In case the embed doesn’t work:
Feynman on Beauty

I might be wrong, if this finding, described at Animal Wise holds up.

As they progressed with their research, Panksepp and his colleagues found that many of their rats seemed irresistibly drawn to tickling, chasing after the ticklers and making substantially more play chirps while being tickled than during any other behavior. But the researchers weren’t content with anecdotal observations, and over the course of several years and a number of experiments, they systematically documented a dozen separate lines of evidence suggesting that the rats’ tickle chirping corresponded behaviorally to playful laughter in young human children.

The Rat Tickler

Animal Wise has plenty more great articles like this one. I recommend it for home-schooled (and regularly-schooled) kids.

I’ve been following John Walker’s Hacker’s Diet for about nine months now. I love the simplicity of it.

“Anyone can control their weight. It’s a simple matter of balancing calories.” – John Walker

Mr Walker’s book is a fun, simple read. If you are technically inclined and you want to lose weight, you should certainly read The Hacker’s Diet. The book introduces a model of the human body as a rubber bag full, mostly, with water. Every day stuff goes in and stuff comes out, but the rubber bag always obeys the laws of physics.

If you eat more calories than you burn, you gain weight at a rate of a 3500 kCal/lb. Simply count the calories you eat and subtract the calories you burn and the resulting number will tell you how quickly you will gain (or, hopefully, lose) weight.

But I think it’s even simpler than that.

If you weigh yourself every day, you can quickly figure out whether you are gaining weight. If your weight goes up, you are eating too much. Eat less.

Ok, ok. It’s not quite that simple. Your weight can vary by a couple of pounds each day as you retain water (or, as John Walker delicately puts it, solids); but if you plot the moving average you get a surprisingly stable trend line. From that trend, you can figure out your daily excess (or deficit) and decide to eat more (or less) accordingly.

People who work in software development use a planning technique based on yesterday’s weather. The idea is based on weather forecasting. Imagine a computer that monitored the humidity and the temperature and pressure and a thousand other variables and used it to predict the weather with an accuracy of 82%.

It turns out that, if you just predict that today’s weather will be the same as yesterday’s, you’ll be correct about 70% of the time. That’s close enough for most purposes and it saves you a really expensive computer.

In my case, the prediction that I’ll eat about the same number of calories today as I did yesterday saves me lots of tedious calorie counting. With a little practice, I got quite good at knowing whether I was eating too much or too little and adjusting my intake accordingly.

Here’s my trend since last October:

You can see from the chart that I lost weight pretty steadily for several months. My daily deficit held steady at about 250 cal/day for most of that time. 250 calories is about a bagel a day and represents the loss of a pound every two weeks. Since I don’t really like bagels anyway (or french fries, or bread, or candy) it was easy to stop eating them. I hit my target weight about a month ago and, since then, my weight has crept up a little (I don’t like bagels but I do enjoy beer).

The little red dots are a warning sign that I might be eating too much (notable red dots: The Captain’s Table Dinner in January and Piratefest in July) and the prominent red 74 says that I need to have half a pint less beer at Quiz Night.

Like any good hacker, I decided that I didn’t like any of the weight trackers out there so I wrote my own for my iphone (it was also an excuse to learn Objective C). I might decide to stick the app on the app store one day but, for now, it’s just a bit of fun that I am sharing with some friends. Ping me if you want to play along too.

Everyone knows by now, about the Diana monkeys who have different alarms calls for “leopard” and “eagle” and “snake”. If a monkey spots an eagle flying over, he’ll scream “eagle!!” and all the other monkeys will take cover. If a monkey sees a leopard, he’ll scream “leopard” and the other monkeys will run higher up the tree. Their words are not actully “leopard” and “eagle” of course. They are more like “eeeeeuuuugh! ooh oh ooh!” and “ooouuugh ooouuughoo”.

The segment on the Diana monkeys ends with the spine-tingling tale of how the researcher, while walking through the jungle, heard troop after troop of Diana monkeys screaming “eeeeeuuuugh ooh oh ooh! eeeeeuuuugh ooh oh ooh!” and he thought “silly monkeys! They think I am a leopard!”

