Hipster scientists postulate existence of ‘ironic matter’

Senior hipsters have announced that they believe it likely that the universe is filled with massive quantities of ‘ironic matter’ on the analogy of the ‘dark matter’ hypothesized by physicists.

Dark matter has not yet been directly observed, because it neither emits nor absorbs light. That’s why it’s called ‘dark’ matter. The behavior and distribution of objects that can be observed points to large and unexplained gravitational forces acting on what we can see. As that gurning science pin-up Brain Cocks puts it:

“If we only refer to the matter that we can see, then we just have no idea why that matter is carrying on the way it is. It’s fucking weird is what it is. So, we have a choice. We can accept that the universe is very weird, or we can propose that it only seems weird because there is some very weird and difficult to detect stuff in it, and that we physicists could find this stuff if we got handed trillions and trillions of dollars to build insane toys. And it’s not just the expensive toys. We need money to fly around getting hammered at conferences, and money for a tiny number of female post-docs who we cluster around like vultures near the bloated rotting remains of a bull hippo that’s been dead for five-days. Obviously we thought about it really carefully. Can we have our money now?”

Figure 1: Physicists say that the large-scale distribution
of observable matter makes no fucking sense at all, unless
there is a whole lot of dark matter distributed in blobs
like those in this image nicked from Wikipedia. They also
say ‘we need more money’.

In a little more detail, the speculation favored by the physicists is that there are very large quantities of this dark matter in the universe, engaging only in gravitational interaction, and perhaps the ‘weak’ force, but not electromagnetically. A leading hypothesis in the field is that dark matter consists largely of ‘Weakly Interacting Massive Particles’, or WIMPs. If this hypothesis is correct, then substantial numbers of WIMPS must pass through every part of the earth almost every second. A number of (very expensive) experiments to test this hypothesis are underway, but WIMPS of the required sort have yet to be observed.

It is also well known that hipsters neither emit nor absorb anything genuinely useful. Indeed do not spontaneously interact with anything recognized as interesting or entertaining by the vast majority of people. Even so, the observed behavior of hipsters demands an explanation, just like the observed behavior of galaxies. Why the fatuous obsessions with retro hats, poorly functioning energy inefficient and sometimes unsafe, albeit visibly non-contemporary vehicles, unsuccessful bands and movies without plots? Why devote so much effort to sourcing and wearing T-shirts with badly rendered logos of defunct products and quotations from movies nobody ever watched? Why, when the world is so exciting and scary, pay so little coherent attention to things that matter to everyone else, and work so hard to cultivate a disposition of bored indifference?

Figure 2: This also makes no fucking
sense. None. At all. Holy living fuck.Picture taken from here. 

‘Ironic matter’, the hipster scientists argue, would answer all of these questions. The brainwave came while a hipster affected complete indifference to a room-mate’s explanation of his ‘horrifyingly mainstream’ physics PhD. As the resolutely unsmiling hipster put it, “the physics problem was that the ‘dark matter’ theory said there should be loads of WIMPs, but the WIMPs had not been observed. And then it hit me. If you look at hipsters, it’s clear that there are loads and loads of observable wimps. But the mainstream just can’t ‘get’ our interests and priorities.’ Later, while listening to a bootleg cassette of some staggeringly obscure Amish ‘shun core’, his thinking went a little further:

“The physics guys could explain what visible matter does if they could detect the WIMPs. And the mainstream can detect the hipster wimps, it just can’t explain them. But what if there is a whole lot of invisible ironic matter, which only hipsters respond to and interact with?”

The analogy with physics and hipsters breaks down about here. Mainstream, and dorky, physicists work very hard to figure out how to detect dark matter if it does exist, and spend a lot of time trying to secure massive funding for massive experimental tools to conduct the tests. (And getting hammered at conferences, etc.) Hipsters say that even if ironic matter could be observed, the mainstream just wouldn’t understand it. Some Hipsters speculate that that the act very of observing ironic matter would bring it into the mainstream and thereby eliminate its ironic properties. And nothing would more clearly establish that ironic matter was no longer performing its function than a massive research grant. As one hipster “all that funding shows that physics is the opposite of hip.  They should call what they’re looking for ‘dork matter’.”

