern improvement upon string theory is brane theory, the subject of the second revolution. Brane theory adds an extra dimension, making a total of eleven dimensions, and allows for both the existence of two-dimensional membranes of all shapes and sizes as well as one-dimensional strings which are attached to the membranes. Gauge bosons and fermions are the result of open strings (both ends attached to the membrane), so they are confined to the brane, but gravitons are the result of closed strings, so they can travel between branes within the dimensions (strings stretch between branes). The reason brane theory was so exciting was that it proposed dualities that unified the subtypes of string theory. First, there is a duality of strongly interacting 10-dimensional superstring theory and weakly interacting brane theory, meaning it is the same theory with different descriptions. This duality allows calculations made within one theory to apply to the other theory. The different subtypes of 10-dimensional string theory are also connected by dualism. One type of dualism is S duality, which is a symmetry between the strong and weak coupling regimes. Some of the types of string theories are related by S duality. T duality occurs when swapping momentum modes with strong interactions yields equivalent states. Some of the types of string theory are related by T duality. The discovery of these relations between the subtypes of string theory and between string theory and brane-theory show that all of these theories are only superficially different; they are actually equivalent theories.

Although string theory has a fascinating history and promises to produce a feasible unified theory of gravity, it contains many problems that have caused modern physicists to abandon the effort in lieu of more contemporarily promising alternatives such as loop quantum gravity. Despite its shortcomings, however, string theory, and its consummation M-theory, has allowed for great advancements in the field of theoretical physics and seems likely to offer more in the future.


Works Consulted
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage, 2000. Print.
Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Vintage, 2005. Print.
Randall, Lisa. Warped Passages Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Print.
Smolin, Lee. The Trouble With Physics The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. New York: Mariner Books, 2007. Print.
Stephen, Webb,. Out of this world colliding universes, branes, strings, and other wild ideas of modern physics. New York: Copernicus Books in association with Praxis, 2004. Print.

scientific spiritualism

We were infinite once, I think.

Because all of the particles inside of us were around in the form of radiation energy right after the big bang (conservation of energy/mass gives us that much), and back when the energy of the particles inside of us was much less than the temperature of the universe times the boltzmann constant, our particles behaved like massless particles and contributed to the cosmic background radiation.

At that point I think that the mass of the particles probably still made the time dilation non-finite, but you could at least think of the interactions of those particles forming energy in the form of photons, and photons have infinite time dilation due to zero rest mass.

So at one point, even if only abstractly, the things inside of us were infinite.

hey NASA, it's your birthday...

Without making myself sound a little bit too geeky, I must inform you that this discovery of water on the moon is the realization of my childhood dreams. I was very, very into space when I was a kid (dead set on being an astronomer after I realized my eyes etc weren't quite up to par to be an astronaut), and I was especially interested in water on the moon. We would get out the telescope (my father and I), and look at the craters, and talk about all of the most recent articles and discoveries.

This is SO amazing. Nobody in the general public is going to appreciate how amazing it is.

As for me, having water discovered on the moon *and* the LHC up and running again all in the same week makes me feel like it's my birthday six months early. :-)

yay

LHC is up and running! (For the moment at least.) I know I wasn't the only person who got really excited about it last year only to have it break down nine days after opening. Hopefully this time's for real. It seems like every time I read about some far-out theoretical physics idea, it says, "Well, we'll have to wait for the LHC for proof." So a lot of stuff is on the line right now, and I'm excited, the Higgs boson of course being one of the more popular items.

Okay I don't have time to write right now, I have to go get my laundry and continue plodding through my neuroscience studying, but I just thought I'd take a moment to celebrate.

black holes always liven things up

So in a really brief summary for any reader as confused as I am about astrophysics at the moment: The Schartzchild metric is metric derived from general relativity to describe objects falling radially into black holes. I won't try to write it here because it involves a lot of symbols that won't mean anything unless I spend an hour explaining them, and I'm sure it's on good old Wikipedia. So anyway, you can plug the coefficients of the Schartzchild metric into the general equation for a geodesic (describing the shortest path between two points in curved/non-Euclidean space), which is this unpleasant monstrous equation summed over multiple partial derivatives (but which thankfully simplifies for black holes because objects only move radially and not in the other spherical directions so the derivatives in those directions vanish). Anyway, so you can plug all this junk in (well theoretically you could; I'm not very good at it yet, which is unfortunate given our exam next Thursday). Once you do this you can write an equation for conservation of energy, and you can solve for the proper time, or the time measured by the falling object. This proper time is a defined equation that has its final value when the object falls completely into the black hole.

However, the interesting point of all of this math mumbo jumbo I'm talking about is that there are singularities in the coordinate time, or the time measured by things beyond the Schartzchild radius of the black hole. You get singularities because the integral used to solve for time has (r-Rs) in the denominator, where Rs is the Schwartzchild radius and r is the perceived radius of the falling object. Thus when r reaches Rs, you get the observer as seeing the object falling for infinite time.

Okay, while that is cool, that's not my main point here. My main point is that it's kind of sad actually to learn about this math. I read about this effect first when I was in sixth grade or so (I wasn't quite your normal sixth grader, I think, though I really tried for a while to appear dumb and wore way too much makeup). And I think the reason I really liked it, and all of the other astrophysics stuff I read from the age of eight onwards, was that it was, well trippy. I heard someone talking in the lounge at my dorm the other day. He said string theory sounded like someone on acid. He imitated the person by saying "what if everything is made of little tiny strings... woah" and the way he said it really did make it sound a bit like one of those things that people on LSD think are brilliant that everyone else thinks are crazy. And I think that's always why I've liked astrophysics, because it was so out there, because it bended my thoughts at every turn.

And it turns out that while I do like actually learning the math for these things that have amazed me for over half my life, in a way it's kind of sad. I'm the kind of person that would rather think about things that actually do the experiment, which I think differentiates me at this school (except maybe all the math majors are like that, but they're too far gone I think in their topologies). When I actually have to do the math (besides feeling upset at having to face my woeful failures in basic algebra), I feel like I'm kind of losing something, the clarity of the acid trip maybe, the "woah, dude, that's gnarly" aspect of it all.

So it's nice I guess to think that the reason the proper time and the coordinate time are different at the vanguard of the black hole is an integral denominator approaching zero, but it's not quite as nice as thinking that it's some crazy bent up quality of time itself that I can make up in my head because I don't know enough to make realistic predictions. I like my creative astrophysics ideas. I love the ideas a lot. It's just not quite so fun when I have to calculate derivatives.

Anyway, it doesn't matter I suppose because in the end I chose what I was best at (biology) and abandoned what interested me most in that acid-trip way. And while I was sad for a while, I don't regret it at all now. Because I can always sit around in my living room thinking about things stretching in black holes, but I can't really think about the psychedelic awesomeness of AMPA receptor endocytosis during depotentiation, and that's something I actually enjoy figuring out in a lab. So I think I'm doing the right thing.

But seriously, tiny vibrating strings whose curled-up radius determines the properties of the particles we actually "see" (in cloud chambers anyway)?

