My mind casts a rather wide net, piqued by interest in history and politics to cognitive science, psychology and evolution to parenting and consumer culture to music, literature and poetry to personal anecdotes. A casual glance at this blog should reveal this fact. I snorkel the world in search of interesting nuggets of observations and ideas that illuminate the condition of humanity, the universe we live in.
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Blog Archives
Understanding Science
Posted on September 12, 2011
Teach A Man To Fish
Posted on June 14, 2011
A wise friend told me about the modern variation to the old adage about fishing and feeding. The new version goes like this: “Feed a man a fish and you’ll have to feed him for the rest of his life. Teach a man to fish and he’ll wipe out the fishes.”
I thought this was catchy, but didn’t know how true it was. Last week, via a link from kottke.org, I came across this shocking visual put together by David McCandless, author of a blog on the UK daily, The Guardian.
Vanishing Fish by David McCandless
David explains the picture:
“This image shows the biomass of popularly-eaten fish in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1900 and in 2000. Popularly eaten fish include: bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot. Many of which are now vulnerable or endangered.”
David explains another very crucial and chilling point, about memory and public policy. He says that most of us who’re trying to protect these fishes don’t even know how rich the seas were once upon a time, because we have no memory of them, the damage done before our generation was born. So, whatever policies we come up with are already poor. As W.S. Merwin wrote in the poem, Witness:
I want to tell what the forests
were likeI will have to speak
in a forgotten language
If you thought, well that is why I eat farmed fish, you’re out of luck. Following a link from David’s blog, I came across this 1 minute video that succinctly summarizes why eating farmed fish isn’t better, it might be worse!
Eating Fish from Nigel Upchurch on Vimeo.
When Maya and her children question our carelessness and profligacy, the bereft land that we bequeath them, how shall we answer ?
Gray Whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothingI write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another dayThe bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
- A Coming Extinction, W.S. Merwin
Starry, Starry Night
Posted on June 4, 2011
What child is not fascinated by the night sky ? If I ever want to feel a tingling in my spine, all I have to do is look at the night sky, even in this light polluted suburban land. As a teenager, I longed to own a telescope, something that was just not possible in the time and place I lived in. I spent a few nights lying outside in the garden, staring at the sky through a binoculars that had somehow come my way. I tried to decipher the constellations and make out interesting patterns. I didn’t succeed much. A decade or so ago, I was in Australia, on Kangaroo Island. I had gone out at night to see the penguins as they returned to land. The power went off and the whole island was plunged into darkness. The night sky in that darkness is imprinted in my mind. There was a large band of light that seemed to split the sky, the Milky Way. When I got an iPhone, the first app that I bought was Starwalk, an app that helped me make sense of the night sky.
Today morning, I came across this beautiful time-lapse video of the Milky Way, taken by a South Dakota farmer and photographer. I loved it so much, I had to write a brief entry about it. As someone said, we can’t help being struck by the night sky, after all, we’re all made of stardust.
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Pointed Observations
Posted on March 26, 2011
Maya is intensely curious about people and their interactions. When we go to a restaurant, she can’t stop swiveling around to try and see everybody who’s in the place. People next table are subject to intense scrutiny if they’re engaged in an animated conversation. “She’s your daughter”, Shanthala usually says when this happens. At times, Maya points at the people and asks us what they’re doing or tells us her thoughts on what’s going on or attempts to mimic their conversation. All this of course results in our gently hushing her and trying to get her to not stare at people so much or even point. Pointing is rude, we say, people don’t like being pointed at. She’s even more curious about the denizens closer to her age. If a child is crying, she stops everything she’s doing and stares at the child and the adult(s) involved at the scene. Sometimes, she gets right up in their face as the adults attempt to pacify or admonish the child. She then comes to us and pointing at the child informs us that the child was crying and asks us why. More hushing and more “please don’t point” statements.
At such times, I often wonder, at the origins of the rituals we ask Maya to engage in or desist from. Is the behavior universal or predominantly Western or Indian ? Is it quite old or was it relatively unknown as recently as when I was a child ? What about other animals, do they have similar behaviors ?