Robophobia in The Grauniad

Last week's Guardian has a blog piece by Mark Lawson about the composer Emily Howell, who has a forthcoming album. Part of what is interesting about Emily is that she isn't a natural person, but a trained computer program. She's the successor to Experiments in Musical Creativity (EMI, or 'Emmy'). Both are projects of David Cope, himself a composer. There's a lot you can read (including a lot that’s on line) about the history of Cope's work, and the music produced by the systems he has developed and trained. I'm not going over any of that here, but I do want to take issue with some things Mark Lawson has to say. Lawson doesn't care how good Emily's music might sound. He says it's "worthless" because it's not made by real people. I think that he is being a silly anthropophile robophobe twerp.

After some rather disorganised paragraphs in which Lawson half-heartedly faces up to the fact that much creativity is a matter of re-arranging elements that are not themselves original, he turns to banging the table. Along the way are a few telling bits of rhetoric that show honesty is not a big priority for him, including the gem that when Emily produces a work it is by “simply randomly reshuffl[ing]” bits of another. Clearly he’s simply ignored the fact that Emily is laboriously trained, and that the process of construction is guided by the set of constraints produced by the training. Anyway, here comes the table banging:

So logic is on her side. Art, though, is illogical. Although she can be defended intellectually, the creator of From Darkness, Light is no more a composer than a synthetic sperm knocked up in a laboratory would be a father.

Oh. So a traffic light isn't a “real” instruction, because it's just a machine. Calculators don't tell us arithmetic truths, because they're not people. I haven't really been to Scotland because I didn't walk there. It’s not about what happens, it’s about where it comes from. Why should we think this? Lawson continues:

Music, writing or art is a communication between two humans. This does not mean it has to be emotional or warm – a delusion industrialised in large parts of Hollywood – but that there is some sort of conversation between two members of the same species, even if the artist's side of the exchange is "go away and leave me alone".

Paradoxically, it was JD Salinger, a novelist who has refused any rapport with his readership outside the pages of the books, who most beautifully captured this truth when the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye suggests that reading a really good book makes you want to phone up the author. A composition by Emily Howell might make us want to email her, but we know that she could not reply. Admittedly, we also know that Salinger wouldn't take our phone call, but the crucial difference is that he could if he wanted to.

A computer, cleverly programmed, could probably produce the Doubting Thomas Passion by JS Bach or More Snow on Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. But the exercise would be worthless because the works from the software would not be informed by being a God-fearing kapelmeister in 18th-century Germany or a suicidal macho male in mid-20th century America.

Our shelves may be full of composers and writers who could be accused of having only artificial intelligence, but their efforts are still more worthwhile than art created by AI. "From the heart – may it go to the heart," wrote Beethoven on the manuscript of his Missa Solemnis. From the byte to the brain can never be equivalent to that.

This is a pretty strong set of claims. No matter how beautiful, or moving, or exciting, or anything else music, including Emily Howell’s, might make us feel, it's "worthless" because it didn't get to us by being passed through the brain of a natural person. And the reason for that being important is that we could (in some fabulously diluted sense of could, which covers long dead people who can't talk to anyone now, and living ones who don't want to talk to us, etc.) talk to them about stuff.

It's interesting that no matter how it got here, and irrespective of whether anyone could (or would want to) talk to where it came from, that is surely the most lousy justification for a claim that I've seen all week.

Lawson is, I’d argue, perfectly free himself to have a silly prejudice to the effect that he prefers music that in some sense came out of a brain. But it’s arrogant and absurd for him to declaim that such much is in general “worthless” just because he’s prejudiced.

