Electronic Scribblings

Holiday 2006

I am about to go on a 2 week holiday tomorrow! Yay!

Horror of horrors - no internet access! Boo!

Oh, well, I am sure I can survive - visiting the Eden Project, Boscastle & Tintagel (the former home to the  Museum of Witchcraft and the latter is alleged to be the birth place of King Arthur), and possibly the not-very-Lost Gardens of Heligan.

We are actually staying in Devon, just north of Dartmoor, and have been there a few times before with a group of friends.

Oh well. Need to finish packing.

QotD: Survey Says

When you were younger, were there any game shows that you religiously watched and wanted to be a contestant on?

Not really. Most were american or japanese (I used to live in HK).

Content Lite: Horoscope for Pisces

Go ahead and sink into your feelings, even if they aren't at all practical. You will exercise all the right muscles as long as you remember that an impulsive spontaneity binge may not help you, as it could derail you from your current responsibilities. Sure there are many potential temptations, but you must first plow through your list of chores. Don't worry; you won't lose the opportunity to enjoy yourself later on.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Plant question

Plant question

Hmm, well as the title and the picture say, this is a question about  a plant. Specifically a plant in my UK back garden. I am holding some of the small purple flowers - 5 petals blade shaped, with apparently spirally organised leaves rotating down the main stem.

The berries ripen to red, like miniture tomatoes, but obviously quite a bit smaller.

Personally I think it is a member of the nightshade family, which tomatoes do belong to, but don't have a decent biological key for proper plant identification.

Any ideas?

Welcome to my New Neighbours

Hi! My current policy is to add people to my neighbourhood who add me - You are of course all delightfully mad but you will probably know that from reading the random stuff I post.

Speaking of randomness, I suppose I should actually put real life stuff in here a little - but I warn you now, I won't post my real name, home address or details of my work place here.

I will however post a bit about my work in that I work within the pharmaceutical industry, so this colours my view of animal/human testing (which has been real fun in the last few months thanks to TGN1412) - I have had a livejournal defriending over that so I shall warn everyone now :)

Hum, and now to get ready for tomorrow :P Too much work to do and too little time to do it in!

 

Teaching us to Think

I am sure a lot has been written about this by actual academics, but I was thinking / day dreaming the other day and thought about it quite a bit. Sadly I my words here are not as eloquent as those I imagined.

I started off thinking about Science Fiction, and that so many people dismiss it as rubbish as it is so far fetched, unrealistic and irrelevant. But think about it. Star Trek - we may not yet have phasers but it looks like we may soon have a form of cloaking device, something we have had in part in stelth technology for some time. The medical team had ray's that sealed wounds, much like microlasers can do, and they used spray devices to inject you with drugs - these are now available. And lets not forget Star Wars - NASA has given the ISS their own droid modled on the one that Luke Skywalker spars with while training.

But then Star Trek, and most Science Fiction, also had a different side - that of social experimentation. A series of what if questions that range from FireFly's apparently benevolent faciest state vs the good old boys in the wilds (so like the old westerns, with central government so far away) to the Star Wars UN/Senate that falls in a Hitler-esque take over, with the Jedi - Chivalric Knigts come Samurai Warriors battle - a failing war that turns into a classic WWII style of story with plucky underdogs, small places helping out, gurilla war, at all that.

But also, what are the ethics of inter-species relationships? What sort of thinking goes on in the alien mind? What sort of governments work, and what are the issues?
Even sexuality - in our world, where gender identity is so key, and our sexuality a major issue - with the tendancy to gender neutral, to anonymise ourselves into genderless individuals, what is the outcome? ST:NG #117 "The Outcast"  shows the J'naii; an androgynous species that views the expression of any sort of male or female gender, and especially sexual liaisons, as a sexual perversion. According to their official doctrine, the J'naii had evolved beyond gender and thus viewed the idea of male/female sexuality as primitive. When one has a relationship with the male Riker, she is taken for reprogramming and then apologies to him for its behavior when it thought it was female.

How are these sort of stories different from the ancient tales, the ones telling us of the Gods and Goddesses of Ancent Greece and Rome - the ones that those civilizations modeled themselves on and took their lessons from? Or the older ones that celebrated the Winter Solstice - the shortest day, and yet the time that the days started getting longer, heralding spring - that taught basic nature lore, that explained the migration patterns of animals, how to search for them, and the basic man management that the elders needed to practice for the good of the community. And these stories grew, and became Lore, and Law - and religion.

This may seem like a tangent (hence the colour change), but there was a study done (I read of it in the new scientist) where 4 monkeys were kept in a cage that had all the normal things, plus a ladder just under a bunch of bannana. The down side was that when a monkey climbed the ladder to get the fruit, the whole cage was sprayed with water. Soon the monkeys learned that climbing the ladder = everyone wet. So they attacked any one who tried to climb the ladder - smart, see, to stop them all getting wet.

The keepers then replaced the monkeys one by one, and when the new monkey tried to climb the ladder, they got punished - they had never been sprayed, but they learned a new lesson: Climb = punished. Eventually the banana's were removed. And none of the monkeys were the same as the original ones, that had got wet, but still the Law was in place: Do not Climb the Ladder! We punish those who climb the ladder!

So, back to stories. You can quickly see that theory/concept in so many of our ancient tales, teaching us to think, teaching us what to do, and what not to do. But not all of them are relevant in the 21st Century.

 

Links to writings about Star Trek: The science of Star Trek  by D.A.Batchelor / T he Faciest Ideology of Star Trek: Militarism, Collectivism & Atheism  /  Hand Scanner   / "Trek" science shows its human side  / Medical Ethics through the Star Trek Lens  (this is the cached version of a pdf.

Philosopy and Thought II

OK, I was thinking about how we define self. It is clear from neurological studies, and what happens to people who are brain damaged, is that a lot of who we are is directly linked to the brain structure. But it remains hard to believe that all the joy and hope, hatred and sadness, faith and fear, all our memories are just neurones and chemical shorthand stored in that walnut like thing in our skulls.

This seems a similar issue to the question of 'how can all this wonderful stuff in the world/universe be just RANDOM??' and leads to the concept of something else, something outside the physical realisty and into the spiritual, and the higher being - whether that means talking about a persons spirit/soul or about Deity.

And to quickly explain, I use the concept of Deity to replace God, Goddess, Insert-deity-of-choice, Great Spirit, The Force, etc. I think my ideas about that need a whole post to itself.

Why is it so hard to believe that we, and everything around us, is/are nothing more than the sum total of our parts? That there really isn't anything more?

I think we need to search far further into the past, the Dreamtime as the Aborigine of Australia call it. A time when people needed explainations, like children do. And like children, there was a limit to what could be explained. Unlike today, when there are better explainations, there wern't any - so they were made up based on logic and evidence.

People try to make sense of their world, and we do this mostly by stories - (our self-hood is a series of stories about who we are as well) - stories about why there is thunder, where does the rain come from, and why do we know the sun will rise, spring will come.

Most of our earliest stories are based around nature as that was what was important - and it taught us how to live, how to think, and what to expect. But the tellers of these tales also maniputlated the stories to ensure harmony, and to ensure their own place - In many Aborigine tribes the young do not eat Kangaroo tail because the old men say 'ayeeee, eating the tail will make you weak, and your hair white - look, I eat the tail and I am old and feeble, So give it to me - I no longer care' - one crafty way of ensuring a bit extra food in the oldsters pot!

I have wandered from my point of self-hood to stories.  So the next bit is about how we are Taught to Think - something I wrote a while back.

Philosophy and thought

can be contagious - with a bit of luck :)

"What we consider normality is nothing more than the sum of everyone divided by the total number of people. It is a lie. A useful lie, but false nevertheless. We are unique, but not precious. We are snowflakes in winter, lovely, different and ephermal. "

I wrote that as a tag line at one point. And having read some of my neighbours today I thought about it again, as well as my thoughts on faith versus religion. And upon identity.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a description of a variety of neurological case histories, presented for relatively simply understanding, that explores both the condition and the people who suffer.

Some of these are quite odd, and certainly make me wonder what counts as me, and shows how people can be altered by disease or injury. One woman lost her left side due to a brain injury - for her Left, and that which was on the left, no longer existed. Another suffered a stroke, and in doing so re-experienced sounds and memories of the music of her Irish child-hood, a childhood that ended at 5 with her mothers death and her departure to America, and one she had previously had no concious memory of.

Ultimately we don't have an answer to such a simple question as "What is Self" - the others about Faith and Religion are bound up with that  as for so many of us we define our selves by our labels: our colour, our country of birth, our country of decent, our gender and sexuality, our racial group, our religion and sect, where we grew up, what university we went to (or not), our job - they are our past and help define who we are, and where we fit into the world.

To question something that you consider to be intrinsic to your self is to question the self. We get angry and attack the perpetrator of this disturbance.

Someone quoted that Faith is what God wants, but Religion is what Man thinks God wants. Terry Pratchet, in Small Gods, explores the idea of the Religion becoming an object of faith in and of itself when the God is no longer truely worshipped.

Hmm, Shall continue anon.

 

 

Too busy to think!

Have been pondering ethical dilemas :P

 

Reuters: In Sudan, Pale is beatiful but price is high - Sudanese women wanting their skin lightened run the same risk that so very many women in Africa, the Middle East and Asia want pale skin.

This used to be a common desire in Europe as well, up to the time that the wealthy could travel and the sun-tanned look became fashionable. Before then a tan meant you worked outside, a lower class manual laborour or some other such scum. The upper-class, particularly Ladies, woudn't dream of being anything other than the palest of pale.

But like the old white paints, like white lead and arsenic, today's creams, lotions and potions arn't much better for you. They can contain mercury for one, and strip the upper layers, bleaching them and in the long term damaging the cells. You can end up with chemical burns, blistering and darkening. You can die from cancer or kidney damage.

1/4 Dermatology patients in one Khartoum hospital is there due to skin lightening.

And we look and snear down our made up noses, possibly crafted by plastic surgery, at the strange things these people do.

There is also a darker side - that of politics and conquest by lighter skinned northern peoples. Pale skin marks you as an elite. Interestingly in SUdan, where this has happened, the Pale are the Arabic Muslims, the Dark are the Christian or Pagan.

Dark or Light skin, Muslim or Christian, Arab or African.

How do you measure beauty?