I won’t spoil the ending. Go listen to it yourself so your spine can tingle too. Then listen to the one about america’s heroes or the one about animals showing empathy to humans and get hooked right along with me. Each show is a zany mix of interviews intercut with sounds effects and voice overs and they are mostly about some new aspect of science or psychology or philosophy that you previously did not know. Marvellous stuff.

That wasn’t my favourite bit of the show though. In another segment, a researcher analyzed prairie dog calls and discovered that they used different “words” when different men walked though their territory. The researcher was able to figure out that the prairie dogs had words for tall and short and blue and red. When someone walked by, they would say things like “here comes the tall man wearing blue!”.

The researcher rigged a pulley system so that he could drag coloured shapes across their territory and recorded the prairie dogs saying “big, blue triangle” or “small, red circle”. How cool is that? He learned the language of another species! Humanity has dreamed of this moment since Doctor Doolittle!

I felt a touch of the  Doolittle myself on Monday when The Quail Family stopped by for a visit.

We get quail in our garden nearly every day but on Monday, Ma and Pa Quail introduced us to their new chicks. All eight of them.

When we saw them through the window, they seemed to be on a mission. Ma and Pa did a superb job of keeping their little childers in line – better than Mr and Mrs Clown anyway – and hustling towards their destination, at least until they reached the corner by the fence.

Ma and Pa hopped up the twelve inches of our retaining wall and called “pipipipip” to encourage the littl’uns to hop up with them. But, either through obstinacy or the fact that there was no freaking way that those tiny bundles of fluff could jump that high, the baby quails stayed firmly where they were.

Ma and Pa got more and more impatient – “PIPIpipiPIP!” – and even tried to demonstrate the technique for jumping up onto a foot-high wall…you just hop… hop up… you hop…hop..you….dammit you little buggers! Get up here!

The fluff bundles looked up at their parents like they were eedjits [that sounds familiar - ed] “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! How are we supposed to jump all the way up there?? What are we? SuperQuail?”

That was the point where we – the non-quail residents of Quail Creek Circle – decided to intervene.

You may remember the unfortunate affair of Mr and Mr Robin – the last time we tried to interfere in the lives of our feathered friends – and suspect that our intervention was not fated to end well. We suspected the same thing.

My first idea was to build a little quail staircase out of leftover pavers – the kind you might build if you had a salmon trapped in your pond – but I was scared that I’d freak Ma and Pa Quail into abandoning their offspring. Besides, once they cleared the retaining wall they still had an even bigger hop ahead of them to clear the fence.

Mrs Clown suggested picking up the fluff bundles in my hand one by one but, having recently witnessed the Twilight Temptation of Edward, I wasn’t sure I could overcome my carnivorous instincts with such a tasty avian snack in my hand.

Eventually, I decided to open the gate and let them walk out of the garden. To get to the gate, I had to walk quite close to the little snacks chicks and this naturally caused their parents a good deal of consternation. This is where my Doolittle instincts kicked in.

I noticed that Ma and Pa had pretty solid control over the movements of their tiny wards. Like shepherds in an avian edition of One Man and his Dog, they had the little chicks running hither and thither at their every peep.

I figured out that

chip-chip-chip-chip-chip-chip

meant

Hurry along my little ones!

and

cheep-pip-pip-cheep-cheep

meant

Huddle together in a little fluffy bundle!

Another command told them to spread out and forage. Still another had them scurrying for cover behind a huge rock when the big, bad human – and potential quail-eater – walked by.

Eventually, I opened the gate and the grateful parents hurried out calling for the younglings to follow. We bid The Quail Family a fond farewell for the day but my curiosity was piqued and I went to consult the literature on quail calls.

Sure enough, I found a paper, VOCAL BEHAVIOR OF ADULT CALIFORNIA QUAIL by H.Warrington Williams [1969].

THIS paper describes the calls of adult California Quail (Lophortyx californicus) in terms of their form, causation,and function. A later paper will report on the derivation of adult calls from the repertoire of the chick.
Previous studies of this species concerned with life history, habitat, food habits, and social behavior, placed little emphasis on vocal communication (Emlen and Lorenz, 1942; Howard and Emlen, 1942; Genelly, 1955; Raitt, 1960). Sumner(1935) provides the most complete listing of calls and the contexts in which they are given.

