The 327th Male

Recently a blogger over at skepchic set the site on fire with her post about why she supports intelligent design. A reasonably polite flame ware is currently raging and one of the themes brought up is whether intelligent design and theistic evolution are considered different things. What the hell does that mean? It all depends on the kind of game you think god is playing.

In the theistic evolution camp, god is playing dominoes. He/she/it/they set up an intricate pattern for how things would play out, then knocked the first domino over - lets call it the big bang. Everything from that point on plays out according to the plan, without intervention - planets form, life begins and eventually evolution cranks out a few bipedal monkeys.

In the intelligent design corner, god is playing curling.

Rather than just setting things up and watching them play out, god is frantically brooming, altering the course of events throughout history. God had to intervene to create humans; tweak things here, add a pinch of salt there, simmer for several thousand years.

So the question is, which god do you want to believe in? If I wasn’t an atheist I would prefer the domino god, something about it just implies perfection and omnipotence. This viewpoint also doesn’t contradict the evidence we see around us. People who believe in such a god, in such a creation story, can be positive supporters of evolution, science, critical thinking and skepticism.

I walked in to the lunch room today to see the front page of “The Advertiser” newspaper.

Being the space nerd that I am, the first thing I thought was that the mars rover named “spirit” had finally given up the ghost. I should have known better, a science article would never be on the front page of The Advertiser. Also the cheap celebrity photos splashing the rest of the page should have been a dead give away.

The real spirit keeps on trucking, stubbornly lasting 17 times longer than expected. The poor little robot has seen its share of troubles, and now has to drive everywhere backwards, dragging a dead and useless front wheel, still limping across the surface of Mars, doing science, even though it is 1360 in rover years.

Go spirit!

Sometimes when I am bored during lunch I dig out the paper and flip to the puzzles section. Crosswords don’t do it for me, I always look for target, the nine letter box thingo.

You know the rules, construct as many words as you can using each letter only once, and each word must contain the letter in the centre of the square. Sounds easy enough right? Most people are content to plow through, rattle off a few words and then give up. I usually try to go for the nine letter word, but always fail. Why is it so hard?

This is the difference between a normal person and a computer programmer. That question, “why is it so hard?” becomes a new game, all of its own.

There are only nine letters, there can’t be that many combinations right? Wrong.

Let’s start with three letter words. The first step is to take out the middle letter, ‘E’ (the example from the picture). We then have to pick two other letters to go with it, ‘F’ and ‘A’. How many different ways can we write them down?

Well there’s ‘AF’ and ‘FA’. After that you can stick the middle letter in three different positions, at the start, in the middle, or at the end. Three places for our two combinations gives six possible words, they being ‘EAF’, ‘AEF’, ‘AFE’, ‘EFA’, ‘FEA’, and ‘FAE’. None of those are real words, but we still had to try them.

Extending the same reasoning for more letters you come up with this:

Using 3 letters there are 6 possible combinations (3×2).
Using 4: 24 possible combinations (4×3x2).
Using 5: 120 possible combinations (5×4x3×2).
Using 6: 720 possible combinations (6×5x4×3x2).
Using 7: 5040 possible combinations (7×6x5×4x3×2).
Using 8: 40320 possible combinations (8×7x6×5x4×3x2).
Using 9: 362880 possible combinations (9×8x7×6x5×4x3×2).

Now it’s easy to see why finding those nine letter words is so hard. While a person won’t take the approach of randomly trying every combination it still gives a daunting idea of the search space they are dealing with. I also now understand why these puzzles are so common - it’s dead easy to write a computer program that generates them, so you don’t have to pay anyone to sit there and write them!

And that is the way my brain works. Rather than trying to play the game, I try to find the rules and principles behind the game. Unfortunately this approach doesn’t work in other areas of my life. Sometimes the principals are just too complex to grasp…

Game theory is a concept in applied mathematics. Like any branch of mathematics, it throws around big sounding terms such as pay-off matrix and Nash equilibrium, but at its heart game theory is really very simple.

Game theory is about winning.

