Sleights of Mind

Having resolved to go easy on the Youtube and Vimeo for 5 minute edutainment fix , I'm free/forced to start reading some books. I have a back-log from the last few Christmas-and-birthdays. Dau.I and I had 20 minutes spare time when I was hangin' with her in Dublin in the Spring. She propelled me into Hodges Figgis Dublin's largest and most venerable surviving bookstore.  It's currently owned by Megacorp Waterstones but is still full of books, some, remaindered, cheap enough for me to purchase. Accordingly, I bought a short handful of books that seemed to have possibilities. I have to be ruthless here because we are trying to significantly down-size the library at home. Then again, at €2.50, a remainder paperback is somewhere between a newspaper and a cappuccino in price. Actually it's cheaper than a 0.01c book at Amazon because postage-free. I got good mileage out of Chasing Venus by Andrea Wulf.

But today's book today! And it is Sleights of Mind What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains by Stephen Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde with [much smaller print] Sandra Blakeslee.  It is holding its value on Amazon, so it must be good?!  The first two authors are married [to each other] and run parallel neuroscience labs in the BNI the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix Arizona. Sandra Blakeslee is a journalist who can write . . . about science. You can find her regularly in the NYT and, for one example, co-authoring VS Ramachandran's [prev] Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind. 

I'll get the snark out of the way by suggesting that Blakelee could, for readability, have been given bigger billing and a bigger pair of editors scissors: the book is not richer for TMI anecdotes about the family and friends of Mr&Mrs. Because a funny thing happened to my father in the Spanish Civil War is not sufficient reason to have a section in a book about Magic and Science.  Sometimes it seems as if the publishers can only market books of a certain length and authors are required to lurry in material to that measure.  Publishers could pay more attention to the physical book as a thing to read. The gutter margin is the additional margin added to a page layout to compensate for the part of the paper made unusable by the binding process.  It is a crucial 4-5mm narrower in my copy of Sleights of Mind than my copy of The Running Sky [prev] which makes it very difficult to hold in one hand to read.

I love magic shows, we all love magic shows, so in one sense we are complicit in not wanting to understand how we are fooled. Part of us wants to go with the flow and clap our hands with delight as the rabbits and silk handkerchiefs pour from the hat.  Not all magic is the same: some of it is technical, some of it mathematical, and all of it is perceptual.

1. For technical a dove pan is a multi-layered piece of kit that can transform one thing into another; how it works is less important that the patter that accompanies it. The days of high-Victorian Marvo-the-Magician with a top hat and a pencil moustache are moving aside for performers who play it for laughs; but the dove-pan lives on. The box for sawing the lady in half is a bigger version of a container with compartments.
2. For mathematical, even I can do a 21 card trick, and did again and again when I was 9 or 10 years old. At the start I just followed the protocol I had been taught gathering up columns of cards and laying them out in rows. This relentlessly pushes The Card to the centre of the reduced 21-card deck.  Three iterations are enough. If you do this slow enough and inept enough repeatedly in front of the same person, they will eventually twig that you gather up the columns of cards in an idiosyncratic way and the magic is exposed. Real budding magicians work hard on the peripheral flim-flam and misdirection so that the process is, as far as possible, concealed: they get more life out of the trick that way. More importantly they practice practice practice until the actions become muscle-memory and your hands can work independently while your mind controls the audience with obfuscation.  Art Benjamin did an early TED talk on his "mathemagical" perf which is more complicated but not that much more complicated. If you worked at it, you could do some of his tricks.
3. Perceptual is most of the rest of  magic: the art of misdirection - look up there [and not down at my other hand]. What's interesting about the Sleights of Mind book is the acknowledgment that magicians for a couple of hundred (or a couple of thousand) years have known about the biases in human perception and worked with these to s[t]imulate the unbelievable.  Our eyes involuntarily track objects that move steadily across our field of vision. Our brains are incapable of multitasking: attention give here prevents it being given there.  Indeed, as Daniel Kahneman pointed out in Thinking Fast and Slow, task-switching itself consumes vital energy and multi-taskers are less efficient that those who complete tasks in series. The title says it all, it is less sleights magicians' hands and more bending the minds of the punters.
4. Action: at about the same time we found Art Benjamin on TED, this show by Lennart Green surfaced. He acts as a bumbling bohunk playing it for laughs but works his magic behind this facade. tl;dr?  try this shorter show.

Summary: the book is a bit woolly and self-indulgent but worth the struggle if you're interested in knowing a bit more about how you tick - and maybe will help polish your crap-detector. Macknik and Martinez-Conde worked very hard on their task of understanding the pattern and process of magic. So much so that, at the end, they passed a test to be inducted into the Academy of Magic Arts in Hollywood. This is one of the trade organisations for those who make a living from bamboozling audiences, and they don't want ineptitude queering their pitch. The neuroscientists did not bring shame upon themselves demonstrating their mastery of a new way of seeing.

Erratum-ti-tum-tum

One of my thangs is an interest in the intestinal flora, on which surprising levels of our health and happiness depend. In order to put into perspective the balance of power between human cells and other cells, I have been in the habit of trotting out the figure 100 trillion human cells and twice that of the (much smaller in diameter) microbial community. That turns out to be a bit of an exaggeration, as I found out before [phew!] I started teaching my first maths-for-biologists class in this just started academic year. It is a lesson to be careful when establishing your facts by referring to some Authority rather than, or as well as, working it out by guesstimating from first principals. A trillion in my book is a thousand billion and a billion is a thousand million; that's the US usage which has swept through science. Some British hold-outs of Rutherford's [prev-passing] or Rayleigh's [prev] vintage hold that a billion = a million million. A trillion = 10^12, 1,000,000,000,000 therefore.

The task for my starter scientists is to calculate, estimate or discover of how many cells they are comprised. Given that they weight 70kg [weight of a standard man in these text-book examples] and the 'average' cell is 20-30 microns = μm = millionth-of-a-metre across. Because we are almost all water, the volume in litres is the same as the mass in kg. You could address this by assuming the cells are spherical and use 4/3(π)r^3 or think of it as a bunch of cubes packed together. That won't make much difference, the former being close to half the latter [See diagram R].  A litre, remember, is a cube with 10cm on each edge. 10cm = 100,000 = 10^5 microns. I find it easiest to transpose all the measurements for the packing problem into cubic microns of which there a 100,000*100,000*100,000 = 10^15 in every litre. or 70 * 10^15 in your body. Each (average) cell is 20 * 20 * 20 = 8,000cu.μm OR
30 * 30 * 30 = 27,000cu.μm or split the difference at 20,000cu.μm.

(70 * 10^15) / ( 20 * 10^3) = 3.5 * 10^12  = 3 trillion cells in the human bod. That's a long way adrift from my 100 trillion, so my assumptions must have been wrong. What else do we 'know'? That there are 5 litres of blood coursing through our veins, about half of which are red blood cells (the rest is plasma: you can ignore the white cells because less than 1%). r.b.c volume is 10 * 10 * 5 = 500cu.μm, so there are (2 * 10^15) / 500  = 4 trillion of them alone. Therefore the cells in the body count must be much higher.

National Geographic had a report last year on the human total cell count which cited an original peer-reviewed article.  The consensus on that is a count of 30-40 trillion cells is in agreement with the estimate (in Nat Geog!)  of thoughtful blogger and journalist Carl Zimmer.  10% of them r.b.cs?  Is that reasonable. It's okay by me seeing that the 2 lt of packed red cells is 3% of the total mass of Mr 70kg and also that r.b.cs are much smaller than the average cell.  So I can live with the internal consistency of the numbers. Nat Geog is also suggesting that the microbiome is not comprised of double the number of human cells but rather a little bit more somewhere in the 40 trillions.  There I'm glad we're sorting that out. When making assertions, it is important to a) marshal your evidence and assumptions (my r.b.cs are like small pizza boxes rather than bi-concave discs, for example) and b) show your working: you may have made an error; as I did in earlier drafts of this piece.