I learned a ton about quails and their vocalizations.

The adult California Quail has at least 14 calls. I have divided these into four categories modified from Collias (1960):   social contact, alarm, reproductive including agonistic and sexual, and parental. The causation and function of several calls vary with season and social context and are described under separate categories. I initially named each call by ortho-graphic description to avoid implications of function.

H. Warrington has tables and tables of data showing duration and frequencies of the calls as well as frequency plots of all 14. O! If only I hadn’t run away to sea, I could’ve spent my life recording quail calls (or Diana monkeys!) instead of writing software!

The calls were all right there in the paper.

Adults confined in adjacent individual cages and not in visual contact gave the call during active periods or after a disturbance. Birds that had been separated from a group or mate called ut ut loudly immediately following separation. This grades to the cu ca notes and finally to the complete cu ca cow sequence (Figure 2C). The ut note and the cu note of the cu ca cow call are similar in configuration (Figures 1 and 2).
Adults give a similar call sounding more like a mo mo mo to their chicks. The ut ut grades to the food call with the discovery of new food or movement of the group to the food hopper.

He covered alarm calls too.

The alarm notes of the California Quail are associated with the presence of aerial and ground predators, freezing following alarm, running away, and severe distress.
The pit pit call (alarm note).–Next to the cu ca cow, the pit pit call, a series of metallic-sounding pits (Figure 3A), is the most frequent call of the California Quail. Both male and female birds give the call at all seasons of the year with little variation among individuals or sexes.

Fortunately, although I frittered away my life writing software, I still have two offspring on which to project my frustrated hopes and dreams. I hope you like quails, little clowns!

pit pit pit!

Photo Credits

Quail photos: Mrs R. Clown
Diana monkeys photos: cburnett c/o wikipedia
Prairie dog photos: Baldur c/o wikipedia

We gazed up at the heavens – something we do all too rarely – looking for planets. I confidently pointed out Mars and my daughter asked me what that other fuzzy clump was.

Trusty iPad to the rescue!

If you point an iPad (or iPhone) filled with Star Walk at a star, it tells you its name. Turns out that the fuzzy clump was M5 and that Mars was actually Arcturus. I had been lying about Mars for years!

It also draws in all the constellations as you wave your iPad across the sky. It’s like Orion has OnMouseOver.

Star Walk – it’s what iPad was invented for. That sound you hear is Matt, clicking on the Apple Store right now.

Splendid wrap up of the Darwin Anniversary last year in the London Review of Books (it’s not short).

The reviewer focuses on the question  Why Darwin? After all, there are plenty of people (ok…not plenty of people…a few people) who have made as big a contribution to science as Darwin – Einstein, Newton, Gallileo – why is Darwin such a big hero?

According to Dawkins, Darwin’s idea wasn’t just a great one (‘the most powerful, revolutionary idea ever put forward by an individual’), it is essentially the only idea you need to explain life and all its phenomena: ‘Charles Darwin really solved the problem of existence, the problem of the existence of all living things – humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria. Everything we know about life, Darwin essentially explained.’

After a roundabout tour that disses evolutionary psychology and the New Atheists, the reviewer settles on the idea that, even without Darwin, someone would’ve come up with Natural Selection [er...they did - ed] just as someone would’ve discovered oxygen without Priestley [er.... -ed] or  figured out calculus without *Newton [now you are just messing with me - ed]. But Darwin’s great contribution was not that he was one of the greatest scientists of all times. It was that he was a great writer.

You can still say, with perfect accuracy, that the Origin is much more than its ‘essential’ theory of natural selection: it is a book, a magnificent theatre of persuasion, ‘one long argument’ (as Darwin called it), supported by masses of arduously compiled evidence, ingeniously organised and vouched for by a special individual, with known special virtues and capacities.

It so happens that I am reading The Descent of Man at the Moment, so I have recent experience of Darwin’s writing. It really is magnificent. When you think that he was writing about cutting edge science – not a popularization – and that, in fact, he was the one doing the cutting… it just takes your breath away.

