Regime Change Now

A few days ago, I was watching a little bit of television (seems to be a continuing theme in my life)... I was listening to a pundit talk about government expenditures and why they didn’t match with what he viewed as the proper priorities. As an example of this, he cited space research. I’ll paraphrase him here:

“I mean, the market could use a shot in the arm right now to keep some companies afloat. The government seems more concerned about funding a new space shuttle design and sending rovers to Mars than it does about bailing out General Motors!”

The program had a studio audience, and when he said this to the anchor, the audience broke into thunderous applause. Sometimes I forget just how differently I see the world than do other people. Could it be that this fellow, and all of the audience members, failed to recognize the fundamental analogy that describes the Earth?

The Earth is a like a lifeboat, afloat in a gigantic ocean. Humanity clings to life by consuming the precious supplies aboard the raft, but if we fall off, we will surely die. At first, there were so many resources on board the raft that we behaved like a child given their first allowance payment. We ate, drank, and made merry without regard for how quickly we consumed.

But now, there are so many of us that we can no longer consume resources in the manner we once did. Some of us see this problem. Other people do not. If we are ruled by those who continue to suppose that we can consume and consume without regard for the rapidly depleting resources all of the members of the life raft will starve to death while floating in the endless void.

Recently, I was reading a book on biodiversity by noted biologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson pointed out a fact which startled me. Every person on the planet uses up a certain amount of land and water. Some is used for our housing. Some to grow an individual’s share of food. Some to dispose of that individual’s waste. Others to mine an individuals share of metals to manufacture into that person’s share of objects. If an American wished for all people on the planet living today to have the same type of lifestyle Americans take for granted, we would need slightly more than 4 planet Earths to do so. And the population of Earth is expected to reach 10 billion (3.5 billion more people than are alive now) by the year 2050. The Earth simply does not have enough resources to sustain humanity as some believe.

Much more dangerous, however, are those who not only insist on voraciously consuming, but insist on consuming resources using methods which endanger the raft in another way. There are still those, like our President, that deny the existence of global warming, and feel no reason to reduce American profits simply because some people see a danger in playing with steak knives in the middle of our rubber raft. Issues like loss of biodiversity, the loss of forest-lands, and the wholesale pollution of our waterways and oceans have ramifications which scientists are predicting may be more dangerous than we know. In China, developing industrial systems are dumping chemical by-products into rivers instead of safely disposing of them. China has over 50,000 km of rivers, but at the current time, more than 80% of China’s rivers are so polluted as to no longer support living fish.

When I read that, it reminded me of a picture I had seen in one of my National Geographic magazines a few years back. The story in the magazine had been about over-pollution in China, and the field reporter had interviewed an old Chinese man who ran a laundry service. He had, for years, washed his customers’ clothing in the river, but had to give up his livelihood after a chemical plant had moved in upstream. He was afraid to have his face captured on film for fear of reprisals, but allowed his hands to be photographed instead. His hands, as a result of contact with the river water, were blistered and peeling, with large, angry red welts, and cracks that ran so deep you were surprised you didn’t see white flecks of bone.

There is more behind the exploration of space than idle curiosity. We are looking for a second raft. Maybe we won’t find one as good as the one we are on now, but we might find something. If we managed to put a colony on Mars which could, in a self-sustaining way, support 100 million people, oughtn’t we to try?

Some say that lifeboat mentalities can justify almost anything. In a very real way, they are right. At the moment, we are ruled by a President whose administration insists despite all evidence to the contrary, that we have an unlimited supply of resources, that conserving those resources is not necessary, and that it is perfectly acceptable to endanger everyone on the raft simply to grab a larger share of the already limited resources.

How should we deal with the President and his greedy administration and corporate friends? How would you deal with the fellow on a life-raft who refuses to ration the resources while gobbling down more than his fair share?

At some point, we need to stop being cowards and demand that our scant resources be preserved and only used in a responsible manner. Or else.

Complicity in Murphy's Law

Some days it simply does not pay to get out of bed. Today came very close to being one of those days. As my academic career progresses, I have come to a very unsettling realization. I am a procrastinator. I’m not suggesting that realization is particularly unsettling, because, face it, what student at any level of education doesn’t put off working on those big assignments? I have realized, though, that the way I dealt with assignments in college cannot continue to be the way I deal with assignments in law school.

