Pseudoscience

I recently finished reading a curious book called "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character. It’s a collection of memories and funny stories by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, who tells about all kinds of things: from fixing radios as a child, over his involvement in developing the atomic bomb, to his many adventures with beautiful blondes – the typical life of the average academic, quoi. (Not.)

Now if there was one thing Feynman couldn’t stand, it’s pseudoscience. In his last chapter of the book, he explains why:

During the Middle Ages there were all kinds of crazy ideas, such as that a piece of rhinoceros horn would increase potency. Then a method was discovered for separating the ideas--which was to try one to see if it worked, and if it didn't work, to eliminate it. This method became organized, of course, into science. And it developed very well, so that we are now in the scientific age. It is such a scientific age, in fact that we have difficulty in understanding how witch doctors could ever have existed, when nothing that they proposed ever really worked--or very little of it did. But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFOS, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I've concluded that it's not a scientific world.

On the one hand, it’s really quite fascinating to see that Feynman reacted so heavily against pseudoscience because of his unshakable belief in science itself. On the other hand, it’s quite tragic that what Feynman complained about decades ago (the above was written in 1974), still applies today.

Indeed, it’s tragic how much pseudoscience is still around these days. One very clear example of this is what is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc. Confusing an event that preceded another event with one the cause of the latter event. Indeed, only today there was a very clear example of this kind of mistaken logic in the papers.

Four hours of sport a week reduces your chances of having a burn-out by half the article in question said. An Israeli study had studied workers for nine years and observed that the more people did sports, the less their chances were of getting a burn-out. Ergo: doing sports prevents a burn-out.

But this is faulty logic. It’s not because event A is followed by (post hoc) event B, that event B is caused by event A (propter hoc). It’s not because you do sports, that you don’t get a burn-out; just like it’s not because you don’t do sports that you do get a burn-out. Think about it. Isn’t it much more logical that people who exercise for four hours a week have energetic personalities and are therefore (either genetically or psychologically) less prone to get a burn-out anyway? At the very least the Israeli experiment does not prove that exercise is the cause of the lack of the burn-out.

The same is true for all the alcohol versus life expectancy research. Every so often there is a study that proves that one or two glasses of beer or wine a day supposedly makes you live longer. Indeed, when you observe a bunch of people, those who drink moderately tend to live longer than those who don’t drink at all. But that doesn’t prove that moderate drinking is the cause of living longer. Isn’t it more likely that most people who drink moderately probably live an easier, a funner, in short a happier life than those who never touch a drop of alcohol? And happy equals less stress equals less cardiovascular disease. But if you’re happy because of another reason, like through having a rewarding job, a good family life, etcetera, I’m sure it’s just as beneficial for your life expectancy. So it’s happiness that makes you live longer, not alcohol.

After all, Feynman stopped drinking very early on in his life and he lived to be 70, which was exactly the life expectancy of a male at the time.

Aha!

Pod-heads (6)

It seems like our jobs finally got a grip on this blog. I am not just speaking for myself when I say that Fred's output has been on the low side lately, and this is all because we were too busy working. I wish I could say we were too busy having a life, but that would be a bit of a stretch. We're fighting deadlines, working ourselves through piles of papers and spending (way too much) time in front of - luckily enough - eager students. 

In times like these, when planet Fred seems to be in orbit around the bright sun called our job, I tend to spend time with the usual suspects when looking for comfort: food, friends and erhm... music. Damned, where are the adjectives starting with d- when you need them? Aha! Here. Let's make it fantastic music then. And now that the days are getting longer, as opposed to my shorts (at least during the weekend, damned you ink on the calf), I tend to scroll to the albums listed under 'punk' in my iPod. 

And there, we can find one of the bands that has always been one of my favourites: Pennywise, a Californian punk rock band named after the clown in one of Stephen King's novels. I have a particular liking to this band, because I once shared the stage with them. Well, let me explain: the first time they played at Pukkelpop (2003, if I am not mistaken), they invited people on stage during what is probably their biggest anthem (Bro Hymn, also known as the "Oooh, o-o-o-ooh, oooh, oo-o-o-ooh"), and this Fred was one of them. Jumping up and down, pointing my finger in the air, singing along, enjoying the view: thousands of youngsters moshing around in a giant circle pit. 