Yesterday, I came across an article in one of the blogs that I often follow, ICICI. The article was titled “Human avoidance in pointing: a cultural universal?” The author of the article wondered about the universality of pointing and the reasons for its taboo. He requested fellow anthropologists and other similar practitioners to respond. Reading the responses and the links to the papers that were put out and engaging in a little contemplation on my own provided interesting insights into yet another fascinating aspect of human and animal behavior.
Consider the following experiment. There are two opaque bags and into one, a person places some food. A chimpanzee is shown the two bags and two different things are tried. In one case, the bag with the food is pointed at by a person. In another case, the bag with the food is tilted so that the chimp can see the food. What do you think the chimp does in each case ? In a different experiment, instead of pointing or tilting, one of the experimenters deliberately marked the bag with food with a large X and clumsily dropped the marker into the other bag. Which bag do you think the chimp chose ? Now instead of a chimp, if a toddler is brought in and the experiment is repeated. What do you think the toddler does in each case ?
The chimps picked the right bag when the bag was either tilted or marked (they seemed to note that the dropping of the marker was accidental and ignored that and went for the bag with the X), but they failed to pick the right bag when it was only pointed at. Just to be clear, if one chimp stares at an external location, another chimp can follow the gaze and venture up to the spot targeted by the gaze, even looking back at the other chimp if there is nothing there. In other words, they can “project an imaginary line of sight through invisible space”. But they do not point or follow pointing. It appears that pointing is a human trait. This is fascinating.
As a parent, I engaged in pointing very early on with Maya. Naming various objects involved pointing. Current research seems to indicate that around their first birthday, infants begin to point to draw an adult’s attention at something that caught their eye. Researchers differentiate between two different ways infants use pointing. Infants point to get something, say “get me that ball daddy”, and they point to direct the adult’s attention at something of interest, say “look at that bird daddy” (I’m not saying they can verbalize bird or ball, of course). Interestingly, autistic kids only engage in the first kind of pointing (called protoimperative i.e. a rudimentary command) and not in the second (called protodeclarative i.e. a rudimentary declaration). Even apes raised by humans can apparently engage in protoimperative pointing but not in protodeclarative pointing. Postdeclarative pointing to achieve joint attention is considered by many to be a key step in infants developing a theory of mind (i.e. the knowledge that people have mental states which can lead to certain behaviors and that other’s may have mental states different from one’s own). As the author of the ICICI blog entry notes, pointing is a trait acquired in humans even before the onset of human language.
If pointing is such a key characteristic, why do we then dissuade its use as we grow older, i.e. why is pointing such a taboo ? There are several reasons given, all slight variations of each other, in my opinion. Pointing is calling attention to or singling a person out for some specific reason and the reason is usually not complimentary. Pointing seems entwined with blaming or accusing in our society. As the Dire Straits song goes, “When you point your finger ‘cuz your plan fell through, You got three more fingers pointing back at you”. And there is of course the well-known term “finger-pointing”. Further, the person pointed at, feels isolated and loses the safety of being invisible in a larger whole. Another possible reason is that pointing implies a dominant-to-subordinate relationship such as in a parent-child case. We point at our children and admonish them to not engage in some behavior. One commenter on the ICICI blog narrates an anecdote from Ecuador where a mother explained that it is dangerous for a child to point because of the evil eye of the person being pointed to. In short, pointing is very threatening.
So is it a universal taboo to not point ? One of the commentators to the ICICI blog article says that based on his work with the Yucatec Maya in Mexico, he doesn’t think they consider pointing taboo. But that’s about the only evidence I found that the taboo against pointing is not universal.
Pointing gets convoluted to get around the taboo of not pointing. People in Southeast Asia such as Laos and indigenous people in Southern America, Africa and Australia engage in “lower lip pointing“. The Vezo in Madagascar use a fully bent index finger to point at superiors and those they revere including whales. And of course, there is the Judas kiss.
Another fascinating piece of information that I learned is that there is a disorder called heterotopagnosia in which the patient is unable to point at someone else’s body parts. They pointed at their own body part when asked to point at another person’s body part. They had no problem grasping the other person’s body part, they just couldn’t point to it. The Neurocritic blog has more information about this strange malady.
Little did I know when I first started down this path, of the simple act of pointing.
I’m working on my poems and working with
my fingers not my head. Because my fingersare the farthest stretching things from me.