More than that, it’s confused. People, and their brains, are physical systems. Their basic working parts are mechanisms – mechanisms of DNA transcription, protein construction, ion channelling, neurotransmitter action. Their interesting functions are the product of gigantic co-ordinated action among these myriad mechanisms. This means that if having in some sense been produced by mechanisms guarantees being “worthless” then everything made by any person is worthless.

Besides all that, it’s fascinating to learn more about music, and what sorts of process can compose it. There’s little reason to think that what goes on in Emily will be strictly analogous to what happened in Bach’s skull, but there’s at least a tantalising suggestion that we have more idea that we used to about what might have been in there. And there’s exciting work to be done – I for one would like to see computers capable of sophisticated ensemble improvising.

Here are some links:

Lawson’s article (comments unfortunately closed).

David Cope's mp3 page, with material by EMI. (In particular, see 5000 works in Bach Style.)

Article on Ars Technica.

Article on Times Online (includes streaming media with short clips from the forthcoming album).

Article on Vox.

(The image at the top was lifted from an image challenge on B3TA.)

Blogging for Darwin

There's a blog swarm a'commin', and it is taking place from February 12th-15th of this year (2009), to mark the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth, which was February 12th, 1809.

Effortless Incitement will be participating. I'm not sure what I'll be doing yet, but I'll search the pile of stuff I'm planning on blogging for suitably Darwin celebratory hooks. To find out more about the swarm, click the image.

Lint interview

Well, my cup runneth over. There's also an interview with Jeff Lint in this issue of All The Rage (opens as PDF).

Choice excerpts include:

LINT: [...] So my idea of an acceptable hero is some sort of a spider with multiple eyes like rally car headlights who, when issued an order, will jet tears of hilarity from the entire bank of eyes and tell a friend later while adapting a submarine for spaceflight: 'I hadn't the heart to obey such a moron.' You know. This means that a different sort of story happens - the characters aren’t blandly reactive and the story isn’t a machine.

And:

AG : You killed a stranger.
LINT: No I didn’t kill him. I sort of barreled into him on a sunny day and broke the front end of his face.
AG : His nose?
LINT: He’d probably call it that. Anyway, it was hard work and paid nothing. The situation didn’t allow either of us much latitude. And it wasn’t very encouraging.

There's also a page of adverts from an issue of The Caterer that are bound to evoke uneasy nostalgia here.

LINT the Movie

Fans of Jeff Lint (and who wouldn't be one) will be pleased to hear that there's a forthcoming movie about the author of such baffling and remarkable works as "The Stupid Conversation". You can check out the MySpace page of the movie.

Note that it is the movie, and not Lint himself, who is 92 years old and in the South of the United Kingdom. Lint's age, not to mention the number of times he has died and the precise circumstances in each case, remain hotly disputed. It is unlikely that the film will shed any light on these matters, although it is to be hoped that it stokes the flames with suitable lack of effort.

(The inclusion of Chekov in the poster is unlikely to settle ongoing arguments over Lint's never filmed episode of Star Trek, that so vexed Gene Roddenberry.)

Jacob Zuma fears God, and thinks you should too

I have a pet theory that some influential groupings in the ANC in South Africa have opted to give Jacob Zuma (hereafter simply JZ) a longer leash since the 'resignation' of Mbeki, to let him do some damage to himself. I have no evidence for this theory, it's simply an interpretation of what seems to me the difference between his public style before and after.

My local newspaper ('The Mercury' in Durban, South Africa) today includes a front page story with some rather choice quotations. JZ was apparently addressing about 500 religious leaders outside Polokwane in the Limpopo province. He's quoted as saying that "We need to teach people to fear God". In case there's any doubt that he means all people, he goes on to say that "even those who are not religious ... must learn to fear others. We must also learn to fear our ancestors".

