Thursday, September 29, 2005

online biology course




There has been a shift in this writing to science, but this does not mean my interests in novels, films and so on, has waned, just that I feel the need to think and learn about science, following from the notion that people who read fiction tend to ignore non-fiction, especially science. If avid fiction readers try non-fiction it seems mostly biography,history or current affairs. The biography of a scientist, say Einstein or Darwin, might be tackled because of the life outside science.

That's why it seems obvious arts students beginning at high school, and following through in their tertiary education, ought to do {or, would benefit from} a few units in history of science. By the same token no one should leave a university without being reasonable proficient at statistics, simply because attempting to understand the world is more difficult without it.

A biology online course brought to my attention from a website I have never seen before, ChannelIM, is all one might need to catch up as an adult, or for the teenage children who are finding the textbooks a but dull:

Discover Biology

It is up on the sidebar under resources.

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Usual mixture of pleasure and mild excitement when a secondhand book store ot charity shop turns up a few cheap papersbacks which I actually want to read.

Biography: Richard Ingram's Muggeridge, first pubished in 1995. Wanted to fololw through the Hitchens attack on Mother Teresa, hoping there might be some reference there (though unlikely).

Fiction: George Orwell's Coming Up for Air, with a short note on the text by Peter Davison, explaining its history. I had written a too lengthy and much' dependent on source material' paper for the school literary society, which everyone knew when I read it out was not my thinking, but at least read piles of books by and on Orwell in my late teens. Though not much since.

This out to go into my first sentance website:

The idea came to the day I got my new false teeth


But is this a good or bad one?

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Telegraph, 30 September 2005 :

How dying Orwell avoided the clutches of the taxman
Ben Fenton



Wednesday, September 28, 2005

I said that.....



Watched the Scorsese Bob Dylan films but still wanted someone else to come to a conclusion for me, which Mark Hudson has done in his Bob Dylan: a poet and a poseur. There, I've said it...


How stupid I felt in the early 70s, when sitting in a summer garden talking with an beautiful, unattainable woman, I threw out that I didn't like him because I couldn't get the words and didn't like his voice. I was told "But he's a poet!". Since I have a distinct blind spot on the poetry front, both getting and appreciating little of it (a big hole..) I was not in a position to say whether he was a poet or not.

After the documentaries which filled me in on so many of the lyrics, after years without them, I decided both that I was now prepared to listen to his versions of the well-known songs (double CD now in all good music stores) that others recorded, but also to read the words carefully. However, I too noted the rap-simple rhyming on the films which was good qua pop but could in no way be said to have any connection with the dense and complex poetry we are told is Good. However, taken with the voice and the music, they work for the most part. Its a shame someone couldn't (even him) say that you can't always come up with good stuff. And Bob Dylan produced quite a lot of mediocre to crap songs too.



Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Everything you always wanted to know about writing an essay




Everything you always wanted to know about writing an essay

was not the object of the seach, though quite useful even if you have spent your whole life writing the things. Just to have it to hand would be a useful reminder. Meant for your high school student (by a high school student - or teacher?), but we are not proud. All bloggers who tend to think of themselves as essayist might benefit from what amounts to a checklist.

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Stimulated by a comment to a post in, Famous for 15 megapixels, I was looking for an academic paper which discussed analogy in relation to empathy. It is on paper somewhere but last resort: Google 'analogy' brought it back to life pretty high up the listing, even though it was published in 1997. The 'analogy' google listing from which it came is quite useful too.

This is what started it off: Minority Report says
While I am a Dawkins atheist, my favourite difficult case animal is the giraffe.

If the giraffe has the right length neck now, why did it not die out when it had evolved to only half the height and couldn't reach the right leaves? If it didn't have long enough legs, it would fall over. So it must have evolved a neck and legs at the same rate. How did it survive through this process? Where are the short giraffe ancestors?

Frankly its easier to believe in God given design. The designer was just heavily into variation. 5 million different insect species at last count - maybe a designer with attention deficit syndrome?

Principled attack on Darwinism has not been helped by literal Christian rejection. Not many people want to stand shoulder to shoulder with these guys. However, scientists are too keen to repeat that life started in deepest Africa - they know how that titilates. The theory of evolution is exactly that, a theory. Its doing well; but probably needs another century to mature.