I am currently enrolled in a class on Health Care Law. On the first day of the class, the professor informed us that we would either be able to take a final in the class (a take home test that he would make really long and difficult, too) or he would let us write a paper. The paper was to be well-researched on an area of Health Law of our choosing, and should be about 20 pages long. Being the lazy guy that I am, I did what I did as un undergraduate with assignments like that: absolutely nothing. The paper was due today at 4:00 pm, but I did nothing on the paper whatsoever until last night.

Actually, I’m not sure whether I can count doing anything last night, really. My only action with regard to the paper was to set my alarm clock for 4:00 am this morning so that I could get up and write the paper.

Today, however, I was a living testament to Murphy’s Law. When I woke up this morning, I glanced at my clock. It registered as being 10:30 in the morning. Off to a great start... Nothing like oversleeping your alarm by 6.5 hours. In my mad rush to get around in my darkened room and get to my computer so that I could start writing, I accidentally stepped on (and broke) my electronic weight scale. I know that it broke because I put my weight on the screen part instead of the pads where you are supposed to put your feet, but the painful irony of breaking my scale when I stepped on it was not lost on me.

I sat down to write at my computer, only to realize that I had, in the intervening 4 months or so, failed to decide on a paper topic. So after 30 minutes of brainstorming, I finally selected a topic I knew a little about already and which incorporated enough philosophical background for me to be able to simply write for a few pages without having to do any strenuous research.

Well, I finally finished my paper at 3:00. When driving to school, I normally leave 30 minutes before I need to be there (20 minutes driving time with a 10 minute grace period), so I set the paper to print and ran upstairs to take a shower. When I came back down, much to my horror, I discovered that my computer had spontaneously restarted itself while I was gone. That WordPerfect wasn’t open failed to terrify me until I realized that I had, in my mad orgy of writing failed to save my document even once. 3:25.

With the blood pounding in my ears, I opened WordPerfect. I quickly thanked whatever gods might be watching out for me. WordPerfect had made an auto-backup right before I’d hit ‘print’ and so my document wasn’t lost. I told the document to print again, this time on ‘Draft Quality’ because my time was running short. I ran upstairs to put some laundry in the dryer, and when I came back down, I was happy to note that the paper had printed in its entirety.

The ink cartridge, however, had run out after only 3 pages.

Using a personally rarely-used technique, I highlighted all of the text in the document and changed the text color to a very dark blue and re-printed in color. When the document finished printing, it was 3:40, and I was 10 minutes later than I wanted to be.

I took the document, hopped in my car, and raced off down the highway toward Topeka. I was making good time (read: I was speeding like a maniacal hellion) until I hit the city streets of Topeka. Wouldn’t you know it, I immediately ran into a car accident in the middle of the road on which I was traveling. 3:51. Ambulances, police cruisers... The works.

Complete standstill.

Police officers were directing traffic around the accident. Cursing like a sailor who’s been denied shore leave, I took the detour. When I finally got moving again, it was 3:56. According to my watch, when I handed the paper in, I had 23 seconds remaining.

I felt good that the fiasco was finally over, until I realized that it was MY actions that led me to the madhouse rush all day long, and that I could have averted the entire near-disaster if I’d been more on top of my assignment over the course of the semester.

The upsetting realization about my procrastination, the one that caught me mid-stride and to which I referred earlier, was the realization that the person who caused the accident over which I’d swore to high heaven... The person who made me late while I drove like a madman toward the school... The person who had caused injuries, perhaps to themselves, perhaps to other people... But by the grace of god, that person might have been someone just like me.

Magical Thinking

Few things in this world irk me more than ‘Magical Thinking.’ I was listening to CNN this evening while I was writing on a paper I have due on Thursday, and they featured a fairly uncritical story about the Church of Scientology’s program to ‘detoxify’ the body with a regimen of exercise, cleansing, and refusing medical drugs.