JZ apparently claimed people would behave better if they had an imaginary friend who they thought was watching and scary. He suggested that the way to make people have scary imaginary friends was to enforce compulsory morning prayer in schools, and urged the religious leaders to "speak out" when the government enacted laws that were "not in line with the teachings of God".

This is all very bizarre and ridiculous. Religious folk hardly agree on any substantive moral questions. Round up ten or twenty senior religious figures ask ask whether women should be able to act as priests, attend university, dress as they please. Ask whether the death penalty is OK, whether homosexuals should be allowed to adopt, whether eating crayfish is OK, etc. We're supposed to improve morality at large by ordering children to listen to the blatherings of a constituency -- the clergy -- that's farther from univocal than a sack of parrots on acid. Go Cope, go. (That's Cope the 'Congress of the People' - which as I write doesn't seem to have a web page. I'll add a link if I find one.)

Carnival of the Africans #4

So, I'll be hosting the next Carnival of the Africans here at Effortless Incitement. The guidelines don't indicate that there's a dedicated email address for submissions to the Carnival, but I'll apply the sharp pointy end of my foot to the soft fleshy end of Meadon and see if I can find out more. Bottom line about the Carnival is:

The aim is to showcase the best blog posts on science, academia, and scientific skepticism by Africans or on Africa.

The Daily Show - 3 September, Sarah Palin gender card

Here's a fine example of Jon Stewart at work, getting highly effective comic (and also serious) mileage out of juxtaposing utterances by the very same people.

Semi-hiatus

I'm at a conference, with only intermittent access to the blagopipes, and so posting may be a bit slow until next week. Then again, if there are dull sessions I may write some articles on my laptop and publish them as soon as I get access.

Byrne & Eno at it again :-)

So this isn't science, and it isn't woo-bashing, but by golly I'm pleased to report it: Brian Eno and David Byrne have made another album.

Everything that Happens, Will Happen Today.

Effortless Incitement readership update

So here's another roundup of the Effortless Incitement readership (the first one is here). This is a matter that likely doesn't interest anyone except me, but there's no better place to write about it. Since I started tracking with Google Analytics, I've now had 714 visitors, and 1063 page visits, from 50 countries, still only two of them African countries. The USA and UK account for about 50% of traffic so far, and including South Africa the three account for nearly 2/3rds of visits.

My technorati rank has grown steadily - back on August 3 it was 787,635, up from 1,287,256 when I first registered there, and now it's at 518,149. The'authority' of this blog has reached the dizzying heights of 13. Only a tiny fraction of visitors comment - I'm not sure what that's about, and don't know what ratio of visits to comments to regard as healthy. (That last sentence is a very flimsy pretext for posting the Bristol Stool Chart.) The blog itself, or individual articles have been picked up at sites that I admire, which is gratifying. The fraction of visits that are referrals is picking up as well.

LHC goes live on 10 September...

... so if you think the world might end when they turn it on for real, best get your world-ending duds ready, and perhaps mix a few cocktails.

Here's the official LHC page. Here's an earlier post on this blag. And here, below, is the awesome LHC rap, which there's a good chance you've seen, but just in case not...



(And isn't that Stephen Hawking one incredible ventriloquist? I saw him on telly blathering on about galaxies for hours and I never saw his lips move once. Genius. [Thanks to the Viz letters page.])

Effortless Incitement readership

So this here blag has been running for nearly two months. According to Google Analytics, it has had a bit over 400 visits, a bit over 600 page views, and a bit over 300 unique visitors. (Yes, you are all individuals.) The most viewed individual article so far is The Coghill Challenge - Part 2, mostly on the back of it being featured in the most recent Skeptic's Circle blog carnival. The daily maximum readership has been 54 so far, and 18 subscribe via feedburner.