Gnarly, dude.

alan guth's sense of humor

In the frame of the Earth, all the objects (the elevator, the man, and the
groceries) are accelerating downward under the force of gravity. But in the frame
of the elevator, everything appears weightless. (Well, all is weightless until the big
crunch occurs in the building’s basement — but remember, this in only a thought
experiment. No living creatures were harmed in the writing of this paragraph.) -From Alan Guth's lecture notes

While I am currently hopelessly confused at deriving metrics for non-Euclidean spaces obeying general relativity, at least I get thrown a bone every once in a while. Don't worry! Nobody was hurt! They repeat this elevator thought experiment in every class involving general relativity in the universe, I think. But nobody was ever harmed!

:-P

(later note- found another one):
One further simplification is known as the Einstein summation
convention. This is no doubt Einstein’s most important contribution to ecology,
saving barrels of ink and tons of paper each year. The convention stipulates that
whenever an index is repeated, it is automatically summed over the standard range.

Haha. Einstein's contribution to ecology. Obviously his greatest talent in life.

language acquisition

As annoyed as I am getting with all of these papers I have to read about children's performance on verb raising of finite main clause verbs in German and negation movement in French etc etc, I really do appreciate that one of the largest miracles of human existence, almost as baffling as life itself, is language acquisition. It's such a miracle that a baby with only the rudimentary congenital genetic capacity for language manages to take sounds and through some elusive devices including calculation of distributional frequencies, prosodic word boundaries, and phonotactic constraints, determine what a word is and somehow learn the representational content of that word. I mean, first of all obtaining a lexicon is so amazing... I think the first time a child says "ma ma" or whatever his first utterance is, is perhaps the greatest miracle of all cognition. How has this little child with such an underdeveloped cognitive faculty manage to do something so mathematically amazing, something we can't even get computers to do, just by listening to disorganized input?

And then later, for children to go on and somehow learn to set their languages parameters (for example the horrid papers about German and French acquisition show that toddlers have an awareness of syntactical functional categories (inflection, complementizers), head movement (like with finite V2 verbs or negation), and the difference between finite verbs and infinitives (apparent even within the optional infinite stage as the child manages to place the verb correctly in the V2 languages, even if he is conjugating incorrectly by using an infinitive in a main clause). I mean, most of us learn how to talk without really ever understanding linguistics. It's so amazing how naturally it comes, how children have this unspoken awareness of complicated conventions that I can't even seem to learn now for my linguistics midterm.

I honestly don't even like linguistics that much (although I do enjoy syntax and I like thinking about acquisition), but one cannot deny how amazing it is that we have a language at all, that it somehow erupted from our genetic nature. No other animal is anywhere near having the language complexity that we have (the closest is like those monkeys with different calls that I rambled on about a year ago in this blog, and they can't really talk to each other, just scream "jaguar" and the like).

Amazing. Life continues to amaze me. Maybe that's why, despite all of my attempts at becoming a physicist, I ended up right back in biology.

state dependent learning

It was actually admitted by our neurophysiology TA that it is better to smoke pot while studying (creating a drug-altered effect) and then to smoke right before taking the test than to not smoke at all. I guess drug altered states cause really strong state-dependent learning, and recall is way enhanced if you put your brain in the same state again, even- get this- even if the drug-altered state is detrimental to memory formation. We haven't quite learned the mechanism for the detrimental drugs, but I find it interesting.

Of course, if you're smoking pot there's the challenge of getting yourself to really focus on studying or taking the test. I am told that while it's easy to really focus on one thing while high and kind of tune everything else out, one is also easily distracted by other interesting things.

I'm not planning on trying it. But it is interesting.

a quote that could be taken out of context...

"It's always much better to react with yourself than with someone else, even if they're associated with you."
-organic chemistry teaching assistant

Ha ha. He was talking about intra-molecular reactions being more energetically favorable, but it sounded kind of funny if you weren't paying attention to context.

a funny thing about alcohol...

So because memory recall for some strange reason regenerates hippocampile lability (ie it requires protein synthesis in the hippocampus, which is really weird because consolidated memories aren't hippocampus-dependent and are stored elsewhere in the brain), you can do some funny things.

Imagine the scenario: you have a test coming up on Monday. One week before, you study really hard. Between Monday and Friday the memory begins to consolidate. You decide on Friday that you worked hard enough on Monday, so you just review the material briefly in the afternoon. That night you go to a party and get really drunk.

The interesting thing is that if you do this, you're liable to lose your entire memory of everything you studied, not just your review of it but the original memory as well. This is because when you recall the memory on Friday, you make it labile again. Alcohol is known to mess with forming memories in the hippocampus, so it can mess with reconsolidation of pre-formed memories. Essentially, if all you did was study on Monday and then got drunk Friday, you'd be better off than if you attempted to be somewhat responsible by reviewing before partying.

Wholesome message of the day: get drunk now, review later.

Or, my preferred and personal message: just don't get drunk.

obama of course

It's kind of thrilling to be joining the masses blogging about this right now. Not that my words obvoiusly hold any sway, but it's somewhere to put them.

Yes, I like Obama. Yes, I think he's doing a much better job than Bush (although I always thought Bush was trying to do the right thing). Granted he hasn't been as rigid on healthcare reform as he should have been.

He's been in office for eight months, and despite all his efforts it seems he hasn't accomplished that much peacekeeping stuff. He's tried, yes. I do believe the motives are there. But the results? Lots of people have motives to make the world a better place. If nobel peace prizes were awarded for motives, every other person would have one stashed in the closet.

So I guess I agree with people that say the nobel prize committee folks jumped on the bandwagon with this one. There are people more deserving than Obama. There was even contention when Gore got the prize, and it was apparent that he'd at least done more actual work than Obama has.

So yeah. Interesting idea, giving him the prize, but should have been a few years pending.

Not that I don't like Obama. To my parents great chagrin, I really do.

the only thing the human brain can't understand:

Obviously itself. We know so much about the physiology of every other organ in our body. We know so much about the first three minutes of the universe when everything was radiation dominated and atoms couldn't form. We know more about the nature of spacetime and cosmology in general than we know about our own minds (brains?).

On a good day, that's exciting to me. There's so much left undiscovered in the field of neuroscience, and that unappreciative gap between cognitive science and neuroscience. On a bad day (like today), that just seems overwhelming. I feel like we'll never understand all of these mechanisms in our brains. It's not like something in physics that takes a sudden insight to all fall into place. Everything's complicated in neuroscience. So many things are impossible to understand, and so many aspects are impossible to model experimentally due to the complexity of everyday life. It's crazy.

An example of this is the occlusion of learning by previous learning. I pick this example because I feel like it has happened to me, although I am assured by my neuroscience professor that such a thing is impossible (it would require the saturation of every synapse in my hippocampi). However, I feel like every synapse in my hippcampi has reached its excitatory maximum, its information threshold. In such a case, further learning is occluded. Why? We don't really know. One way to occlude learning is previous maximum phosphorylation in the postsynaptic spine (since phosphorylation drives so many processes involved in potentiation, saturating the phosphorylation by inhibited phosphotases for instance yields a maxed out post synaptic density). But that's only one way. We have no idea what other mechanisms may be involved, or what role such saturation has to play in normal behavior (although I am convinced it is the reason I can stuff no more information into my brain before my test tomorrow and my test Wednesday). And there's no promising way to experimentally figure that out in the near future.

That's just one mechanism of a million in the study of long-term potentiation, and long-term potentiation is just one effect of millions in the study of the brain. Hopeless.

