Rafee Kamouna Owes Me $500 Today - But Will He Pay?

Rafee Kamouna, who has been claiming for years that he has proved something important about the P versus NP problem, bet me two years ago that his marvelous work would appear in the Journal of the ACM by today.

Needless to say, it hasn't.

By the terms of our bet, I was to pay him $1000 if it appeared, whereas he only has to pay me $500 because it hasn't.

Rafee, I'm prepared to accept my money now. You can contact me for payment instructions.

Geologic Silliness

Earlier this year, at the Niagara Peninsula Gem and Mineral Show , there was a guy, Harry Johnston, selling what he called "The Mystery Stone", which appeared to me to be nothing more than common, ordinary quartz, being sold at rather high prices.

He's got a website in which he describes his rock as "a self cleaning stone of natural energies". It "enhances the energies of other stones, also clearing all Charkra points for most people". What does that even mean?

There was also a guy, Mars Islamov, selling Shungite, which is a form of noncrystalline carbon. Shungite is of genuine mineralogical interest, and there was an article about it by Buseck et al. in the Canadian Mineralogist 35 (1997), 1363-1378. But it's certainly not rare; the article of Buseck et al. says there are more than 10¹¹ tonnes of it near Karelia, Russia.

At his website you can find claims like "Shungite cures, purifies, protects, normalizes, induces recovery and promotes growth in living organisms. Everything which takes a toll on us, is killed; and everything health-giving is concentrated and restored by this miracle rock. Every scientist investigating shungite, declares it to be miraculous." This seems very dubious to me.

I wish geologists and mineralogists would speak up more strongly against these kinds of unsupported claims.

The Bible is Inerrant!

At least according to Doug Groothuis.

No need to even glance at all those lists of biblical contradictions, Doug. You've proved it with logic!

Strangest Textbook Title

There are a lot of strange textbook titles, but this one may be the strangest of all:

Discrete Mathematics with Ducks.

That's just silly! Everybody knows that you do discrete mathematics with geese, not ducks.

Hard Questions?

Here a very silly person lists 20 questions he thinks atheists are incapable of answering.

Some of them are just question-begging, such as "What caused the universe to exist?". Ignoring the fact that causality is not very well-defined, how do we even know for certain that the universe was caused? And if atheists cannot answer this question, it's not like the theist answer ("God created it") provides any more insight.

Other questions are downright strange, such as "Why did cities suddenly appear all over the world between 3,000 and 1,000BC?" What this has to do with theism or atheism is beyond me. Mesopotamia had cities even earlier, in 4000-3500 B.C.E. In any event, probably the development of agriculture led to the formation of cities, and once this innovation occurred, it would have spread through trade.

Question 10 asks, "How do we account for self-awareness?" This has a relatively easy answer. Through natural selection, organisms come to model their environment. Sometimes this modelling is reflected in their geometric structure: a camel has a very different body profile than a shark. But organisms also sense the natural world and react to it. Having a better model -- one that allows an organism to predict future events in the world -- clearly would contribute to better survival and reproductive success. As the model becomes more sophisticated, eventually it will have to encompass the organism itself. Self-awareness is just when your model of the world becomes so detailed that it has to include yourself.

I won't spend any more time on this silly list, but readers should feel free to chime in with their own answers.

Yet Another P vs. NP Proof

From the Saudi Gazette we read about the truly astonishing work of Dr. Rafee Ebrahim Kamouna, who claims to have resolved the P vs. NP question.

“The paper has been on the site of Cornell University to conform its academic standards. This means the paper is of relevance and of interest to the scientific community."


No, it means he put it on the arxiv, a preprint archive that happens to be housed at Cornell.

"Dr. Kamouna is currently writing a book that will be entitled “Bi-Polarism Theory: The Death of Computer Science, The End of Mathematics, and The Birth of Logical Physics.”

... which we are all looking forward to read with breathless anticipation.

If this silliness isn't enough to satiate you, you can look at Gerhard Woeginger's page.

My Review of Le Fanu's "Why Us?"

Here's my review of the atrociously bad book, Why Us?, by James Le Fanu. It appeared in Reports of the National Center for Science Education, 31 (6) (2011).

I DIdn't Buy This in the Video Store

Because at the price of $9.97, it was about $20 more than it's worth.

I love the part about learning about the Grand Canyon from creationist geologists who are "the scientists who know it best".