In any game where the rules are clearly defined, game theory can be used to try and find the best strategy. Take a classical game of chicken for example, where two drivers accelerate towards a head-on collision, the one who swerves being the chicken. A traditional pay-off matrix for chicken looks like this:

The matrix is fairly easy to understand; if both players swerve, the game is a tie. Neither player is the chicken and neither player dies. If both players stay the course, they both die - the worst possible outcome. If one player swerves, only their pride will be hurt, while the other gains the honour of winning.

So what is the best way of winning? If you don’t swerve you could die - so you’d better swerve. The other guy will be thinking that as well though, so if you don’t swerve they probably will. But wait - what if he is thinking the same thing! Then you will both die!

Analysing the game in this way, trying to work out the right decisions to achieve the best outcome - most people call this strategy. Mathematicians call it game theory.

Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician who was also very religious. He used game theory’s sibling, decision theory, to try and tell the world that belief in God is the right decision. This is now known as Pascal’s Wager.

The wager states that belief in God is the correct decision because the pay-off is infinite, while the punishment is infinitely painful. The pay-off matrix as proposed by Pascal would look like this:

It would seem Pascal is right. Time to throw away all my years of scepticism - praise be to God the almighty! I see the light! But wait, something tells me the matrix isn’t quite complete. That’s the problem with game theory (and decision theory): it can appear very authoritative until you realise that you haven’t accounted for all the variables.

Take my initial example of chicken. The analysis of the game looks complete, it looks like I have thought of every possible scenario. But what happens if both players swerve in the same direction. There’s a chance that if they both chicken out, they could actually swerve into each other and be killed. Taking this into consideration, the pay-off matrix now looks like this:

In the initial matrix, there was a 25% probability of winning and a 25% probability of crashing. In the new matrix there is only a 22% probability of winning and a 33% probability of crashing. Clearly it could lead to disaster if you base your decisions on the original matrix.

Pascal’s wager is equally flawed. For starters it doesn’t take other religions into account. Let’s add Islam:

Or what about a God / Allah that doesn’t punish wrong choices in belief, and only judges based on how good you have been throughout your life?

And what if God / Allah exists, but actively punishes belief? What if God / Allah wants us to think for ourselves?

As you can see, decision theory isn’t very useful if you don’t know all the rules behind the game, and we know nothing of the rules behind the afterlife, or even whether it exists. This makes the wager an unconvincing argument.

Sorry Pascal, but I’m sticking with atheism.

In a previous post I mentioned that a co-worker was presenting a relaxation session to the rest of the staff, and that said co-worker was involved with the dubious alternative medicine practice called bodytalk. I had hoped that the session would be focused more on simple, proven relaxation techniques like guided visualisations but although these took up half of the session, the other half was on bodytalk.

The exercise she had us go through first was called cortices. Initially this involved tapping the top of your head while breathing in, and tapping your sternum while breathing out. At the end of the exercise she asked the class whether they felt more alert, aware and focused. They didn’t. One concept debunked, and I didn’t even have to confront her or say anything. Of course she justified it by explaining that it often doesn’t work the first few times. It probably takes that long for the placebo effect to kick in.

The most disturbing thing about the session was the explanations given. At one point after the cortices exercise one of the participants yawned. This was taken as instant proof that the cortices had worked - she was yawning because the energy was flowing through her head properly again. I don’t know about you but one person out of ten yawning after five minutes of silent head tapping was probably due to boredom more than anything else. Of course that’s just speculation, the cause and purpose of yawning is still unknown.

In another exercise we were asked to lie still on the floor. Noticing that some people were still moving slightly, our instructor explained that people twitching or performing small movements were doing so because “the energy” was trapped in those places. Of course it had nothing to do with pinched nerves or the fact that I just like to wiggle my toes.

At one point she mentioned that the kundalini at the base of your spine can cause problems if it rises. This sounded odd to me and no one else was questioning it so I asked her,

“Is the kundalini a physical thing?”

“It is the energy at the base of your spine.”

“So sort of like chi then?”

“Yes.”

She then proceeded to explain that the kundalini can cause all kind of problems if it rises unnaturally. Apparently the insane asylums in some foreign country are full of monks, who, through meditation, forced their kundalini to rise before it was ready. Normally our Ganesh - the hindu elephant god - stops the kundalini from rising (lucky for us). After this explanation I didn’t have to bother with any further questioning, the disbelief was already written over my co-worker’s faces. But if I hadn’t asked these questions, the existence of the kundalini might have been brushed over and my co-workers may not have questioned it at all.

