Happy Arbitary Calendar Reset Day

I'm a real scrooge when it comes to New Years. I find it completely underwhelming.

Just to annoy everyone, I make a point of going to bed extra early on NYE to make sure that I'm definitely asleep at midnight. That'll show em!

And no, I don't do new years resolutions either. If something is important enough to be made into a resolution, then its important enough to start doing the moment you think of it. Why wait for new years?

Interestingly, the Cancer Council here in Australia has recently come out and said that New Years is one of the worst dates to choose to try to quit smoking. With all the parties and drinking and stress of this time of year, the temptation to smoke is likely to be at its greatest.

Ok, that's enough from me for this year... I'll get back to wetting these here blankets (grumble grumble). See you in '08.

Mac Software recommendation: OmniFocus, the ultimate to-do list

We nerds love systems -- systems of all kinds, protocols of all sorts. We're always on the lookout for ways of living more like robots. And so for nerds, clever little systems designed to help you get organised are always a really appealing way to overcome the clutter and chaos of life. This is even more true when the system can involve some kind of gadget or software. Nerds, you may have noticed, love gadgets and software.

But sometimes we nerds forget that, ultimately, we aren't robots. And so we get too ambitious and try to implement systems that are too nerdy. I've fallen into this trap many a time. A couple of years ago I built my self a Super Duper Intelligent Techno ToDo List using FileMaker. At its core was a super intelligent algorythm that would prioritise all my to-dos based on the importance of the project they were a part of, the domain that they contributed to (e.g., career, social life, health, etc.) and how soon they were due. The hope was that it would run my life for me, showing me the most important things to do at any given time. The system took me ages to set it up, and it was all very clever (if I do say so myself), but I only ended up using it for a couple of weeks because, ultimately, it just wasn't human friendly.

And then i discovered Getting Things Done (GTD). GTD is a little nerd cult based on a book by David Allen called, funnily enough, Getting Things Done. It is a set of 'action management' principals that are complement the human mind, not replace it. The basis of the system, as I understand it, stems from the notion that we typically have ideas about things that need to be done at times when we have no way of doing them, and that trying to remember to do these things is both inefficient and stressful. So GTD encourages us to abolish the practice of taking 'mental notes' in favour of either a paper and/or digital system. And under GTD such a system should include a few core features:

a) ubiquitous capture - one must be able to capture todo items quickly and easily, at any time (the moment they come to mind) and keep them safe.

b) context based lists - todo items must be grouped together on the basis of the context that they can be done in, or the resources they require, NOT, as we instinctively tend to do, on the basis of what project they are a part of.

c) trust - you need to be able to give yourself the iron clad garuntee that once a todo is in the system, it will DEFINETLY be seen when it needs to be seen, and so, one has to develop the discipline of regularly processing one's inbox and context lists.

Those, in my opinion, are the core essentials. You can learn more via the wikipedia article. It's nothing revolutionary. In fact, David Allen describes GTD as "just advanced common sense".

A GTD system can take many forms. For example, you could implement it using index cards, a notebook, or text files. But if you are a Mac user, I would recommend this new piece of software from OmniGroup: OmniFocus.

A free beta version of OmniFocus has just be released, although i've been an alpha tester since early this year. I think that it is the most elegant GTD software available. It's become an indispensable part of my life now; I couldn't live without it.

Best features (IMHO):


The quick entry window.When working in any other application a single (assignable) keystroke brings up a 'quick entry' window. You bang out a quick note, hit enter, and voila, it's in your digital inbox.

Smart start- and due-date parsing.As well as entering dates via a mini calendar window, OmniFocus will also recognise dates written in almost any format (e.g., 01/01/08, January 1, Jan 1, tomorrow, tom, 3 days, 3d, next week, January, 2 months, March 2008, etc.)

SmartMatch. You can assign tasks to a context or project list by typing its full title, or, simply by typing any aspect of it; OmniFocus will match it to the most similar context. For example, typing "wo" might match to the context "Work", or typing "market" might match to "Supermarket".

Sorting, Filtering, and Grouping. You can sort, filter, and group tasks by all kinds of different task characteristics, and easily change between these views.

What OmniFocus doesn't do, however, is run your life for you. And for this reason, Omni Focus can be dangerous in the wrong hands. So it's best suited for people who are familiar with GTD. It's also probably best suited to people who spend most of their time around their Mac.

If you're interested in OmniFocus, check out the 15min intro video (available here), and download the beta.

Also note that there is a 50% discount available if you pre-order before Jan 8. You can get a futher discount on top of that if you own a copy of OmniOutliner Pro (another Omni product).

Nicafaith CQ

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, made some comments recently about which elements of the Christmas story are important to believe in and which one's aren't. (I heard about this via Lee's post over on the 'Thinking Outside The Cage' blog.)

The Archbishop says he doesn't believe that a star literally guided three wise men to Bethlehem. This, apparently, is not an essential miracle to believe in. Furthermore, according to The Age, Dr Williams said that "while he believed in it himself, new Christians need not leap over the "hurdle" of belief in the virgin birth before they could join the church".

Interesting.

In marketing his very relaxed and moderate brand of religion, Dr Williams might hope that religion might capture a greater market share. It's a 'lite' version of faith, now 99% miracle free; a Diet Faith for those people who would like to take up religion but have previously found some elements hard to swallow.

I wonder, though, if moderate, diluted religion ends up playing quiet a different role? I wonder if it might serve as the religious equivalent of a nicotine patch; an intermediate step, not into religion (as Williams might hope), but out of it. Are Williams, and other moderates, creating a form of belief for those who are finding religiosity less and less compatible with the rest of their lives, but can't (for one reason or another) bare to go 'cold turkey'? And might this ultimately lose them more of the flock?

How much, I wonder, do either side of the believe divide know about how religious ideas play out in the minds of people in the long-term, and which are ultimately the best at capturing hearts and minds?

The things you find when doing literature searches: study on the correlation between shoe size and penis length

I was simply poking around the internet for articles relevant to my PhD, and just a few wrong clicks landed me in the British Journal of Urology.

Those urologists sure do seem to have a lot of fun. If ever there was a scientific journal that could replace the in flight magazine on aeroplanes, the BJU would be it.

One article that caught my eye was titled "Can shoe size predict penile length?". I just had to find out the answer, because, let's face it, we've all wondered.

The abstract sums it up:

Objective

To establish if the ‘myth’ about whether the size of a man’s penis can be estimated from his shoe size has any basis, infact.

Subjects and methods

Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size.

Results

The median stretched penile length for the sampled population was 13cm and the median UK shoe size was 9 (European 43). There was no statistically significant correlation between shoe size and stretched penile length.

Conclusion

The supposed association of penile length and shoe size has no scientific basis.

Myth busted!

(this blog post is so going to attract the wrong kind of google ads)

References

Shae, J. & Christopher, N., (2002). Can shoe size predict penile length? British Journal of Urology International, 90, 586-587

A tribute to the Pale Blue Dot

Kid Nation

I find this new TV show, Kid Nation, absolutely riveting!

It's not hard to imagine the TV executives pitching this one:

"OK Johnny, I got somethin you're gonna love, the next big the thing! It's dynamite I tells ya!...think Survivor meets ....Lord of the Flies!

Ya like?! No Johnny, it's got nothin to do with the Hobbits...Lord of the Flies! It's with kids! Kids, see!...no, no, no, not elves! it's with kids!"

Star Wars Holiday Special - Happy Life Day

I just discovered this via the MacBreak Weekly podcast. In 1978, when Star Wars was at its most popular, there was a Star Wars 'Holiday Special' that went to air only once.

Oh, how it captures the holiday spirit!



And you thought the Phantom Menace was painful!

Nectarine Appreciation Day

Is it just me, or is the nectarine the most amazing fruit? I just can't get over how great nectarines are!

Social Functions of the Santa Conspiracy

As December 25th approaches I've been thinking about Christmas and the traditions that accompany it. What would an alien anthropologist make of our behaviour this time of year?

From an outside perspective, I imagine that the great Santa Claus deception would seem to be one of the more bizzare traditions. Out of love, we adults go to the effort to give children gifts at Christmas, but then instead of taking the credit we go to great lengths to trick children into thinking that the gifts come courtesy of an overweight elderly Eskimo with superhuman couriering abilities. It's a deception as weird as it is implausible, but yet we find it entirely charming. And if I had kids would I partake in the conspiracy?....ummm.....yes, of course! But why? Why do we do it?!

The Pagan, Christian, and Coca-Cola origins of the Santa myth are well known. But that's not what i'm interested in. What I want to know is what function the Santa conspiracy plays? What do we adults hope to achieve by partaking in the hoax? What's the pay-off?

Let's put on our nerdy over-analytical thinking caps, shall we? Here's a few preliminary hypotheses:

1. The Gift of a Fantastical Story

Perhaps we perpetuate the Santa myth because we think it is a story that children will enjoy. It's a story with a friendly hero, flying animals, and a seemingly impossible quest. So perhaps the Santa myth is like any story that we might tell to children for their enjoyment, but this story just happens to involve the annual provision of goodies to children worldwide.

Now, sure, kids enjoy fantastical stories whether it be Harry Potter, the Chronicals of Narnia, or a make-believe scenario of their own imagining. But they can enjoy stories in this way without believing that the story is literally true. Why then do we go to such great lengths to convince the kiddies that Santa a literal reality? There's got to be more to it.

2. The Gift of a Comforting Belief

What aspects of the Santa myth might a child find comforting if they believed in the literal truth of it? Perhaps the Santa hoax is intended to create a sense for the child that they are loved and cared for, not only by their parents and family, but also by the whole world; Santa, maybe, represents a grand-parent of an ultra-extended family that includes all children everywhere. Or perhaps the Santa hoax is merely supposed to instill optimistic expectations about life more generally. The child might be expected to think something along the lines "an overweight elderly Eskimo went to enormous effort to break into my houuse to give me presents, thus, the world must full of such kindness and altruism more generally."

I've been trying to think back to my own childhood memories of Christmas, but it's all a bit sketchy. I know I was definetly excited about getting presents, but how much was that enhanced by the delusion that Santa would be bringing them? I just can't remember. It's all a bit hazy.

3. Training Children in Blind Faith

Maybe Santa serves a training ground for children to develop the ability to believe in something implausible (or at least in something that at times may be hard to believe). The parent might hope, on some level, that developing this ability might facilitate better faith in religious/spiritual concepts (note that Santa in many ways resembles the Christian God concept; perhaps Santa is God with training wheels). Alternatively, a parent might hope that, having exercised their 'faith muscle' in childhood, the child might be better able to "believe in themselves" later in life, even when the chips are down.

4. Behavioural Control via Supernatural Surveillance.

Santa "knows when you are sleeping" and "knows when you're awake" and "knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake". Yes, Santa has supernatural powers of observation, and therefore can punish bad behaviour even if it goes undetected by the child's parents. So if the child isn't 'good' all of the time then they won't get any presents. Thus, by partaking in the Santa conspiracy the parent may hope to gain some control of the child's unsupervised behaviour.

Thankfully, my parents deleted this aspect of the Santa myth from my childhood. It was made clear that Santa is an unconditional gift giver. No sack of coal for me, but then, I was a habitually well behaved child....mostly.

5. Anonymised provision.

Parents may want to provide a child with gifts, but don't want the child to know that the gift came from them. But why wouldn't they want to take the credit? A couple of possibilities seem likely. First, in times of financial hardship parents might wish to keep a child from knowing that it cost them money to provide the gift. They might not want the child's enjoyment of the gift to be tainted by any worry about what it cost the parents. Second, parents might wish to avoid creating the impression that the child could have want they want at any time of the year. If Christmas gifts were attributable directly to parents children might wonder why they couldn't of had that new Barbie in July when they first asked for it.

In some ways this seems quite a shame. I think parents should take credit for the effort and thought that goes into the gifts. The tradition in my immediate family was (and still is, LOL) that 'Santa' delivers various odds and ends into my Christmas pillow case (stockings are too small), but that my main Christmas gift comes directly from my parents. And i'm really glad that Mum and Dad chose to do it that way. It allowed my main gift to serve as a demonstration that my parents understood the kinds of things that I liked and supported those interests and hobbies. It served as a really nice validation of my personality. And surely it's more important that it's your parents validating your personality than the big red Eskimo.

6. Santa is a classically conditioned stimulus

Just as Pavlov's dogs associated the ring of a bell with the provision of food, we associate Santa with the warm fuzzy excitement of Christmas, simply because the two stimuli have been paired together so often. However, we mistakenly assume that it is the Santa myth that partially creates those feelings and so we see it as an indispensible part of our children's Christmas experience.

6. Santa is a selfish-meme

Another possibility is that perhaps Santa is a selfish-meme, a self-replicating idea that survives because it's good at surviving. Could the tail be wagging the dog?

In summary, then, it seems that there are a number of functions that the Santa conspiracy might play. So parents, parents-to-be, and all of you who grew up believing in Santa, tell me what you think? Do any of these hypotheses fit your experience in any way? Can you think of any other functions that Santa might play in family life?

(I started writing this blog entry at 10am and it's nearly 2.15pm. Time to stop analysing away everyone's Christmas and do something productive. Hope I didn't unweave anyone's rainbows.)

A FaceBook App Based on the Big 5 Personality Dimensions

As we all know, the vast majority of FaceBook applications are annoyingly silly and a complete waste of time. And, as we all know, the vast majority of popular online personality tests are also annoyingly silly and a complete waste of time.

What a huge surprise it was, then, to find this really good FaceBook personality test application: My Personality

The great thing about this test is that it actually measures the Big 5 personality dimensions, one of more scientifically validated frameworks for characterising individual differences. The important thing to understand about the Big 5 traits is that they were identified using a statistical procedure called factor analysis. Essentially, a very large sample of people were given a very long list of adjectives and were asked to rate someone they knew on these adjectives. These ratings were then analysed to identify clumps of adjectives that vary together. For example, people who are rated as being very 'happy', might, on average, tend to be rated as being very 'cheerful'. Thus both of these adjectives could be seen as tapping an underlying 'happy' factor. Factor analysis examines the relationships between all possible combinations of adjectives seeking to extract the underlying factors.

Using this procedure, five major clumps (factors) were identified and given a label based on what the items in each clump seemed to have in common. They are:

- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism

The mnemonic is OCEAN.

These dimensions are continuous and independant of each other. Different people will have different 'amounts' of each one and the mix accounts for a reasonable amount of your stable core personality. And these dimensions weren't plucked out of the air, they arise from the trends in the way people actually differ (or at least the way people describe the way that people differ).

No, these dimensions don't predict everything you'll ever do, no they don't account for all of the differences between people, and yes, there is some personality change over the life span. But the Big 5 do seem to account for a good deal of stable individual differences; these factors come up again and again in personality research. Research, of course, continues into refining this model and understanding the underlying causes of these dimensions. And as with everything, the Big 5 has its detractors.

It's also important to note that there's nothing good or bad about where a person lies on these dimensions. Some of the labels (e.g., openness and agreeableness) might seem to suggest that the more than the better. I mean, who'd want to be disagreeable. But there's advantages and disadvantages to all personality traits. It's horses for courses.

Anyway, so the My Personality FaceBook app taps these dimensions using items from the International Personality Item Pool. You start with 10 items, but you can do a full 100 if you decide (and I recommend that you do do the full 100 to increase the reliability). You can then post your results to your facebook profile, compare yourself with friends, and search for a 'personality twin' amongst other users. You can also invite friends to give their ratings of your personality to see how their perspective differs from your own. (Be careful, however, of mischevous people who might seek to screw with your results. You know who you are!)

The test is just for fun, and most people won't take it seriously, but I quite like the idea of making this kind of info available to my friends. I'd like to think that, just maybe, it might help them deal with me better. Or that someone out there looking for an conscientious-introvert to converse with might stumble on my profile.

My Personality is a good example of what a facebook app should be, an innovative interpersonal lubricant, a tool for connecting with people over the internet in a meaningful way...more than just a never ending flood of notifications that one has just been bitten by a virtual zombie, scorched by a virtual dragon, or been gifted a picture of a kitten eating a cupcake.

You can find My Personality here.

I hate TomKat!

I'm feeling tired and murderous this morning. All last night there was something making this horrible noise outside my window. It kept me awake all night. It was loud and repeated at irregular intervals.

Here's what it sounded like.

Dad said it was probably TomKat, which just makes me more anrgy, because you'd think they could find better ways to spend their time.

Any tips for getting rid of them? I hear TomKat doesn't like psychiatrists, but i was hoping for a cheaper solution.

Interesting Psych Video: Interview with Paul Ekman on the Science of Faces

For me, the most interesting thing about science is the journey of discovery. I love hearing about how things were discovered more than just what was discovered. I think that knowing a bit about the personal journey of the scientist really ads to the understanding of the discovery in many ways.

That's what I really like about this interview with Paul Ekman. Paul Ekman pioneered the science of facial expressions. His work is really fascinating, and I've been meaning to find out more about it for a while. In this video he talks about his career and how he came to do research on the face.


(56mins)

Ekman and Co. have a CD-ROM out that trains people to recognise facial expressions better (particularly micro-expressions). I ordered it a few months back to have a play with. It is pretty cool. The software flashes images of parts of faces at you and you have to quickly identify the emotion (e.g., happy eyes, disgusted eyes, angry eyes). It didn't take long to master. Sadly, I don't really feel like I've gained any psychological superpowers from it. Although, i'm now always sure to crinkle my eyes when faking a smile.

Ekman also has a photographic exhibition on at the moment I believe.

Show and Tell: 3D Glasses

I went to see Beowulf 3D at the movies on Friday; these are the magical 3D glasses.

I was a little dissapointed that they didn't have the classic red and blue cellophane ones. At least everyone recognises those ones as being 3D glasses. But with this new polaroid type, when you forget to take off them off after the movie, people just think you're weird.

At Chadstone they charge extra for 3D movies. A whole extra $5 for just one extra dimension. A bit steep!

Mike Huckabee on Bees

"It is aeronautically impossible for the bumblebee to fly. However, the bumblebee, being unaware of these scientific facts, goes ahead and flies anyway."

- Mike Huckabee, Governor of Arkansas and republican presidential candidate for 2008

Things Psychologists or Students of Psychology Hear All the Time

"Oh, you do psychology! So you can read my mind!"

"Oh, you do psychology! I better watch what I say..."

"Oh, you do psychology! You should meet my friend/father/mother/sister/brother/uncle/aunty. He/she is nuts."

"Oh, you do psychiatry!"

The Joy of Auto-Deletion

One of the best things I ever did was setting my computer up to delete my files by default. Now, that might sound crazy to you, anathema to the very notion of good computing. But, let me tell you brothers and sisters, it saved my digital soul!

You see, fundamentally, I'm a messy and impatient person when it comes to my digital lifestyle. I can't be bothered labeling all of my files carefully. I can't be bothered maintaining a taxonomically perfect filing system. I download or create hundreds of files every day, and the 10seconds it would take to file each of them would add up to too much.

So, inevitably, the clutter on my hard drive would mount. My desktop was drowning in a million icons (far worse than the picture above, actually), and the state of my other folders wasn't much better. I just couldn't bring myself to knuckle down and tidy it all up and DELETE ALL OF THE CRAP, because I knew that once I started it would take days to achieve complete cleanliness. Yes, I was lost. Dark days, dark days.

But then it hit me! The whole system was back to front. Generally, computers keep every file by default, and the user has to actively choose what to delete. Now, that would be efficient if the things worth keeping outnumbered the junk. But that's not how it is any more. Not for me at least. 90% of the files that I create on my hard drive are useless within a few days. Precious files are quite rare. Thus it would be more efficient for my files to be deleted by default, and persist only if I went out of my way to designate them worthy. Clearly, I needed to set up auto-deletion.

So that's just what I did. I found a piece of Mac software called Hazel that seemed perfect for this job. Hazel is an application that runs in the background, watching any folder or folders that you ask it to. You can then assign actions for Hazel to perform on that folder. For example, Hazel can automatically move mp3 files to a 'music' folder, set the label on any new files to green, or delete files that have not been touched in the past month. You define the rules.

Using Hazel, I implemented a very simple auto-deletion system. I created a folder on my desktop called "temp", and I set Hazel to delete any "temp" file that has "not been added in the past 30 days". I then made "temp" my default save location for everything. Every download, every text file, every screenshot now goes to "temp" by default. And if I haven't filed it elsewhere in 30 days...poof...it's gone. In other words, my Mac presumes files to be junk (which they usually are) unless I specify otherwise.



This system seems much more human friendly to me. In someways, it resembles the way our brain does file storage. By default, information that we are exposed to is forgotten half a minute after exposure (mostly). If we need to remember something in any detail we have to put in effort and think about that information, or even right it down. And thank goodness for that. If we remembered every detail about our day (every word of every conversation, every license plate number, every frozen orange), we'd go crazy pretty quickly. And for the brain, that system works brilliantly. Because we don't expect our memory to store absolutely everything in detail, we know we have to put in effort when there's important information that needs to be remembered.

I find that my auto-deletion system has a similar effect. If I start an important document, I know that I have to put in the effort to file it away in a permanent folder. If I don't, it will be gone in a month. It's very motivating. And I haven't lost one important file yet. Most importantly, however, my hard drive is cleaner than it's ever been, without me hardly ever having to clean it up. I'm saved!

(Ethan over at Kinkless.com has detailed instructions for setting up a more complex Hazel based filing system, complete with some really cool demo videos)

Online Christmas Card Printing and Mail Out

Help me out. I'm looking for a website that will let me create and customise Christmas cards, then will print them out for me and send them off. Has anyone heard of such a thing?

I'm not a big Christmas card person, but I might be if I could use something nerdy like that.

Is it a good idea to 'sponsor' children in the third world?

Ja'mie (from the ABC comedy series We Can Be Hereos) and her 'Global Vision' promotional poster.

A conversation with some people from my French class had me recently contemplating signing up to one of those sponsor-a-child-in-a-developing-country programs. Quite a few of the people in my class said have sponsored a child and said they found it very rewarding.

However, in doing some research, I stumbled on a very interesting article that has made me think twice.

ONE MILLION 'foster parents' in the West are now sponsoring children in the Third World - each giving around $20 a month - in what has become an extraordinary international exchange.

This is a very 'personal' form of giving - and from the outset the needs of the individual donor are taken into account. Advertisements for Save the Children in the US offer the prospective parent a long series of multiple choices. You check one box to choose the sex of your child and then another for their location or race. After this, as with most of the organisations, you get a child 'on approval' - with a photograph and a case history. If you accept, the process starts; you send your monthly aid and get letters from the child of your choice.

The appeal of all this is almost irresistible, and it is hardly surprising that this is one of the fastest-growing sources of money for voluntary agencies. The organisations concerned - like Foster Parents Plan and World Vision - are expanding rapidly. And even the relatively new British agency, Action Aid, now has 60,000 children on its books.

There can be no doubt about the good intentions of most of the donors. They wish to help identifiable individuals and hope to learn more about the places where their money is being used. It is a more attractive proposition than working through a conventional aid agency, which might fund a thousand projects from a central fund and appears much more impersonal.

Offering sponsorship is certainly an easier way to raise money. But is it a good way to spend it? (Continued...)

The article goes on to argue that, compared to other modes of charitable donation, child sponsorship has several hidden disadvantages for those you're trying to help:

- It's an inefficient use of your money (much of your donation is spent on taking photos of the child, monitoring the family's progress, translating the child's letters, etc).

- It causes divisions, setting the child apart from other children in the family, village, and school that don't also have a sponsor.

- Makes the child and his/her family acutely aware of their poverty relative to the sponsor's lavish first world life style.

- Maintains the child and his/her family's consciousness of aid and dependence.

Hmmmm. I had never considered these things before. It's not the kind of thing that is readily apparent to prospective donors. Of course, the article is from 1982, so maybe things have changed since then. But I haven't been able to find much info to the contrary.

Anyway, I feel obligated now to find something else to donate the equivalent amount to. Something that gets me 'bang for my buck'. But how do you calculate 'bang'? How do you work out which charity squeezes the most goodness out of each of your charity dollars?

The logical fallacy in Paul Davies' article 'Taking Science on Faith'

The blogosphere is abuzz over the recent article in the NY Times by physicist Paul Davies. In the article Davies has a go at repackaging the old fallacy that science requires blind faith in the orderliness of nature.

Taking Science on Faith
By PAUL DAVIES

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified. (continued here...)

But hang on, science doesn't presume orderliness, it just looks for it. Scientists examine various phenomena looking for reliable relationships between things -- rules that reality seems to hold to most of the time -- and sometimes they find them and sometimes they don't.

"Ah, but you wouldn't look for these reliable relationships and orderliness unless you believed (i.e., had faith) it was there" Davies might say.

Um, no! One looks for something because one entertains the possibility that it might be there.

For instance, let's say that I was playing a game of hide and seek with the readers of this blog. You all hide, and I begin to search for you. And the first place I choose to look is in a cupboard.

"Why are you looking in the cupboard?" Davies might ask.

"To see if anyone is in there," I reply.

"So you expect someone might be in there. You believe they might be in there. You have faith that they might be in there? You must, otherwise you wouldn't look."

"Well, I think someone might be in there, and I'm putting that hypothesis to the test. I certainly think it is possible that no one will be in there, Paul."

Scientists don't need to believe in an orderly lawful universe, they just look for it and very often find it. But scientists are quite open to the possibility that they won't. That's completely different from religious faith.

More analysis of the Davies article can be found over at Edge.

Longevity with a hard 'g'

The new leader of the Australian Liberal Party, Brendon Nelson, pronounces the word 'longevity' with a hard 'G'; 'G' as in 'gap' rather than 'G' as in 'gee wiz'.

What's with that?!