Today, I decided to post another Pennywise favourite. As a finger of your choice for everything that prevents you from doing whatever you want to do, because time doesn't permit. Or just because it rocks. Shorts or no shorts...

The wonders of the world

You know us by now. We Freds wonder about stuff. So here’s a few more things I can’t get my head round.

1) Some weeks ago I passed through Ghent’s busiest shopping street while it was close to zero degrees outside. At once I was reminded of something that has puzzled me forever: why the hell are fashion and shoe shops allowed to keep their doors wide open all the time? You can actually feel the wasted heat against your cheeks as you pass by on the pavement! How much energy and money could we save just by shutting the door like mum taught us to?

2) A while ago my car battery was dead. When I had finally found someone who had jump cables, he wanted to listen to the sound the car made first. He knew cars; so he would  be able to tell if it was a mechanical thing, not an electric one. I put the key in the ignition, turned it and voilà, the car started no problemo. Crap, just bothered someone for no reason. But why is it every time something is broken it miraculously fixes itself once the expert has shown up? Think plumbing, toilets, computers, phones and such. Only to break when the expert has left…

3) Also: why do we still have announcements in our railway stations? You know, those announcing stupid stuff like The train for Brussels is arriving at platform 2. First of all, in 99% of the cases, you’ll hear this several minutes before the train arrives. (That just gets me nervous.) Secondly, the volume is usually louder than shit. (I want to listen to my iPod, dude!) And thirdly, it’s not as if I don’t know where to go if I didn't hear these messages. I mean, either you look it up on the Internet or you look at the giant screen in the entry hall, or at the television screens in the corridors, or at the screens on the platforms themselves. We don't need an uninterested woman’s nasally drone announcing which train is arriving or (more often) delayed. (We saw the red +5, thank you very much!)

4) And the most frightening thought: today I realised that I have no idea when the last time was I swam. Suddenly I wondered: on average, how long until you forget how to and drown? 

Holy crap! 

Hide and seek

Almost two weeks ago, a sperm whale was found stranded on the beach in Knokke-Heist, a small town along the Belgian coastline. It goes without saying that it was obviously found: sperm whales don't really qualify as excellent creatures to play hide and seek with. Especially not when compared with the reigning world champion, a dwarf chameleon living in Madagascar. It's only fair to add that this tiny creature (growing at a maximal length of 30 millimeters, from snout to tail) must have had access to a decent manual on basic hide and seek strategies (damp rain forests are somewhat better than stretches of beach, when plotted on a degree-of-shelter scale), but still: unlike the sperm whale, it took scientists up to a few days ago to discover this peculiar reptile...

As always the stranding of a sperm whale, the biggest mammal known to men - unless there is a creature playing hide and seek to perfection, lead to a bunch of newspaper articles and buses of disaster tourists, staring at zealous biologists cutting the carcass into pieces for further investigation. That, and energy production: the creature will be recycled, in the sense that its body fat will be converted into renewable energy. As a matter of fact, 12 and a half tonnes (roughly half of its total weight) of biomass can produce the equivalent of what 14 families consume in the span of a whole year!

By far the most heart-warming piece of documentation, was an interview with the family of Theofiel De Groote, after whom the sperm whale was named. This man had a name that rung like a bell, even before the unfortunate creature beached itself. Unless you weren't part of the fishermen community in Knokke-Heist, that is, as he was a famous shipowner often setting sail to Iceland. Theofiel passed away in 2010, leaving behind his wife Simonne who declared to be proud that the whale was named after her late husband. I found that rather sweet, especially because it had a rather unconditional air to it. I mean, for all we know this mammal could have been the dork amongst the sperm whales. It's not that I want to ruin the party, but Theofiel De Groote may have been bullied around at Whale School, because he was too fat (don't worry Theofiel, your additional biomass will serve a great purpose) or because he had a strangely shaped head (don't worry Theofiel, your cranium may serve as the topic of a rather mystifying PhD-thesis). As a matter of fact, Theofiel's stranding along the Belgian coastline may have been a final attempt to finally find peace and quiet. In which case his solution, beaching itself in Belgium, can hardly be called a bright solution - can it?

