…we saw a blue heron. Zipping home to grab my camera, we came back to find it still fishing in the pond nearby. Nice birdy!

Apparently Ali Hussain Sabat, a Lebanese TV personality made a trip of religious devotion to Saudi Arabia, where things got a bit nasty. Part of Mr. Sabat’s shtick involved a kind of “Carnak the Magnificent” routine wherein he would dispense sage advice and pretend to read the future for callers. The stuffy Saudi religious police seemed to take a dim view to this self-avowed fortune-teller setting foot in their holy nation, and promptly arrested him. Witchcraft, it seems, is still punishable by death according to the laws of America’s good friend and ally Saudi Arabia. Recently after appeal to Saudi Arabia’s high court, the conviction was upheld. But then, these religious zealots are convinced their most holy artifact is a meteorite cloaked in absurd mythology – which should make us suspicious of their ability to separate reality from fantasy.

Then of course, there’s logic: If Sabat could in fact tell the future, wouldn’t he have known not to go to Saudi Arabia? Or maybe he’s going to be executed for practicing witchcraft, regardless of whether he gets successful results. In the U.S. charlatans like Miss Cleo can be prosecuted for false advertising and deceptive business practices (but not executed). If Saudi Arabia is determined to kill anybody who makes a living by dispensing fanciful supernatural guidance (and there’s no such thing as non-fanciful supernatural guidance) to the masses, then logically they should put all their clerics and Mullahs in the cells adjacent to Mr. Sabat.

But logic is never a good companion to zealotry. The sooner liberal tolerance and science permeates global culture, the better. As for Mr. Sabat, I suspect there’s a good chance global outcry will end up saving his life. However, he’s but one of countless people persecuted not for their own religious beliefs, but because of the imposed beliefs of others.

 

 

Recent research has shown the brain inherently uses something like the scientific method. Although the study specifically assesses the response of the visual cortex to anticipated or novel stimuli, it makes sense that there’s a more general pattern-matching mechanism underlying basic cognition. A commentator even suggests there’s a link between the brain’s success rate at predictive analysis and overall intelligence.

I wonder about something different: I know that humans are very prone to confirmation bias. Perhaps it’s true that the brain’s tendency is to confirm predictions, due to the reward system or simply from the lower energy required to process confirmatory future perceptions. This is a fine point: Not only would it tend to make perditions, but it would also tend to provide more false-positives than false-negatives. In cases where a prediction is proved invalid, insofar as such prediction doesn’t entail negative consequences (or more generally, of emotionally significant consequences), there would be less probability of subsequent re-evaluation and learning.

Confirmation bias is a bane of pseudo-science. Just because we make a prediction it does not follow that we will apprehend subsequent related information with cold impartiality. As soon as we make a prediction, we have a vested interest in its being borne out. I believe this study provides evidence of that (but then again, perhaps it’s just my own confirmation bias!). Add in the notion that an incorrect prediction may not have nearly the emotional consequence of a perceived correct one: When you are correct you are pleased. When others think you’re correct they may even cheer and praise, which can be quite exhilarating. If the topic regarding which you are prognosticating is not, of itself, likely to have an immediate impact on your well-being, the consequences for being wrong may be trifling enough that they are ignored and dismissed as you bask in the laurels of your perceived success.

I find it intriguing that scientists have interpreted their results as supporting the notion that people’s brains are like scientists. I propose it is far more likely that people’s brains are like fortune-tellers: Happy to make any number of unrealistic predictions as long as they’re rewarded for doing so. A neurologic underpinning that is even slightly biased toward dispensing reward signals in response to our predictions ensures we will tend to exhibit and reinforce our biased thinking. A true scientific brain would be completely neutral regarding comparison of future evidence to prior prediction.

How sweet the irony that the study’s authors fell right into the trap they so cleverly exposed!?

These are some of the things I have seen today.

From my back patio in a suburb of bustling Chicago.

A mother owl with her chick

                

The first flowers in my yard

 

 

A watchful mother
Owl family in moonlight

I am filled with wonder that such beauty is available

right under my feet,

and up above my head.

And yet, I am only just here. Just home. Just now.

On just another spring day.

Let these stars and things give me pause

to recall there’s nothing trifling or banal…

about just another day.

    M42 – Orion Nebula
(EOS 1D MkIII and 200MM f/1.8×1.5 8sec)

    .The Pleiades

Adding the functionality to build dynamic treemaps from Nicolas Garcia Belmonte’s InfoVis javascript package into Capacity Integrator.

 

I’m confident this is the first product for enterprise IT capacity management that uses treemaps to provide an overview and drill-down of the tremendous amount of performance and capacity data large enterprises must deal with. I’ve written SQL queries that turn any two-dimensional collection of system metrics into a hierarchical view allowing drill-down by grouping critieria. In this case, it’s based on location.

Next on tap is linking the ability to drill down into system performance stat overviews similar to the following:

The Roosevelt Atheists club attended a wonderful lecture by Dr. Michael Shermer last night as part of Birthday Week celebrations. Dr. Shermer talked about why people believe weird things. A moment of excitement came when a U. Wisconsin professor asked a question that revealed he was a “Nine Eleven Truther”. The crowd booed and muttered, but Dr. Shermer was polite as ever in his answer.

An interesting point Dr. Shermer made is that the brain’s default mechanism for handling information is to believe it. It takes more work (literally, from a neurological perspective) to think critically about and assess new information, than to just “go with it”. Seems gullibility is hard-wired. Religion may also be hard-wired in the temporal lobe.

We also learned that Michael Shermer once thought he was being harassed by aliens from an otherworldly spaceship, and that he volunteered to have his brain saturated with EM waves intended to induce altered consciousness.

Afterwards we met him for some brief chat and book-signings. He was quite personable and it was obvious that he loves thinking, discussing and chewing on ideas. In the picture, one of the aforementioned Atheists is apparently being sworn in by Dr. Shermer. He’s either promising to eat his vegetables or to always be skeptical of everything but skepticism so help him the FSM.

Personally, he’s my favorite promulgator of rationalism since Carl, though Dennett is also phenomenal.