Look at the tree. Like its longest branchI touch the evening’s quiet breathing. Sounds
of rain. The crackling heat from other trees.The tree points everywhere. The branches can’t
reach to their roots though. Growing longer theygrow weaker also. Can’t make use of water.
Rain falls. But I’m working with these farthest stretchingthings from me. Along my fingertips bare shoots
of days then years unfurl in the cold air. – Long Finger Poem by Jin Eun-Young
References:
1. Twelve-month-olds point to share attention and interest, Liszkowski et al, 2004.
2. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition, Tomasello et al, 2005.
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After the Storms
Posted on March 1, 2011
We were socked with two big storms over the past two weeks. On the tail end of the first storm, we celebrated Maya’s birthday for the first time in the US. We hosted the largest party we’ve ever held at our house. Some 20 odd people including kids showed up. Overall, the party was a success I’d like to think.
The next day we went for a hike. The air was crisp and fresh after the almost four days of continuous rain. Maya had been demanding that we take her to climb a hill and so we eventually did. Gray rain clouds still clung to the sky, but co-mingled with snow white clouds and great patches of blue sky. The whole thing was quite atmospheric (pun intended).
After I got the iPhone, I hardly take the regular camera any more. The iPhone does a pretty good job most of the time. It is only in really low light conditions that I have difficulty getting a good picture (the picture is too grainy). I purchased a couple of apps a few months back and that coupled with a free app enhance the photographs taken with an iPhone quite well.
The first one is called Pro HDR. It simplifies the technique of taking HDR pictures. HDR (high dynamic range) is a technique whereby you combine two photos taken with different exposures to obtain a single photo that uniformly lights all the subjects. For example, if you’re shooting against the sun, the foreground is quite dark while the background is quite well lit. If you place the focus on making the foreground bright in such a condition, the background is too bright, a complete washout. But our eye can see both the background and the foreground quite well. To affect the same illusion, a HDR image is one that is created by combining two such images, one with the foreground dark and the background correctly lit and another with the foreground properly lit and the background a complete washout, to produce a single image that has a high dynamic range of illumination.
Pro HDR is one of the several HDR programs available for the iPhone. I picked it up on sale and because it was one of the higher rated HDR apps. With it I’ve captured several gorgeous pictures. Here is one taken on the hike with Maya up Rancho San Antonio County Park. Compare it with a similar photo taken without the HDR program.
Here is another good looking picture taken with the HDR program.
Notice the ghost at the far left, caused by an object that moved between the two differently exposed pictures.
Another program that I purchased is called 360 Panorama. This allows you to shoot panoramic pictures quite easily with an iPhone. When I had gone to my sister’s graduation, I was impressed by a camera that my cousin had, the Sony Nex 5. He just pressed the shutter and fired away as he swung the camera in an arc across the auditorium. The camera automatically composed a panorama out of these pictures. Compare that to the panorama mode in most cameras that I had seen till then with the panorama stitch assist mode. A few days later I ran into the 360 Panorama app which does pretty much what the Nex did, except that it ran on my iPhone and cost $1.99 (yes, less than $2).
Here is a panoramic picture taken with this program.
As you can see, the picture is not that great because of the poor light conditions. I’ve come to realize that the more professional cameras are more forgiving of adverse light conditions and poor photographers while the cheaper ones or like the one with the iPhone produce great pictures under a limited range of lighting conditions.
Hardly had the first storm abated than the second storm hit. This one came with far greater expectations than the first. A cold front from Alaska was bringing brrrr! temperatures. Snow was expected, snow so rarely seen in this part of the world. The excitement built up so much that a website called IsItSnowingInSFYet.com sprang up. The local paper carried the headlines:
“‘Coldest storm of season’ hits Bay Area; snowball fights in San Jose
still possible”.
Sure enough, the temperatures dropped to record busting lows. Oakland and San Francisco Airport had their lowest temperatures recorded for the month (34 and 35 degrees Farenheit, I know nothing Arctic, but hey, this is Silicon Valley). Nearby Mountain View and San Francisco had temperatures that tied with the existing record. But no snow came. The local paper this time said: “The much-ballyhooed Great Blizzard of 2011 was more like the Great Fizzle.”
But catching a break in the rain on a slow work day, I went for a trot on Friday morning. It was quite cold, but after a mile or so, I had warmed up enough to not notice it. I wanted to see Stevens Creek in spate.