When dealing with something in the physical world (not issues like morality or spirituality), science is the only reputable way to discover information about the universe. How people can doubt the efficacy of science in the modern era astounds me. Science has allowed humanity to see into the farthest reaches of space with ultra-powerful telescopes. Science has allowed humanity to visualize single atoms using ultra-powerful microscopes. Scientists have given us medications which have eliminated entire diseases from the face of the Earth, and which have extended the lifespan of humans from in about 40-45 years old in the century immediately prior to the Enlightenment to double that number today. Scientists can see to the bottoms of the ocean and inside a beating heart. Science can even replace that heart with a mechanical replicate when the original becomes too damaged.

Yet despite the fact that science has provided answers to EVERY physical issue onto which it has turned its attention, a staggeringly vast number of people insist on holding beliefs which are not only contrary to the findings of science, but which are unsupported by a warrant of evidence. I received an undergraduate degree in Philosophy (yes... laugh all you want to, but unlike most people, I now have the ability to engage in critical thinking), and studied epistemology. Epistemology is the study of knowledge and truth. It encompasses issues about the physical world, how we know what is true, and the laws which govern the universe (like the rules of logic). A rational epistemological position will demand a warrant of proof for (at a minimum) claims about the physical world.

If I were to claim that eating a particular brand of frozen yogurt turns one invisible, people would ask me for proof before believing my claim. If I claimed that I can walk through solid walls, people would demand evidence before accepting my contention. But if I claim that I can read people’s minds, predict the future, or talk to the dead, people suddenly become credulous.

Why?

Every day, I see people making absurd claims which have no warrant of evidence. There are people who claim to be able to talk to the dead, despite the fact that hucksters and magicians have shown that they can mimic the performance with a technique called "cold-reading." There are people who claim to have predictive powers over the future, even though statistical studies of their claims find that they are only right about the future with the same regularity as other people. Some people claim to be able to heal people by stabbing small needles into their bodies along ‘meridians’ in the body, even though these ‘meridians’ were imagined by ancient Chinese well before vivisectionists discovered the inner workings of the human body and found that ‘meridians’ don’t correspond to anything inside the body. People make outrageous claims, but none ever stand up to scrutiny. Just to make it entirely more obvious that such claims are bogus, there is a man named James Randi.

James Randi is a magician. He entertained people with his finely honed skills and tricks, but became frustrated that other magicians were making lots of money convincing people that their tricks were actually real. Randi has duplicated the tricks of supposed ‘psychics’ like Uri Geller’s spoon bending and dead-watch starting. Randi finally became so frustrated that no one believed that these were simply magic tricks that you can teach yourself and perform at parties, that he took one million dollars and placed it in trust with a financial organization. Any person who contacts the Randi organization and can demonstrate under controlled experimentation paranormal powers (dowsing, acupuncture, homeopathy, astrology, palm-reading, divination, psychic powers, etc.) will get the one million dollar prize. To date, nobody has claimed the prize, and most people making the claims even refuse to apply despite personal invitations to do so. Instead, they continue to bilk ignorant people out of their money, and remain content that they do not have to substantiate their claims to anyone.

Scientologists are barely different. I won’t criticize in this forum their spiritual beliefs, since these are unverifiable, just as are the claims of every religious group. But their claims about the world, such as the claim that medications doctors prescribe are slowly poisoning people to death, and that sick people should stop taking medications to detoxify their bodies is a claim about the world and the way the world works. Such a claim is ruled by the laws of science and ought to have evidence. Unfortunately, gullible people accept anecdotes as evidence and spend huge amounts of money on the Scientologists’ programs (the girl they talked to on CNN spent $1200 to be told to exercise, sweat, and take nutritional supplements, and thanked them for the 'medical' help).

This kind of magical thinking is not only silly... it is dangerous. All of the people spending money on crystal therapy, magnetic bracelets, or Scientology "cures" are putting their own lives in the hands of people who have shown no interest in making verifiable claims about their products and services, but instead have shown an interest only in getting paid. Forgive me for my cynicism, but we used to have a word for people like that.

We called them Con-Artists.

