The Political Economy of Our Food Systems

This short news piece quite remarkably illustrates the subversion of science to corporate interests even when the outcome effects the health and well being of children. Many studies have shown that feeding children good quality food improves concentration abilities and grades over all with a negligible added cost: commonsense, simple commonsense.

Tonight with a good Scope

Four of Saturn's moons will transit the planet early in the morning tomorrow (Tuesday the 24th at about 5:54 my time) and I'll not be able to see it: it is snowing in Pittsburgh and anyway, I don't have a respectable telescope. But for those of you who do... well, I envy you. A lot is learned through the observation of the transits, most famously, the transit of Venus across the Sun, but I doubt this is going to be especially exciting as far as data collection goes. It will be a fun sight however. Space.com has a fine article on the subject and they also point out that a comet will be visible, for all of you not being snowed on, tonight at tomorrow night near Saturn as well. If I can find some good Hubble Pictures post event I'll post them here.

Big Heads makes for Good Looking Babies

The Science in this is all rather self evident; the basic question is why do we find 'cute' things 'cute.' The video argues, in a rather cute way, that we misplace the biological imperative to like our own species' young upon the features which the young have: (this is called Pedomorphosis.) It goes on to argues that the features the young have they have for other reasons than just cuteness (big heads = big brains, baby fat = insulation, etc.) and while that can generally be inferred it cannot always be; the causal relationships can be confusing here: we may have accentuated features as children precisely so that we are not subject to infanticide - that is to say that cuter children probably aren't the ones you kill and eat if you're super cold and hungry. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" as the Evolutionists are fond of saying. (I found this on Popular Science.)

The Evolution of Language and The BBC

Quentin Cooper's Material World is one of the two popular science radio programs which don't drive me crazy with an overabundance of vacuous questions. This weeks show was particularly good; He had an interesting piece on the significance of historical climate data in modern climate modeling, but the best part was the last segment on the Evolution of Language. I have to say that I'm in love with linguistics, especially biolinguistics, as it solves so many interesting intellectual problems. Mark Pagel and Nick Chater were the guests on Material World and had quite interesting things to say about the coevolution of language biologically and sociologically: really, quite remarkable. I recommend a listen. They, Mark and Nick, casually mention another smart Linguist by the name of Steven Pinker, and if you haven't check him out on TED then you should watch him now. They of course talked about a hero of mine, Noam Chomsky: I say of course because he invented modern linguistics but he unfortunately doesn't do TED talks; you can, however, check him out on Google Video very easily as most of his talks are publicly posted.

Indispensable Cooking

The Economist, that bastion of so many insensibly sensible people, had an interesting recent article about someone whose work think I rather like: Harvard Professor, Dr. Richard Wragham. I'm not totally convinced by his arguments but I do find them interesting, rigorous, and plausible. Among other things, Dr Wragham helped develop the idea that non-human animals often use non-foods to self-medicate: (in the technical literature this is called Zoopharmacognosy.) This latest article is concerned with the evolutionary role of cooking in human animals (erectus & sapian) and is based off the work published in his 2003 paper, "Cooking as a Biological Trait" and a 2006 book on the same subject (The Cooking Enigma). The paper is not unreadable and "suggest that cooking may be obligatory for humans" because of calorie needs which are satisfied by the increased efficiency of digestion from cooked food. I'm not really sure if this explains my need for a good curry or a home-cooked Pizza, but at least I now have good reason to not be a Raw Foods person.

Abstruse Higgs

This was just too good: Abstruse Goose is always quality, but this captures, I think, the sentiment of so many people. While I really don't care who detects the Higgs first, Tevatron or CERN, I do feel rather badly for all the Ph.D students at CERN who are waiting on the Collision results to get awarded their degrees; it must be frustrating to have ones degree delayed a year because of relatively small technical malfunctions.

It is quite interesting, as a side note, that no one doubts that we will find the Higgs: quite an interesting fact about a lot of Astronomy and Physics of late is that prediction vastly proceeds our capacities for observation.

Thermodynamics

I just wrote an overly long overview of Thermodynamics for a school function and I thought I'd share one of philosophically interesting ideas generated by the field: (I'm leaving off talking about Creationism, The Arrow of Time, and many other interesting, but more talked about, concepts in favor of my own personal favorite. And, of course, I though I'd share this Moxy Fruvous video, which says everything better than I ever could:

Moxy Fruvous - Entropy

Heraclitian versus Parmenidean metaphysics

This is to my mind the most interesting philosophical question posed by Thermodynamics. Heraclitian metaphysics are process conceptions, where as Parmenidean are substance conceptions. Parmenideas proposed the idea that the way to understand the world was through the idea of unchanging stuff (atoms). He said that in order to understand the world the natural philosopher much examine closely this unchanging stuff for its universal, necessary, and certain characteristics. Heraclitus on the other hand said that everyone recognizes experience to be particular, contingent, and positive of some uncertainty. He, therefore, said that in order to understand the world you should look at the Logoi (plural of Logos meaning rules or laws) for change. With the advent of the Calculus we were able to model change in a much more sophisticated way and as the Statistical Mechanical world view became more prominent we start seeing that the world has qualities which are not exclusively Parmenidean; that is, knowledge of the world cannot be said to be universal, necessary, or certain.

This is also sometimes called the idea of “stochastic law”, stochastic being a 75 cent word for statistical. It is quite odd, on its face, to say that a Law is only probably true. And of course this is what we do say with respect to Thermodynamics as well as many other areas of modern physics.

I’d rather not say that the Heraclitian and Parmenidean metaphysics are in conflict with each other, but rather complement each other. But I think if modern physicists had to give up either the idea of the ultimate reality Matter or the Idea of the ultimate reality Energy, they would en mass give up the idea of the reality of Matter: (that is, side with a process rather than with a stuff.)

Energy

The rise of the science of thermodynamics brings the idea of energy into the center stage. But energy is only real in specific forms and no specific form of energy is really Energy. That is to say that Energy has a generic character, but it only manifests itself as Heat E, Gravitational E, Chemical Binding E, ElectroMagnetic E, Etc. So there are rules,(logoi) to the transformation of energy, because if there weren’t you couldn’t talk about reality, but the ‘thing’ Energy does not itself exist: it is ontologically vacuous. So we believe that each specific form of Energy is an instance of a more generic concept which is not itself observable or necessarily real. Another way to put this is that the generic form of energy is what is conserved, and what the first law applies to: the specific forms can be mutilated however you like.

This really shows the gulf between atomistic/Parmenidean THINGHOOD thinking and process/Heraclitian metaphysics of dynamic change. Energy is immaterial, but it has explanatory characteristics of mater: it has properties: it can act upon matter and change it without being material itself.