On a side note, the tree outside my window has turned a beautiful rustic red (if I remember correctly this is because the chlorophyll that reflects light of the green wavelength dies out in the fall, leaving other photopigments to control the coloration of the leaf as it slowly dies and falls to earth). The tree next to it is still largely a hearty green, but the very peripheral edges next to the red tree are also turning red. It looks as if the red tree has a communicable disease that is slowly spreading to the surrounding foliage.

How interesting, to think of beauty as a communicable disease. Or is it death, primarily?

thought

I wonder what happens when two people walk, and neither one knows where they are going but each assumes the other does. Each feels as if he is following, but neither is leading. Strange. How does direction result? And yet such wandering does seem directed...

Chavez's dominoes

Disclaimer: the second I start talking about economics or politics, I am on shaky ground. I am a neuroscience major, and anything I know about anything other than science and philosophy and high school knowledge is from personal study and not expertise.
That said...
"The Economist" tells me that because Brazil won't stand up to Chavez about Columbia updating the agreement with the US over facilities use, some fear a Latin American domino affect of Chavez-like dictatorships (I'm assuming that's an allusion to the domino effect scare in Southeast Asia during the US involvement in the communist "threat" over there).
Okay, here's the question: will Chavez-like regimes spring up around Latin America, a region struggling in some areas through peaceful color revolutions and others through violent revolution/insurgency to achieve some kind of stable democracy and turnover of power in the presidency? And is that a bad thing?

As for Venezuela, I think that the socialism rising there isn't necessarily a bad thing. I've heard speakers talk about whole factories revolting and forming a classless system where anyone can be trained to do any job. And I suppose that's great, and alleviating the poverty gap and all that. But I think Venezuela has a real problem with the balance of its federalism. From what I understand, Chavez pretty tightly rules on the national level but tends to ignore the local grassroots revolutions that he's supposedly supporting. There's too much disconnect. I don't really understand how the nation is stable at all.

Brazil is more democratic, and it seems like the president is less willing to subscribe to extremist politics or to give into thinkers from either wing. And he's also narrowing the poverty gap without any messy socialist revolutions. I think that Latin America would be worsened by a Chavez domino effect, especially since it would really put tension on international relations between Latin America and the US.

Do I think it will happen? I don't know, I'm not an economist or a political scientist.

I don't really know what I'm talking about. Seriously. I just love that nobody can get too mad at me for spilling out vague ideas in a blog.

sad and happy...

Bad news first:
1. It seems God and all creation just doesn't want me to be a humanist and help others. Every effort I make to do a humanitarian program gets thwarted. I really, really wanted to take this class at my school that works on projects in developing countries and then goes to these countries for all of January to implement the projects. Unfortunately the class is always massively over-enrolled. This time they accepted about 40% of enrolled students, and I was not one of them. This is very frustrating to me because I can't seem to find the resources or connections to do the volunteer work that I want to do. Now I am left with just my peer mentoring program I'm doing, which is good yes, but not quite the same. At this rate, I'll get denied the funding to go work in India this summer that I'm fighting for. But I won't give up yet!

2. This is going to most likely annihilate any of my geographical anonymity, but it's just so freaking amazing that I have to brag. One of my classes is taught by Alan Guth!!!! If you are leading a sorry enough existence to not recognize that name immediately, I will tell you that he is the father of the modern inflationary theory that is currently held to best explain the phenomena manifested from the very early stages of the universe. (See wikipedia article.) I expected like Stephen Hawking, and he is somewhat like Stephen Hawking, but he can talk and walk and stuff (hopefully that doesn't sound offensive; it is true), and he's actually quite a good lecturer. Today wasn't that bad because it was a cosmology overview, and because I am an avid modern physics fan fiction reader, I was up to date. But as soon as we have to start doing calculations and (Zeus forbid) using differential equations, I'm doomed.

I also was thrown rudely into electromagnetism today during my computational neuroscience lab which I think I will drop as the teacher started scribbling differential equations describing different models for neurons in very small handwriting. I think the class would be really interesting, but I just don't want to put myself through it if I can take the much easier neurophysiology of memory class I am also signed up for. And, the one benefit of not getting into the development lab is that I only have to take five classes now instead of the original suicidal six.

Random other note- my philosophy of film teacher is legitimately deaf. He spent the first thirty minutes of his lecture last night trying to get his hearing aids to work. Without success.

Cracks (some fiction I wrote two years ago)

She always cleaned on Mondays, but never like this. The dust blew out in nebulas as things shifted in the closet. The furniture polish bit at her eyes, justifying the tears that cut gullies down her dirt-smeared cheeks. Her hands fluttered in the afternoon light. Once they were so strong, the wedding ring cutting angles on her straight fingers. Now they looked like weak things in need of rehabilitation.
She cleaned to blur her mind away from everything, but she found today that the distraction of smoothing wood picture frames and ironing dresses only gave her mind the permission it needed to dwell in the very places she was trying to escape.
Always it was the wedding that came first and last, Harvey in his jacket that pulled smooth over his muscular shoulders so that his shirt was as taught as his body. She saw the moment when he tried to pour champagne down her throat but missed, the pink fluid creating a pool on the chest of her wedding dress. He had apologized endlessly, even gotten down on his knees the way he had when he slid the angular ring on her strong finger, but of course she hadn’t cared, and now the most important thing about her wedding seemed to be that washed-out pink blush that still lingered on her dress.
The light caught on her weakened joints, the veins raised against the flesh. It seemed absurd that they were the same hands that he held that night. Time had divided things somehow, so that in all of the continuity some indiscernible fracture had occurred, and now there was no convincing connection but the gaunt memories billowed out by the sting of ammonia on tile.
She had felt so safe that wedding night. She had never expected it. She had anticipated claustrophobia, panic, the walls closing in with a dizzying tilt, but the moonlight on his bare back had actualized her, defined her again as something strong and new.
Now, her own back was a bit crooked from the shallow advent of years, and her skin, once silvered in the night, was mottled from the bombardment of ultraviolet light.
If she wiped the pictures three times, she thought, she could erase their contents, wipe the memories from her mind.
Every Monday he had brought Chinese food takeout. The greasy, white boxes and the crumbled fortune cookies in plastic wrappers became the symbolism of her happiness. They were closest when they spooned out the sweet and sour chicken. No matter the trials of the week in those early years, every Monday was a baptism that ameliorated all of the small fissures between them that every week were in need of healing.
The 409 dripped thickly down the glass, the solvent helpless against the buildup of grime.
She could not pinpoint exactly a first Monday on which there was no Chinese food, and the week’s pains were left to accumulate for the next week’s Monday, though such a day must have happened. She was aware of a gradual shift from fortune cookies predicting fantastic futures to fortune cookies dispensing advice, and finally to fortune cookies commanding her actions.
She tried to forget, but as she wiped at the hopelessly tarnished glass, she was transported again to that night when all of the symptoms she had repressed became unbearable in the silence and sterility between them.
It was odd, finding out she wasn’t the one the way they had always believed there was nothing else but each other. How could there be spaces he needed someone else to fill? How could someone else share his fortune, his future, his bed?
She had, until that night, naively believed that love never died, and she thought it would sustain her. But then the mortality of romance overwhelmed her, and she lay on the bed they had consummated together and sobbed until her nose bled onto the white sheets, and she left the blood to dry and decay.
She didn’t know where he was now as she cleaned what she planned on taking. She felt their separation deep inside of her below the place the pink champagne had spilt on her white dress so long ago. There were so many years between them, so many losses, so many hopes that dried up now as the sun descended.
The door was not audible enough to shake her from her washing of the pictures with her tears, tears which dissolved the dirt after the 409 failed. When she finally became aware of his presence, he was standing in front of her with pink champagne and Chinese food in greasy, white boxes. They said nothing as she cracked open a fortune cookie with trembling, aging fingers (“don’t lose faith in tomorrow”), and he tried to kiss her lips but missed. He looked so small, finally, in this end.
She would still leave in the morning with her pictures and her shame, but for now, it was Monday, and there were so many cracks to fill.

the math... it haunts me...

