Fred Astaire Week: I Won’t Dance

August 24, 2012 • 5:35 pm

Astaire was an artistic polymath: this clip, from the movie Roberta (1935), demonstrates his singing, dancing, and piano playing. Yes, that’s Fred at the beginning, playing hot stride piano, and he’s really good! He then segues into a duet, the Jerome Kern tune “I won’t dance“, with his most famous dancing partner, Ginger Rogers (I’ll show some of their dances in a day or two). And don’t forget his drumming skills from yesterday!

Finally, Astaire does some of his seemingly effortless tap-dancing—perfected, of course, through endless practice. Notice that he manages to tap while piroutetting at 4:40, and there’s a wild, machine-gun finish.

I think we’ll need at least four more days to show off this man at his best.

Beetle of the week

August 24, 2012 • 1:04 pm

The acorn weevil (Curculio glandium) is a curious beast/It uses its snout for an acorn feast./The squirrels all hate it ’cause the beast is rude/For its larvae horn in on the squirrels’ food.

Photo from @TGIQ’s (‘TheGeekInQuestion) Twitter feed. The bug (remember, not a true bug) looks like it’s having a good ol’ time stomping to cowboy music.

[EDIT from Matthew Cobb: TheGeekInQuestion is really Crystal Ernst, a PhD student at McGill University in Canada. She has a blog and a website where she shows her photos, with the foot-stomping weevil on the masthead. There’s some great advice there for how to take macro photos of vertebrates. She also has some amazing photos of hairworms in various beetles which are just mind-bogglingly gruesome. I sent a video of a hairworm coming out of a mantis butt that Crystal posted, but Jerry refused to put it up here saying it was too horrible…]

A cool National Geographic video of the feeding and oviposition behavior of the acorn weevil is here.  Do watch it! The larvae can take three days to emerge from the acorn. The narrative is a bit corny, but the video is great.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Film: The descent of the Mars rover

August 24, 2012 • 10:54 am

I guess my fascination with the Mars rover hasn’t yet abated.  Here’s a new film of the descent of the vehicle complex, showing the ejection of the heat shield and the landing.

The YouTube notes say this:

This is a full-resolution version of the NASA Curiosity rover descent to Mars, taken by the MARDI descent imager. As of August 20, all but a dozen 1600 x1200 frames have been uploaded from the rover, and those missing were interpolated using thumbnail data. The result was applied a heavy noise reduction, color balance, and sharpening for best visibility.

. . . The heat shield impacts in the lower left frame at 0:21, and is shown enlarged at the end of the video. Image source: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/?s=0&camera=MARDI

Scientific American adds this:

Visual effects dab-hand, Daniel Luke Fitch, has used the more recently available HD frames of the descent to make this jaw-dropping movie. As he explains, it runs at 15 frames a second, which represents a speed-up of real events by 3 times. So the actual descent was not quite as ferocious, but it was pretty darn close.

The fidelity is astonishing. Early on, at around the 2-3 second mark, and again at 0:08 you can see the diffuse glow of what I think must be atmospheric and dust reflection of sunlight. The final drop happens at around 0:33, it’s pretty messy, one can only presume that without the sky crane it would’ve been even more so.

For the feline perspective, click here.

Yet another failed attempt to argue for free will

August 24, 2012 • 7:37 am

Oy gewalt, and this defense of free will appears in Harvard Magazine, the vehicle of my alma mater.  In a short piece called “Two steps to free will,” Craig Lambert presents the pro-free-will views of Robert Doyle, of the university’s department of astronomy. Note that at the outset Lambert states the problem as one of dualism, a view that many compatibilists claim, nobody really holds. I disagree, of course, for it’s the view of millions of religious folks. (The “will of God” bit below is unfortunate).:

For five years, Doyle has worked on a problem he has pondered since college: the ancient conundrum of free will versus determinism. Do humans choose their actions freely, exercising their own power of will, or do external and prior causes (even the will of God) determine our acts?

Now I haven’t read Doyle’s writings on this topic, but the “two-stage model” as presented in the article seems specious. There aren’t really even two stages:

Doyle limns a two-stage model in which chance presents a variety of alternative possibilities to the human actor, who selects one of these options and enacts it. “Free will isn’t one monolithic thing,” he says. “It’s a combination of the free element with selection.”