If you have tried reading The Origin and got stuck at the pigeon chapter like I did, give Descent a try. You won’t regret it.

* For all the received wisdom about the inevitability of discovery, it was surprisingly hard to come up with a third example to make my joke work.

(It probably needs flash 10 to work)

So far I have gravity and collisions for circular objects. Up next: drag.

Here’s the main loop:

[sourcecode language='js']
public function tick() :void {
for each(var body :Body in bodies) {
var force oint = calculateForceOn(body);
body.apply(force);
body.move(1);

checkForCollision(body);
}
}
[/sourcecode]

Inverse Square Law to calculate gravity:

[sourcecode language='js']
public function calculateForceOn(body :Body) oint {
var force oint= new Point(0, 0);

return force;
}
[/sourcecode]

Look for collisions and calculate the impulsive forces:

[sourcecode language='js']
public function checkForCollision(body :Body) :void {
for each(var other :Body in bodies) {
if(body != other && body.intersects(other)) {
var normal oint = body.findCollisionNormalTo(other);

body.applyImpulse(impulse, normal);
other.applyImpulse(-impulse, normal);
}
}
}
}
[/sourcecode]

And some heavenly bodies:

[sourcecode language='js']
var sun :Body = new Body("Sun", World.Origin);
sun.radius = 60;
sun.mass = 50000;
sun.color = 0x26393D;

world.add(sun);
world.add(earth);
world.add(moon);
world.add(mars);
[/sourcecode]

I am still not sure whether I like Flex. The libraries are fantastic but the language - ActionScript - is super-annoying. It makes me wish for C#. It's allegedly a dynamic language but the compiler makes you declare every type anyway in that wacky syntax that I can never quite remember. Simulating solar systems is fun though.

I couldn’t find my favourite exhibit – Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. There are so many great exhibits that I have never actually seen them all.

Wan moaning, Rat Rotten Hut’s murder colder inset, “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! An yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!”

Jazz fell in love with the drawing board and watched it for about 90 minutes. It’s basically a table hung from four ropes like a pendulum and a pen that draws patterns on a piece of paper as the table swings and twists.  There is a weight that makes it swing eccentrically to make the patterns more interesting.

I promised to make her a real one but I wanted to see if I could do it in Alan Kay’s excellent Squeak first. It was pretty easy and quite effective.

Here’s the program. I messed around with the constants to get different effects.

and here’s a picture I made with it:

Today: simulation. Tomorrow: the real thing.

Wish us luck!

UPDATE:

I just downloaded the latest version of Squeak (now called etoys). It’s MUCH better than it used to be. All the bugs are gone and it doesn’t look like it was made in 1983 any more. Go get it from http://www.squeakland.org/ then you can play with my project – Squeak: Drawing Table

Maybe you could add damping for me.

To judge from the extracts — and of course, if this is the kind of thing that interests you, you should read the whole book — D’Souza seems to lean heavily on arguments of the type:

• Science currently has no explanation for X. (In the extracts, X = moral behavior).
• Therefore we must go to religion for explanations.

The overall schema there is contrary to an empirical style of thinking, which would prefer:

• Science currently has no explanation for X.
• Therefore we must press on with our investigations in hope of finding an explanation.

The empirical style is, though, a minority taste.

Quoting from his own book

The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.

Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. Just as religious thinking emerges naturally and effortlessly from the everyday workings of the human brain, so scientific thinking has to struggle against the grain of our mental natures.

She had the data. Why didn’t she reach the solution? There are several answers to this; but one is that she had a fixed idea about how the problem should be solved. Namely, she wanted to work out the structure using the methods she had been taught. These methods are intricate, abstract, and mathematical, and difficult to use on a molecule as complex as DNA. Watson and Crick, meanwhile, were building physical models of what the diagram suggested the structure should be like — an approach that Franklin scorned. What’s more, their first model was ludicrously wrong, something that Franklin spotted immediately. But they were willing to play; she wasn’t. In other words, she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, adopt a more intuitive, speculative approach.

Francis and Crick had what Einstein had. Franklin didn’t.

But there’s one way in which we should not be limited: imagination. As Einstein put it, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”