Garden Pix (dept. of disguise)

After our trip to Kilver Court, Shepton Mallet, we dropped in to Dobbies Garden World where Clare checked out the category of 'plants which hide unsightly concrete posts when they grow up'.

The gardener at work ...

This is a bamboo which grows to 5 ft apparently

... and this is another plant with similar aspirations

The animal and his shadow ... checking stuff ...

"Wild" (film)

Went to see "Wild" this afternoon.

Here is what RogerEbert.com thought about it.

“Wild” begins with novice hiker Cheryl Strayed at one of the lowest points during her three-month, 1,100-mile-long solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail. She gingerly inspects her bloodied feet and prepares to pluck a battered nail from her big toe. While yanking it, she emits a primal scream of agony and causes one of her boots to tumble over a steep cliff. In frustration, she tosses its partner down the incline as well, and shrieks some colorful expletives for good measure.

We should rightfully be filled with concern for this traveler, all alone in the wilderness and sans appropriate footwear. Yet I knew she would be all right. Why? Because Reese Witherspoon, an actress with enough high-octane spunk to fuel an entire cheerleading squad as well as the football team, is playing her.
...
There are plenty of encounters, both welcome and unwelcome, along the way, including a rattlesnake, a curious fox, predatory men and surprisingly kind strangers. She sweats, swears, shivers and mutters her way through scorching heat and unseasonable snow, copes with dehydration and gobbles freeze-dried meals, all the while building up quite a stench in between rest stops.
...
As for life-threatening hazards, they mainly exist in her head as flickers of old memories grow into full-blown flashback sequences. I was less convinced by these visits to the past where we see Strayed lose her bearings after her adored mother dies from a virulent bout of cancer at 45. (Laura Dern, only nine years older than Witherspoon, manages to be quite fabulous as Bobbi, a human sunbeam who radiates unconditional love for her children after leaving behind an abusive marriage.)

Overwhelmed by grief, Strayed engages in reckless sex with strangers and picks up a heroin addiction while destroying her marriage to a rather sweet and caring husband.

The audience was overwhelmingly female - that's the demographic for this film - and I was occasionally watching through spread fingers and internally reviewing my recently-acquired understanding of density matrices during some of the more life-affirming scenes.

I had some variant takes on this film: (i) it's a familiar hymn to the improbably advantages accruing to impulsive and emotional young women faced with difficult tasks over better-prepared guys; (ii) an example of the genotypic consequences in offspring of mating a hippy-dippy chick with a violently abusive alcoholic; (iii) a case study in emotional blackmail, whereby someone who is basically incompetent and out-of-control implicitly relies on the helpfulness and restraint of strangers to survive at all.

Curmudgeonly thoughts aside, consider all the prudent, pleasant people in the world (those who have not mainlined heroin and indulged in damaged-goods hyper-promiscuous sex 'with any man who asked') whose mundane life stories have not been turned into a best-selling book, and then a major film with a Hollywood A-lister salivating over the leading part!

(More about Cheryl Strayed).

A long read

Clare and Nigel in Greece: 2007

A pointless holiday snap: we were travelling with the Andante archaeological travel company visiting Athens, Delphi, Corinth, Sparta and the site of the ancient Olympics at Olympia.

Terry Pratchett's humour doesn't really agree with me, although I respect his evident intelligence, wisdom and all-round national treasure status blah, blah, blah. I had therefore avoided "The Long X" sequence, X ∈ {Earth, War, Mars, ..., ...} on the grounds of anticipated boredom. Co-authorship with Stephen Baxter, big science and poor characterisation, did nothing to mitigate my fears.

A visit to the library and I weakened, bringing home {Earth, Mars}. The critics are right: nothing much happens for hundreds of pages. I quite like the idea of a countable (possibly countably-infinite) number of parallel universes accessible by 'stepping' -  a Euclidean fifth large dimension. That seems to have been where their joint imagination ran out.

But could the universe be even stranger? It would be soooo cool if the spacetime of our common-sense reality were an emergent property of some high-dimensional Hilbert space. Now wouldn't that be something!*

---

* I don't pretend to understand this paper, but I like the authors' aim:

" ... a new approach to the problem of unification of quantum theory with general relativity theory. Its key idea is to “general relativise quantum theory” instead of “quantising general relativity” ...".

"The Star Fraction" - Ken MacLeod

What would I have done without the Fourth International? As a marxist cadre in my early twenties I experienced the camaraderie of a close-knit community, endless parties and discos, a structure and framework to my life plus a mission of the greatest importance - the future of humanity itself.