This is reminiscent of natural selection, in which mutation presents a variety of genetic variation which is then winnowed by natural selection. But Doyle’s model seems wrong in both its steps.  The “alternative possibilities” are, in my mind, illusory: they are the possibilities that the actor thinks she has, or that an outside observer thinks are available. In reality, there’s only one real option, and even compatibilists believe that. Further, nobody thinks that the alternative possibilities arise by chance: the things that appear possible arise as a combination of one’s genes and one’s environments. Nobody, for example, would say that I even have the possibility of choosing to play the piano. But leave that aside for the moment.

What is more important is that we don’t “select” a possibility—if by “selection” Doyle means that we could just as easily have chosen another possibility.  To the naive reader, at least, this is pure dualism.  That impression is reinforced by something  Doyle says later in the piece:

But [Doyle] identifies James as the first philosopher to clearly articulate such a model of free will, and (in a 2010 paper published in the journal William James Studies and presented at a conference honoring James; see “William James: Summers and Semesters”) he honors that seminal work by naming such a model—“first chance, then choice”—“Jamesian” free will.

In 1870, James famously declared himself for free will. In a diary entry for April 30, he wrote, “I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s [French philosopher Charles Renouvier, 1815-1903] second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—‘the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts’—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

The key phrase here is “when I might have other thoughts“, i.e., one can at a given moment make a free decision about which thought to entertain.  We can’t do that, for which thoughts we entertain are the products of our physical brains, which themselves come from our genes and the environmental influences that have molded our brains. We are constrained to think the next thought we think. Further, having read the new Schurger et al. paper (reference below) that has been widely touted in the press as giving neurophysiological evidence for free will, don’t find that implication convincing (I’ll post more on this complex paper later).

I’m willing to grant that the Harvard piece might present an incomplete, compressed, or even distorted portrait of Doyle’s views, but I’m going on the article as written.

I know most readers will disagree, but I still think that compatibilist attempts to resuscitate free will are rearguard actions designed to make a virtue of the determinism that most scientifically-minded people agree on. (Victor Stenger, in his book Quantum Gods, makes some calculations implying that the action of quantum indeterminacy on brain function seems unlikely.)

_______________________

Schurger, A., J. D. Sitt, and S. Dehaene. 2012. An accumulator model for spontaenous neural activity prior to self-initiated movement. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, online http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210467109

Playboy interview with Richard Dawkins

August 24, 2012 • 5:06 am

Playboy magazine, which has had some famous interviews over the years, has published a four-page discussion with Richard Dawkins. (Warning: a half-dressed woman flanks the interview, so this is probably NSFW.) Because Richard is peripatetic, the interviewer (Chip Rowe) had to follow him to Las Vegas, New York, and Washington D.C.

Because I’m so familiar with Richard’s views, I didn’t find much new, nor did Rowe seem to ask very informed questions. But I suspect that many Playboy readers may not be familiar with either New Atheism or evolution, so in the main I think it was a very good interview for that moiety of America that actually reads Playboy for more than the pictures. A few snippets:

PLAYBOY: It sounds like the argument made by Bertrand Russell, who said that while he could claim a teapot orbited the sun between Earth and Mars, he couldn’t expect anyone to believe him just because they couldn’t prove him wrong.

DAWKINS: It’s the same idea. It’s a little unfair to say it’s like the tooth fairy. I think a particular god like Zeus or Jehovah is as unlikely as the tooth fairy, but the idea of some kind of creative intelligence is not quite so ridiculous.

I was a bit surprised at this: while the idea of a creative intelligence is indeed more likely than the existence of one of the thousands of specific gods posited over history, there’s still no evidence for any “creative intelligence,” and I worry that this statement will allow some to claim that Dawkins allows for the possibility of God. (Well, he is a 6.9 on the 7-point scale of theistic probability.)

Re his scatological appearance on South Park, he brings up recent schisms in atheism:

DAWKINS: Transsexual, okay. That isn’t satire because it has nothing to do with what I stand for. And the scatological part, where they had somebody throwing shit, which stuck to my forehead—that’s not even funny. I don’t understand why they couldn’t go straight to the atheists fighting each other, which has a certain amount of truth in it. It reminded me of the bit from Monty Python’s Life of Brian with the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea.

Dawkins gets Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) idea right, though he doesn’t add that Gould made another error beyond imputing morality to religion alone: he didn’t consider any religions that made claims about the real world—that is, all theistic religions—as “real faiths.” In that way Gould eliminated much of the conflict by definition.

PLAYBOY: The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould viewed science and religion as——

DAWKINS: Non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA.