So it makes sense that there is some conceivable pattern for every finite list of numbers (things, etc) that could either be disproved or not disproved (never proved of course; nothing is ever proved in science, just not disproved) by the addition of another element. Sure, we may not be smart enough to come up with conceivable patterns for really long sets of elements, but it seems like as long as that set is finite, such a pattern must exist.

I don't know why this is interesting. It just is. I wish I could remember my topology. It's like the concept of a cover or something... anyway, as the world is mostly finite (leave infinity for math and physics groping for solutions), there should be a pattern to everything.

That's kind of comforting, even though of course most of those patterns are probably wrong. But who would ever know if the additional element is never given, if the pattern is never explicable?

2 things

1. It bothers me when people say I'm "converting oxygen to carbon dioxide." Oxygen is absorbed through the linings in the alveoli in the lungs into the capillary beds where it is distributed through pulmonary circulation. Once distributed, it serves as the final electron acceptor in the electron transport chain. The electron transport chain is a series of redox reactions that generates the proton gradient in the Krebs cycle that provides energy for the pump that drives the creation of ATP, cellular energy.
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is, I think, a byproduct of the citric acid cycle, which is a separate event from the electron transport chain and the Krebs cycle. The citric acid cycle generates the electron carrier molecules needed for further redox reactions by transforming carbon-based molecules.
This carbon dioxide waste is carried in the blood back to the lungs where it is absorbed back through the alveoli down a concentration gradient and respired back into the atmosphere.
You are not "converting oxygen to carbon dioxide."

2. I think it's really interesting that we have a stronger memory for visual things than for other senses. I think it's true that olfactory stimuli provide the strongest memory inducer, but try this exercise: conjure the image of your bedroom, or office, or whatever room you're not at at the moment. It's pretty clear, right? Now conjure the taste of chocolate cake. I mean, I want you to really taste it the way you really see your room. It doesn't work as well, does it? I wonder why that is? Maybe the visual component of our engrams is stronger than the other components? I don't know enough to know that. Hopefully some day I'll find out.

That's all for now folks.

more cool things my brain can do

So I know that the brain isn't really great at touch localization on certain body parts in relation to others due to the differing representation of body parts in the humunculous down the center part of the brain (ie we are much better at localizing touch to our hands than touch to our backs or something). But something we should get credit for I think is that imazing cortex (I can't remember which... really I am often am a failure of a neuroscience student) involved in three-dimensional representation of the world. For instance, I can close my eyes and touch accurately all of my body parts without making a mistake, even the fine tuning on my face. If you asked me to touch somebody else's nose you'd get a pin the tail on the donkey problem, but my 3D localization is tied up with my body sense, so I'm so much better at proprioception or whatever it's called than I am at knowing where your body parts are.

Just one more reason our brains are amazing.

haha bureaucracy

Quote from my hazardous chemicals training for work. Shock value, anyone? :-P
" Note: When handling toxic materials that penetrate the skin, the proper glove is critical. A researcher died from skin exposure to dimethyl mercury."

comments and questions

1. What if someone with synesthesia went blind due to damage of their eyes? I am fairly certain that they would still "see" colors because the brain regions are intact and stimulated by the false connections, and that is kind of cool...

2. So string theory is vibration of tiny strings in space or on branes in ten or eleven dimensions (one being time, the rest space). So the evidence is not good for string theory at the moment (in fact there is no evidence, just the nice way it unites the particles and forces), but imagine with me that in every dimension a string vibrates through it vibrates space (which it does, causing creation of particles). But if it vibrate space it must produce a sound wave at some frequency way to high to hear I think. But imagine we could hear it. Then it would be like every instant was a ten-note chord, and the universe was a chord progression. Very cool.

3. I had something else but I've forgotten it... perhaps I'll come back and fill it in.

bipolar and internal sound localization

About bipolar- I learned that not only is lithium a protein kinase C inhibitor (I don't understand why inhibition works, but whatever), so is.. um... Lamictal maybe? I can't remember which, a drug that also treats bipolar anyway. Also, breast cancer drugs that affect protein kinase C help with bipolar, further evidence (although the study was small). So the conclusion is that one of the bipolar risk factor genes is a gene that codes for protein kinase C that has an SNP. Now I'm going out on a limb here, but if an inhibitor works for treatment, it must cause a protein kinase C that does something wacky, and if inhibiting doesn't restore normal function, it must at least get rid of that detrimental effect. I don't know though, that's just my guess. Anyway, I wonder if they're working on the genes that protein kinase C phosphorylates transcription factors of or whatever it does? That seems like the next step. My PTSD work seems simple compared to bipolar. At least PTSD isn't genetic (I mean a tendency towards it is, but you have to have the spark). I think bipolar is multifactorial as well as polygenetic. Very complicated. But it seems we're making progress! This is the field I want my Ph.D in: bipolar and pharmacological treatment of bipolar. Then I can be a psychiatrist with a strong drug background... that will be awesome (MD-PhD).

About sound localization- I was thinking. So vertical sound localization is caused by the pinna in your ear differently refracting sound waves I think at different heights. Horizontal sound localization is caused by some structure (can't remember which- LGN maybe?? that's probably wrong) receiving sound waves at different times, thus causing different amounts of action potentials because the waves are curved on either side by the curvature of the head. So my question is- why do we perceive internal noise location as being in our head when we plug our ears and hum? It definitely seems like we get the vertical and horizontal localization correct although at least the vertical localization can't be working the same way.

Hmm... well if some major neuroscientist ever reads this is the distant future, please comment and explain.

cnn in the morning

This is ridiculous. More on it later, but seriously. I know the line has to be drawn somewhere and nobody wants a future voyeur streaking naked across the stage, but seriously, here? Blowing a kiss? That's *so* normal. Jeez.

And don't get me started on the child rapist that got only one year in prison.

Most beautiful chord progressions in history:

1. "Elegie" by Faure, the piano accompaniment towards the end while the cello is holding some note (it's like this string of three chords or so repeated twice... melts me every time)
2. "Sonts my Mother Taught me" by Dvorak, towards the end, it kind of slides down this beautiful line. SO SO beautiful... it's five seconds long, but I rewind over and over again.
3. The beginning six or so chords of Elgar's Cello Concerto in E minor, Opus 85, Allegro Moderato... sucked me in eigth grade, and I haven't been the same since.
4. The end of Andrew Loyd Webber's "Music of the Night" (I think that's the right song)... it just climbs upward in this amazing pattern.
5. (my least favorite, but still awesome) Mahler's Symphonie Number 1 in D mvmt 2, the augmented or something pizzicato. I liked that a lot when I first heard it in early high school It's not beautiful the way my other favorites are, but it's characteristically brialliant Mahler.