The slow leak of information

I’m preparing to purchase a new computer. I know that this probably makes me a bad person, and that with the $2000 I’ll likely drop on the computer that I could have saved literally about 5000 living, breathing people from things that would otherwise kill them in terrible ways. There are times when I wish that I could come up with some way to get around that argument that I mentioned in my last post. Then I could act like everyone else does and buy things for myself every once in a while without a tremendous surge of guilt. Then I could engage in my day-to-day routines without the knowledge hanging over my head that I’m a bad person.

In preparation to buy a new machine to replace the one I’m currently using, I was going through some of my saved documents. In keeping with my pack-rat nature, I tend to keep documents long past when I need them, and have a folder where I dump old essays, photographs, and assignments. I decided that I should go through some of these documents and see whether I should delete them, and sort them into documents I wanted to keep and documents that it is safe for me to delete. As I was opening random documents, I came across an essay for one of my classes in my undergraduate career. Pols 608: Social Choice and Game Theory... I recall it being a really fun class where we learned about mathematical modeling of individual behaviour and how we could, using a minimum of assumptions, predict human behaviours and how to manipulate groups of people into making choices that we wanted them to make.

Here is a sample of what was in one of my essays from that class:

"Scenario: A citizen, congressional representative, and bureaucrat are engaged in a game represented by the extended form game represented on the attached sheet labeled "Pre-tweak Extended Form Game." The constituent has the decision to make whether to telephone the Congressional member about a problem that she thinks is an important issue. Even if she doesn’t call the Congressman, there is a chance that he’ll take action on the issue anyway, and the call takes some time that she otherwise might have spent on things that she finds enjoyable. The Congressperson, regardless of the choice of the constituent, can take action on the issue, or ignore the issue. If he takes action, he will be seen as a pioneer in the fight against the problem, but nobody will notice if he does nothing about the issue, since he is simply one of hundreds who did nothing on the issue. To see the representation of the scenario as an extended game, see "Figure 1" which is attached.

"The extensive form game has been described, and the equilibria are given here:
Nash Equilibria: {(L, A1A2), (L, D1A2)}
Subgame Perfect Equilibria: {(L, A1A2), (L, D1A2)}

"In this game, we find that the addition of a criterion for subgame perfect behavior does not alter the equilibrium points that we find through a Nash analysis. Indeed, the Nash analysis is simply a comparison of dominated strategies in an attempt to find the points where it is clear that nobody would choose a different path, given the same choice of strategy by other people.
"The scenario as given above can be changed to alter the outcome of the game. In this scenario, when the legislation is handed over to the bureaucracy for implementation, a petty bureaucrat finds a way to embezzle all of the funds from the new program and flee the country. Thus, the scenario is more like the following:

"Scenario: A citizen, congressional representative, and bureaucrat are engaged in a game represented by the extended form game represented on the attached sheet Figure 2." The constituent has the decision to make whether to telephone the Congressional member about a problem that she thinks is an important issue. Even if she doesn’t call the Congressman, there is a chance that he’ll take action on the issue anyway, and the call takes some time that she otherwise might have spent on things that she finds enjoyable. The Congressperson, regardless of the choice of the constituent, can take action on the issue, or ignore the issue. If he takes action, he will be seen as a pioneer in the fight against the problem, but nobody will notice if he does nothing about the issue, since he is simply one of hundreds who did nothing on the issue. If the legislation is passed, a bureaucrat is handed the job of carrying out the will of the legislature, but he discovers that he has the opportunity to embezzle some large amount of money away from the funding for the new program designed to address the problem that the legislation was trying to combat.

"The extensive form game has been described, and the equilibria are given here:
Nash Equilibria: {(C, A1D2, E1E2), (C, A1D2, E1N2), (L, D1A2, N1E2), (L, D1A2, E1E2), (L, A1A2, E1E2)}
Subgame Perfect Equilibria: {(L, D1A2, E1E2)}

"By using the subgame perfect criteria for the equilibria, we discover that many of the Nash equilibrium points are not the final resting place for the game, and that a certain outcome is more likely when the game is played with the utility outputs given.

"This is just one of many examples which could be constructed to show the differences between games with only the addition of small changes to the overall structure of the game. Simple alterations to the payoff structure, additions of nodes, players, or information sets all will likely change the result of the game in different ways. For this reason, when constructing a decision tree or extended form game, great care must be taken to ensure that the representation adequately matches the factors you wish to model in reality."

