Deus ex machina?

I have become a bit of a Pastafarian of late. The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster started off in response to the teaching of Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution in American schools. If you can teach one non-evidence based version of the origin of life, they figured, why not make them teach two? Many people argue that the Pastafarian viewpoint is obviously an unbelievable piece of rubbish, full of fallacies and completely illogical conclusions. Then again, some people also say that about intelligent design.

Pastafarians, er, **believe** that the world was created by an invisible Flying Spaghetti Monster, who blesses those who are touched by his noodly appendage. The Church of the FSM teaches that global warming is a result of the dwindling number of pirates in the world. As the number of pirates decreases, the world gets hotter. The country with the lowest carbon emissions in the world, Somalia, also has the largest number of pirates. Coincidence? I think not… The clincher for me, though, is that the FSM version of heaven features a beer volcano and a stripper factory. Also, eating pasta is a form of worship.

I was reading the hate-mail section on the FSM website (yes, they publish their hate mail), and I came across a post which really demonstrated that evolution works, and that believing in a controlling deity is a false hope. The post was entitled ‘I can’t believe the internet allows people like you’. The author seems to be calling on the entity which controls the Internet to stop the FSM viewpoint being published. Which entity is that then? The way the internet works is that the more people read a page, the more hits it gets, the higher it climbs up the search engine rankings. People email links to their friends, the page gets discussed and linked to pages elsewhere (like this page right here), and the page either becomes a hit or it doesn’t. In fact, it is survival of the fittest: it is evolution.

No-one controls the internet. If I publish a libelous statement about you on a page, you can contact the web hosting service and ask them to take it off (lawyers would probably be involved). That doesn’t make it go away though. The page will be cached in people’s temporary internet files, it will be cached in Google’s and Yahoo’s servers, it may even be mirrored somewhere (you don’t need to be the author or owner of a page to mirror it: it can be done by anyone without any sort of permission). You cannot make the information go away. The best you can do is ignore it, and hope everyone else does too.

The author of the hate-mail does not understand how the internet works. Why should we accept that their view of how the world works? As well as calling on the controlling entity of the internet to ban the FSM (which it can’t), they have drawn attention to the FSM, which will boost its evolutionary advantages on the Internet and make it more successsful. That is totally counterproductive from the hate-mailer’s point of view. The thing is though, by publishing this hate-mail the Church of the FSM has demonstrated that evolution is a far better explanation for how the world works than either a putative pasta deity, or Intelligent Design. I suspect that the ID afficionados will be more upset about that than the Pastafarians, somehow.

Peace and pirates, RAmen, and may you be touched by His noodly appendage.

Drummers are intelligent?

Research published by the Karolinska Instutet yesterday showed a positive correlation between general intelligence and rhythmic accuracy. The media, of course, decided that this actually meant that drummers are intelligent. Hmmm…

I am both a drummer and a researcher, so I’m afraid I have to debunk this one. The researchers were testing a correlation between two factors. A correlation is not a cause, it’s just a correlation. There is a correlation between the number of people carrying umbrellas and the likelihood of it raining: that doesn’t mean that people carrying umbrellas causes it to rain. The causes of rain: humidity, wind, temperature; can be measured and forecast to try and judge whether it is going to rain. If you broadcast that forecast, then the precursor conditions for rain will cause it to rain, and will also cause people to carry umbrellas: the same cause will produce two correlating effects.

What the researchers also found was that there was a correlation between rhythmic accuracy, general intelligence, and the volume of white matter in the frontal lobes. Now we’re getting somewhere: grey matter is the parts of brain cells which actually do the work (well, they either fire or they don’t fire); white matter is the parts of the brain cells that connect them to each other. The logical conclusion is that more white matter equals more interconnections between cells, in the part of the brain that manages problem solving, planning, and time-management. More interconnections means that you can enrol a larger number of brain cells into performing a single task, whether that be problem solving or time management.

A famous maxim states that ‘Intelligence is that which is measured by intelligence tests’. By that it means that if you change the test, you change the definition of intelligence. So, if your intelligence test is just problem solving then you are testing the person’s problem solving ability. If your rhythmic accuracy is managed by the same part of the brain, then this all starts to make sense. Now, I’m not suggesting that the white matter is the cause of the correlation: it is a possibility; but it is also a possibility that it is just another correlation, with another cause entirely. White matter (brain cell connective tissue) increases and decreases in response to how much you use it. It is like your muscles: if you exercise your muscles regularly, they grow; if you don’t exercise your muscles, they shrink and atrophy.

Playing the drums is a multi-skilled occupation. No, really it is… While you are moving all four of your limbs independently of each other, you are concentrating on keeping the rhythm steady, following the structure of the piece of music you are playing, engaging in non-verbal communication with your fellow musicians, and also trying not to freak out because you are playing in front of an audience (if you’re very unlucky, you have to sing backing vocals as well). Your left foot has to maintain a steady pressure on the hi-hat pedal while your right foot batters out the bass drum rhythm. Your left hand is playing the snare drum, which is the counterpoint to your right foot (different limb, different side of the body), and your right hand is the only limb playing a steady beat. Another consideration here: you have to stay on you stool and not fall off. With all that going on, staying seated is not that easy.

There is a specific white matter structure that crosses the brain from one side to the other: it is called the corpus callosum. Left-handed people have a more highly developed corpus callosum than right-handed people, probably due to the fact that in a right-centric world they need to adapt more, and perform more tasks with their non-dominant hand. More to the point, musicians have an even more highly developed corpus callosum than non-musos, probably due to the unusual amount of cross-hand activity inherent in playing music. It is a logical supposition that if you undertake unusual tasks, co-ordinate unusual parts of the brain, the connective tissues that support those activities will develop a greater number of connections to support that activity. So, maybe we develop more white matter in the frontal lobes when we practise our problem solving skills, planning or time management.

So people who use their brains are intelligent. Their brains react to innovative problem solving by creating more interconnections. Drummers have a good sense of rhythm because they exercise that ability regularly, thereby stimulating white matter growth. Intelligence and rhythmic accuracy are not static attributes you have: they are things you do. 

Howdy!

It’s the school holidays, so I’m off work and I’m bored. I am desperately applying for other jobs at the moment.  My current job has terrible hours, terrible pay, is by its very nature stressful, and staff morale is extremely low. Through a series of ‘water cooler moments’, I have managed to establish that absolutely everybody who works there is looking for other employment. Every single one. The rats are leaving, therefore the ship must be sinking.

Anyway, I have two weeks off and I don’t seem to have done anything with them. OK, I got the car through its MOT, I’ve applied for a few jobs, I went for an interview (unsuccessful - boo!), I’ve caught up on my sleep a bit, but I still haven’t done half the things you should be able to do in two weeks. I think the problem is stress: I need to de-stress during my holidays; but I also need to get stuff done while I’m not stressed from my work.

If you want to do DIY stuff properly, which requires you to have some clarity of thought and peace of mind; you cannot be stressed, angry, tired, nervous or jumpy. You need to be calm and relaxed. I am currently neither. What is more, I am getting angrier, more stressed and jumpier about the fact that I cannot de-stress, relax, and calm down. Bummer, eh?

Hence blogging. Well, either that or beating my family. Actually, that wouldn’t work: I may be big, but they’re younger, smaller and faster, and they work like a tag team: I would lose. Badly. Blogging then… Jane, my wife, started her blog the other day, so I thought I’d give it a shot as well. We’re both graduates, we both read voraciously, and we both reckon we’ve got a book in us somewhere, so I guess it’s a good idea to start practising our writing in a non-work, non-academic setting.

I’ve read a few authors’ autobiographies which have mentioned unpublishable first (or second) books. I hope that this might be a way to avoid all that wasted effort, and get used to reading my own stuff (as well as getting used to other people reading my stuff). I am used to other people hearing my music; but when you play music at a gig or in a recording studio, you are concentrating on the performance you are delivering and not the content of the music itself. Different medium: different criteria. If your songs are rubbish, you don’t play them at gigs, or lay out serious money to record them: if your writing is bad, it’s just bad writing.

Anyway, I think that is enough doom and gloom for one evening. I’ll check my email and see if anyone is offering me cheap-but-badly-spelled antidepressants, and hopefully I will be a little cheerier tomorrow.