There is no reason for Darwinism to effect religious faith whatsoever - Darwin was of course god fearing. When religious texts are taken as factual reports, then faith becomes more entrenched.

It would appear that survival of the fittest is a horrible moral code. So humanity needs religious faith to enshrine superior moral doctrines. But then science never did care about the consequences. Thats for others to work out.


It was not a desire to start discussing evolutionary theory again, which occasionally comes into norfolkskies, but a recollection that in an academic paper there was a mention Darwin employed analogical thinking to help him explain his theory. Anyone who has read Origin of Species, or about it, will know he relied on examples of domestic animal breeding to put over his case. Interestingly, too, the Victorians were, unlike like us, very familiar with the whole gamut of the selective breeding of animals : farming was still a full part of their lives. Hence easy for them to understand his analogical correspondences.

Although the paper is about empathy and analogy, in the section 'analogy as a cognitive process' the authors use Darwin's analogy between natural selection and artificial selection to examine the concept of analogy.

This is not the end of my story. I had learn somewhere, way back, that model, metaphor and analogy were the only ways something could be explained, and have believed it ever since, though without having any proof it was true. It just seems like a neat idea and one which on can play with. Probably came from Jacob bronowski or someone like that. Once stated this explanatory triun to a good friend, but coming rapidly unstuck because I couldn't find simple analogies for model. Analaogy and metaphor are common currency in english courses. The concept that gets people who are scientifically untutored is model. I started with what I had originally though was a simple model: a cork tied to a piece of string. My friend looked dubious. He probably thought I had taken leave of my senses from his expression, but humoured me. He's an engineer but not a scientist. My idea for a fool proof explanation collapsed as I desperately tried to remember what I had written down a few weeks before, which all mafde perfect sense to me, about the concept of model explained by analogy to a cork on a string!

This all started one day when I heard some bright spark suggesting tying a cork on a length of string at the back of the garage a good and simple way to keep the car bumper off the back wall.
I recognised this as a device. Even if there was no car around to hint at what it was for, it would not be too difficut to see why someone might have tied a cork there. Soon as you see the string move, break. But then I thought, "Cut it down and throw in on the floor". Was it now a device? Now it was no longer a device but a model (I conjectured). But of what? Attached to something it could be a pendulum. We've seen that at school. We've done the experiments. Remember? Extending the length of the string and ending up with a nice graph. Remind yourself. The other idea for 'cork on string on ground' : a way not to lose a cork. Perhaps it has been tied up but fell down. But this is more in the direction of the sort of thinking a detective enggaes in. That is not where I'm going.

The unattached cork on a string was a model, I convinced myself, and the free standing attached string with a cork another. Easier to see it was a device than a model. As soon as you pick up the unattached cork on a string and tie it on the ceiling, it turns from one device (and model) to another. Well, that's what I began to think. I had convinced myself this was a way to explain 'model' to someone who hadn't a clue. It was no use in explaining the concept of model in sentances, or attempting to fashion a definition.

One very simple model analogy, visualisation, which avoided resorting to definitions which had to use other concepts such as parameter, was to see a sphere with various holes in it of different shapes. The holes represented something of how the model worked. It would be possible to say "If you took out one of the holes, say a square, but left the cone and the elipse, then the model had been changed.

Would it be easier to give a definition, and then work back to examples? The point of all this is that when you get down to it (I deliberately didn't go into this with the cork and the sting, whether actually a model of something) there are different types of model. wiki : model shows what I was suggesting is a far from the complete story, for one reason: which type of model had I been referring to? Was it the first category, 'abstract model', or was it 'mental model'?

The one thing I haven't introduced in this explanation is metaphors. Or have I? I thought I was using analogies. If you google 'metaphor' it lists 22 million sites! I wonder how many model would give. 584 milion. Analogy? nearly 23 million. That tells you something. But what exactly? Interestingly there is a site called metaphor.org, though as usual wiki: metaphor is of great help.