Ken MacLeod's "The Star Fraction" is Trotskyist science-fiction. Published in 1995, twenty years after I attended countless demos and endless meetings in smoke-filled rooms above pubs, the comforting ambience of daily life in the revolutionary-left is summoned again as an old friend.

Macleod is entranced by one of his female characters, the intriguing Catherin Duvalier (part of her allure is the absence of that terminal 'e'). Here is how she is described, entering a bar:

"She moved liked a dancer, glanced around like a fighter. She had a shining halo of blonde hair, bright blue eyes, skin the colour of pale honey, high cheekbones and the kind of jawline that the rest of humanity would take about half a million years to evolve. She wasn't tall, but she had long legs, covered to just below the knees by a dress that had quite plainly been made out of cobwebs beaded with morning dew."

And here's the Wikipedia summary of the plot:

"The world is controlled by the US/UN, a sort of semi-benign meta-dictatorship which doesn't rule directly so much as enforce a series of basic laws on a vast number of microstates. Many of the microstates are in a near-constant state of low-intensity warfare. Among the laws enforced on them is a prohibition on certain directions of research, such as intelligence augmentation or artificial intelligence; precisely what is prohibited is of course secret, and as violation of the prohibitions will result in the swift and efficient death of everyone directly involved, scientific research is a dangerous proposition at best.

"The main characters – a trotskyist mercenary, a libertarian teenager from a fundamentalist microstate, and an idealistic scientist – find themselves caught up at the center of a global revolution against the US/UN. The revolution was planned, and partially automated using financial software, in order to break out when a certain set of conditions were reached. The stakes are raised at the end of the book, when it is revealed that the autonomous financial software has evolved into an intelligent form, which might cause the paranoid US/UN to make a "clean break" with the earth, knocking the planet back to the stone age with the orbital defense lasers."

Ken Macleod is part of that Scottish SF 'mafia' which also included Iain M. Banks. The group has consistently eluded true eminence, Banks coming nearest although he never wrote the definitive great science-fiction novel. Macleod is a competent writer and you are prepared to relax and be taken into his world. There is of course a 'but'. He lacks stardust - the originality, audacity and sheer intelligence to pin the reader back in surprise and remake their worldview. Few have it, of course: for the remainder we hum along -  'hmm .. yep .. that's interesting' - and don't wholly feel the guilt of wasted time.

This was a nostalgia-fest for me, both the left-wing politics and the sub-Neuromancer tech-extrapolation (who 'jacks in to modems' these days?). The conflict which informs the plot is that of oldtime Marxist-Leninist proletarian vanguardism vs. the identity politics of the truculent middle-classes: greens, ecologists, gender politics. In my time this was all just getting going: we welcomed these strange new allies in the struggle for workers' power; in the 1990s the conflict was a battle for primacy, while latterly, in the historic absence of any significant worker radicalisation, the far-left has finally been captured altogether.

Still, I may have been one of the few readers who knew the difference between a faction and a fraction without having to look it up.

Malodorous, hmm ...

From the Wikipedia article: today we are talking about the gene ABCC11 and its alleles, which have the following unfortunate consequences.

"The product of this gene participates in physiological processes involving bile acids, conjugated steroids, and cyclic nucleotides. In addition, an SNP in this gene is responsible for determination of human earwax type and presence of underarm odour."

My earwax type, like most Europeans, is 'wet earwax'. To be honest I could be happy with no earwax at all - lose the regular eardrops and self-syringing! Here are the alleles of the ABCC11 gene as segregating at SNP locus rs17822931 according to SNPedia.

(C;C)		Wet earwax. Normal body odour.
(C;T)		Wet earwax. Slightly better body odour.
(T;T)		Dry earwax. No body odour. Likely Asian ancestry.

They're very polite over at SNPedia. Here's what Razib Khan noted in this post.

"The subjects were a few hundred Filipins. This is a population where the allele of interest segregates in intermediate frequencies. So there are many individuals with dry earwax as well as wet earwax, and all the associated traits.

Here are some tables I extracted*:

Mean malodour scores
	5 hours	24 hours
TT	2.59	2.6
CT	3.26	3.4
CC	3.21	3.5
	Genotype
	TT	CT	CC
Uses deodorant	0.5	0.86	0.97
Does not use	0.5	0.14	0.03

"I have no idea how subjective malodour scales work, but the moral is pretty straightforward. Those with the TT genotype saturate at a much lower point. This manifests in daily behavior. There is a fair amount of Japanese data that people who go to the doctor for body odor issues are much more likely to have wet earwax. This data from the Philippines illustrates that individuals with the derived genotype, TT, must be conscious enough of their lack of body odor to forgo deodorant purchases, even though I assume it is normative in the American influenced culture of the Philippines."

My own 23andMe data returns this:

My 23andMe data for the ABCC11 gene

Keep those showers coming and don't forget the Sure is, I think, the message here.

---

The real puzzle is how the relatively recent (c. 50,000 years ago) T mutation swept to near fixation in the Han Chinese and neighbouring populations. What on earth was the selective advantage? *

From the comment by Greg Cochran at Razib's post:

"It’s essentially impossible for selection to favor a pure recessive trait. You’re never going to see it. Therefore, we can conclude that some effect of this mutation shows up in heterozygotes and is favored by natural selection – but nobody seems to know what it is."

Why is it "essentially impossible for selection to favor a pure recessive trait"? The recessive mutation is initially rare in the population and the offspring of the carrier will almost certainly be heterozygous. This hides the selective advantage of the recessive allele so it doesn't get to spread in the population. Most likely it will simply die out.

---

* Update: it could be sexual selection for smelling better: CT beats CC leading to heterozygote advantage, then TT wins out.

"The Egg" by Andy Weir

Just finished reading that superlative hymn to engineering can-do, The Martian, by Andy Weir. The man is a compelling writer as this story below illustrates (h/t my sister again).

More short stories from Andy Weir.

---

The Egg

By: Andy Weir

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.”

“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.”

I stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had.

“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.”

“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?”

“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.”

“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?”

“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.”

“Where you come from?” You said.

“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.”

“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.”

“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.”

“So what’s the point of it all?”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?”

“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted.

I looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.”

“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?”

“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.”

“Just me? What about everyone else?”

“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.”

You stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…”

“All you. Different incarnations of you.”

“Wait. I’m everyone!?”

“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back.

“I’m every human being who ever lived?”

“Or who will ever live, yes.”

“I’m Abraham Lincoln?”

“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added.

“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled.

“And you’re the millions he killed.”

“I’m Jesus?”

“And you’re everyone who followed him.”

You fell silent.

“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.”

You thought for a long time.

“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?”

“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.”

“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?”

“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.”

“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…”

“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.”

And I sent you on your way.

Since this whole conversation takes place 'out of time' perhaps our careless driver is in fact God as well, but God doesn't know it?

A strange attractor in the car park at Wells

Greg Egan has a short story in Axiomatic, "Unstable Orbits in the Space of Lies", where humanity has had some kind of mass sea change in which prevailing belief systems manifest as psychic forces that compel all within their range to believe, and the city of the story is divided into zones of belief that vie and shift, with the protagonist one of a minority who seem to have kept free by constantly keeping between the zones, never being overwhelmed by any one belief system.

The protagonist finally realises that his nomadic journeying around the city is not free at all: he is confined within the physical limits of the strange attractor which corresponds to his own libertarian beliefs.

I thought of this as we walked across the car park in town towards the library this morning. Clare kept pulling off to the right. Eventually, as I gazed at her oddly, she became self-aware and advanced an explanation: "I'm being pulled towards Whiting's."

This being the hardware emporium  which could keep a body entertained for a week.

What every schoolkid kinda knows ...

XKCD: Fundamental Forces

And here's the (mouse-over) punchline:

"Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand."

"Is it the weak force or the strong?"

"It's gravity."

Yes folks, it's true.

Mars One

Just started "The Martian" by Andy Weir, passed to me by my sister.

"In Andy Weir’s novel, The Martian, an American astronaut named Mark Watney is stranded on Mars after a vicious sandstorm cuts him off from his fellow crew members. They assume, with good reason, that he has been killed in the storm; their only recourse is to save themselves by aborting the mission and returning to Hermes, the mother ship.

Watney’s situation then is the most dire that can be imagined. He has no means of communication with Hermes or Earth; as far as the known universe is concerned, he is dead and therefore no rescue operations are contemplated.
...
Watney is heir to the labours of countless other individuals — he has at his disposal numerous gadgets left behind by his fellow astronauts, ranging from a hammer and screwdriver to a plutonium-fuelled generator called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. (Such a device does exist by the way — Weir’s future fiction is pretty much set in the present.)

It is through these devices — mainly an atmospheric regulator, oxygenator and a water reclaimer — that Watney is able to keep breathing and moving around and even to start planting and harvesting a potato crop on the soil of Mars."

The ludicrous "Mars One" project is doomed in a variety of ways, but the most telling fact is that the kind of guys you need on a no-return, ramshackle Mars base are plumbers, electricians, botanists and electronic engineers: people with mechanical aptitude and green fingers. The people who've signed up all seem to be folk with doctorates in black hole physics. As I said, doomed.

---

In "Wolf Hall" last week, Thomas Cromwell advises his son, who is about to joust with King Henry 8th for the first time. Cromwell explains that he once met a superb jouster in Turkey who explained the key to success: relax in the saddle, hold the lance as if it were light as air, and lose all care as to whether you will survive or not.

This is a very familiar trope. I recall some years ago watching a very bad film about King Arthur. I dimly recall someone like Danny Kaye playing the knight Lancelot, who at this point is wandering around incognito as the sword-fighting equivalent of a prize fighter, taking on all comers. A young man asks him the secret of his success. Kaye/Lancelot replies with the usual - do this with the sword, watch your opponent like that .. and then his final advice, and don't care whether you live or die.

Do you recognise this as another example of 'hawk vs. dove' or the game of chicken? A superlative dogfighting tactic was simply to fly head-on at your opponent, firing all the time. Both aircraft are small targets, but the first one to break away exposes itself completely to its opponent's fire and will be shot down. The pilots who 'didn't care whether they lived or died' were the ones who lived.

I think this advice comes down to: we can't all be psychopaths but sometimes it pays to emulate one.

---

I am a really slow learner. For years I tolerated being thirteen and a half stone, with a spherical abdomen and a vast, forty inch plus waistline. Six months of the 5:2 diet a couple of years ago lost me two and a half stone and for ages I was stable at just over 11 stone (70 kg). Recently I realised that I was still tolerating a layer of flab under the rib cage and a residual layer of abdominal fat. Why?

I guess I just hadn't engaged. I have now decided to forget BMIs and target weights, I just don't need to carry this extra stuff around. I was 10 stone 12 (69 kg) this morning and the loss of a kilogram is already noticeable at the gym (more power!). I have in the past been briefly 10 stone 9 lb and it's looking like ten and a half stone might be a healthier weight to be at. We shall see.

I recall Matthew Parris's famous remark on dieting. 'If you're a bit overweight, skip breakfast; if the problem is a little more serious, skip lunch too. The problem will soon be resolved.'

I agree.

Two unenviable choices

More quirky writing from Dr Michelsen, describing the two main options for understanding what quantum mechanics really means. This surely answers the question; "How would Jesus have explained it?"

"Dr. Xavier E. Rox believes in predictability. There can be no collapse, no random events. Physics is deterministic, just like the old classical physicist, Dr. Diehard, says. Dr. Rox observes, “Diehard’s only problem is that his math is wrong. Physics follows the Schrödinger equation.”

Of course, to be consistent with experiment, Dr. Rox must assume that at every instant, the quantum state of the entire universe, including himself(!), splits into a new superposition of all possible results. “Better complexity and confusion than uncertainty,” he declares, much to the dismay of Werner Heisenberg.

On Sunday, Dr. Rox goes to the Church of Duplicity, and worships a rapidly growing list of very similar gods.

***

Dr. Ophelia C. Cam retorts, “Stuff and nonsense! I can only ever perceive one world, so it is unscientific to talk about others. They are, by definition, outside the possibility of observation, and therefore, also by definition, outside the realm of science.” She believes that each observer, with each observation, collapses her own wave-function of the universe. That is, to be consistent with experiment, she must assume that each observer has her own wave-function for the universe, which collapses only when its owner makes an observation. This means the quantum state of the universe is different for different observers.

How can a wave-function collapse? How can a wave-function be subjective, and not absolute? “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” says Dr. Cam. “Like it or not, it is what it is. The measured results provide a single reality for all observers, so there is no physical consequence of personalized wavefunctions.”

On Wednesdays, Dr. Cam goes to the Church of One Mind, where she prays to a very lonely God.

Who is right, then, Dr. Rox or Dr. Cam? This is not a scientific question, since both professors make the same experimental predictions. Whom you believe depends on which church you attend."

You see what he did there? With the names?

Satire aside, it's interesting that this is the best that the greatest minds on the planet have been able to come up with, in a century of trying. We're missing something important.