If I ever happen to reincarnate as a bullied sperm whale with a disfigured head and a rather strong inclination towards suicide, I would at least find myself a nice stretch of beach in the Caribbean Islands; being mourned over by a bunch of half-naked locals - trying everything they can to keep me alive, splashing coloured cocktails and lukewarm ocean water over my body, feeding me shrimps from the BBQ, playing chilled reggae tunes to relax me - doesn't seem that bad to me. So yes, I thought the interview with Simonne was heart-warming: after all, who knows how the underwater world thought about what will forever live on as a whale in our minds...

Air cats

Yesterday I was in a bar with Fred and his girlfriend. As per usual the conversation meandered in all kinds of directions, until we hit one of my all time favourites: animals. Fred’s girlfriend mentioned that she found it strange that in Dutch we have a product called ‘WC-eend’ (Toilet Duck – I’ve complained about it before), which should really be called ‘WC-swan’ (Toilet Swan) if you think about it. Indeed, the bottle looks much more like a swan than a duck.

Which brought me to the following thought. There are actually loads of animals that have funny names in the sense that they don’t look like the aninal they’re named after. Especially sea animals, it seems.

Oh sure, there’s a sea spider or a sea horse which do look like spiders or horses, but there are others that just don’t make any sense to me.

Like the different kinds of seal-like creatures – you know, those slippery bastards with big snouts and whiskers that shout ‘uh uh uh’ all day and used to stink up your local Aquaworld. They have the most funny names like sea lion, sea cow and even sea bear or sea elephant!

But I don’t get it. What kind of biologist was observing this animal:

and thought to himself: “That kind of looks like a bear! That’s it, I’m gonna call it a sea bear!"? Didn’t it cross his mind that it would be pretty confusing to have a sea bear if we already have a polar bear, which is basically a bear that (partly) lives in the sea?

I mean, it’s almost as if we were out of inspiration when it came to giving names to the sea animals. Instead of inventing something new we just said. Okay that’s a sea eal, that’s a sea spider, that’s a sea turtle, that’s a sea snail. There’s no end to it!

Imagine we’d done that to birds? Look, son, there’s an air cat:

   

Lazy biologists.

Movie of your life

I had a near-death experience the other week. Not in the true sense of the word, as I wasn't actually floating through the peaceful passageway usually mentioned by people who were clinically death for a while. I didn't see the blinding white lights, nor was I weightlessly hovering towards an eternity of rice pudding in golden bowls with matching spoons (which never appealed to me anyway: I'd rather settle for more copious portions of food, even if these are served in dog bowls and meant to be eaten with my hands tied behind the back). 

So what happened? I wanted to cross the street, one of these streets that doesn't have a traffic light telling you when to go, but for some strange reason my brain told me not to do so. Luckily enough, because the next thing I knew a crazy bad-ass wanna-be rally-driving nutcase raced past my nose. Leaving me gasping, and wondering what could have been no longer. This wasn't the first time something like this happened to me, and the same interesting question crossed my mind: exactly which part of the brain is it, that does this useful trick? I don't know the answer to this riddle (intuition? pre-historic instincts?), but I do know that I felt happy to (still) be alive. Because despite the fact that I am looking forward to seeing the movie of my life (Who will play me? What genre will it be?), I'm not ready for it yet. 

The incident also made me wonder: what did people expect to see when they passed away before the advent of moving images? The play of their life? Just imagine watching the story of your life in a Shakespearian version. Or as a traditional Indian Sanskrit drama performance - the horror... Nothing against drama obviously, but I'd prefer to be able to press pause every once in a while (getting more beer from the fridge, cutting more cheese cubes, going for a little wee), or skip certain passages forward. And backwards, for that matter. 

At least this explains why people claiming that eternal life awaits after we die, are actually right: after all, we will end up watching ourselves, watching ourselves. Ad infinitum. 

Why I don’t like pie

This morning, as I was fumbling with the three digit number lock for my bike and as I later read some tweets about Valentine cancelling itself out this year (14-2-12=0), I was reminded how much numbers matter in our lives.