Following this through there is this person writing that people use metaphor whe they mean analogy

This has interesting questions (and answers) about what a model:

Abstraction, Analogy, Example, Icon, Metaphor, Model, Morphism, Paradigm, Prototype, Simulation

Don't forget the diagram comparing world, model, theory which even for the unsicentific or logico-philosophical trained is a good starting point because it is simple and has visualisation.



Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Hanif Kureishi reflects on writing




Something Given - Reflections on Writing : Hanif Kureishi homepage

[via Wood's Lot]





Saturday, September 17, 2005

There's the Life and there's the Art...



Funny, mad: Werner Herzog: possibly true

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Intriguing, informative, surprising: The Secret life of Arthur Ransome, BBC2 TV

So it was not just Swallows and Amazons but also:

The Crisis in Russia

Russia in 1919

Six Weeks in Russia
7 contemporary reviews


Interesting, varied sources at Arthur Ransome Literary Pages

Contemporary reviews of Old Peter's Tales, written when he was in Russia.

A note in some forum or other on Ransome's politics, which gave another forum in The Scarlet Standard discussing some of the details from his MI5 files.

Arthur Ransome pictures including book covers and other extraneous.

The most fascinating facts were his talking to Lenin and meeting Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Shelepin who he eventually brought out of russia and married, and his closeness to all the Bolshevik leaders who he saw cut down by the subsequent waves of terror from a safe distance.



Friday, September 16, 2005

Semiotics for beginners




Semiotics for beginners


Another site which appeared out of a google for 'modality' which leaves no excuse not to knuckle down to the subject now that it has been explained intelligibly.

Learn here that

Saussure's term, 'semiology' is sometimes used to refer to the Saussurean tradition, whilst 'semiotics' sometimes refers to the Peircean tradition, but that nowadays the term 'semiotics' is more likely to be used as an umbrella term to embrace the whole field


which would be handy if you want to trap some know-it-all at a dinner party who can offer a definition (but knows nothing more).

It was produced by a lecturer at Aberystwyth, originally to supplement a Media and Communications Degree. Note the full use of graphics.






Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Kuhn: Structure of Scientific Revolutions



The I-Web is a place where you are constantly confronted with your ignorance. True have been crossing philosophy sites recently. Never going to read all that stuff: Socratic dialogues et al.

Stuff: a fine word but overused. However, it seems to be a word I'm locked into using at every opportunity. Perhaps one has key words to lard text to ensure no one mistakes one's national origin. Stuff can be hard work. Because of the tiddlywiki business, well exemplified by Elise Springer I see how little philosophy I actually have read. And how much I would need to tackle. Perhaps they ought to train you early on to recognise this as they might tell you "fear of death is intransitive." All helps.

I've got books which explain Kuhn's paradigm shift, but have never tackled the source. Here is an Outline and Study Guide by Professor Frank Pajares, Emory University which will be useful (if itself correct). Plus chapter 9 transcribed by by Andy Blunden.



Thursday, September 08, 2005

Tiddlywiki



Hypertext. Rupert the Bear. Three levels: cartoon; short story; longer story. That's hypertext, all on one page. So is a book with an index. Digital hypertext, which has been around for yonks, is one up by being able to present what you need or hide what you don't want. Reading text without clicking links comes to a dead end unless your go back to the home page to start again or at least back one stage.

The weblog had always seemed to have something missing: although there are hyperlinks (web) there is no hypertext. Not true anymore: Tiddlywiki.

An example is worth three pages of explanation :

Elie Springer

In the world of web design, taste is everything. The too-ing and fro-ing of the tiddlywiki might seem too distracting for some. There is an argument for simple linearity. Having used and benefited from hypertext software starting with Hypershell, I recognise the value of this new hypertext. Its all about data retrieval and fluidity. In the days of hypershell and its cofreres (long gone) it was easy to develop a story without worrying too much about structure AND it was very easy to find bits and pieces by keyword, possibly ending up with lists of links to text on similar themes.


Whether you feel comfortable reading TD-style webogs it is another yoke, cleidoic.


Tiddlywiki a reusable non-linear personal web notebook


TiddlyTagWiki : a develepment of Tiddlywiki by Jonny Leroy

wikipedia: tiddlywiki



A modified tiddlywiki :

Singularity!

