Universality of Religion

On the Effect Measure blog, there is post about "Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: Dawkins on evolution and religion", with the following video:



I am struck by a few things.

1. 
   First, in the blog post he mentions:
   

   It assumes that all things we call religion or religious impulses are essentially the same or have some common core. This faces the philosophical problem of properties and propositions in general. For example, take the property of redness. Is there something that all objects we call red have in common? And if there is, is this the same kind of thing we call religious belief?

   
   
   In fact there is something common to all things red: the wavelengths of light that are absorbed. I think what he is asking is whether we experience red in the same way as our friend. In fact, it is quite likely, and it is not a philosophical idea at all. It seems to me more and more that philosophy tries to handle questions that are out of reach for science (for the moment) but the solutions found in philosophy evaporate or are insubstantial once we really understand what is going on. Tom Mitchell has done some very interesting work with looking at fMRI data in his "Brains, Meaning, and Corpus Statistics" talk (talk slides on his home page).
   
   In the work, he compares fMRI data from different individuals, and finds that he can correctly identify images and words from brain activity of one person, using the associations between the images and words derived from the brain activity of other people. This strongly suggests that the internal representations of words and concepts may be very similar between individuals. Not only that, but that we have the possibility of determining what those are and not just leave it up to philosophical ruminations.
   



2. 
   Dawkins mentions belief in authorities as a psychological tendency that may lead to religious thinking under the right circumstances. I would further add the brain's tendency for seeing patterns where there are none as the other piece of the religious-thinking puzzle. It is evolutionary advantageous to see tigers where there are none as opposed to not seeing tigers where there are some. Not all errors are equally costly. Religious interpretation of experience seems to me to easily follow from these sorts of errors.
   

A great observation

So this post from Laura Wattenberg's "Baby Name Wizard" blog has a wonderful observation:

Here's a little pet peeve of mine: nothing rhymes with orange. You've heard that before, right? Orange is famous for its rhymelessness. There's even a comic strip called "Rhymes with Orange." Fine then, let me ask you something. What the heck rhymes with purple?

If you stop and think about it, you'll find that English is jam-packed with rhymeless common words. What rhymes with empty, or olive, or silver, or circle? You can even find plenty of one-syllable words like wolf, bulb, and beige. Yet orange somehow became notorious for its rhymelessness, with the curious result that people now assume its status is unique.

I was directed to the quote by Andrew Gelman's Statistical Modeling blog, and he has other posts about names and sounds.

Information

It all started with "information is beautiful", with this post about the 2012 non-issue, and then it went to this interesting figure which I am pondering...not sure if the labels are correct. Finally I was pointed to infochimps, a collection of data which I need to look at more closely.

We are in the information age, and I'd love the way the information in the first two links is portrayed, and I plan on playing in the infochimps site more.

Autotune, Science, and Creativity

I was just introduced to a very creative project called the Symphony of Science. It uses a technology called Autotune, traditionally used to keep lousy pop singers in key. In real-time it adjusts the pitch of the singer, so what comes out of the speakers is the correct frequency. Technically, it's very challenging to modify the waveform consistently, and in real-time.

Anyway, this particular project takes famous scientists, and puts their speech to music. The music is catchy, and really captures well the philosophies of Carl Sagan and others. It just makes me realize how much I miss Carl Sagan, which then makes me miss Stephen Jay Gould and E.T. Jaynes.

Yet another reason to leave Iraq...dowsing for bombs

So it seems as if the Iraqi police are dowsing for bombs and firearms, as covered in the New York Times and James Randi. They are doing this using a device they've purchased to the tune of $80 million, and it works no better using a coat hanger!

I think the best quote which summarizes the danger and the bad thinking is:

Major General Jehad al-Jabiri is head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives. “I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them,” he says. “Whether it’s magic or scientific, what I care about is it detects bombs.”

Of course, if it hasn't been shown to detect bombs by science, the other option is irrelevant.

Netflix prize

Fortune magazine had a recent article on the Netflix prize. A very interesting competition to increase their correct recommendation percentage by 10%. I was struck by a comment at the bottom by a reader of the article:

If it is true what the article says, that the BellKor team’s algorithms used information such as "genre" and "actors", then they plainly cheated!
This information was not available in the contest. The contest data had only 4 pieces of information: people ID, movie, date, and the rating values.
If BellKor managed to get extra information about the people and movies, it is hard to understand how NetFlix overlooked it. Therefore I'm quite sure that the article got the story wrong – it is too extreme to be believable. But if the article is right, then the winning team used crooked means to get the prize and its 'solution' does not worth much. Hope it is the first option…

I remember looking at the data, and if I recall correctly, I remember a script to add to the database from IMDB. I assume this was allowed, because otherwise there would have been no way to get 10%.

Disturbing video misusing Einstein's name

I saw this video posted on facebook The link to one rebuttal, which links to the original, is here:

http://filipinofreethinkers.org/2009/10/08/does-god-exist-video-campaign-refuted/

I wrote as a comment to the person posting it:

Actually, this is not a true story, nor does it capture even in the slightest way the views of Einstein on religion (see http://www.einsteinandreligion.com/).

Although it is a cute video, there are logical flaws such as the fact that neither "hot" nor "cold" exists except as labels on "temperature", neither label with any special role.

I'm mostly disturbed by the fact that this Christian organization is trying to legitimize a flawed argument, by falsely attributing it to a very famous non-Christian, and nearly non-religious, scientist.