Twilight zone

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

God and zombies: the mental life of philosophers

More Intelligent Life reports on a recent survey of the beliefs and working patterns of modern working philosophers:

Of the three topics that Immanuel Kant once said were the proper subjects of metaphysics – namely God, freedom and immortality – the survey covers only the first two, perhaps because these days life is too short to bother with immortality. Free will gets a thumbs-up: only 12% of philosophers think that people’s lives are predestined. But God gets the thumbs-down: nearly three-quarters accept or lean towards atheism. This is only to be expected. Even in America, which is unusually religious for a rich country, the top echelons of those who think for a living tend to be unbelievers. A survey of the members of America’s elite National Academy of Sciences in 1998 found that only 7% believed in God.

A quarter of a century ago, such a survey would have had plenty of questions about language, but now there are only three (out of 30). Analytical philosophy has shifted its attention from language to the mind, which is why there is a question about zombies – though nothing about ghouls, demons or vampires. By a “zombie”, today’s philosophers mean a hypothetical being who is physically indistinguishable from a normal person but is not conscious. Philosophers argue about whether or not such a creature could exist in theory, and on the whole they are pretty undecided about it. A small majority endorse “physicalism” about the mind, which is the theory that all mental states are in fact physical states. Many of the pioneers of the 20th-century version of this view hailed from Australia, which led one philosophical wag to surmise that Australia is the only country in which it is true.

Those bustards

The great Indian bustard

Zeenews reports:

With the disappearance of the magnificent Great Indian Bustard, it doesn’t feel like good news on Earth Day Thursday as the Karera sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh will no longer be a wildlife
lovers hotspot.

Following Centre’s approval recently of a state government’s proposal for denotification the region, comprising nearly 32 villages in and around the area, would be set free for villagers to carry out sale and purchase of land as well as other commercial activities.

The National Board of Wildlife (NBWL) chaired by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh in a recent meeting approved the state government’s proposal to denotify the sanctuary, after its officials said that the bustards were not sighted since 1995 and that most of the land inside the sanctuary sprawling over 202 sq km was private land and people were facing lot of problems.

“Notified in 1981, the sanctuary in Shivpuri does not have an inch of forest land…” Chief Wildlife Warden, R S Negi said.

Of course not. The habitat of the GIB is open scrubland. If the chief wildlife warden chooses not to inform the public correctly, could one be justified in suspecting that there is more to this than meets the eye?

Apparently this suspicion is not unjustified. The GOI also feels that something may be amiss. The report continues:

However, the approval has come with a rider with the Board asking the state government to declare Dihaliya lake and a portion of adjacent revenue land to be declared as sanctuary and probe into the reasons for the disappearance of the birds, as recommended by Mahendra Vyas, Member of Rationalisation Committee.

A survey has also been sought to ascertain present status and distribution of status of the endangered species, especially to determine if there were any birds inhabiting in any areas outside Protected Areas and if so, these would be established as a Protected Area including expansion of existing Protected Areas or declaration of Conservation Reserves.

One of the mandate of the survey team is to find if there are no bustards existing outside Protected Areas or none left in Madhya Pradesh, an area equal to the area to be denotified in Karera Wildlife Sanctuary will be added to the existing Protected Area network of the State.

Denotification will only be permitted if the equivalent area is added to Protected Area network of the State, the Board said.

But what is concerning wildlife experts now is the fate of the ungulates like black bucks and others species in the sanctuary in Shivpuri who too, they say, face threat of extinction.

The GIB can just about be seen in various protected scrublands. I’ve seen one in the Nannaj sanctuary (near Solapur, Maharashtra) in 2009. It is a hard decision to make, but in a trade-off between black buck and the GIB, the rarity of the latter would mean giving more weight to protecting the bustard. One would not be forced to make such decisions were it not for the dereliction of duty, and worse, on the part of some forest officials.

Hans Christian Andersen

Apr 02, 2010, Google doodle: Hans Christian Andersen's 205th Birthday

I missed this earlier.

The government request tool

Google announced today:

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that “everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Written in 1948, the principle applies aptly to today’s Internet — one of the most important means of free expression in the world. Yet government censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the outright blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content.

So it’s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.

We are today launching a new Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world. For this launch, we are using data from July-December, 2009, and we plan to update the data in 6-month increments. Read this post to learn more about our principles surrounding free expression and controversial content on the web.

The Indian government has made the 3rd highest number of requests to remove data and 4th highest number of requests for identities of accounts. Brazil, US and UK are close on both rankings.

Hacking the cell phone network

CNET reports:

Two researchers say they have found a way to exploit weaknesses in the mobile telecom system to legally spy on people by figuring out the private cell phone number of anyone they want, tracking their whereabouts, and listening to their voice mail.

Independent security researcher Nick DePetrillo and Don Bailey, a security consultant with iSec Partners, planned to provide details in a talk entitled “We Found Carmen San Diego” at the Source Boston security conference on Wednesday.

“There are a lot of fragile eggs in the telecom industry and they can be broken,” Bailey said in an interview with CNET. “We assume the telecom industry protects our privacy. But we’ve been able to crack the eggs and piece them together.”

The first part of the operation involves getting a target’s cell phone number from a public database that links names to numbers for caller ID purposes. DePetrillo used open-source PBX software to spoof the outgoing caller ID and then automated phone calls to himself, triggering the system to force a name lookup.

Flying turns

Inside Science reports:

…researchers have puzzled over how a fly’s simple brain can precisely control each of the 250 wing flaps per second it makes to execute a 180 degree turn.

“Imagine flapping your arms 250 times per second,” said Bergou. “You’re going to have a really tough time controlling the orientation of your arms.”

Using a high speed camera filming at 8,000 frames per second and new image tracking software, Bergou discovered that flies rely less on their brains than previously thought and more on the clever design of their wings. To make a turn, a fly simply twitches a muscle that rolls its shoulder slightly. The wing does the rest, naturally adjusting over the course of a few beats, tilting by about 9 degrees, and creating drag forces that wheel the insect around.

This design principle behind fly U-turns — wings that are self-adjusting and do the work of turning by themselves — has attracted the interest of researchers like Robert Wood of Harvard University, who are developing the latest generation of tiny manmade flying machines that buzz not with life but with electricity.

Dark life

Symmetry magazine reports:

In 1988, a team of Swedish scientists drilled 1000 meters into the ground to gather rock and groundwater samples for a study aimed at improving the disposal of nuclear waste. They were looking for microorganisms that might interact with buried waste canisters, and they expected to find only a few.

Instead the scientists stumbled upon an entire ecosystem of undiscovered microbes, flourishing beneath their feet.

Scientists had imagined that life could exist underground, but what startled microbiologist Karsten Pedersen were the number, variety, and liveliness of organisms living so deep underground that they were cut off from anything touched by the sun. “They were active; they were happy,” he says. “We didn’t understand how, since they were so isolated.”
…
Pedersen agrees: “You could take away the sun from our planet, and as long as heat, water, and hydrogen are still coming from underground, microbial systems could run for a very long time, even if the surface were deep-frozen.”

The natural radioactivity of rock, heat left over from a planet’s formation, or even tidal forces raised by a large body nearby can toast the center of a planet to a life-sustaining temperature. Pedersen hopes scientists will one day probe beneath the surface of Mars or Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, in search of alien life.

For now, Onstott says, scientists are still in the dark about life deep within our own planet: “I don’t think we realize yet how complex life could really be down there.”

Quantum biology

Via CERN Courier this story about quantum effects in biology:

Common wisdom has it that quantum effects should not be relevant for biology because the systems involved are too warm and noisy for coherence to be maintained. Now Elisabetta Collini of the University of Toronto in Canada and colleagues have used two-dimensional photon-echo spectroscopy to study the light-harvesting protein “antennae” that make up part of the photosynthetic apparatus of some species of algae.

The paper appeared in Nature (subscription required).

Mindgames

Wired reports:

American Mensa has been holding its “Mind Games” competition each year since 1990 to select five new games from a group of about 50 or 60 submitted by manufacturers. Those five winners earn the right to display the Mensa Select Seal.

The games are selected by a group of Mensans who love to play board games. They spend a whole weekend learning, playing and evaluating the games submitted, ranking their favorites by the end of the weekend. Each participant has 30 games assigned to them to rate and vote on. They are also able to play any of the other games if they so choose.
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While there were plenty of so-so games at the competition, the ones that won this year were solid choices. Without further ado, here are this year’s Mensa Select winners, in no particular order.
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Dizios by MindWare: I also knew Dizios would do well, since it’s great for families and has a simple concept. The idea is to match up the colors along the edges of the swirly colored tiles and gain as many points as possible by building on tiles that have as many dots as possible on them. The player with the most points at the end wins.
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