For me, however, this has always been the source of much frustration. Indeed, if it had been invented back then, I’m sure I would have been diagnosed as a child with at least a mild form of dyscalculia. I remember having to sit through hours and hours of extra math lessons just to be able to do basic sums and even today I struggle. Honestly, I cannot do something like 15+7 immediately. I have to split it up in 15+5 and 20+2. I’m also notoriously bad at mixing up stuff like 97 and 79, thanks partly to the confusing Dutch system of saying zevenennegentig and negenenzeventig. (Even as I wrote this down I noticed that I had confused them).

Later on my dyscalculia developed into a very apathetic relationship to numbers in general. For instance, for someone who likes history it didn’t help, I’m profoundly uninterested in dates. I always needed a little trick just to remember them, like 1798 for the French Revolution. But the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) or the one at Actium (31 BC), two of the most iconic dates of Ancient History – a subject I took at university –, will be forgotten almost as I’m writing this down.

The trouble is numbers don’t mean anything to me. Which is a pain in the ass. I mean, there are phone numbers to remember, credit card codes, locks, birthdays, licence plates (I think mine ends in 927 but honestly, I’m not sure), and so forth. So every so often I get into trouble. Like that morning this summer when I woke up, turned on my cell phone and realised I had suddenly forgotten my PIN code. So I tried once, I tried twice and I tried three times… And then you need a PUK code, in the middle of France, in a hotel, at 6 o’clock in the morning. At which point you yell something that rhymes with PUK…

It has always puzzled me why I am so bad with numbers. The only explanation I can think of is that there are too few numbers. Indeed, there’s only 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and all the rest are combinations of those signs (I have no place in my life for i, e, or π). At least with things and feelings and places and people there are loads of words! And I’ve never had any trouble remember those.

But with numbers, it’s all the same to me. When I use words there is a certain darkness to black and a certain brightness to white (try it, don’t you agree?), but there’s no Constantinopleness to 1453 (The Fall of Constantinople, in my world also dated 1345 or 1354) and 3,14 has nothing to do with pie for me.

Which reminds me. When I was thirteen, I went to a summer camp in Switzerland where one of the guides was an engineer. He was fascinated with numbers and one day even boasted: ‘I can recite π up to 100 digits after the 3!’. At which point a friend of mine, nowadays a paratrooper and in the army’s special forces, replied: ‘So?’.

Quite.

Quotes from the book (10)

I guess that people working in academia are on the official list of "People who are not allowed to envy other people traveling for their job". Apart from the cleaners, obviously. So there goes the introduction I had in mind, when I decided to blog about one of the funniest books I read in a while: The travel diaries of Karl Pilkington. For those of you who are not familiar with Karl: he is a jack-of-all-trades in the media landscape (podcaster, author, television producer), best known for the travel series "An idiot abroad" and his appearances in the Ricky Gervais Show (the world's most downloaded podcast, unless Adam Carolla succeeded in setting a new record), mostly as the butt of Gervais' practical jokes. 

The aforementioned book, spun off the travel documentary television series, describes the adventures of Karl, traveling in Egypt, Brazil, Jordan, China, India, Mexico and Peru. It is written as a diary, including his telephone conversations with the people who sent him abroad in the first place (Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant), and it is downright funny. His one-liners are hilarious, and some entries could have been scripted for a stand-up comedy show. A few examples: 

I had some toast and a bit of papaya. This was the first time I've ever eaten papaya. It was okay, but if someone told me I'd never eat papaya ever again, I wouldn't be bothered. I feel like this about most fruit. There is too much fruit in the world, and I don't like buying a lot of fruit, as it goes off so quickly. Maybe that's why we are told to eat five portions a day, just to get through the stuff before it gets mouldy. 

The odd thing with China is, they like to go out of their way to do things differently. Even something simple like reading a book they mess with. They read books from top to bottom and then back to the top again. It looks like they're agreeing with everything they're reading. 

The thing with announcing funny stuff is that you may end up with people staring at their screen, finding it all but hilarious. In that case, grab the book yourself and read it from top to bottom. You can agree with me afterwards: funny stuff...

Conversationally challenged

This morning I was quietly doing some work at home, when the doorbell suddenly rang. As I live in an apartment building I have that typical phone in my own apartment that allows you to ask who’s there. Unfortunately the phone is broken. So I have two choices: either let the unidentified visitor enter (I can still use the button to open the door remotely) or go down and see who it is.