The visitors mostly come from the USA, UK and South Africa, but 39 countries in total have sent traffic so far, including most of Europe and Asia, but only one other African country, and nowhere South of the USA in either the Americas or Caribbean. Maybe I should write something en Espanol. Most of the traffic is direct or via referral (from blogger, and the blog carnivals I've participated in, as well as research blogging in the case of articles on peer-reviewed research). Only a small fraction so far is from search results, with 'effortless incitement' being the most common way of getting here by searching.

I can also report the following:

63.4% of visitors are using Firefox.
83.8% of visitors are using Windows.
83.8% of visitors are using 32 bit colour, and 96% have Java support.

Technorati seems to have been wobbly for a while, and the page for this blog there has persistently been a few days or more out of date for a while. Still, since Effortless Incitement got listed, its Technorati rank has climbed from 1,287,256 to 787,635, and its 'authority' from zero to 8. It's one person's favourite there (thanks, Michael).

So it's early days yet. I'll get good and liquored up when daily readership passes 100, and when unique visitors passes 1000.

A Woman a Day

There's suggestive evidence that "A Woman a Day", generally attributed to Philip Jose Farmer, may have been a mash-up of a rough draft by Jeff Lint, with each of the (many) scenes in which all the characters gathered in a hill and screamed until they lost consciousness removed, and the waiter-dog protagonist pair transposed into a man-wife combo. The remaining references to both pasta and tentacles are now simply silly, where they were previously baffling, and the "man" occasionaly muttering "stick with me" no longer properly references Jack Marsden, the pointless and hostile hero of "The Caterer".

It's well known that Lint's first work was most likely published not on its (it is generally agreed) slender merits, but as a result of his decision to submit the manuscript under the name "Isaac Asimov". It appears that further obstacles confront the project of identifying the real Lint. On days like this I'm pleased not to be one of the editors of the planned scholarly edition of Lint's collected works.

More sleazy SF covers are available here.

So PZ Myers stuck a nail through a cracker…

Following a series of hotly debated posts on Pharyngula (including this and this and this), and a campaign by hysterical cranks to have him fired for suggesting such a thing, PZ Myers has stuck a rusty nail through a communion wafer, and a few pages from the Qur’an and (for good measure) The God Delusion. There’s further yelling going on as we speak, all over the place. I’m not even going to try to give a roundup, but I will tip a nod to Michael over at Ionian Enchantment.

Is there anything wrong with what he did? Was anyone harmed in any sense of ‘harm’ that we should respect? No. No.

It is simply intolerable to allow it to count as harmful for one person to do something that another person doesn’t think should be done.

Some things definitely are harmful. Killing someone is, for example. So is physically hurting them. More generally, in any way obstructing their free pursuit of their own desires and interests, as long as that pursuit doesn’t harm anyone else, is harmful. What PZ did falls on the other side of the lines, and so there’s nothing wrong with it.

I regularly run into people who seem genuinely furious that gay people they don’t know, and will never know, are getting married in some distant country. I’m no longer surprised when I run into another dose of that kind of bigotry, but I still find the state of mind baffling. What the fuck do they think it has to do with them?

There’s an important point here that complicates matters a little, but doesn’t change the main conclusion. You can harm some people by harming others. That’s because how (at least some) others feel is actually worth something to us. Most of us, to say the same thing another way, would make an effort to prevent harm to people we care about, and voluntarily suffer outcomes that we’d seek to avoid if all that was at issue was how we felt. So we step in to break up fights where our friends might get hurt, and we give to charities that benefit people we don’t know at all, but whose well being concerns us.

The crusading bigot types like to think that their apoplectic hostility to the happiness of, for example, gay people they’ll never meet is somehow like this -- that they’re protecting someone or other, maybe even the poor deluded gay folks themselves.

But there’s a key test that has to be applied here: do those we want to help accept having us take an interest in them? If some person on the other side of the world refuses to use a mosquito net, for example, then the charity I give to doesn’t get to force her to do so. And if it is my considered conviction in the light of biology, human history, and everything we know about the properties of matter that the idea that wafers turn into flesh is outrageous bollocks, I don’t get to demand that people who participate in (what I take to be) this idiocy get to be fired or otherwise harassed.