Okay, back to studying... but I just love beautiful chord progressions so much that I had to share. I think I caught this love from my father, who made me appreciate them at a young age.

obligatory finals rap

If I see one more paired end on plasmid strings
if I have to deal with one more amino acid that metabolism brings
if I have drill one more hole to get to a rat's brain
I confirm to you that I just might go insane.

If I have to write one more essay about moral will
if I have to hold one more soft body that I have to kill
if I have to calculate the lod score on one more pedigree
I swear I think I might just flee away from MIT.

I'm tired of going to bed once the sun has risen
I'm sick of being too tired to make a real decision
I don't want to see another Gaussian fit
not even if my tuning curves depend on it.

It's getting old waking up with the same confused dreams
when everything is chemistry and nothing's as it seems
and it takes thirty minutes to convince my mind
I'm not speaking in light of the photosynthetic kind.

Yeah, it's this time of year that I forget my position
and not much can improve my annoyed disposition
because I'm always confused with my head in a daze,
population genetics putting my face in a haze.

So really I think it's about time for these exams to desist
so I can back to my mountains and the peace that I've missed
and quit spending nights in a pergutory of p-sets
struggling to assimilate knowledge my brain never gets.

They demand of you here that you give them your life
I think everyone here's enduring the same kind of strife
but it's about time for a summer vacation
so I can escape this insane fate-driven nation.

So watch citric acid and three factor crosses wash down the drain
until next September when I resume hell again.

una cosa mas

"Humans contain an estimated 14,000 square meters of inner mitochondrial membrane, which is the approximate equivalent of three football fields in the United States." -"Biochemistry" (Berg, Tymoczko, Stryer).

There are a lot of other staggering biological statistics rising from really folded up systems, like the astronomical length of the DNA in a single body if it's all stretched out. The demand for surface area has caused the evolution of these systems of really, really folded stuff.

My somewhat related point is that people should then find manifold dimensions a little less staggering. A lot of people can't really imagine string theory (including me I suppose) because the idea of manifold dimensions is so alien. But if the cumulative effect of a bunch of really tiny organelles inside of me can cover three football fields, whose to say there can't be a dimension wrapped up in a space too small for us to find? It seems to at least follow the same logic as our own biological demands.

Okay I really must go now.

Milgram experiments

I know that the results shocked (bad word choice...) everyone, but are they really that shocking?

It seems there are two views of externally derived morality. In the extreme view, we could say that kids derive all sense of morality by observing authority figures in their lives that they trust and deem to be morally capable (e.g parents). In the milder sense, kids at least rely on external authority figures to learn how to interpret their innate moral conscience. Either way, authority figures play an important role in the development of morality. Also, external moral development relies a lot on guilt. Moral culpability relies on the existence of choice.

Given those two observations (and the fact that I know they are true from my experiences killing rats, something I only find manageable because people I trust are doing it and because I feel like I don't have a choice), I think the Milgram results are not that surprising. First, the ethos of the authority figure is pretty strong. Even if the people feel innately as if they are doing something wrong, they are taught to defer their own moral judgments to more authoritative sources. Thus it makes sense that they defer moral judgment to the experimenter even while feeling very uncomfortable with the situation. Second, they are relieved of moral responsibility. Even if no one is forcing them to deliver the shocks, the situation in which the person with authority is giving commands relieves the subject of moral responsibility, which I think is essential in moral decision making and blame-laying.

The last point is disturbing to me... it means people act morally because of how it affects them rather than how it affects those involved. That's not really how I conceptualize morality. But I'm willing to admit it's a major factor.

Anyway, I seem to be in a minority that isn't surprised by the Milgram results. The one result that did suprise me was that a significant portion of people went to the maximum voltage even in the situation in which thay had to hold the victims hand to the device. I know the proximity effect decreased the strength of the result, but I think it didn't decrease it nearly enough. I think that proximity, in my opinion, should wipe away the effect of authority and the displacement of moral responsibility. But apparently not. So that much surprised me.

Kant is *the* folk psychologist?

So this fellow... Knobe, I think... did all these folk psychology experiments. Psychology is one field in which I think the folk version can be more accurate than the scientific version. I mean, theories may explain some behavior, but what better way to explain mental phenomena than the intuition of the mind itself? It's a little recursive, but it seems good enough to me. Anyway, this guy did experiments about people's ascription of blame/intentionality based on outcome. One paradigmatic experiment he did was a Gedanken experiment, so to speak, as so much philosophy degenerates to be.

Say there's a CEO (I don't like this example in particular because I think it enters a little too close into the thorny issues of corporate responsibility, but apparently it still got the results he wanted) that is told by an advisor that one of his marketing plans that will make the company a lot of money will harm the environment. Then imagine the same situation, except that his marketing plan will help the environment. Now imagine that in both situations he goes through with the plan.

The question was: in the first case, did the CEO intentionally harm the environment? And in the second case, did he intentionally help it?

So the results are that way more people are inclined to believe he intentionally harmed it rather than intentionally helped it (there are lots more examples by this Knobe guy). For instance, think about how different the statements "he harmed the environment in order to increase profits" and "he helped the environment in order to increase profits." The first one sounds much better, yes?

So my idea upon hearing this (I should have done the reading, but I am swamped with failling genetics tests and writing data analysis programs) was that it sounded very deontological in a way. I suggested this to the people giving a presentation on the topic, and they kind of shot me down, saying it was more about intentionality than ethics. But I thought about while our professor talked, and it really semeed to me that ascriptions of intentionality in folk psychology really depend on ethics.

So finally I suggested this again (I think I was really annoying today; I talked a lot, but I no longer care) to our professor, and it turns out that in a way I'm very right. The theory that makes the most sense about this folk psychology business is that we view actions as intentionally good when they are guided by a moral imperitive (categorial imperative) and intentionally bad whenever they violate a moral norm, no matter what was guiding them. This is a nonsensible asymmetry by many philosophies, but it fits really nicely into Kant. By deontology, the good consequences of an action don't have any bearing on making the action good; goodness is derived soleyl from the agent's moral considerations. So the CEO happens to help the environment. However, he is not guided by morality or any imperative. Thus we are inclined to say that his good action was not intentional. Whereas if he violates the norm that the environment is a good thing to have around, it doesn't really matter what his ultimate intention is, the violation is intentional. This makes sense if you look at things through deontological eyes. The good action is good if it is deontologically good, not just teleologically good. The bad action is bad because there was a step at which moral guidelines were not just merely ignored but actually actively violated.

I think this is really interesting because people (me included at times) think Kant is so out there, and that his ethics is so impractical. But it turns out that our own folk psychology ideas are very Kantian. Interesting. Very interesting.

Despite my exhaustion, I wanted to take my boyfriend out for his birthday. But I haven't slept more than a few hours in days, and I didn't sleep at all last night.

By 1:20 a.m. at the bus stop, I was hallucinating. I saw the sides of the enclosure moving around. A guitar that a man was carrying turned into a black labaorador. Nothing was what it should have been. Including my brain.

Conversation at 1:30 a.m.
Me: There was this kid that was trying to break the record for staying awake who stayed awake for like eleven days, and he did it without caffeine which is remarkable.
My boyfriend: Oh?
Me: Yeah. I can hardly make it two sandwiches.
My boyfriend: ...what?