Now, here’s the problem: At one point in the not too distant past (less than 3 years), I knew what that all meant. And knew it so well that I got 50 points of 50 points possible on the paper. I no longer understand what most of the material in this paper is about. What in God’s name is a Nash Analysis? What is a Subgame Perfect Equilibrium Point?

Nothing makes a man feel smaller than realizing that he’s slowly losing information that he once held onto with ease. This must be what it feels like for an elderly person who forgets the name of a grandchild, or who has forgotten the name of a brother that died back in ‘the war.’ It’s disheartening. I’m a little less intelligent today than I was a few years ago. Sometime over the holiday break, I’m going to break out my old textbook for that class and try to recapture some of what I’ve lost. I know that I’m always full of cliche sounding comments, but I’m not going to go gently into that good night.

Finals Guilt

After I finished my final today, I came home and decided that I should treat myself for being almost half-done with my law school career (1.5 years down, 1.5 years to go). Whenever I feel like I deserve something special, I usually buy something for myself. It always feels a little like New Year’s Eve, when I get to watch the ball drop on television and wish myself and the dogs a Happy New Year while my parents are out at a party, but when whatever I buy comes in the mail, it makes whatever day it arrives into a very good day.

So I sat down at my computer and pulled out my credit card. After spending a half-hour browsing various books, movies, and computer games, I settled on one that I thought I might want to buy, and prepared to purchase it. It was a book called "Practical Ethics" by a philosopher I admire for several reasons: a man by the name of Peter Singer. In "Practical Ethics" Singer makes an argument that to the extent we spend money on personal luxuries we engage in an act which is morally akin to murder. His argument, now several decades old, runs something like this:

Imagine that you are an important individual walking across a college campus on your way to deliver a lecture and wearing your finest suit. As you pass by a pond on the campus you notice a small child about 30 feet out in the water splashing and coughing. Quickly you realize that the child is drowning. Do you think it is the right thing to do to jump into the water and try to save the child even though you will be late for your lecture and even though you will likely ruin your nice, new suit? Most people would say that doing so is not an act of charity, but rather an act which is morally obligatory. You would be a selfish and cruel person not to attempt to save the child.

Does it matter that other people are also standing around? None of them appear to be doing anything about the child. Surely in this case, your duty to aid the child should be that much more starkly apparent. What if the child was not 30 feet away from you, but instead was 50 feet? Would that make a difference? 100 feet? 200 feet? What if you were a former Olympic swimmer? Again, contends Singer, it ought not to make a difference. What matters, Singer argues, is that you have the ability to save the child without significant harm to yourself. In philosophical terms, Singer argues that one has a moral duty to do good for others, so long as what you sacrifice to do so is not of greater moral importance. For instance, if you were driving a busload of gunshot victims to a hospital (philosophers love weird hypos) when you noticed the child, you might not be obligated to stop and help the child, since the gunshot victims might die. In fact, stopping might be morally abhorrent since you would be ensuring the deaths of a busload of people to save one life.

Singer argues that since we know about the large amount of suffering in the world, and since we (as Westerners) tend to have excess money which we do not need to clothe, feed, or house ourselves in a minimal fashion, we are morally obligated to send aid to those who need it simply to continue to exist. The wide variety and efficacy of charitable organizations only makes it easier for us to help people since the only cost to us is the time and money it takes for us to write a check to the organization of our choice.

This got me thinking about the movie "Schindler’s List." Near the end of the movie, the German man who saved many Jews from death by having them ‘work’ in his businesses realizes that he had the ability to save many more and simply did not see it until it was too late. As he looks at his worldly possessions, he comments that he could have bought the lives of more individuals with his car, and even with the ring he wore on his finger.

Are we not all in the same (or even a better) position? We have worldly luxuries with which we surround ourselves, know of the profound suffering of people around the world, and could do something to help ease suffering and save people’s lives. If you have seen "Schindler’s List" and recall the scene which I describe, you have the added benefit of having seen a cautionary tale that shows you that there are ways to help and that all of the ‘things’ which we find so important don’t measure up to the value of helping a living person who suffers.