What's next, a video where you can learn information theory from Bill Dembski? Or journalism from Denyse O'Leary?

More Muddled Thinking about the Brain

If you can stand it, read this article by Raymond Tallis, entitled "What Neuroscience Cannot Tell Us About Ourselves".

There are a lot of confident assertions, all presented without any real evidence:

• "It is unlikely that the gap between neuroscientific stories of human behavior and the standard humanistic or common-sense narratives will be closed"
  
  
• "But there is nothing in the activity of the visual cortex, consisting of nerve impulses that are no more than material events in a material object, which could make that activity be about the things that you see."
  
  
• "neural activity is not about anything and so can be neither correct nor mistaken"
  
  
• "A consistent materialism should not allow for the possibility of memory, of the sense of the past"
  

And Tallis seems to have no understanding of what "information" is.

But most of the article seems to be gobbledygook. If Tallis were to try to come up with a rigorous definition of words like "about", he might make some progress. By his argument, it makes no sense to count tree rings to determine a tree's age, since tree rings are not "about" the age of the tree.

As Arthur C. Clarke noted, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; when he states that something is impossible, he is probably wrong."

William Lane Craig Does Mathematics

In his debate with Lawrence Krauss last night (audio here), William Lane Craig says,

"But mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers."

It's hard to know what Craig really means here, because it is so confused. Mathematicians routinely study "an actually infinite number of things", such as the natural numbers, the real numbers, and the complex numbers. No contradictions are involved.

But maybe Craig is talking about an actual infinity of things in nature. Then he shouldn't be talking about mathematicians, but physicists. Even here, physicists do discuss an actual physical infinity - without contradictions - such as Malament-Hogarth spacetime. Examples like Hilbert's hotel, that are often proffered as insoluble paradoxes, only show that infinity needs to be treated with care and may result in scenarios that seem counter-intuitive. But so does relativity.

Infinity minus infinity is not "self-contradictory", any more than 1/0 is "self-contradictory". Lane seems not to understand that not all functions are everywhere defined. The subtraction function, for example, can be defined on most pairs of the extended reals, but not defined on (∞, ∞). What's so hard to understand about that?

Addendum As I listen to more of the debate, it seems Craig retreats a bit from his claim about mathematics. He still seems to think that an actual infinite number of objects in the universe creates "contradictions", but he doesn't say explicitly what those contradictions are.

Harris v. Wolpe

This is an oldie, but a goodie: Sam Harris versus David Wolpe:



I think Harris definitely gets the best of Wolpe, although Wolpe's no slouch. There are so many good lines by Harris it's hard to list them all. For example, "We need to cease to reward people for pretending to know things they do not know. And the only area of discourse where we do this is on the subject of God."

What interests me more, though, is Wolpe's utter confusion when it comes to understanding neuroscience (at 44:50):

"The reason that our minds can do something more than just operate on instinct is because we operate all the time with things that are not physical, right: ideas, words... I can say something and change the physiology of your brain. Now how is that unless there's something more to your brain than physiology?"

This is remarkably dim. Ideas and words are not physical? An idea is a certain pattern of our neurophysiology. Spoken words are vibrations of the air. The patterns thus formed are interpreted by the nerves in the ear and are transmitted to the brain as electrical signals. Calling these things "not physical" betrays an ignorant, pre-scientific view of the world.

I wonder where Wolpe thinks ideas reside, if not in the brains of humans and other animals? In some magical ethereal realm?

I can say something and change the physiology of my computer. Heck, if my toaster is hooked up to some voice recognition, I can say something and change the physiology of a piece of bread. How does that imply that there's "something more" to a piece of bread?

Wi-Fi Hysteria

My local paper has a poorly-written Canadian Press article about a group of Barrie parents who are all worked up and worried that wireless internet in their schools are making their kids sick.

Whatever happened to good science reporting? The supposed effects form a classic list of vague symptoms that are likely to have a psychosomatic component: headaches, dizziness, nausea, racing heart rates. A good reporter should be more skeptical.

The article cites Susan Clarke, "a former research consultant to the Harvard School of Public Health", as claiming that Wi-fi "alters fundamental physiological functioning and can cause neurological and cardiac symptoms". But the article doesn't bother to quote any medical official or researcher to the effect that Wi-fi is safe. Nor does it cite any peer-reviewed studies by Clarke or anyone else on the subject.

Really, a little common sense would be useful here. With Wi-fi available in libraries, cafes, airports, and so forth, for years, wouldn't everybody be reporting these supposed effects?

Some Unimpressive Numerology

The fine-structure constant α is a fundamental constant in physics, and is currently estimated to be approximately .0072973525376.

The physicist Arthur Eddington, who became rather eccentric and believed he could compute the number of protons in the universe accurately, thought it was equal to exactly 1/137, but our current estimate gives something closer to 1/137.03599967899.

The mathematician James Gilson seems to think that α is given by the rather complicated formula (29/π)*cos(π/137)*tan(π/(137*29)). But this is just numerology, and not even particularly impressive numerology. The trick is that tan(x) is very close to x when x is small, and cos(x) is very close to 1 when x is small. So Gilson's formula is just (29/π) times something that is very close to π/(137*29), with an additional fudge factor of something that's very close to 1 thrown in. There is no real surprise, then, that one can find small integers to make this close to α.

Heck, it's obvious that the real value of the fine structure constant is actually 250/34259. Or maybe (cos(2 π/57) - sin(4 π/47))/100? I can't decide which.

No Ghost in the Machine

Back when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I worked as a computer consultant for UC Berkeley's Computing Services department. One day a woman came in and wanted a tour of our APL graphics lab. So I showed her the machines we had, which included Tektronix 4013 and 4015 terminals, and one 4027, and drew a few things for her. But then the incomprehension set in:

"Who's doing the drawing on the screen?" she asked.

I explained that the program was doing the drawing.

"No, I mean what person is doing the drawing that we see?" she clarified.

I explained that the program was written by me and other people.

"No, I don't mean the program. I mean, who is doing the actual drawing, right now?

I explained that an electron gun inside the machine activated a zinc sulfide phosphor, and that it was directed by the program. I then showed her what a program looked like.

All to no avail. She could not comprehend that all this was taking place with no direct human control. Of course, humans wrote the program and built the machines, but that didn't console her. She was simply unable to wrap her mind around the fact that a machine could draw pictures. For her, pictures were the province of humans, and it was impossible that this province could ever be invaded by machines. I soon realized that nothing I could say could rescue this poor woman from the prison of her preconceptions. Finally, after suggesting some books about computers and science she should read, I told her I could not devote any more time to our discussion, and I sadly went back to my office. It was one of the first experiences I ever had of being unable to explain something so simple to someone.

That's the same kind of feeling I have when I read something like this post over at Telic Thoughts. Bradford, one of the more dense commentators there, quotes a famous passage of Leibniz

Suppose that there be a machine, the structure of which produces thinking, feeling, and perceiving; imagine this machine enlarged but preserving the same proportions, so that you could enter it as if it were a mill. This being supposed you might visit its inside; but what would you observe there? Nothing but parts which push and move each other, and never anything which could explain perception.

But Leibniz's argument is not much of an argument. He seems to take it for granted that understanding how the parts of a machine work can't give us understanding of how the machine functions as a whole. Even in Leibniz's day this must have seemed silly.

Bradford follows it up with the following from someone named RLC:

The machine, of course, is analogous to the brain. If we were able to walk into the brain as if it were a factory, what would we find there other than electrochemical reactions taking place along the neurons? How do these chemical and electrical phenomena map, or translate, to sensations like red or sweet? Where, exactly, are these sensations? How do chemical reactions generate things like beliefs, doubts, regrets, certainty, or purposes? How do they create understanding of a problem or appreciation of something like beauty? How does a flow of ions or the coupling of molecules impose a meaning on a page of text? How can a chemical process or an electrical potential have content or be about something?

Like my acquaintance in the graphics lab 30 years ago, poor RLC is trapped by his/her own preconceptions, I don't know what to say. How can anyone, writing a post on a blog which is entirely mediated by things like electrons in wires or magnetic disk storage, nevertheless ask "How can a chemical process or an electrical potential have content or be about something?" The irony is really mind-boggling. Does RLC ever use a phone or watch TV? For that matter, if he/she has trouble with the idea of "electrical potential" being "about something", how come he/she has no trouble with the idea of carbon atoms on a page being "about something"?