As soon as I said the word "sandwiches," I felt profound confusion. Because it wasn't the word I was trying to say. Deep down in the sleep-deprived recesses of my consciousness, I had had the word "days" ready instead. However, despite this rational intention, somehow the word "sandwiches," a blip of random noise in the neural net, came out instead. And for a few seconds I just sat there in complete shock, trying to make sense of the disarray that had occurred.

I was so tired. I've never had such a blatant verbal confirmation of my exhaustion. And sandwhiches? really? Where in the world did that come from?

guilty writer

I shouldn't be writing right now; I should be resolving ambiguous genotypes into haplotypes and then writing my essay about free will (which I'm actually excited for). But alas if I don't write things down I forget them. My LTP seems more short-lived than most people's.

Anyway, thing number one:
I was working at one of our Amnesty International events tonight (I'm on the executive board). It was a human rights photo exhibition, but someone had also submitted a report about Uganda. Why, I am not sure, since she obviously wasn't going to win the photo award, and I'm fairly certain I was the only person that actually read her report. But it was fairly informative. After reading about the disasters in Rwanda and Sudan, I believed that Uganda was more of a model of the way an African country should be with decent health care and education and a government that isn't murdering all of the civilians. But apparently I am in the crowd of people that isn't fully informed about Uganda. The report was about the Lord's something-or-other rebellion group in Northern Uganda. I guess it was started by some spiritualist leader and then taken over by another. It's responsible for abducting children when they are very young and forcing them to serve in the army, making them kill their family and friends or given them to men as sex slaves. I always kind of shudder when I read about child soldiers, because I can't imagine ever having do to the things they make them do, or being that desensitized to violence at such a young age, and because I work on PTSD; I know what it can do to just a tiny rat. What can the most horrific acts imaginable do to a ten-year-old soldier? Anyway, what I found interesting was again the corruption of religion. I guess the group initially started as a way to fight for a government based on the Ten Commandments. When I read that in the paper, it made me wonder how people can possibly be so self-deceiving. The Ten Commandments include a lot of things that explicityl condemn raping small girls and making little boys chop off their friend's hands. Love one another? Thou shalt not kill? But most importantly, I suppose, is the "love one another." I mean, I know they've managed to convince themselves that kidnapping these children and putting them through hell is best for their spiritual enlightenment or some other perverse thing. But really, if spiritual growth involves violating the most basic rule of the rule of the most basic tenants of the religion and of the political activism, how can that be right? And how can the adults that are members of this group put up with the horrors they are committing in the name of God? It makes me sick. But I know it's not only happening in Uganda, or now. It has happened in so many places through all of history, this religious corruption. It's so alarming, taking something so beautiful like religion and twisting it into something so terrible.

Thing two: I saw the Dalai Lama today. I bought tickets to see him Saturday a few months ago because I wasn't sure I'd win the lottery for student tickets for the show today at my school. But lucky me I got a ticket.

He didn't talk that long because he was kind of late; I think he went over talking to the Center for Ethics people here becuase they were all late too. One thing he said that I liked was something like "inner disarmament is necessary for external disarmament, and until we have the first we cannot have the other."

The main body of his talk was about developing compassion that can provide secular ethics. He said that secularism wasn't the rejection of religion; it was the equal respect for all religions. In some ways, though, I think that definition then applies to the Dalai Lama himself, and he is obviously not necessarily secular, so I would revise the definition slightly if I were him. Anyway, I got the point. He talked about two kinds of compassion: biased, attached biological compassion for those that show compassion to us and a more complex, undirected compassion that develops from education and prayer and meditation.

By far the most interesting thing he said though was probably something not many people noticed, but I happen to be obsessed with the topic. He said (again, not exact quote): "I am Buddhist, so to me Buddhism is the best religion for me. But you may have a different religion that is the best religion for you." I think he was probably still talking about religious tolerance at that point, but I missed a lot of what he said immediately after this statement because it got me thinking.

It wasn't new, of course. I've read enough Buddhism (and also Hinduism; respect for other people's truths seems to be a pretty clearly Eastern thing) that it wasn't a shocker, the idea that it's possible for someone to be happier with a religion that isn't ones one, and that that religion oculd be *right* for that person, but not for oneself. I'm not sure why, then, I started thinking about it again when he said that. I guess becuase until now I've been making conjectures about Buddhism based on what I have read by the Dalai Lama and others, but now I had confirmation that what I had intuited about Buddhism or Eastern religion was correct.

It is an interesting statement. Because if you believe in some kinds of absolute truths (more true in Hinduism, but also true in Buddhism) that contradict another religion, yet you believe that for someone else that is a member of that other religion, that other religion is the best for him, and brings him the most happiness, then in a way you believe that that person's happiness is best served by- if not lies- untruths. Now Eastern religion has a way of becoming an amoeba and sucking up other religions so that if Christianity or Islam and Buddhuism were juxtaposed, there would be a lot more incongruities between Buddhism and Christianity from the Christian perspective than from the Buddhist perspective. This asymmetry, I think, is partially due to the lack of institutionalization in Buddhism. Sometimes I think people use institution as a way to externalize religion and make it into a negative dialectic rather than a positive dialectic like the eight-fold path or whatever it's called in Buddhism. But even given Buddhism's ability to adapt to differenes in religion, there are differences that can't be resolved from either end. For instance, belief in a contained God. That is something that Buddhism just can't claim. Or belief in Hell.

So in a way, if you are all hippie and Easterny and you believe that everyone is entitled to their own subjective notion of truth, but you still believe in objective truth, you are kind of condemning everyone to home the best truth is a religion other than your own to a less complete existence. Which is interesting to say the least.

That said, though, I really like that aspect of Eastern religion. If only Islam was more like that, then I think that a lot of the conflict in the Middle East would be nullified. Acceptance of others is a really important key to compassion, which may be why it seems a lot of people don't develop religious compassion for those of opposing faiths.

I think Christianity (and Islam, but I don't have my Qu'ran handy to quote anything) has a lot more asymmetries between doctrine and action than Eastern religion (sorry, I'm leaving out Taoism, but it's very similar in its behavior to Hinduism and Buddhism). For instance, consider two things that I read tonight:

1. "Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
..."There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear; because fear hath torment. He that fearteth is not made perfect in love.'
(From 1 John, which is one of my favorite books in the Bible and which, I think, should be a sumamry statistic of Christianity)

2. (Link here) "The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week -- 54 percent -- said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. Only 42 percent of people who "seldom or never" go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified -- more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did."

Now 4 in 10 versus 6 and 10 isn't a staggering difference, but I'm assuming it must have passed the t-test or whatever to make it to CNN.

It reminds me of something I've heard about in school several times, this experiment they did on these religious leaders (Catholic maybe?) at some university. They had the professors write a talk to give on the Good Samaritan and then staged some old man or something on the steps to the religious building to look as if he was fallen and injured or homeless or something (sorry, I'm a littly rusty on the details). Anyway, they found that I think if not every one almost every one of the religious leaders stepped right over the pleading man on the way to give their talks about the Good Samaritan. They varied a lot of things but the only thing that had an effect on whether people stopped was whether or not they were late to give their speeches (they were less likely to stop if they were late).