One of the confusions with TiddlyWiki formats: hypertext is only distinguished from hyperlinks (web) by the lack of an underline. In practice most surfers will not mind been drawn away from the site to other webpages if they have tabs. A TW hypertext text link sets the requested link below the one you are reading, and any hypertext can be closed if you feel there is too much on the page. By being able to close down any hypertexts you can create the hypertexts logically/linearly, say for subsequent printing.

It won't take more than a few minutes to see the advantages of a hypertext weblog over a hyperlink only weblog format rom this example. Distinguish between benefits to site creator and user.

Websites, as a genus, have always badly designed because developers, amateur or professional, cannot understand EOUS (ease of use stupid). A profusion of cramped links; too many colours; unnecessary use of several fonts: still commonplace, despite myriad good examples and lorry-loads of books on how to make an effective website.




Sunday, September 04, 2005

Science is




Science is not particularly well-suited to deal with problems of human existence that have no enduring logical and or factual solution, such as avoiding death, preventing deception, anticipating catastrophes, overcoming loneliness, finding love or ensuring justice. Science cannot tell us what we ought to do or what should be, only what we can do and what is. Religion endures and thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs. No society has ever endured more than a few generations without an unquestioningly true, but rationally inscrutable moral foundation.

Scott Atran




Saturday, September 03, 2005

What is science for?




Well what?




Learning



One subject that everyone has an opinion on is their teachers...

I might write a little piece on this later. There might be a rule: "The older you get the more you think about your teachers".

This, Inspirational Quotes for Teachers and Learners, is quite...er.....um.....educational.

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I can't be the only person who has been through primary, secondary, and yes, tertiary education without really having knuckled down to the grammatical rules of language. I do remember doing all that sentence (clausal) analysis without really understanding most aspects of all the parts of speech. When I started studying a foreign language (French), at the age of 10, that was what was missing: knowing definitions of the parts of speech and tenses. Why I should have been expected to start another language without having theses facts to hand (no one asked me if I knew them) is a mystery. I do remember the panic and dread at the expectation my rather frightening French teacher might ask me conjugate in the pluperfect. Past, present, future, o.k.

Why is that young kids suffer in silence about their educational insufficiencies? If I had told my father I didn't understand the basics of language, I am sure he would have made sure I did.

Here, a belated solution (albeit probably U.S. and limited by my inability to learn anything involving lists) to my ongoing linguisitic ignorance :

Online English grammer

And why is this one more useful than the millions of online (or offline) grammers? Bbecause it gives an example for every definition. We live by association....






Thursday, September 01, 2005

Modalities

A Dictionary of Philosophy by A. R. Lacey.

I will transcribe the book entry on modalities, both because it is important and useful and quite silly
- serious and ridiculous. As you read it you begin to laugh (as you lose the thread) at the way philosophers ruin everything by their increasing desperation to cover every possible - conceivable - angle and, by so doing, make all as clear as mud to all except someone who is steeped night and day in this disciplined thinking.


MODALITIES.
Ways in which something can exist or occur or be present, or stand. Sense modalities are ways in which we perceive, namely seeing, hearing. etc. Alethic modalities are the necessity, contingency, possibility, or impossibility of something being true. Alethic means 'concerned with truth'. Deontic modalities include being obligatory, being permitted and being forbidden. Among epistemic modalities are being know to be true and being not know to be false. This last notion is potentially ambiguous; it is unclear whether it covers both being probable, certain, etc, and being believed, doubted, etc. Tenses are sometimes called modalities; cf moods of a verb. 'Modality' is also used for the property of being or having a modality. Unless otherwise specified, 'modal' and 'modality' normally refer to the alethic modalities of which the most important are necessity, possibility and impossibility. Terms like 'necessary', 'possible', 'must', 'may', are called modal terms.

The relation between these modal terms are rather ambiguous. In particular the possible may include everything not impossible, including the necessary; or it may be limited to what is neither or impossible; or it may be further limited to the merely possible as against the actual. The contingent is normally what is neither necessary or impossible. 'Factual', like 'actual' in one sense, may denote what is neither necessary nor impossible nor merely possible; but it can also be opposed to 'logical', and so apply to a kind of necessity (see below). 'Actual', in this sense, is not used of statements, but 'factual' in both senses, 'possible' in all the above senses, and 'contingent' can apply to false statements as well as to true ones. (cf. FACTS.) The logical relations between modular terms, e.g. whether being necessary means being possible, clearly depends on the senses in which the terms are taken.