We are already beginning to understand how the brain works. We know, for example, how the eye focuses light on the retina, how the retina contains photoreceptors, how these photoreceptors react to different wavelengths of light, and how signals are sent through the optic nerve to the brain. We know that red light is handled differently from green light because different opsins absorb different wavelengths. And the more we understand, the more the brain looks like Leibniz's analogy. There is no ghost in the machine, there are simply systems relying on chemistry and physics. That's it.

To be confused like RLC means that one has to believe that all the chemical and physical apparatus of the brain, which is clearly collects data from the outside world and processes it, is just a coincidence. Sure, the apparatus is there, but somehow it's not really necessary, because there is some "mind" or "spirit" not ultimately reducible to the apparatus.

Here's an analogy. Suppose someone gives us a sophisticated robot that can navigate terrain, avoid obstacles, and report information about what it has seen. We can then take this robot apart, piece by piece. We see and study the CCD camera, the chips that process the information, and the LCD screens. Eventually we have a complete picture of how the robot works. What did we fail to understand by our reductionism?

Our understanding of how the brain works, when it is completed, will come from a complete picture of how all its systems function and interact. There's no magic to it - our sensations, feelings, understanding, appreciation of beauty - they are all outcomes of these systems. And there will still be people like RLC who will sit there, uncomprehending, and complain that we haven't explained anything, saying,

"But how can chemistry and physics be about something?"

A Much-Too-Credulous Review of Signature in the Cell

John Walker is a pretty bright guy who's done some interesting work, but in this review of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, he demonstrates insufficient skepticism about Meyer's claims.

He asks, where did the information to specify the first replicator come from?, and then follows with this non-sequitur: The simplest known free living organism (although you may quibble about this, given that it's a parasite) has a genome of 582,970 base pairs, or about one megabit (assuming two bits of information for each nucleotide, of which there are four possibilities).

Of course, this is silly. Nobody thinks the first replicator was anywhere near this complicated, or even that it necessarily had a "genome" based on DNA. Even the genetic code itself may have evolved. Hypotheses like the RNA World suggest that the first replicator might have consisted of only a few hundred base-pairs.

Oddly enough for someone who has worked in artificial life, Walker shows no sign of having read Koza's 1994 paper, which shows how self-replicators can emerge spontaneously and with high probability in computer simulations.

He then goes on to claim you find that in the finite time our universe has existed, you could have produced about 500 bits of structured, functional information by random search. The only problem? The term "structured, functional information" has no definition in the scientific literature - it's just babble invented by creationists like Dembski and Meyer. There's no sign that Walker has read any of the criticism of Dembski's work.

Walker goes on to give a definition of "structured, functional information" as "information which has a meaning expressed in a separate domain than its raw components". But then there are lots of examples of such information occurring in nature, such as varves. Varves are layers of sediment which encode yearly information about the environment in which they formed. Another example is Arctic ice cores, which encode essential information about climate that is being mined by climatologists today.

Finally, the notion of "meaning" is incoherent. Disagree? Then tell me which of the following strings have "meaning" and which do not:

#1:
001001001100011011111010010111010010111000100000100000100111

#2:
010100111011001100001111101011100101110011110110010000001101

#3:
101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010

#4:
101111101111101110101110111110101111101110101110101110101001

If that's too easy for you, let's try another. List all the binary strings of length 10 that have "meaning", and explain, for each one, what the meaning is.

Bottom line: insufficient skepticism leads to credulous acceptance of bad ideas.

Innumeracy in a Ken Goddard mystery

From Ken Goddard, First Evidence, Bantam Books, 1999:


[the scientists sequence some alien DNA and find two new bases, M and J, in addition to the usual 4]

"The average DNA molecule is made up of approximately three billion base pairs ... code units, whatever," Jody said, as much to herself as the other two. "Which gives us six possible codes instead of four at the first base-pair position; a total of thirty-six possibilities instead of sixteen in the first two positions; one hundred and ninety-eight possibilities instead of sixty-four in the first three..."


Yup, Jody actually claimed that 6³ = 198.

And, one page later, we find one of the most unintentionally funny lines I've ever seen in a mystery novel:


[they're discussing what creatures with this unsual DNA might look like]

"But what would you do with a DNA molecule like this?" Melissa asked, her dark eyes gleaming with excitement. "What could you do?"

"If this were human DNA, I'll bet you could change your shape at will," Jody Catlin ventured.


Yup, that's exactly what I would first guess.