So that story, along with the torture story compared to the articles about love, is quite exemplary of the issues I think are inherent in Christianity these days. Maybe it's precisely because of the more regimented and institutionalized nature of Christianity when compared to Eastern religions, but people that are Hindu or whatever seem a lot more unified within themselves between their actions and their beliefs. Any rules are more cultural and less externally restrictive like the rules in my religion for instance (not saying the rules in my religion are wrong; I mean, obviously I believe in them, and there are a lot, but I will admit that they make it more difficult to follow my religion with unity of mind/heart).

Anyway, I really need to get back to my haplotypes... I'm still working out ways to generate money to volunteer in South America this summer and India next summer. I wish volunteering was less expensive. But maybe it's good to have that kind of sacrifice, like a screening for dedication. I really do want to help, though. Reading about Africa makes me realize how different the states of the world are. I'm going to have to agree with the analysis in Ken Wilberg's "A Theory of Everything" or something in which he hijacks the theory of Don Beck ("Spiral Dynamics") and applies it to government to explain the varying states of governmental/civilian evolution around the world. Too bad we aren't as synergistic as the socialist states in Europe. I mean, who wouldn't want to be like Sweden? :-) But Sudan for instance is lightyears away from Sudan. It's crazy. In a globalized world, civilizations are still falling way behind in technology just because they haven't figured out basic human rights. Too bad the UNDHR is basically useless and unenforcable.

The Ottoman empire fell in part because of it's inability to technologically compete with a developing Europe due to its isolationist tactics.

Also, in Africa's defense, Europe really screwed it up. The problems in Rwanda for instance are very reminiscent of European influence. The Hutus and Tutsis used to live in relative harmony until Europe came in and really messed up all of the stabilization in it's attempt at colonizing the country. Same with Uganda. Europe just screwed everything up. Colonialism is a very bad thing sometimes. How are we to know in our fancy countries the delicate balances of sophistication and power in little countries in Africa? And knowing how complex the world really is, what in the world made the Europeans (or the Americans earlier last century) thing that meddling was a safe bet? Now look what we've created. And we've left them to the mess, refusing to donate enough money to really stop genocide or conscription of child soldiers into rebel groups. This is what happens when you try to introduce government without allowing a natural local evolution. Which is maybe also why Iraq didn't really work, and why as a general rule democratization doesn't work in countries that just aren't evolved enough to cope with it. And like in Rwanda, biases are inevitably introduced that really throw of equilibrium.

Okay, now I really, really have to go. I could probably drone on forever about these sorts of things, but unfortunately in my life the haplotypes currently are prioritized above mass killing in Uganda or asymmetries in Christianity as opposed to Eastern faith.

Me, I stick with my Bah'ai-tinted Mormonism.

why i can handle my job

A few weeks ago at a talk about humanitarian work and microfinancing in India, I heard a story about Mother Theresa. The story was that some woman really wanted to meet her, so she traveled a long ways to talk to her. When she finally got to her destination, they told her Mother Theresa was at the orphanage. They gave the woman directions.

The orphanage was just a room full of tiny, orphaned babies, row upon row, hundreds. When the woman arrived, she saw that Mother Theresa was walking along the row picking out babies and giving them to the woman volunteers who then went to rocking chairs and rocked the babies. The woman went to talk to Mother Theresa, but instead of saying a word, Mother Theresa picked up a baby and handed it to the woman and walked out of the orphanage.

The woman stood there, confused, holding the tiny baby. She turned to one of the volunteers who gestured that she should go sit in one of the few rocking chairs where the women were rocking the babies Mother Theresa selected.

"But you can't possibly rock all of them!" the woman said.
"No," the volunteer responded, "But Mother Theresa can tell which babies will die tonight, and there are enough of us to rock those babies every night, because Mother Theresa believes that no human being should have to die without feeling love."

The woman took the baby and rocked it for hours in the rocking chair, and sure enough it died that night. She said that even though the baby died, she understood that she'd made a difference.

Now there are a lot of meaningful things that I get out of this story, including the reasons for humanitarian work with people as hopelessly ill as those afflicted with leprosy in India (after seeing The Motorcycle Diaries I understand, a little, how devastating leprosy really is, and how it's not just a disease in the pages of my Bible). I like that Emily Dickinson quote that says something like "If I have saved one life from pain, I shall not have lived in vain," which is saying something since I'm not normally much of a Dickinson fan. So I really do get a lot out of that story that you will consider more meaningful than what I'm going to talk about now (and I do agree with you, that it is more meaningful, but right now in my life this is my application).

I have mentioned before how difficult it was for me to take my job. I cannot express to you the pain I first felt upon seeing a rat crumple in a jar of isofluorine only to be put, numb and asleep, into a guillotine. The only thing that made it bearable for me to watch that first descent of the blade was to know that I could do nothing to stop it (my boss was performing the sacrifice), and though that was horrifying, in a way it was really comforting too. But I really, really, very strongly believe in the sanctity of life. There are two things that I find of penultimate amazingness about this world: 1. the simplicity and symmetry of physics and 2. the complexity and functionality of life. You can't be a biologist and not appreciate life with a really great respect. Or at least I can't. The same way you can't be a physicist and not appreciate the way that the universe is held together. Or at least I can't.

So here is what I do with the rats. People told me not to get close to them, not to name them, not to love them, but that is something I cannot help. I love them with all of my heart. I believe strongly that they have a soul, and I believe strongly in some Buddhist notion of the rebirth of their soul in another life. So I really can't help loving them, even unconditionally, the way that I love people. Even if one of them went berzerk and tried to bite me and gave me some lethal disease (very unlikely, given how screened lab rats are), I would still love it, even if it caused my death. I sense their innocense.

I talk to them. My boss has essentially pushed all of the rat-care duties onto me, because that is what undergraduate research assistants are for, slavery, of course. But I really don't mind, because I do love taking care of them. I love changing their cages and giving them warm new wood pulpy stuff; I love feeding the ones that are on food restriction. In a way that I could never grasp when I was young and always in trouble for failing to feed my turtle or change the bedding for my guinea pigs, I really love caring for them. And every day that I work I have to hold each of them in my arms. I'll confess I do have my favorites, despite everything that people warned me, and I'll confess that I really am attached to all of them. Every day as I hold them, alone in the animal holding room, I rock them, I talk to them. I talk to them about their lives. I talk to them about how they are going to be shocked, and it will hurt, but it won't hurt as badly as life hurts for human beings. I tell them that their pain, and ultimately their deaths, will not be in vain. I explain to them that their suffering will be used to alleviate this greater suffering. I want them to understand how noble their lives are, and how sorry I am that they have to go through terror to help us. I know that after being held for so long, they trust me. I feel better if I explain to them that I am going to betray them. Then it is not so much of a betrayal.

I know I probably sound insane, but I do believe that some part of them listens. I do believe that some part of the, their soul, really feels how much I love all of them, how much I care about them and the quality of their lives. Even if they sometimes aren't thrilled with being held and try to scramble away, I like to think that they can at least tell that I'm not trying to hurt them. I know given all of their instincts that they may never feel totally safe in my arms, but I want them to feel comfortable. Last week, for instance, my favorite rat actually fell asleep in my arms. Which is really a big deal for an animal driven by fear instincts.

When I am working on the days that they die, I sit in front of their cages beforehand and try to explain again to them what is going to happen, and why their lives matter. I ask them if there is anything they want. Of course they never answer, but I think they deserve the question. I put my hands on their cages so they are encased (the way I held my fish as he died this year but cupping my hands around the fishbowl, even when it was so painful to watch him drown- yes my fish drowned; his swim bladder popped, and betas need to breathe air; he couldn't get to the surface; it was the most terrible thing I've ever seen).