In this particular instance I wasn’t going to let just anyone in. Call me paranoid, but then again we’ve had somewhat strange visitors before here. So I went down to open the door.

Standing outside was a young guy – perhaps a couple of years younger than I am. He had blackish hair that was combed back with a lot of gel and wore a curious outfit. I guess he’s one of those people who decide, even though it’s freezing, that they don’t need to adapt their outfit to the weather. As if they think: “I don’t care if it’s -5°. A shirt and a summer’s jacket will do just fine”. Strange lot, and the more I keep my eyes open for them on the street the last few days, the more I seem to come across them.

Anyway, there he was. So I open the door and give him a friendly but inquiring look. Eyebrows slightly raised, head cocked to the side and looking slighly upwards. As if to say: ‘Yes?’. At this point the guy doesn’t say anything but just steps into my rather small hallway. Now call me paranoid, but to me that’s odd. Someone rings my doorbell, I open the door for them and they just step inside, without so much as a word. And even though I didn't initiate the conversation, I'm not supposed to, I think. He is.

So I said to him: “Can I help you?”, trying to sound casual and accommodating, but probably not able to erase all notes of suspicion in my voice.

He looked at me sharply and said “I’m here to see my brother. You must know him”. That’s what he said, literally and with the same emphases. Now I found this odd for a bunch of reasons, the most important one being what I subsequently asked him. “So why didn’t you ring his doorbell then?”

At this point the guy was obviously annoyed, as I surmised from his curt answer: “Because his doorbell is broken.” I replied: “Ah, okay, it’s just…” and I left my sentence to trail off. Obviously, I meant to say “Ah, okay, it’s just that I found it a little strange that you ring my doorbell and you don’t tell me why you're there when I open the door”, but I didn’t say it out loud. I mean, that’s the way people handle social situations like that. You leave something unsaid but imply it, rather than being rude by saying it explicitly. It’s called ellipsis. We do it quite often. For instance, why when you accidentally touch someone’s hand in a crowded train you say ‘Sorry’ and not ‘Sorry I touched your hand’. That’s just making things more awkward.

However, this guy wasn’t too socially adept, as I was heavily suspecting by now. And my suspicions were confirmed by his answer to my “Ah, okay, it’s just…”. He said: “It’s just… what?”

So I tried a variety of the same technique of ellipsis. I said: “Well... it’s just that I wanted to know”, again leaving out what I wanted to know. And then I made a conversational mistake, I followed the remark by “It’s not as if I don’t believe you, you know”.

At which point he just sighed. And that was that.

I think this easily qualifies as one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever had. I mean, I can't for the life of me figure out what the sigh exactly meant. Surely he didn’t realize that my “It’s not as if I don’t believe you” actually implied the opposite (i.e. “Yes, I am suspicious of you”)? He'd react more angry if he realized that. Or did he realize that he had been wrong all along by not telling me why he was there in the first place? But that could hardly have been the case, since he was probably lying to me. Indeed, I could clearly hear him knock on his brother’s door and shout his name in the hallway. His brother wasn’t there though. Instead they met a few moments later back on the street. (Oh yes, I confess. I was spying).

But the strangest thing is that I now feel bad about the whole exchange.

Indeed, who is strange here? The guy who rings someone’s doorbell and doesn’t explain why he’s there, or the guy who has spent the whole day analyzing what was said (and not said) in those 30 seconds?

Right.

Bananas?

A few weeks ago, one of the Muslim clerics in Europe warned Muslim women not to get too close to bananas, cucumbers or other phallus-shaped vegetables, in order to avoid sexual thoughts. The unnamed cleric, whose directive was featured in an article in a religious publication, added that if women wanted to eat these food items, they should address a third party - preferably a male related to them, such as their husband or father - to cut the vegetables into pieces before serving. 

(a) This could be me being a bit weird, but have you ever walked through the fruit and vegetable aisle at the supermarket, trying not to give in to sexual thoughts? It must be easy though, if fruits and vegetables make you feel horny. Think about all these supermarkets advertising their weekly deals in a glossy, colourful magazines. My life as a 16-year-old could have been a lot easier, with an abundance of free porn magazines getting shoved into the mailbox. 

(b) Why is it that only Muslim women were addressed. Straight Muslim women, to be more precise. To me, it seems pretty obvious that men should no longer be allowed to get too close to melons, grapefruits, tomatoes, oranges and apples. Unless they're gay, I guess. But if you think about it, virtually any piece of fruit or vegetable is either phallic (carrots, corncobs, zucchini, eggplants and French beans, just to name a few) or erhm... yonic. Which makes perfect sense of course, as fruits are essentially the structures of a plant containing its seeds. You'd better not be a bisexual Muslim, if you'd ask me...

(c) Why consider fruits and vegetables only? How about toothbrushes and vacuum cleaners, pens and pencils or brooms and soup mixers? I could be on a roll now, but to me these objects look pretty phallic as well. And I'm not sure there's much room for innovation, as I would not like to brush my teeth with a device that is not shaped like a stick...

Sounds like someone deserves being hit by a baseball bat. Or a medicine ball, depending on his sexual orientation of course...

Twitter and God

Judging from the fact that most of you came to this particular page through Facebook, I’m guessing  most of us are no stranger to the social media anymore. Or are you? Today I saw a picture being shared furiously on the aforementioned social network, which explained eight different social media in a funny way. What was less funny to me was the fact that I had never heard of five of them: foursquare, Instagram, Pinterest, Last.fm and G+ are total strangers to me. (Okay, I know G+ stands for Google+ but I have no idea how it works).

So that’s five out of eight, but which three are missing? Obviously the most popular ones, since even I know them. There’s Facebook, duh. YouTube, that’s another one. And finally there’s Twitter – which only last week was in the news.

The occasion was that recently the first major study was concluded as to the relevance of Twitter. As you probably know, this rapidly growing microblogging service enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Some use it for personal reasons, as a kind of online version of cell-phone text messages (sms), while others follow or write tweets in a more professional context, like the political media or cultural scene. The conclusion of the study was that a good tweet is relatively rare. It seems only 36% percent of them are experienced by the users as ‘interesting’.

Of course this is a difficult criterion. Suppose I asked you to rate your current email inbox. What percentage would you rate as ‘interesting’? Moreover, if a certain account you follow on Twitter is not interesting anymore, you can easily unfollow it. Indeed, whereas with Facebook you need permission to follow someone’s account, with Twitter you can instantly follow anyone you want. Personally, for instance, I follow @BarackObama, @ParisHilton and even @jesus. The sky is the limit, pardon the pun.

Which brings me to the following. To give you a small sample of how Twitter works, I thought I’d give you a selection of Ricky Gervais’ tweets. Besides an outrageously funny comic, he’s an animal rights activist, a humanitarian and a convinced atheist. Above all, Ricky Gervais is not afraid to speak his mind about what he believes in.

About God and religion, for instance. A while ago Gervais got caught up in a discussion about religious matters. I don’t know exactly when it started, but it seemed to speed up after this tweet:

@rickygervais And this photo is NOT me a dressed as Jesus. It's from The Invention Of Lying. And even if it was, so fucking what? http://pic.twitter.com/DhOD7lF1

20 Jan

What followed was a veritable bombardment of Gervais on Twitter by people who tried to convince him to believe in this or that God or religion. Here’s some of the funnier ones (in quotes “ ”), most of the  time with Gervais’ answers immediately following:

@rickygervais “@HerNameIsDawn: @rickygervais What do you think happens to the mind after you die?” The same as what happens to your voice

24 Jan

@rickygervais “@ckleass: do you have any friends who r Christian?” Yes. & Jewish & Muslim. I've also friends who love GLEE. We don't have to always agree

25 Jan

@rickygervais Ask yourself why you don't believe in all the other gods. Your answer, is why I don't believe in yours. This endeth the religious tweets.

25 Jan

@rickygervais “@jskrew: I believe in Santa Claus and the Easter bunny- what religion is that?" As valid as any other.

29 Jan

@rickygervais “@LeoDukes: Here's a thought! I'm a fan who enjoys your works, but Im sick of you going on about religion. Should I stop following?” Yes

1 Feb

@rickygervais “@ChallonGoodeRVC: @lewisdent @billybasset1 there's heaps of proof of Gods existence!” Go on...?

3 Feb

@rickygervais “@Graeme289: oh man give it a rest about god .....” Sorry for tweeting you all the time Graeme I...oh hold on, YOU'RE following ME. #gorp

3 Feb

Now who said comedy and philosophy couldn’t go together?

Ricky, if we had one, we would award you the 2012 Fred and Fred prize!

One gozer, more geezers...

Yesterday, I went to the latest show of whom I consider to be Belgium's finest stand-up comedian: Bart Cannaerts ('Waar is Barry'). With his mix of clever puns, funny observations describing the connection between our language and everyday life, neurotic stories and a sheer amount of visual humour, he had me going through the complete spectrum: from chuckling over smiling to laughing out loud. One of the nice things about his show was the fact that it actually carried a message. Without giving too much away, as I do recommend you to check him out yourself, I can share a particularly interesting reflection of his, concerning photographs. "Photographs", he said, "are usually taken under the pretext of giving you the opportunity to live the moment again, at home. This is bullshit, as you didn't actually live the moment, since you were too busy taking the picture in the first place."

This reminded me of a particular experience I had this weekend, not to mention all the previous times (notably whilst traveling). I had one of these moments that will sound quite familiar to keen photographers, in which the only thing you can think is "Damned, where's my camera when I need it?". On my way home, cycling along a riverbank in Ghent, I noticed a flock of birds (geese, I suppose) flying in what can safely be described as a fractal formation. You are probably familiar with the typical V-shaped form, but this was different, almost like a binary tree - if that makes sense to you. Halfway one of the legs of the bigger V, another leg branched off, generating a smaller version of the original shape. This repeated itself at several places, including the smaller branches, generating something which essentially resembled a river delta. Quite fitting, I thought, as they are probably on their way to a river delta, somewhere near the equator. 

This particular view of the sky was mesmerizing: the mathematical pattern, the actual colour of the sky, the birds following each other; it made me realize that I was missing a perfect shot. And yet, in retrospect, I feel quite happy that I did not have the opportunity to capture it on film, as this might have ruined my recollection. The mental image is firmly etched into my mind now, making it way stronger than the 4.6Mb image I could have extracted with my camera. As cheesy as it sounds, I really enjoyed riding my bike whilst looking upwards, seeing these magnificent creatures head towards their friends in the South. They were probably completely in panic "What the duck is going on here? Weren't we supposed to leave like... I don't know, a month or two ago?". I envisioned families of geese, switching heads from thermometer to calender, staring at the not so freezing temperatures in utter disbelief, fearing that the annual barbeque party in the backyard of their African friends would no longer be an option. 

But look, it's one week later and the situation drastically changed. Hundreds of people frozen to death as temperatures keep plunging (reasons to stop complaining about trivial shit: plus one), political turmoil over the fact that homeless people have to spend the night outside, and there is more to come. I am safely inside now: nicely warm on the outside - thank your local deity for sweaters and heaters, nicely warm on the inside. Because I saw them geezers on their way to normality, minding their own aviary business. I wished them good luck, I do hope they'll drop me a postcard... 

LinkedIn: TED (The Surprising Science of Happiness)

For various reasons I have been studying cognitive literary theory over the last few months. And although I find it fascinating, I'm not going to bore you with it. However, it did remind me to get you Fredians acquainted with one of my favourite websites: www.ted.com.

TED, which stands for Technology Entertainment Design and which uses the subtitle Ideas Worth Spreading, is a nonprofit devoted to just that: its website is full of passionate talks by the world's most inspired thinkers. And although the three domains seems somewhat limited, there's really no end to the variety of subjects and speakers. From performance artists over business men to mathematics professors.

But I'm dragging on and I wanted (have to!) keep it short today. So here's the reason I was reminded of cognitive literary theory. One of the talks featured is called The Surprising Science of Happiness and is delivered by cognitive researcher Nancy Etcoff.

It's fascinating stuff. Not only does it show how profound the impact of cognitive research is, but also (and much more importantly) it is the most intelligent thing I've ever heard anyone say about the most difficult topic out there: happiness.

So if you can spare 14 minutes and 22 seconds, you won't regret it...

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nancy_etcoff_on_happiness_and_why_we_want_it.html