Finally, I reminded myself of the relatively privileged life I lead. 16 million people (yes, that’s 16,000,000) starve to death each year on Earth, and 800 million (again, that’s 800,000,000) people are malnourished which makes them easy targets for diseases they otherwise would have survived. Nearly 1 out of every 6 people on the planet lack adequate housing, and an additional 100 million are entirely homeless. Nearly 1 out of every six people on the planet can’t read, and almost 2 out of every six people don’t have safe, clean supplies of drinking water. Access to healthcare of any variety is not an option for between 980 to 1000 million (1 billion) people on the planet. And none of these problems reflect the wider problems which threaten humanity like the wholesale destruction of our natural resources and wildlife. If you added together all of the tropical rainforests in the world, they would create a landmass roughly the size of the lower 48 United States. Due to logging and clear-cutting practices, we lose about half of the state of Florida every year. I could go on, but I started to feel guilty.

Unable to live with the irony of buying a book espousing this (and my own) philosophy when I could use the money elsewhere, I put away my credit card, skipped my dinner, and began to study for my next final. Even though I did not donate any money to a charitable organization, I vowed that I would try to make a difference in the world with my life.

And now I can’t help but wonder whether I took the coward’s way out.

If you give a man a fish...

I got into a fight with my father today. He’s a social worker, and I used to think that he spent his days helping people and making the world a better place. The more I find out about his job now that I’m an adult, I am re-evaluating my position. There are people in the world that legitimately need help and don’t get it, and people who should be helped who don’t get helped because of a lack of resources and manpower. Unfortunately, it seems that most of his work revolves around taking individuals whose only problem is a lack of judgment and handing out resources to them. To call in the ancient metaphor, he’s not teaching people to fish, he’s handing them very expensive fish and then has to hand them some more fish tomorrow.

Take for instance one of his former clients. This individual (let’s call him ‘Jeff’) has what I might term a lethal lack of judgment. He has a wide variety of medical problems, but all of them seem to be self caused. He chose to start taking narcotics, got himself addicted, and now fancies himself to be an individual with a powerful will for having kicked the habit after only 4 involuntary trips to month-long detox retreats, lots of Narcotics Anonymous meetings (where they taught him that he can’t control his desires), and after picking up an addiction to alcohol. After AA meetings and another few detox trips (and picking up an addiction to caffeine and smoking), he thinks that he’s living a clean life. Never mind the pack a day smoking habit, and three dozen cans of Mountain Dew each week. Never mind that he eats an entire package of pepperoni and a dozen glazed doughnuts each week. Never mind that at every single chance, he seizes the opportunity to throw back a handful of pain pills and be stoned for a few days. He has digestive problems, but refuses to believe that his "all junk food diet" has anything to do with it. He imagines that his tongue is swelling up and will choke him and makes people drive him to the emergency room where they find absolutely nothing wrong with him.

Well, my father hooked him up with state agencies that bought him lots of free things. They gave him $650 in income each month, plus money for his housing, a cell phone with lots of minutes, money to buy cigarettes (yes, my tax dollars go to pay for his addictions), and to top it all off, they got him a laptop computer. Ostensibly, the reason for this was that he was going to go back to school and get his life back on track. He was supposed to enroll in classes starting in the summer. He forgot about school and got high and missed the deadline to enroll. So he kept the free stuff and was told to enroll in classes for the fall. Well, he did, and attended about half of a freshman semester. But he forgot about school and got high, and had to withdraw from the university to avoid failing out. Well, again, he’s kept the free stuff, and has resolved to enroll in classes for the spring. I have dim hopes of that. The longer he goes without actually having to enroll in classes, study, and pass his classes, the more and more it looks like he's just accepting government handouts without any responsibility.

Tonight, my father told me about his intervention on behalf of another young man. This young man is a Senior in high school. He’s been tested and has a vocabulary that is above the level that he should be at when he graduates from high school, but has the math skills of a 4th grader. Math skills are important in modern society, even if you don’t end up in a job that requires intensive mathematical work. Balancing checkbooks, doing basic calculations when buying and selling goods, and doing basic repairs around the house... Stop and think about it. This young man can’t order carpet for a house he might buy, won’t grasp the dimensions of an 850 square foot apartment without actually seeing it, and can't tell you what a quarter of a half is mentally. My immediate thought was that before graduation, this young man should be held back perhaps a full year for intensive mathematical tutoring. We should teach him how to to handle basic mathematical tasks so that he can be a self-sufficient member of society. Instead of this, my father is helping him to get an exemption from the requirements of mathematical proficiency so that he can graduate from high school with his peers.

