NYTimes: Learning From the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly

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From: Shantanu Singh

From The New York Times:

Learning From the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly

A new study finds that young male fruit flies that have been rejected
by females apparently self-medicate just like humans do.

http://nyti.ms/yL9qGC

Nani Palkhiwala wrote on 16 January 1984.

“The picture that emerges is that of a great country in a state of moral decay. The immediate future seems to belong to the doomsayers rather than to cheer mongers. We suffer from a fatty degeneration of conscience, and the malady seems to be not only persistent but prone to aggravation. The life style of too many politicians and businessmen bears eloquent testimony to the truth of dictum that the single minded pursuit of money impoverishes the mind, shrivels the imagination and desiccates the heart. The tricolour fluttering all over the country is black, red and scarlet – black money, red tape and scarlet corruption.”

Confirmation bias

Another (biased) data-point feeding into my extreme suspicions and
distaste for the field of psychology as it is practiced by the
majority of half-assed practitioners ... it is by far one of the
biggest frauds of the modern era in medicine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/01/opinion/i-had-asperger-syndrome-briefly.html?src=me&ref=general

His name is James Bond

Hilarious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aT8lJEgEuTk&feature=colike

Pit-bull reviewing, the pursuit of perfection and the victims of success

(Yet) Another editorial decrying the excesses (or insufficiencies) of the peer review system:

 

 

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7007/9/84

 

The main thesis of this article is that :

 

the success of a postdoctoral Fellow in finding a good academic position is perceived to depend, and to a large extent probably does depend, on his or her having published a paper in one of the three highest-profile general biology journals; but getting a paper into one of those journals can be extraordinarily difficult because - it is widely felt - referees seem to see it as their responsibility to insist on time-consuming additions and revisions, and editors are unable or unwilling to judge for themselves the justice of the referees' advice.

 

 

 

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

-- Samuel Beckett

 

The tell tale heart

The spookiness of this Edgar Allen Poe story is enhanced many-fold by
the haunting narration of the inimitable James Mason in this animated
short.

http://vimeo.com/12254194

Falling Man

An interesting "biography" about Manmohan Singh and his present bundle of woes:

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/PrintThisStory.aspx?StoryId=1103

Beautiful graphic

Aside from the content of this graphic – the info-vis aspect of it really caught my attention. It succinctly and clearly conveys so much information. Truly – this is an case of when a graphic can be worth a thousand words.

They laughed when I said I was going to be a comedian. They're not laughing now.

 

-Bob Monkhouse, comedian (1928-2003)

Mark Twain's autobiography

One can only hope that the autobiography is as witty as this review of it ...

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/At-Grandpa-Twain-s-knee-7055

To move on

I’m reading this book – Beyond Closed Doors – detailing the wheeling-dealing between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt during the WW-II that led to much of the inequity that happened during and in its aftermath. The main focus of the book is the villainy perpetrated by Stalin – of how he outshines Hitler as the greatest of the genocidal psychopaths of that era (including Mao in this line up).

 

The main thing that struck me – in the aftermath of the Mumbai blasts – is a quote from a Red Army Tatar soldier (the Tatars were at the receiving end of one of Stalin’s brutal purges) – “We have a great ability to endure and to forgive”.

 

It almost sounds as he is proud of this. And this is the same thing one hears of Mumbaikars and Indians in general – “we get on with things”.

 

And I’m not sure this is such a trait to be proud of. It reflects an fundamental inability to see that the joke is on you. An inability to learn and adapt and grow. This “business as usual” attitude is an indication of a moral and intellectual weakness. Because to do things – to change – to fight – “to take up arms against a sea of troubles and in so doing end them” requires courage and effort. To forgive and forget – is just laziness. It is akin to that time when - I was living in Bangalore – that someone broke into our flat early one morning and stole all our shoes. I woke up a roommate who was sleeping and informed him of this . His response – without even fully  wakening “acha ? theek hain – aaj shaam jaa kar naye jutey kharidengey”. And I agreed with him. We could even be bothered to be bothered. Shameful.

 

 

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. -William James, psychologist and philosopher (1842-1910)

The argumentative theory of reasoning

The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning

 

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments. That's why they call it The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning. So, as they put it, "The evidence reviewed here shows not only that reasoning falls quite short of reliably delivering rational beliefs and rational decisions. It may even be, in a variety of cases, detrimental to rationality. Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

 

… A lot of people in psychology were accumulating evidence that the mind, and reasoning in particular, doesn't work so well. Reasoning produces a lot of mistakes. We are not very good in statistics, and we can't understand very basic logical problems. We do all these irrational things, and despite mounting results, people are not really changing their basic assumption. They are not challenging the basic idea that reasoning is for individual purposes. The premise is that reasoning should help us make better decisions, get at better beliefs. And if you start from this premise, then it follows that reasoning should help us deal with logical problems and it should help us understand statistics. But reasoning doesn't do all these things, or it does all these things very, very poorly.

 

And the beauty of this theory is that not only is it more evolutionarily plausible, but it also accounts for a wide range of data in psychology. Maybe the most salient of phenomena that the argumentative theory explains is the confirmation bias.

 

http://edge.org/print/conversation.php?cid=the-argumentative-theory

 

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

 

-Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)

127 Hours

What a terrible movie  !

 

James Franco is such a superman – in fact he's so Awesome that I would have feel more empathy towards Superman.  He's standing there for 5 days with his hand crushed. But he's experiencing no pain, no trauma, no fatigue – nothing. His legs are absolutely fine. Just a little perfunctory thirst – but don’t worry it’s not too serious. Why not,  it’s entirely plausible to go 5 days on a quart of water in a bone dry desert without experiencing massive emergency-care level dehydration :-/

And then he chops his hand off like it's a walk in the park. Again – a little perfunctory yelling and grimacing to connect with us humans in the audience. And then – he literally  gets up and goes for a walk in the park, as if nothing happened. After 5 days of thirst - he drinks a gallon of putrid water - and continues merrily on his way. Killer cramps are for losers, no?

 

Really Danny Boyle ? Maybe they could have brought some real human beings on as consultants to the movie. They would have told you how ridiculous the entire thing is.

 

If you want to watch a good survivor movie, I would rather recommend Touching the Void. Even though it seems to have been a TV-docu-drama – it is so much more compelling and empathetical. You can feel the pain and desperation of the guy. Or even Lost in the Wild –  which is a beautiful movie.

 

Here, all that I see is a super-dude doing super-unbelievable-stuff. Not a human being. Not to mention all the over-wrought camera angles, meaningless flashbacks to his childhood, a highly contrived soliloquy and the gratuitous love-angle.

 

This trash after the badly-acted clichéd exotica nonsense that was Slumdog … is making me seriously reconsider why I liked Trainspotting. Oh yeah now I remember – coz there was shit load of profanity and a lot of scatological humor. How can you not like that? The problem begins when this moron goes out and make idiotic films and then seriously gets considered for (and wins) film awards.