PLAYBOY: Completely separate.

DAWKINS: That’s pure politics. Gould was trying to win battles in the creation-evolution debate by saying to religious people, “You don’t have to worry. Evolution is religion-friendly.” And the only way he could think to do that was to say they occupy separate domains. But he overgenerously handed the domains of morals and fundamental questions to religion, which is the last thing you should do. Science cannot at present—maybe never—answer the deep questions about existence and the origins of the fundamental laws of nature. But what on earth makes you think religion can? If science can’t provide an answer, nothing can.

PLAYBOY: Some scientists say that you should stop talking about atheism because it muddies the waters in the debate over evolution.

DAWKINS: If what you’re trying to do is win the tactical battle in U.S. schools, you’re better off lying and saying evolution is religion-friendly. I don’t wish to condemn people who lie for tactical reasons, but I don’t want to do that. For me, this is only a skirmish in the larger war against irrationality.

The last bit is right on: “lying for tactical reasons”.  And I claim some precedence here, for 6 years ago in Playboy (Letters, p. 15, Aug. 2006), I wrote in response to a piece by Michael Ruse that “[Ruse] makes some good points but fails to grasp the real nature of the conflict. It’s not just evolution vs. creationism. It’s rationalism vs. superstitition. . . To many of us, then, a mind that accepts both science and religion is a mind in conflict.”

There’s a soupçon of humor:

PLAYBOY: What will happen when you die?

DAWKINS: Well, I shall either be buried or be cremated.

And he states the case for skepticism concisely:

PLAYBOY: All the atheists we met at the skeptics convention in Las Vegas seemed to have a story about being kicked out of Sunday school.

DAWKINS: Yes, that’s terribly funny. What a Sunday school teacher should say is “Let’s look at the evidence.” Instead they get cross. And the reason they get cross is that there isn’t any evidence.

PLAYBOY: They get cross with you as well. You are asking a religious person to change his or her worldview.

DAWKINS: I want people to change their worldview such that they demand evidence for something they’re going to believe. It’s not a good reason to believe because “our people have always believed that.” If you’d been born in Afghanistan or India, you’d believe something else. Another lousy reason is because you have an inner feeling it must be true, or you’ve been told by a priest it’s true.

The last part of the interview includes quite a lot about evolution and, as usual, Dawkins shines here:

PLAYBOY: What about this one, another favorite of creationists: If modern animals such as monkeys evolved from frogs, why haven’t we found any fossils from a transitional creature such as a fronkey?

DAWKINS: The fallacy is thinking of modern animals as descended from other modern animals. If you take that seriously, there should be not just fronkey fossils but crocoduck or octocow fossils. Why on earth would you expect you could take any pair of animals and look for a combination of them? We’re looking at the tips of the twigs of the tree. The ancestors are buried deep in the middle, in the crown of the tree. There are no fronkeys because the common ancestor of a frog and a monkey would be some kind of fishy, salamandery thing that looks like neither a frog nor a monkey.

I doubt that I could provide such an eloquent response on the spot!

By the way, isn’t it time for Dawkins to be knighted? His contributions to rationality and the public understanding of science certainly warrant adding “Sir,” to his name, but there’s fat chance of that in Anglican England!

Fred Astaire Week: Nice Work if You Can Get It

August 23, 2012 • 6:47 pm

I find this one of Astaire’s most stunning performances: he uses the drumsticks, drums, and tap-dancing to produce an amazingly intricate bit of choreography.

The movie is “A Damsel in Distress” (1937), the song is the George and Ira Gershwin standard “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” and the whole sequence was shot in one take.

Unbelievable. Only one man could ever have done something like this.

More cowbell?

Curiosity’s first drive on Mars

August 23, 2012 • 12:18 pm

NASA took the Mars rover Curiosity for a test drive yesterday. This short video shows the results. Right now they’re at the initial checking-stuff-out stage, so the rover moved only a few meters. But everything appears to be copacetic.

Here’s a screenshot from the video showing its tracks.

The video also includes an animation of Curiosity’s short jaunt. Another piece in The Atlantic, which also describes the drive, shows a bit of whimsy on the part of Curiosity’s designers: the tires are shaped to leave three imprints in Morse Code:

. – – –
. – – .
. – . .

Those letters spell out “JPL,” for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.  For scientists, that’s high humor, for it’s nothing decipherable by aliens.

Here’s a Morse-code tire: