Saturday, May 29, 2010

Judging a Book By Its Cover

Mostly I'm all for old quotations. Lots of wisdom to be had there. The old adage 'Never Judge a Book By It's Cover' is something that's close to my heart. I always remember it when I form opinions... especially about people. Although it applies to cars and software and graphic novels too.

Who would have known that the fancy-pants Fiat Punto runs a trashy engine half a decade older than the humble Maruti Swift? But there's still one field where I find that I just can't agree with that old saying.


That's when I'm trying to judge...


...er...
... well...

Books.







These are all good books.

Can you recognize a common thread to them all? No? Yes? I assume no.

Maybe it'll help to have some comparative pictures of great and not so great books from the same author :)





Good. ...................................................Meh.



Like reading an awesome action movie.





Like reading a B-grade
action sequel.




I think most of you would have gotten the very simple distinction between the covers of the good books and the not so good books. That's right... the good books place the emphasis on the name of the book, the bad ones place emphasis on the name of the author.

Somehow I never liked reading authors names in large characters. I didn't put my finger on 'why?' until much later. Having your name in massive characters is an ego exercise, and takes away from the work itself. If the work is good enough to stand on its own, it does not need the crutch of it's author. On the other hand... if the work is weak, the author, the publisher is insecure, he tries to bank on past glory... either that or he has the ego the size of a mountainside.


Is it too ridiculous a thing to base your entire understanding of book selection on?


Maybe.


I've followed this simple algorithm for years, and with ridiculously high levels of success in detecting trash.
Sometimes I look for good art too, as an indicator that the publisher has confidence in the book- but this isn't nearly as trustworthy a mechanism as the first one.


Judgemental? Hell yes.
Accurate-? Oh yes, about 80+% accurate.

There are some grave miscalculations, of course- Endymion Spring made me want to puke while reading it, but I liked the cover when I saw it.


Of course, many books have several different covers, experimenting with both styles of presentation... but eventually the 'equilibrium' shifts in the direction of one or the other experiencing better sales- so the company moves into mass producing the more successful cover... and you will find... perhaps in the four most common covers for a good book, that the name of the book takes prime position in three out of four, and just the opposite for a bad one.


Sometimes good and bad books are released in a 'series' so they need to have the same cover styles... Newer authors are less likely to have planet sized names on the cover...

Er, maybe I'm writing too much. I don't really think too much when picking up a book.

I guess I can't resist the irony of the fact that I always DO end up judging a book by its cover.

And It's pretty damn effective.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

A nice fun letter based on the literal reading of Leviticus (not by me)

In her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by a US resident, which was posted on the Internet. It's funny, as well as informative:

Dear Dr. Laura:
Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination ... End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.
1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Lev.24:10-16. Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan,

James M. Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus, Dept. Of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia

(It would be a damn shame if we couldn't own a Canadian :)

Science is Magic



Ferrofluids

Sunday, May 16, 2010

...You can tell if someone is scum or not by checking to see if he's being represented by Ram Jethmalani or not.

Also, when they ask you for your caste, and you don't care what it is, please write 'Indian'.

"Who needs drugs when you have Fractals?"

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect and some of it's related results are some of the most mysterious phenomena in medicine, biology and psychology.

The gist of it is quite simple. Make people think that they should feel something- and they do. The far too classic humans-behaving-as-cattle mentality.

You've probably heard the story in one form or the other- the one from my college goes- two guys walk into a room-party expecting to find drinks, the host hands them glasses of pepsi mixed with mountain-dew and tells them it contains alcohol just to shut them up.
Three glasses later they end up kissing themselves, claiming they were too drunk to know otherwise.

But of course, the drink contained no alcohol- so biologically- they couldn't have been drunk. It's easy to just call guys like this wannabe morons and continue on with life like nothing's happened- but you've just been witness to something poorly understood even today- even after vast amounts of research in many fields.

Imagine the same effect mentioned above, applied to the field of medicine.

For many years it's been responsible for the spread of crackpot science- Homeopathy, Ayurveda (though many parts of this have scientific support), 'Vitamins' as cures for infectious disease. They prescribed their remedies- sold them with confidence- and the patients reported results.

A clear cut case- the patients report improvements! All of these 'alternative' medicines must therefore be effective.

Not exactly. Let's take the case of Homeopathy.

Homeopathy's two fundamental laws are -

1) The more diluted a mix is- the more potent it is.

Yes. The more diluted a mix is, the more potent it is.

This is in contrast with 'allopathy'- modern medicine, which works on the general idea that higher concentrations of an ingredient are 'stronger'.

2) An ingredient that causes an ailment at higher concentrations- heals it in lower concentrations.

Surprisingly- this is at least partially true for some cases. Vaccines work on the principle of making anti-bodies develop immunity by exposing them to alien protein strains that must be devoured. Snake anti-venom is made using snake venom. However, these cases are true largely because you need the causative agent to know what to destroy. An ingredient that causes an ailment is needed to figure out how to cure it.

You can't, for example, cure illnesses born of poisoning this way. Exposing a guy to small doses of CO won't make him resistant to carbon monoxide poisoning. Cure arsenic poisoning by drinking water contaminated by arsenic.

And certainly- injecting 'small doses' of small pox without weakening them first is about the most evil thing you can do.

------------------------------------------

If you are horrified by what I've written by homeopathy and want to refute it... you're free to google it yourself. There are plenty of corroborative sources online, find them, find flaws in them and we'll have an argument. Be sure to provide raw stats- My recent probability and statistics course should help with the p-values.

If you're horrified by the two laws and wonder how come homeopathy hasn't killed off large swathes of the population already-
It's because the first law negates the harmful effects of the second.

You take 1 drop of an arsenic solution and drop it into 99 drops of water/alcohol. You now have a 1X or 1C solution. The (according to chemistry) strongest and (according to homeopathy) weakest solution.

Mix it up, take a drop from the above hundred and put it in 99 drops of water/alcohol. You now have a '2X' or '2C' solution of 0.01 percent concentration of the original.

Typical homeopathic solutions lie in the 20x to 30X zone. that is for a given sample- they contain ten to the power minus forty or ten to the power minus sixty times the number of molecules in the original drop.

This was all fine and dandy in the 1700s when atoms hadn't been discovered and the molar concept had not yet been established. Today we know that 16g of carbon contains approx 6.022 10^23 molecules of carbon. I'm not sure how much 1 drop weighs- but let us, for an approximation, assume that the drop manages to contain 1 mole of the active ingredient- 6 x 10^23 molecules- (this is a mass effectively greater than 1 gram, and practically greater than 20 grams at least considering that pure elements esp. gases, aren't used as 'active ingredients'.

This means that 6 x 10^23 molecules in that original drop are diluted to a level that is equivalent to them being divided into 10^40 equal vials of the final homeopathic solution. The probability of finding a SINGLE molecule of the original ingredient in a vial of 20x (moderate strength) solution is about 6 x 10^-17. (I.e. substantially less likely than you picking up a single random rock and it being made of pure gold.)
That's one atom. One atom can't do much, to be honest.
However it is in practice a few hundred times even less likely- because we originally took a very sweeping approximation- a drop of water solution does not weigh 20 grams.

So if you're taking homeopathic "meds", you're mostly ingesting sugar, water and alcohol- harmless. No need to worry about arsenic poisoning, you'll occasionally find a single molecule of arsenic floating around here or there- shouldn't do too much damage.
Just to be safe- remember to ask for the 'high power' (low concentration) tablets.

Now the question remains- if this quack medicine openly flouts some of the most basic rules of some of the most basic chemistry, how come people that take the sugar pills report an improvement in their condition?

--------------------------
When homeopathic medicine is tested against no treatment being provided- the homeopathic medicine shows better results.

When homeopathic medicine is tested against tablets made of random harmless-but-not-helpful ingredients. Both show equal results.

So random pills are equally effective as homeopathy. Nice.

The patient, upon receiving the medicine, has a certain 'expectancy', he expects to his situation to improve... and is more likely to believe that he feels better.
If he's given a painkiller placebo, he's more likely to believe that he is in less pain than a guy given no placebo.
It's simple up to right now- right? It's all in the mind- people are easily programmed, duped and coerced into believing things.
I'm sure the early researchers of the placebo effect would have come to the same conclusion.
I certainly wouldn't have thought it prudent to investigate further.
Luckily, there are people a little more insanely logical than even me.
So they actually decided to test to see how similar or different this 'imaginary' painkiller response was to the real deal.
Researchers discovered that Naloxone, a painkiller antagonist, actually stops the effects of a placebo.
Wait.
"WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?"
Ah. Let me explain. Most painkillers belong to a certain class of drugs called opioids. Yes, because we live in a sad, sad, world, Opium the recreational drug belongs to this group and is the most popularly known member of it.
An opioid antagonist is a chemical that interferes with the working of the opioids- the painkillers. So this literally means that someone that ingests a placebo with Naloxone (without being told what naloxone does, of course. that wouldn't help with the placebo effect!) will not experience an alleviation of pain. But if it's all in the mind- it should make no difference. Naloxone itself does not 'cause' pain, it simply makes REAL, CHEMICAL painkillers less effective by a mechanism that is scientifically documented.
Why the hell is it working on imaginary painkillers?!
The Placebo effect is not just in the mind it seems.
Patients given placebos have shown tangible, observable differences in recovery! And largely to the positive!
Our brain is a powerful thing. We usually associate it only with control and co-ordination of motor functions- but it's in charge of hormonal release as well.
It's the brain that releases adrenaline when something scares the shit out of you, it's the brain that releases endorphins when you're happy, the brain that drives your body wild when you see the most attractive person you've seen for a while. Conversely, when the serotonin receptors on your nerve endings are overloaded, as any junkie will tell you, the it affects the brain as well.
The naloxone study lead scientists down a path to discover that the 'painkilling' due to a placebo was not in your head (not all of it, at least) but rather because of an opioid manufactured inside the body, by the brain, because of it's expectation parameters.
The brain wanted a painkiller. So the brain MADE a painkiller. Thus the brain got a painkiller.
The brain, overall, oversees the creation of a massive variety of chemicals in the body, some seemingly without conscious input (insulin, testosterone, HGH), while others that most certainly rely on conscious input (adrenaline, noradrenaline, sexual arousal, the entire sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems).
It's entirely plausible that there's a third class as well- a 'semi-conscious' brain that can't be tapped into directly like the parasympathetic/sympathetic systems, not simply by willing it, but by coaxing it in a way most people generally can't do.
'Believing', ridiculously enough, makes your brain produce the right chemicals it needs to sustain that belief... unless you've got naloxone to deactivate those chemicals as well.
I will not delve to the philosophical extrapolations of this... since it's fairly unscientific to do so. But certainly, some will look to this as being in support of the old adage 'believing you can do it' helping you actually 'do it'.
The effects of conditioning are startling and fascinating. From what we can tell, the brain can be trained to make the right chemicals needed for treatment- of pain and disease (for now), evoke the right responses, and with the correct conditioning- actually, substantially help with recovery.
Now researchers are arguing over the extent to which immunity and pain can be influenced from the top down- i.e. physiological changes from psychological changes, and doing experiments on rats.
There's a lot we do not know.
It's like having a latent superpower! And not the only one your body is hiding from you, I might add.

Maybe in the future we'll be able to make ourselves immune to pain at will, enhance our metabolisms into burning more fat simply by commanding it (imagine losing weight just by wanting to!), some might use the body's dopamine and serotinin as a substitute for well... er... dopamine and serotonin substitutes found in recreational drugs- though it seems unlikely that the body would willingly push dopamine levels so high that it could permanently damage receptors. Maybe we'd be able to fall asleep and wake up on command- there are even muscle delimitors that sometimes allow people access to incredible strength- atheletes might tap into those reserves by conditioning themselves.
Will all of it be legal? How much of it is really even possible? I have no idea.
Lots of people are trying to find out just what exactly this body of ours is capable of.
Till then, we will simply have to brainwash ourselves into making our superpowers work.
Please note- there's a Nocebo effect as well. Basically the same thing as the placebo effect but with a 'negative' expectation and a negative result. I suppose the case of the two guys getting drunk on pepsi and dew would be classified as a Nocebo. If people expect pain and suffering, their brains might just decide to oblige them by releasing pain receptor agonists.
So homeopathy helps because people believe it does. If my deconstruction of the two basic homeopathic laws has made you a disbeliever- the placebo effect will no longer help you, sadly.
I'm sorry, if that is the case.
I don't know if it's morally right or wrong to disable a believer's placebo effect simply because my ego pisses me off when homeopaths consider themselves to be equivalent to 'allopaths' despite doing no research, having no scientific models for how their medicines work, going against the basic concepts of chemistry, and yet claiming to be a 'science'.
Another interesting area, I guess, is to experiment on whether 'believing' in the placebo effect itself can actually activate a placebo response... who knows? it might actually be possible.

I'll end with a piece of advice that's pretty novel for this blog.
When in medical treatment... stay positive. It actually helps. We're pretty sure about that.
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Sunday, May 9, 2010

Also

hedonistic nihlists.

Ironic huh?

Cracks me up every single time.
The lick of rain against my skin, explosions of light and sound that sent shivers down the spine, the sweet smell of nature gone wild, a wind that blows through my very soul.

This storm is what I live for.