Finally, I'll share a really amazing fact about the living world. Your (presumably adult) red blood cells are the same size as the r.b.cs of my 2 y.o niece - you just have more of them, That has the ring of truth. You may not have paused to reflect on the size of the r.b.cs of a mouse or a whale. But they are also more or less 8μm too. I find that a remarkable insight into biophysics, bio-energetics and the constraints under which mammalian bodies work.

Filmlets 100917

I find I can justify showing films on Sundays if I embed the links in commentary (of commentary) rather than just popping them up for your edutainment. We'll see how it goes.

• Luck of the Irish explained by Enterprise Ireland, our entrepreneur-support quango " . . . luck puts in the hard yards. . .". Come to Ireland - we eat problems.
• This might be important. Grace Kim, architect, has designed and lives in a cohousing intentional community where 9 families have apartments but a chunk of the space inside and out is a common area where inter alia everyone eats together periodically. Social exclusion can kill. The concept was developed in Denmark in the 1960s as Bofællesskab.
• Here's six Vimeo minutes on the photographs of 1960s NYC street-photographer Garry Winogrand with a commentary by Ian Bogost explaining just how OOO the pictures are. That would be object-oriented ontology. That self-standing filmlet is embedded in a fatter envelope explaining what OOO is.  It's a philosophical position which was sent me by The Beloved who has a better brain for philosophical transactions which tend to wreck, or fly well over, my head. Here's part of a comment on the latter link ". . . Is the apparent equivocation between an anti-narrative on the one hand, and an implicit confirmation of narrative as inescapable on the other, intentional or problematic? Or is it more like an extra-narrative -- narrative not so much denied but merely demoted . . ."  Possibly profound but I have no idea what it means. Here's a comment attached to the Vimeo movie "Thanks Ian! I knew that thousands of years of philosophy would eventually lead to something more important than boring old people. My toaster and I are very grateful."  Ooooo, irony, I can understand irony.
• After Harvey @ Houston we have Irma incommming. Juan "Oroville" Browne comments on the situation. Esp interesting view, starting at 11 mins,  of the impossibility of driving a Citroen 2CV in a hurricane.
• Here's a nice, neat, Numberphile film about the Trinity Hall Prime a very large number which, if printed out in decimal can represent an image of the college's coat of arms.
• At a loss for words? American Sign Language has a rich vocabulary of swear-words which the deaf are shiningly happy to share. via Tywkiwdbi.
• For, probably obvious, self-referential reasons, I am interested in Things Bob like Bob lives in a van by the ocean.
• Ewa Laurance is a Swedish pool player who has worked on her obsession to become the World Champion.  That's an interview, there's loadsa footage out there of her actually playing.

Over the hill? Not!

Writing about "the delicate folds and subtle colours of the reproductive parts of some plants" last week made me think of  W. Keble Martin about whom I wrote this trib as the vicar who drew a year ago. There I characterised him as "not an idle sort of chap and spent every available hour hunting out ordinary and rare plants and recording their distribution".  I now know that the key word in that sentence is available because years would go by when Martin drew nothing at all because he was busy with his day-and-night job as a vicar and rector of the Church of England. I know this because I just finished a sequel to The Concise British Flora in Colour called Over the Hills, which is available super-cheap on Amazon.  His Concise Flora was hawked around numerous publishers who saw the colour plates as only a cost and not an opportunity and refused the project. When it was finally published in 1965, Martin was 88 and the book became a publishing sensation which shifted 100,000 copies before Christmas that year.  It cannot have been only because there was a foreword by the Duke of Edinburgh. Hoping to net some more profit from the tsunami of petals, Michael Joseph asked Martin to write an autobiography which came out in 1968. For those of us nearing retirement, we may note that when Martin resigned his last parish at the age of 72, he still had 20 years of active life - and a second marriage, the old dog - ahead of him.

Keble Martin was born in 1877, the first drawing for the Concise British Flora - of snowdrops Galanthus nivalis - was made at Dartington in 1899 while he was waiting to go to theological college. He was still tricking about with the drawings 60+ years later. Some of them had to be traced and redrawn to get them onto better quality paper, some suffered from fading of colours and he had to re-label all the early work when he realised that English common names wouldn't answer any more, and he relettered everything as Linnaean binomers. Indeed, he lived through the period when Latin came to be acknowledged as the universal language for clear communication.  Don't get me wrong, in my tribs to An Englishman's Flora I've delighted in the diversity of names which ordinary people attach to flowers in their local world. But we no longer spend our entire lives living in the same parish and we may need to talk about snowdrops with Hungarians [hóvirág - lit. snow flower] or Germans [Schneeglöckchen lit. snow-bell]. On the back of his Flora, he was invited to submit four designs for standard-rate postage stamps; they [see R above] were published in 1967. The design included "Keble Martin" the painter and "Harrison" the printer in small print but neglected to include any ID for the flowers themselves - neither English nor Latin. I guess that's because each design included several species and a complete inventory of names would fill the stamp on their own.

Compensation compassion

There's lies, damned lies and willful mis-representation of facts. There have been a couple of fanous cases where an excess of hubris and certainty led some scientists to generate fake data to support a case the they knew to be true. Cyril Burt [the genetics of intelligence] and Gregor Mendel [genetics of genetics prev] are widely suspected of fudging their data or at least being subject to unconscious bias in their counting. A more recent headliner is Andrew Wakefield [prev] who claimed that he had found a connexion between MMR vaccination and the development of autism. That is the main evidential plank in the anti-vaxxers platform that vaccination is a conspiracy to enrich multinational Megapharm at the expense of the mental and physical health of children. Unfortunately, it is demonstrably true that Wakefield sexed up his data and failed to declare substantive conflicts of interest. But that exposure has made no difference to the lobby who continue to believe that autism is worse than measles or mumps and/or that the risks of the former outweigh the benefits of avoiding the latter.  My family have weathered measles [The Boy unvaccinated - tsk!] and mumps [Dau.I vaccinated - dang!] and, believe me, they are no fun.

I had some e-mail traffic from one of The Beloved's sisters, let's call her G, last week. She is tech savvy, restlessly curious about medical issues, has a useful crap-detector but no scientific training. So she often sends links over to me hoping that I'll do her research and post an executive summary on The Blob. I appreciate that because I am often short of copy and have my own thread of restless curiosity about things that don't impact me directly. aNNyway, here's what I got:
Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 9:21 AM
True or not true?  A dodgy claim or . . .
http://www.alternativenewsnetwork.net/courts-quietly-confirm-mmr-vaccine-causes-autism/
Sat, Aug 26, 2017 at 9:36 AM
Answered my own question
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/mmr-and-autism-rises-from-the-dead/

First thing to note is that my Professor pal Dan had a practice of only answering his e-mail once a day. 24 hours later, he'd often find a desperate question from a frustrated post-grad at 1030hrs . . . followed by a "sorry, I worked that out for myself" apology two hours later. G is clearly quicker on the uptake because she only took 15 minutes to solve her problem.  The latter is a devastating rebuttal of the AltNewsNet story. Well that's my take on it: "he would say that, he's a scientist" if you will. If you're an anti-vaxxer you won't have read the piece, let alone be swayed by its arguments. I found the response interesting because it spoke about the VICP National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in the US. It appears in the story because the anti-vax position takes the pay-out of compo as evidence for an association between vaccination and a different condition to that for which the compensation was given : a double whammy of alternative news. VICP is a government run vaccine-damage compensation initiative. Not to be confused with the NVIC = National Vaccine Information Center which is a charitable non-profit organization dedicated to preventing vaccine injuries and deaths through public education. With respect to the VICP, the NVIC digs with the other foot.

What I like about the idea of VICP compensation is that, if the damage and the vaccination event are sufficiently close in time, the parents get some money to help with their troubles because they have 'taken one for the team' . . . without having to prove negligence, or a multinational conspiracy. Limited resources for health services and the pervasive reach of the adversarial system of the legal establishment mean that the HSE routinely and stoutly denies any responsibility for medical misfortunes . . . to keep the floodgates of compo-culture as nearly closed as possible. Many cases of cerebral palsy have been put down to a difficult birth, perinatal anoxia and . . . incompetence of the medical staff. You have to assert the latter because without that you have to carry the child [literally in the case of CP] on your own. I wrote about one case last year where it took 25 years of trundling through the courts to secure a settlement in one such case; nine! other similar cases are cited in my link.

If we lived in a fair, compassionate society, a) there would be compo money for those dealt a crappy hand and b) it would just Go to the unfortunate rather being top-sliced by lawyers. Let's lay out compensation as compassion rather than as a consideration, as the lawyers define the value in a transaction.

I caught a scammer

A story has been going round the blogosphere about "the biter bit": where a tech-savvy merkin turns the tables on a 'foreign gentleman' attempting to scam him out of $400. If you want to hear the original podcast, you'll need 50 minutes and a certain tolerance for commercial breaks. But the story was picked up by Ars Technica which a) will allow you to skim the scam details and save some time b) has embedded copies of some of the key photos that feature in the story.  It's quite exciting in a technogeek sort of way, rather than a car-chase and abseiling sort of way, and nobody dies.

It reminded me of the old days when I was given a mighty server to store copies of Genbank the DNA database and software for accessing and analysing the sequences therein contained. The database seemed very large back then, partly because comms tech was so primitive.  it has been doubling in size every 18 months since, so is now really big.  1994 was early days for the internet, the WWW was only a few years old and the dot.com bubble wasn't even thought of, let alone bursting a lot of youngster's dreams of riches; as it did in 2000.  There was no point in storing all that data unless I was going to allow Irish researchers to access it.  I would set up accounts for anyone whose boss was prepared to pay a nominal annual subscription.  I was also expected to update the database every three months, which I did, but also to update the firmware of the operating system which I lacked the confidence to do with sufficient regularity. I adopted an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude which meant that most security updates languished off the operating system.

TCD's official Unix expert was a very helpful guy called Mike McGovern, who would hold my hand but couldn't actually do the work I was contracted for. One day I whined "How am I expected to do all this? I'm only a biologist".  He curtly replied "I'm only a geographer", with the implication that I could do what he had to do, if I moaned less and did more - it was kindly meant.

In between database updates, I had time to learn about how Unix computers worked and pay some attention to checking who was using what software when. Although I was based in Trinity College Dublin, I was providing a National Bioinformatics service and got log-ins from IP addresses in other Irish universities; and because scientists travel, some traffic came in from abroad. I felt I was running a rather sophisticated cosmopolitan hub.  One day, going through recent traffic, I noticed a log-in from an unrecognised address which I tracked down to an Internet Café on Dame Street about 300m outside the railings of TCD.  Yes, there was a time before Wifi, laptops and smartphones. I called the café up to report possibly nefarious usage and their Sys$op got terribly excited because they had CCTV security cameras. If I told him the time and the IP#, he could get me a picture of the perp: Cybercrime Bust! Unfortunately, they only stored a few days of CCTV tapes and my event had just been over-written.