This is how alternative medicine works. They give plausible sounding explanations for things at first, but the deeper you dig the more whacko the ideas get. They try not to scare you off with the weird stuff until they’ve got you sucked in to their beliefs. By asking questions at this session I drew out these beliefs so that my co-workers could examine and question them immediately for what they are. I managed to do this without foisting my opinion on them, or stepping on the presenter’s toes simply by asking questions instead of making judgements. I am now more convinced than ever that asking questions is not only the way to be a friendly skeptic, but also the best way to be a convincing skeptic as well.

I like my current job. The work is challenging and the people I work with are great, but being the passionate, future obsessed sci-fi geek that I am, I want to be doing something more important than simply increasing profits for my company. My dream job would be something where I am actively working on improving the future of mankind. While I could quit and volunteer for an orphanage in Africa, I would much rather get a job where my skills in computer science can be put to use.

“Why don’t you get a job at the CSIRO” came the insight from my housemate. It sounded like a good idea so I hit up the career section of their website and found a job in my field, working on something I deem important - Water for a Healthy Country. Please hold the jokes about how long I spend in the shower, they’ve all been done before.

The job is in Tasmania but I figured I’d give it a shot anyway. I had a memorable holiday there a few years ago, so have fond memories of the place.

After whipping my resume back into shape I was all set to apply… until I saw their online application process. It prompted me for a user name and password, but over an unsecured, plain ol’ http connection. Where was the https? Where was my little padlock icon in the bottom corner of the browser? I entered some bogus information and continued the process where I was prompted for my contact details, including address and phone number, as well as my resume containing my employment history and the contact details of two referees. Still no sign of a secure connection. This all in addition to the constant “404 not found” errors when accessing valid content.

For a highly respected governmental research institute, with a fully fledged ICT research division, this is appalling. Sure, the ICT centre is probably completely separate from the recruitment website, and (hopefully) had nothing to do with its design and implementation, but it still reflects poorly on them. The dream job I was imagining began to evaporate as doubts were cast over the level of professionalism in the organisation.

For those who cannot understand my horror, let me explain the way the Internet works. When I punch up the CSIRO website in my browser, I do not get a direct connection to their webserver. Instead my connection is routed through a whole bunch of third parties. You can check out this route using a tool such as traceroute, or visual traceroute as I have done below.

As you can see the traffic is transmitted through severs in Adelaide, Sydney and Canberra before hitting the CSIRO server in Wangarratta. I’m not entirely sure that’s accurate but it should give you an idea that my resume, and all it’s personal details, would travel through several other places before getting to its destination. At each point along this line my details are readable. Sure I might be paranoid, but computer security and cryptography are hobbies of mine. If the CSIRO used the https protocol on their recruitment website the traffic would still take the same path, but the contents would be encrypted, so that only the CSIRO itself could read them.

I did finally apply for the job through another method, but I don’t really know that much about the position yet. I wasn’t able to ask them any questions before submitting my resume as the application deadline was so soon. I’m looking forward to hearing more about the project they are working on and finding out if it will be worthwhile enough for me to jump ship all the way to Tasmania.

Those of you who know me well know I am skeptical by nature. I know that the scientific method is the best way to understand any phenomenon, and I am very passionate about it. Ask me what my star sign is and my usual response is a scathing five minute lecture on the fallacies of astrology. As you can imagine this often puts me in a situation of conflict with those around me.

At work I am part of a culture team responsible for the training of staff. Previous training sessions have been on such subjects as time management, effective writing and public speaking. Sitting around deciding who should lead the next session, we decided that a co-worker, known to be involved in alternative medicine, would be a good choice. I’m not sure why but no alarm bells rang at this point. I was thinking of having her run a course on relaxation and stress, possibly a guided visualization. I remember doing them in drama at high school where half the class usually fell asleep. We could use something like that to tone down the stress around our office. After a chat we booked in a timeslot for her training session.