So what I'm saying is that the reason I can do this, love them and then watch them die, love them and then kill them, is that I really believe that they have a soul, and I believe that Mother Theresa's story applies to them too. I believe that somehow they will be happier in the life to come, and all of their lives to come, if they were truly loved, and not detested or run over or killed with rat poisoning. I believe it will make a difference.

I know most of the world will think that's absurd, but I know it's not. I see them every other day. I know how beautiful they are compared to many people. And I know that there's something in them that really deserves love the same way any baby deserves love. And that's why I can handle my job.

more on free will

I first want to say that I find the arguments for randomness based on quantum physics rather stupid, because there are all of these principles showing that despite the disorder of quantum systems, somehow as you zoom out order arises. It's not like the world is completely unpredictable. Maybe we can't predict quantum entanglement or position or anything, but we can predict where the sun will rise and the trajectory of a rocket ship. So I think that arguing for randomness based on quantum physics is rather stupid.

Anyway, I was thinking about the fact that as time goes on, we are unearthing more and more evidence of the neurological basis of... everything. I have realized all along that my belief in dualism is somewhat threatened by my simultaneous belief in the physical basis of mental illness. It seems, however, that that is a small enough discrepancy to overlook. However, what do I do when more and more evidence arises from genetics and neuroscience that really begins to eliminate any idea of a separate, non-physical, accountable self?

I read this article for my lab meeting last week or so about the neural connections between addiction and PTSD. I can't remember the exact structures, so this is going to be a vague description, but the circuitry for PTSD and the circuitry for addiction seem related. For both there is an activating system and an inhibitory system. There is evidence to believe that when you active one, you activate the other, and these changes create marked changes in the physical structure of the brain, like enlarged or shrunken parts of the brain. So for instance if you get lasting neurological damage from a tramatic situation which leads to PTSD (has something to do with dendritic retraction; I haven't looked into it enough), it can either activate the system activating addiction (which is I think the core of the accumbens) or it can deactivate the inhibitory system (which I think is input to the shell of the accumbens). Experiments on rats that are both fear conditioned and bar-pushing trained have shown a lot of correlation between the two.

Anyway, this is very nice, and very convenient for people like my uncle that came back from a traumatizing war with severe PTSD and fell hopelessly into substance addiction, but really it is beginning to erode at the personal responsibility we hold dear. I mean, the legal system really revolves around the idea that people have responsibility for their own actions. The insantiy plea is a little... um... hairy, but for the most part, we as a society or as a world believe in agency. The more we find out about the deterministic nature of neuroscience (which is large enough, I'll tell you, to escape the thorns of quantum uncertainty), the more our conceptions of human responsibility are being slowly shattered. However, we welcome such revelations with open hands because they could mean effective treatments for PTSD and addiction. But what about the self, this self we experience as being independent of these addictions and problems? What happens when the jaws of discovery chew away everything, and all that is left is this self, and then that is gone too, prey to deterministic nueronal circuits and deterministic gene expression?

We are obviously still a long way from this since there are reasons to believe that we are incredibly complex systems affected by initial genetic compostion, by environmental factors that physical change us and physical alter gene expression, by the ever-changing circuits in our brains. Even so, it is beginning to become clear that there are things that are undisputably deterinistic, or at least deterministic disadvantages, such as the propensity for addiction after having PTSD. Obviously not everyone with PTSD develops addictions, but the fact that the higher incidence can be physically explained is kind of scary to me (as well as really cool, I'll admit it).

I don't know, I'm still clinging to my Cartesian soul, and nothing I learn in neuroscience can really affect my belief in my religion since I believe science is a hierarchy nested within religion, and thus it has no essential power over religious truths.

There was this interesting idea we were learning about in philosophy a few weeks ago by this guy called Frankfurt I think, and I think it is an idea that is reflected in a lot of theories about free will. His idea is essentially that free-will arises from multiple-order desires, perceptions, actions, etc. If we have a first order desire to smoke, and we smoke, we don't have free will; we are prey to that addiction. But if we have a second order desire to desire not to smoke, and we identify with that desire, then we are suddenly moral agents. I think it's an interesting idea, and I actually really like a lot of Frankfurt's ideas about holistic desires, but I think it doesn't really solve the physical problem. I mean, what if a second order desire is just a more complicated neural circuit? I know it seems ambiguous sometimes which level of desire will win out (to smoke or not to smoke), but I'm sure that if we knew everything about the universe we could explain these variations physically. And again, that bothers me.

I suspect that at the end, even if we figure out we don't really have free will becaouse our brains are determined, we will be forced to act like we do. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but I think that is a really funny paradox. Forced to believe in free will. My what a crazy species we are.

Happy Easter

I hope that today you took a few minutes to remember being young, and what it used to feel like to wake up on Easter morning to chocolate and plastic grass and dyed eggs hidden all over the house, how exciting that use to be.

I hope you took time to tell the people that you care about that you love them.

I hope you felt happy enough and went slowly enough to notice the spring, to see the way the flowers are pushing out of the trees slowly but steadily.

I hope you didn't let yourself believe you're too old to dance in the rain.

I hope you watched your child laugh, or someone else's child laugh, and really appreciated that for the miracle it is.

I hope that you did something you were afraid of and are stronger for it.

I hope that you didn't give up.

I hope that you found a lot of reasons to get out of bed in the morning. I hope that there were still reasons when you climbed into bed tonight to believe in tomorrow.

I hope you gave someone some part of yourself today, even someone you didn't know.

I hope that you believe in yourself.

I hope you laughed until you cried, or until milk came out of your nose, or until you couldn't stay standing, and I hope it made you feel young.

I hope that for once, even an instant, you felt innocent again.

I hope that you love yourself.

I hope you took a minute to realize how beautiful and amazing life is, even the smallest leaf growing out of the smallest tree.

I hope you know that even though we'ver never met, and evne though I really need to go to bed now, I love you. I truly do.

I hope this is your every day.

RAIN 04-06-09

Is it that in rain we find
that the cleanest part of ourselves
has been rusting away all this time
in its Nautilus chamber,
and we never knew until the water swept away
enough grayish sludge to trace the edges?

What is it that dies in us
when we see the truth of the loss of our innocense
swept clean by summer rain?
It becomes apparent that the seasons are changing,
the flowers are kissing the drops
with fat, hungry lips,
but somehow that place inside of us
that once stretched and throbbed
with every snae-toungued fork of lightning
has now begun ot fail?

Oh, how we fight in the rain
for the humanity we sold so cheap.
Oh, how we ache with its resonance
when before we felt no indication of is absence.
When the sies are gray and the sound explodes
of small things making a difference
only in mass integration,
there is suddenly the knowledge,
frigid, immutable,
that somehow we never noticed
that exact, precarious moment
when we no longer cared.

What is it about rain
that makes us feel so small,
that makes us remember happiness
the way a veteran recalls a phantom limb,
that makes us so aware of how old we have become
without noticing the wrinkles?
What is it about the storm
rthat reminds us of people we could have been,
lovers we could have loved,
smiles we could have cradled,
and makes us with its frozen embrace
not clean- no- but finally aware
of our nakedness?

Is it that in the rain we find
the cleanest
part
of
ourselves
and we
never
k
n
e
w...
?