A few months later, I noticed a login from TCD - so far so normal - but from the user-name of a student I knew had graduated and moved abroad. That was peculiar, and more to the point it was happening even at that moment. I called Mike who identified IP# as a terminal in one of the Public Access Terminal PAC rooms in his building. We agreed to meet five minutes later in the corridor outside; then burst in and literally collared a second year CompSci student trying to find what Unix computers could do. The kid was ultimately disciplined in some way and I resolved to impose some password discipline on my users.

That was another interesting exercise. With a slightly guilty feeling, I acted as game-keeper turned poacher and hacked the encrypted passwords of all my users. This didn't require me to know any 20 digit prime numbers. There was a program you could download - Crack, was it called?, or Doom?: I can't recall.  aNNyway, this program would encrypt a dictionary using your computer's password security software and see if any encrypted words matched strings found in the /etc/passwd file. It took a few hours to run and I flagged about 5% of my users as having failed this elementary test. I sent them all a message to up their game on the security front. I remember one case where the user had 'cleverly' reversed her surname, oblivious of the fact that it was now a normal but uncommon English language word.  We were all super-naive w.r.t. computer security 20 years ago. My 5% trawl had just used a plain language hack-dictionary; with more time, it could have added l33t [prev] substitutions of 'one' for 'el'; 'zero' for 'oh' and outed a bunch more people.  The current advice is not to use any word - even if gussied up with substitutions and special &$%# characters - strip the first letters off a phrase instead: nmtesirtd for nihilists or tbontbtitq for decision-makers.

Books for the people

I've given up I'm trying to give up my dependence on electronic media, especially video.  There is, I recognise, an irony here in that I generate about 15kbytes of Blobocopy every day which has to be stored on a server-farm next to a hydro-electric plant in rural Finland. In my restless ongoing quest for More Information, I'll have to read more books! Paradoxically, while reducing my youtube prescription, we are downsizing the [book] library at home and shifting boxes of books back into circulation via a local charity shop. At my advanced age, there aren't that many books which I will have time to re-read, so one may ask why I am holding on to hundreds of once-read volumes.

If we had more traffic up our lane, I'd set up a book exchange outside the gate and hope that the hill-walkers didn't fill it with the lunch-wrappings as they came past off the uplands. The Cheekpoint Book Exchange, on another lane to nowhere in particular, was crushed by a falling tree-branch and hasn't been re-instated. I've just heard about another books-to-outdoorsy-people project called Street Books [R with right-on appropriate technology delivery system] which was set up in Portland Oregon.They don't talk about homelessness in Oregon but there are "people who live outside" as if it is a life-style choice. Whatever you call them, getting to charge the phone is a task and a laptop is a lot to schlep about if you can't leave it somewhere safe. But a book? That's pretty robust to the wet, can fit in a pocket, and can be replaced if lost. Started in 2011 by Laura Moulton as a three-month Art Project, Street Books has acquired legs . . . or rather wheels; because the branch libraries run out from head-office each day on customized tricycles [see R with a big smile]. A bit like Rockfield Ice-Cream created by an entrepreneurial alumnus of The Institute, but more healthy: mens sana beats corpore sumo. I like the idea of Street Books and the customers look like they're delighted.

Another eye-opener about the chronicle of Street Books is that their clients look so normal. "people who live outside" are no longer crusty folk with alcohol or mental problems or refugees: they are citizens like you and me or my daughters who just can't afford to live inside because of the invidious distortions of the housing 'market'. A home isn't primarily an investment and there really should be enough to go round in Portland or in Ireland or wherever it is that you live.

There's another positive aspect to reading - or listening on the wireless - that you have to make your own pictures. With a book you can put it down to savour the moment, integrate it into your own experience to enrich your life. You build your own sunset rather than having it thrust upon you by the cinematographer's vision. That integration enriches and empowers - must be good for morale. So let's get more books Out There - in book exchanges, bicycle libraries or book-bags for the merchant marine. Here's an interesting story about library books being carried into remotest Appalachia on the back of a mule in the 1930s - intrepid.