Talking with her again at lunch today I started to get very anxious. She practises what is known as “bodytalk“, and her explanation of it was frightening. As I understand it, her clients come to her with various problems which she corrects by helping the body heal itself. The idea is that problems occur because the communication within the body breaks down. Once this communication is re-established the body can begin repairs.

Sounds reasonable doesn’t it? The alarm bells were tingling, but it wasn’t until she started using terms such as “energy medicine” and “aura” that they began to chime with full strength. I’m no expert in either scientific or alternate medicine, so I won’t go into the full details; suffice it to say I wasn’t sold on the idea. I chewed my salami sandwich, terrified with the question of how to confront her.

How do you tell someone that you question the things they believe in passionately? How do you tell them that your skepticism is equally passionate?

The problem was especially pronounced as I genuinely like my co-worker. Often she is a colourful breath of fresh air around our drab office. I can usually get away with a scathing attack on astrology because not many believe in it passionately, but that was not an option in this case. She wasn’t merely a believer, she was a practitioner.

So I asked her politely if there were any scientific studies to prove or disprove the practice. She assured me there were, and that they showed real positive benefits from the therapy. I don’t doubt that positive benefits are achieved - simple movement, relaxation and the placebo effect could account for that. What I doubt is the explanation for the end result, the idea that by tapping your head and heart you can re-establish the energy flow and lines of communication in your body, thereby allowing it to heal itself. I told her as much, she explained it some more and then lunch was over.

So what do I do now? I am horrified at the idea that she will be presenting this concept as fact to the rest of the staff. And I am the one who asked her to do so! Do I go to the training session? I must, if only to learn more about it and ask the right questions.

Do I confront her ideas during the session? Do I discuss it with the rest of the staff and offer an opposing viewpoint? Or do I sit back and let them make up their own minds?

I think the right approach is not to tell the rest of the staff anything. While I could thrust my opinion at them, instead I will ask them questions about what they believe and what they base it on. In considering my questions hopefully they will learn to be more inquisitive and skeptical themselves.

After all it is the question which is at the heart of science and skepticism, and I believe it is also the correct approach to being a friendly skeptic. In the past I might have been a brow-beating skepticism evangelist, but in the future I will endeavour to be polite and respectful. Even if you ask me my what my star sign is.

Update: Here’s a follow up article written after the training session.

Orbiter is a space flight simulator for the PC. It is not a game. There are no missions, no levels - there is only your craft and the vastness of space. You can take off from the surface of the earth, reach orbit, dock with the ISS, make a round trip to the moon or even take a swing past Saturn.

When I still lived with Mel and Sam they saw me doing all this and wondered why. What was the point of it? You couldn’t even shoot anything. I didn’t really give them a proper answer. I felt that if they didn’t naturally understand why I was interested in this stuff then I couldn’t explain it to them. Well now I think I can.

It’s because I want to be there.

That photo of the ISS was taken by the space shuttle crew as they were leaving for their journey back to earth. Take a look at that view. Click on it and open up the high res version. Soak it in. How can you not dream of being there?

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Email sucks.

Once there was a time when the personal computer did not exist. A time when there were only mainframes and terminals to access them. Some bright spark eventually decided it would be a neat idea to connect them together. After a bit of this another luminous individual thought hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could send funny little messages between them. Thus email was born, and therein lies the problems with it. The creators of the simple mail transfer protocol had no idea the extent to which the whole of society would eventualy come to depend on their technology.

Email, like so much of the framework of the internet, is a forty year old hand me down, patched and mended so many times there isn't a shred of original cloth left. It is a garment that no longer fits - we have outgrown it.

For several years all of my computers have been running the SETI@home project. This means that any spare CPU power is used to try and find aliens.

No, I'm not joking.

The program downloads data collected by a massive radio telescope in Puerto Rico, and analyses it to try and find a signal from the stars. Since the project began in 1999 there have been a few candidates, but no joy.

So where the hell are all the little green men, and why aren't they talking?

One of the pioneers of the search for extra terrestrial intelligence (SETI) is Frank Drake. Among other things he is famous for creating what is now known as the Drake Equation. This equation predicts the number of our galactic neighbours capable of communicating with us at any given time.