If there is a God, and s/he/it’s annoyed about maltreatment of (a little piece of) the kid some people supposedly had to torture to death because of something to do with a very weird kind of love and forgiveness, then s/he/it can take the matter up with PZ. Worrying that somebody might have insulted one of your imaginary friends isn't a good enough reason to interfere with a real person.

(PS I’m leaving out direct consideration of children, and others where there's a serious presumption of rights to be protected, but that really isn’t relevant to whether PZ has annoyed God, or whether any crazed kooks have a legitimate grievance with him.)

(PPS The image at the top was stolen from cynical-c.com.)

Support for PZ Myers

So, as any fule in the blagosphere kno', crazy catholic fanatics have declared war on PZ Myers. You can read his original posting, the one that annoyed them this time here. You can read their noxious little attempt to attack him here, and his response here. It's also covered (among many, many places) at Richard Dawkins' place here.

All PZ offered to do, is visit some good atheist disrespect on a communion wafer, and blag the process. You know, do some stuff with his free speech, act in ways that made clear that he held beliefs incompatible with those of the loons and freaks who call the act of some poor kid who smuggled a wafer out of church to show a friend a "hate crime" and a "hostake taking".

My mate Dave wrote a letter to the President of PZ's university. It's copied below. Also, if anyone can get me a wafer, then by golly I'll give it a going over myself.

President Robert H. Bruininks,

The public campaign against Professor P.Z. Myers by one Bill Donohue has recently come to my attention. I understand that he is exhorting people to write directly to your office calling for action against Professor Myers. While I object to their methods, under the circumstances -- including my rejection of their intentions -- I feel that it is my responsibility to add to the flood of messages.

Myers is not only a fine scholar, but an important and energetic public intellectual defending science and learning against some of its most committed and often unprincipled enemies. He is famous and widely admired for this among scientists, just as he is disliked by many opponents of science. His proposal to publicly express his lack of belief in the supernatural status of a communion wafer was, I think, an entirely legitimate exercise of free speech. It strikes me, furthermore, as an important intervention in the ridiculous reaction to the action of Webster Cook, including suggestions that Cook was guilty of a hate crime, and that taking the wafer amounted to holding a hostage.

With respect to the specific suggestion that Myers' remarks violate a university requirement to be 'respectful, fair and civil', it seems to me that the following points are worth making:

(1) Myers' proposal was calibrated to respond to the outrageous response to the actions of Webster Cook, which have included death threats to Cook. (And now, I gather, to Myers himself.)

(2) Myers' proposal is in an important sense brave - he's offering to put himself on the line, in defence of the rights of those who do not hold the communion sacred.

(3) While admittedly expressed with a certain fire, I do not believe that his post is in fact disrespectful, or unfair. That is, unless asserting that one emphatically holds a belief incompatible with that held by another is disrespectful or unfair. If it is, and fairness holds trumps, it's hard to see the point of universities, or a future for science.

(4) Finally, I do not think Myers' public utterances are truly examples of a failure of civility. They are a vigorous assertion of the right of some to do things that others find objectionable falling short of infringing those of their freedoms that do deserve protecting. They are no different in principle from the act of any individual who allows it to be known that she or he eats pork, shaves, thinks women have a right to education, has a same-sex partner, etc. If universities do not hold the line against conflating disagreement with lapses of civility, I wonder who will.

Regards,

And apologies again for feeling duty bound to add to the deluge,

David Spurrett

Professor of Philosophy

Head of School of Philosophy and Ethics

University of KwaZulu-Natal,

Howard College Campus

Durban

South Africa

Goodbye to George Carlin

George Carlin has died, at 71 after a long and impressive career. (There's a decent overview at Wikipedia.)

One of his last filmed skits can be seen here:



Nod to Ionian Enchantment where I first heard of this, although the news is all over.