Maybe I’m thinking about these things incorrectly, but it seems to be that a high school diploma means something. Society has said (through the state) that in order for a person to be minimally functional in modern society, they must attain a minimum level of proficiency in several different subject areas, like Math, History, Reading, and Science. A Diploma from an accredited high school signifies to the world that the person holding the diploma has reached those minimums. What is the point of handing him a diploma if he has not attained those minimums?

My father countered that the young man has no plans of going into a business which requires frequent use of math. The young man wants to become a music teacher, and ignoring the inherently mathematical nature of dealing with music, let’s stop and be realistic. How many times did I change my mind about what I wanted to do with my life between high school and where I am now after two bachelor’s degrees and halfway through a graduate degree? A dozen? More? Hell, I'm not even sure I know what I want to do now. I’m fairly sure that my experience isn’t unusual. What are the odds that a high school student knows what he wants to do in a real sense, and even more, who’s to say that he’ll be good at what he wants to do or can find work in his chosen field? Giving him the fish for today and ensuring that he’ll graduate without reaching the state-mandated minimums only ensures that I (and the rest of the taxpayers) will have to give him a fish tomorrow. Personally, I’d much rather teach him to fish.

Monkey toys and scary news about bees

Interesting bits of news today, both of which deal with a recognition that non-human animals are more human-like than previously thought:

1. A Texas A&M study suggests that biological pre-wiring determines why boys and girls enjoy playing with different toys, not sociological factors. Psychologist Gerianne Alexander says it’s commonly believed boys and girls learn what types of toys they should like based solely on society’s expectations. But she says her research brings that into question. Alexander, who studies sex differences in behavior and biological factors that influence them, examined monkeys as they interacted with toys.

She and Melissa Hines of the University of London found monkeys’ toy preferences are consistent along gender lines as those of human children. Young male monkeys enjoyed playing with model cars and young female monkeys preferred dolls. "Masculine toys and feminine toys," Alexander says, "are clearly categories constructed by people. However our finding that male and female vervet monkeys show similar preferences for these toys as boys and girls do, suggests that what makes a ‘boy toy’ and a ‘girl toy’ is more than just what society dictates – it suggests that there may be perceptual cues that attract males or females to particular objects such as toys."

The study appeared earlier this year in the journal "Evolution and Human Behavior."

2. Honeybees may look pretty much all alike to us. But it seems we may not look all alike to them. A study has found that they can learn to recognize human faces in photos, and remember them for at least two days. The findings toss new uncertainty into a long-studied question that some scientists consider largely settled, the researchers say: how humans themselves recognize faces. The results also may help lead to better face-recognition software, developed through study of the insect brain, the scientists added. Many researchers traditionally believed facial recognition required a large brain, and possibly a specialized area of that organ dedicated to processing face information. The bee finding casts doubt on that, said Adrian G. Dyer, the lead researcher in the study.

He recalls that when he made the discovery, it startled him so much that he called out to a colleague, telling her to come quickly because "no one’s going to believe it – and bring a camera!" Dyer said that to his knowledge, the finding is the first time an invertebrate has shown ability to recognize faces of other species. But not all bees were up to the task: some flunked it, he said, although this seemed due more to a failure to grasp how the experiment worked than to poor facial recognition specifically. In any case, some humans also can’t recognize faces, Dyer noted; the condition is called prosopagnosia.

