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My friend Gerry Pareja forwarded a link to this story from ‘Improbable Research’ about the first prize winner in the Neural Correlate Society’s 2007 Illusion of the Year contest.

The image certainly is pretty cool. But to test the explanation I tried covering each image in turn and the effect was still there! I wondered if there was a perceptual delay effect in that our memory of one picture affects our interpretation of the other but then I also noticed that the effect changes depending on where the picture is in our field of view. If I position myself facing the right hand edge of the monitor, then the right hand tower seems more vertical and the left one almost seems to lean left or backwards. So the illusion may be more (or at least partly) due to the fact that in the absense of other visual cues in the picture we tend to interpret as if viewed from the direction at which we are looking at the picture – ie we interpret the picture edge as a window frame.

AlterNet: Environment: Exposed: The Truth Behind Popular Carbon Offsetting Schemes

Arts&Letters Daily pointed to this fine essay by Ian Parker in The New Yorker. It really is an interesting and entertaining blend of anecdote, history, and good science reporting.

Skeptic: eSkeptic: Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

AlterNet: Environment: Is Fear About Climate Change Causing a Nuclear Renaissance? provides a balanced review including summaries of a number of people’s positions but doesn’t really add any new information.

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed – earth – 16 May 2007 – New Scientist Environment

Light and Dark

These words (used in the previous post) need exploring. We are not nocturnally well adapted so naturally fear the dark. This leads to much weight being attached to the words and makes their metaphorical use a powerful tool in discourse. But that use reinforces an association that is false and wrong in other contexts. Should it be avoided? How can we avoid the negative effects without giving up much of the richness of our language?

Note also the negative implications of pallor (esp in China) and darkenss as robustness or strength. Would striving for more balanced use of  metaphor save both ends? How can this be encouraged without introducing a tone of moralistic political correctness?

David Barash reviews some theories of religion in an article in The Chronicle: 4/20/2007

Thanks to Theodore Labadie who posted the link on the ‘Transforming Langara’ listserv, but this is not surprising. The interview subject is promoting the purchase of “carbon offsets” and the opportunities for fraud in that are so magnificent that no self-respecting greedy mogul could possibly hold back for long.

This is generally well-informed nonsense from a very smart nut.

This post by Stephen Downes presents an interesting link, but I don’t agree that it supports his thesis about human reasoning. Pattern recognition at this level is characteristic of many species and devices, and it’s a capability that is probably necessary for human reasoning whether or not such reasoning is based on rules and language.

In fact, it seems to me that if such a thing as distinctly human reasoning exists, then it shares many features with other more rudimentary forms of reasoning, but to say it is “based on” these is similar to saying it is based on biochemistry (or even physics if you want to go that far down into the foundations).

But if, as the base of human reasoning we are looking for  a characteristic which distinguishes it from other forms of reasoning, then language is not enough since it appears that language at some level is practiced by other species. Some people suggest that an awareness of contingency is key, but anyone who has watched a cat learning to control a mouse may be inclined to disagree. But unless Chimp research proves otherwise it may be that the language of contingency is unique to us (and perhaps also that of propositional truth though I suspect that a chimp who can lie to keep a friend from finding a treat might eventually be trained to recognize and label the lie of another). Failing that it may just be that the concept of a distinctly human form of reasoning is a mere conceit based on quantity or scale rather than anything qualitatively different.

AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Renewables Can Turn the Tide on Global Warming

What Al Gore Hasn’t Told You About Global Warming is a review on Alternet by David Morris of George Monbiot’s book ‘Heat’

PNW Conifers–Genus page

Oregon State Univ., LANDSCAPE PLANTS

Carbon Footprint includes a “calculator” for estimating one’s personal contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere and suggests various ways of reducing or offsetting it. But the encouragement to “plant trees” (or pay for same) may be misguided, since it seems clear that it is the lifetime carbon sequestration that is being assigned for each tree so the instruction “plant 5 trees” means plant 5 trees every year AND make sure that they all grow to maturity and are never used for fuel.

RealClimate is a blog about climate science maintained primarily by Gavin Schmidt. It appears to be a forum for active discussion of current issues with input from a wide cross section of those active in the field.

This is a balanced complete and well referenced account of the history of our understanding of CO2 in the atmosphere.

This The New Yorker article discusses two recent books criticizing the current ineffective dominance of String Theory in theoretical physics

Silence: A short history of our atoms is actually a posting by Dutch blogger Renee Alkmar about the idea of science as a form of religion. I arrived there via the link from the author’s March21 comment on the Jan24 posting at ‘Philosophy Talk’. Such are the vagaries of asynchronous communication. I often find it fascinating to see a seemingly dead thread revive like a dry seed in the sand at the onset of rain, but that is not my point in responding so let me move on to the issue at hand.
In her posting Renee comments on the very real spiritual sensibility with which many of us approach science, but I believe that there remains a major distinction between science and religion which hinges on the confounding of two quite different uses of the word “believe”. In particular, the belief I have just expressed is one which I can imagine giving up in the face of a contrary argument, but the belief of a religious disciple prides itself on its immutability. To me, that is the essence of “religion” and is something to be avoided. Perhaps “faith” would be a better word for the religious kind of belief. Granted, that word also sometimes is used with a more modest interpretation – more like “trust” (in the sense that I may have “faith” in my climbing rope but if that faith is betrayed I will be shocked and dismayed but won’t suffer a philisophical crisis over it even though fear of impact may cause a mental breakdown to precede the physical)- but I believe that the weaker interpretation of “faith” is less common than that of “belief” and so that that word is the better choice for how people feel about religion.

Also, a religion seems always to be based on authority, but I believe that a “belief in scientists” is in fact contrary to the true spirit of science. In my opinion, a true scientist doesn’t believe something because some greater scientist declares it but only as and while she is convinced in her own mind that the weight of evidence and argument supports it.