A statement is necessary if it must be true. A statement which claims that something is necessary, one containing modal terms like 'necessary' or 'must', is called apodictic. A statement containing modal terms like 'possible' or 'may' is called problematic. A statement containing no modal terms is called assertoric. A necessary statement need not be apodictic. 'Twice two is four' is necessary in standard arithmetic, but not apodictic: it contains no word like 'necessary'. Nor need an apodictic statement be necessary. 'Necessarily all cats are black' is apodictic, but not necessary nor even true. In fact whether a statement is apodictic, problematic os assertoric is independent of whether it is necessary or possible, etc. A statement containing 'impossible' or its equivalents counts as apodictic. 'Apodictic' can also mean ' connected with demonstration', as often in 'apodictic necessity' and is sometimes synonymous with 'necessary'. (Kant used 'apodictic', etc, slightly differently, to indicate how judgements are thought, not expressed; cf. also IMPERATIVE.) 'N', 'L', '□' are among symbols for 'necessary' or 'it is necessary that' ('L' is limited to logical necessity {see below} ; in Polish notation 'N' means 'not'). 'M', '◊' are among symbols for 'possibility' or 'it is possible that'. Statements containing modal terms are the subject matter of modal logic (see LOGIC), which is not always limited to alethetic modalities.

>When a modal term is applied to a statement itself containing one, as in ' Its is possible that the statement is necessary ', we have nested or iterated modalities.

A difficult and controversial distinction, of medieval origin, is that between de re and de dicto modality. Roughly, cases where modal terms apply to the possession of an attribute by a subject are de re and cases where they apply to a proposition are de dicto. Consider the sentence,'The number of the gosphels exceeds three', which is ambiguous. It may mean it is necessary that the number in question, the number four, exceeds three, which is true; or it may mean that necessarily there are more than three gosphels, which is false. On a a de re interpretation, however, the term 'necessarily' remains inside the original sentence, whose subject is the number of gosphels, the number four. The sentence therefore says that the number four necessarily has the property of exceeding three, which, if it makes sense at all, is true.

To be appended.



If this so far is confusing (or like trying to juggle six balls) then you will not want to check:

What is necessity ?

What is possibility ?

wiki: modal logic

However, this article on Modals in English Language Teaching is a clarity on modals.

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A result of checking this modalities business: the wiki on Deontological ethics

...the Greek word "deon", meaning duty. In moral philosophy, deontology is the view that morality either forbids or permits actions, which is done through moral norms. Simply put, the correctness of an action lies within itself, not in the consequences of the action. This lies in contrast with teleology. For example, a deontological moral theory might hold that lying is wrong, even if it produces good consequences. Historically, the most influential deontological theory of morality was developed by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who introduced the idea of the categorical imperative.




There is also :

A Brief Glassary of Modality



If you get that far you may need:

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
I checked Derrida (only an example, alright!) and found it educated me. There is something he calls arche-writing which looks like it might merit futher study.

Arche-writing refers to a more generalised notion of writing that insists that the breach that the written introduces between what is intended to be conveyed and what is actually conveyed, is typical of an originary breach that afflicts everything one might wish to keep sacrosanct, including the notion of self-presence.


Since re-listening to the Radio 4 creativity series this all makes perfect sense to me. And I have just spent time with a wise old friend who was asking why is it when he is working on his lathe or doing some welding in his workshop, he goes into a mind-state where he pictures a past event clearly. While describing this he lost his train of thought by me picking up on something and adding my piece! I had had 24 hours of absences which made it difficult to speak and was running through what it might mean to have an absence (qua epilepsy)in neurophysiological terms.

I suggested it was in the trance of the day dream that the associations were able to kick in. Lo! programme II (a few minutes later on my return) mentions reveries and REST (random episodic silent thought), hypnagogic states and theta rhythms. Unfortunately he is man who cannot sit still so is not prepared to sit by a PC to recieve a continuation-conversation via email.

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