In the bee study, reported in the December 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Dyer and two colleagues presented honeybees with photos of human faces take from a standard human psychology test. The photos had similar lighting, background colors and sizes and included only the face and neck to avoid having the insects make judgments based on the clothing. In some cases, the people in the pictures themselves looked similar. The researchers, with Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, tried to train the bees to realize that a photo of one man had a drop of sugary liquid next to it. Different photos came with a drop of bitter liquid instead. A few bees apparently failed to realize that they should pay attention to the photos at all, but five bees learned to fly toward the photos horizontally in such a way that they could get a good look at it, Dyer reported. In fact, these bees tended to hover a few centimeters in front of the images for a while before deciding where to land. The bees learned to distinguish the correct face from the wrong one with better than 80 percent accuracy, even when the faces were similar, and regardless of where the photos were placed, the researchers found. Also, just like humans, the bees performed worse when the faces were flipped upside down. "This is evidence that face recognition requires neither a specialized neuronal circuitry nor a fundamentally advanced nervous system," The researchers wrote, nothing that the test that used was one for which even humans have some difficulty.

Moreover, "Two bees tested two days after the initial training retained the information in long-term memory," they wrote. One scored about 94 percent on the first day and 79 percent two days later; the second bee’s score dropped from about 87 to 76 percent during the same time-frame.

So much for Bob...

Sometimes I think I might be wrong about the way I see the world. For anyone who knows me, that should come as a bit of a surprise. After all, my personal hero is "Bucky Katt" from Darby Conley’s comic strip, "Get Fuzzy." In one of my favorite strips, Bucky, Satchel, and their owner, Rob, are eating dinner. After making a short speech about why he refuses to eat mushrooms, Bucky is told by Rob that he’s awfully closed minded, even for a cat. Bucky’s classic response? "I’m not closed-minded. You’re just WRONG."

When I look at the world around me, I’m often horrified at what I find. Cruelty. Injustice. Hatred. Ignorance. Apathy. Magical thinking. And what’s worse, even the most progressive of people that I know don’t see half of the things that horrify me. It’s easy to be outraged about the United States engaging in torture (excuse me, I’ve been informed by an FBI agent at my door just now that force-injecting several liters of saline solution into the veins of ‘terrorists’ doesn’t fall under the definitions of ‘torture’ in the Geneva accords or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as interpreted by this administration...). It’s easy to be enraged by Phill Kline’s ever-increasingly creepy effort to mine Kansans’ privacy and protect Kansans from the 'terrible influences' of rap music. It’s easy to feel ashamed that Fred Phelps and his clan (or is it Klan?) are Topekans and represent Kansas to people all over the nation... but I always seem to find more to make me numb than do other people.

I flipped through the channels on television this evening after preparing my dinner, and found a story on CNN about halfway through. It wasn’t really a news item, I suppose. There wasn’t any breaking news or national impact to the story, but it was more of a human interest piece. It was about deer hunting. A newsman was interviewing a young 11-year old girl about her first hunting experience. She had ‘bagged’ a deer, was telling the newsman about how she’d waited with her father in a treestand, what kinds of bullets she’d used to kill the deer, and how she had affectionately named her deer Bob.

I wonder how many other people watching that story on CNN reacted like I did? I felt physically ill. Looking down at my dinner (some homemade bread, vegetables, and a leftover Christmas cookie my mother had baked), I found that I just couldn’t eat any of it, and pushed the plate away. It was difficult to bring myself to look back at the television. The image an adorable little girl smiling and laughing next to the carcass of a non-human animal who had suffered greatly before death, pierced by bullets, bleeding profusely, and most likely in a nightmare of unimaginable terror and confusion... Can there be a more awful disjunction of images? One side of the screen was a reaffirmation of the value of living beings and why life is worthwhile, and the other side a paean to suffering, bloodshed, and misery. Physical revulsion doesn’t half cover how I felt. I was about to throw out my dinner when I realized that if I didn't eat the food, I'd get hungry later and would eat more food. Knowing that there are people all over the world, including some in my own city, that starve to death each year, I couldn't bring myself to toss it in the trash. I forced myself to eat my dinner.

Other people don’t seem to have these reactions. Hunting, fishing, testing cosmetics on rabbits, bull-fighting, dog-fighting, cock-fighting, factory farming, using the magnifying glass to fry ants on the sidewalk... Isn’t there enough death and cruelty in the world between humans to sate people’s bloodlust? I wonder if there is a way to just close off the part of my mind that wants to gently catch the spider in the bathtub and escort him outside, and instead just squish him like other people do? Would that make me a bad person if I could?