The creek was a roar compared to its usual silent flow. In places where the path descended to the level of the creek, the creek looked like it’d overflow. The creek was a rich, chocolate milkshake brown, frothing white as it tumbled over rocks and sudden changes in gradient.
The second picture above is another image shot with the HDR app.
As I ran down the trail, my mind raced over some news that I had been browsing in the past few days. The East Coast of the US had been hit with one of the worst storms in its recorded history, Australia had suffered devastating floods. I remembered that my friend at the non-profit that I work with had titled an essay on how weather is affected by global warming as: “How the 100 Year Flood Became An Annual Event”. If that sounds too dramatic, NYT blogged back in 2007 that:
“Floods that happen every 100 years could come as often as every 10 years by the end of this century, Long Island lobsters will disappear and New York apples will be just a memory if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.“
2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year in recorded history (since record keeping began in 1887). The weather all of last year was quite irregular. So what, you say ? Here is a chart put out by the BBC on world food prices:
According to the article, titled “Q&A: Why food prices and fuel costs are going up“:
“… in 2010, severe weather in some of the world’s biggest food exporting countries damaged supplies.
That has helped to push food prices almost 20% higher than a year earlier, according to the FAO. (The 2010 figure was slightly below the annual measure for 2008 as a whole.)
Flooding hit the planting season in Canada, and destroyed crops of wheat and sugar cane in Australia.
In addition, drought and fires devastated harvests of wheat and other grains in Russia and the surrounding region during the summer, prompting Russia to ban exports.
As a result, wheat production is expected to be lower this year than in the last two years, according to US government estimates.”
Meanwhile, in the US, we voted Tea Party led Republicans to power and what have they started ? Attacking EPA and climate change regulations that they claim hurts business. Yahoo had an article titled “Congress Begins Assault on EPA’s Climate Change Regulations“. In Montana, there’s talk of passing a bill that would declare that global warming is good for business! Discover, the popular US-based science magazine, said that the number 4 science story of 2010 was: “Climate Science Wins a Round, But the Campaign Goes Poorly“. This was after the so-called climategate scandal, in which some conservative hackers hacked into University of East Anglia and retrieved more than 1000 emails that they said showed how scientists were distorting the evidence and that there was no scientific consensus on global warming. There was no evidence of distorting evidence, of course, but that didn’t help the cause, especially in the US. Pew Research found that the percentage of Americans who believe that human activity is causing global warming fell sharply to 34% in 2010 from 50% in 2006. Only 13% of conservatives believe human activity as the cause for global warming.
As I ran, I wondered how we would come together on such a divisive issue. The US especially is so deeply anti-science and anti-global warming that I find it alarming. Even friends who seem to accept the problem, do little to change their lives to act in a way that reduces their carbon footprint. Of course, I’m no saint when it comes to reacting to global warming either. I may do a little, but there is not as much integrity or depth to my responses.
Last year, Time magazine carried an article titled: “Climate-Change Strategy: Be Afraid — but Only a Little”. The article said that research by two Berkeley psychologists showed that: “when people are shown scientific evidence or news stories on climate change that emphasize the most negative aspects of warming — extinguished species, melting ice caps, serial natural disasters — they are actually more likely to dismiss or deny what they’re seeing. Far from scaring people into taking action on climate change, such messages seem to scare them straight into denial. … The results, Willer and Feinberg wrote, “demonstrate how dire messages warning of the severity of global warming and its presumed dangers can backfire … by contradicting individuals’ deeply held beliefs that the world is fundamentally just.” (WEIRD warning alert, of course).
I think like recycling and driving less, some minimal actions that can help the cause is how we shop for food. Buy local produce. Avoid purchasing goods that have been produced and shipped from across the country or worse, from across the world. If you have farmers’ markets, shop there, especially if you can afford it. Run the heater a little less in the house. Do these really help or are they only feel good actions ? I think that once we decide to factor carbon footprint and sustainability into our decisions, even just a little, there is a potential to affect a larger change. I also hear Gandhi’s quotes, “Be the change you want to see in the world” and “My life is my message”.
I finished my run in good time and my legs felt good. I was glad for the lull in the work schedule and the rain that I could go for a run. My mind harked back to the Derrick Jensen quote that I have written about: “We are really fucked. Life is still really good.”
