Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Cool RSS feed of the day: MarsNews - the XML version didn’t work for me, but the RDF was fine

I stumbled over The Nemesis Affair while looking for The Case for Mars in the library. The former tells the tale of the 26-million-year cyclic theory of extinctions proposed by David Raup and Jack Sepkoski in the early 80’s. The statistics themselves have never been convincingly disproven; the dinosaurs had an appointment with death and ours is coming up in 15 million years.

Even without Nemesis, the theory was already controversial. It seems that paleo paleontologists preferred a steady-state theory of extinction - the dinosaurs were on their way out anyway. It’s hard for outsiders like us to believe that in a field (paleontology) in which the eons have always been separated by massive extinctions that there would be so much disbelief in mass extinction per se. Setting it to a bouncy 26 m.y. beat did not go over well in the scientific community. Likewise, no one believed in Deep Impact-style meteor impacts twenty years ago; today we take the sky falling for granted.

Despite being largely about that sort of scientific infighting and malingering, The Nemesis Affair was a good, quick read. Given the pretty pictures of extinction cycles (you can see one partway down this science beat page), the question immediately arises, who’s tossing meteors at us?

Three answers were suggested: Nemesis, Planet X, and the galactic plane. The mechanism was more or less the same in each case - every 26 to 30 million years, the menace passes through the Oort Cloud and disturbs the comets, many of which come screeching in towards the sun. On their new orbits, a comet or two may slam into the Earth (or any other innocent bystander planet), punching holes on the order of the 200-km wide Chicxulub crater, blocking out the sun with aerosolized bits of the Yucatan, and killing off the dinosaurs. The stray meteors don’t have to do us on their first pass - the cycle is measured in millions of years. Two out of the last twelve cataclysmic cycles resulted in no appreciable extinctions - ergo, the strays may even miss us all together.

So about the culprits… Our sun passes up and down through the plane of the galaxy like a yo-yo every 30 million years or so (65 million years round-trip), presumably encountering more dust and stuff while in the denser plane than when above or below it. It’s not clear how the dust does its damage or where those space dust bunnies are located. Planet X is the long-lost tenth planet that was supposed to balance the wobbles in the orbits of the outer planets. It’s no longer so clear that those orbits wobble at all. Nemesis is a postulated dim companion star that travels halfway to Alpha Centauri when it’s not busy wiping out Terran life. The failure of the IRAS survey to find a suitable star nearby has put a dent in the Nemesis theory, but at least one scientist still believes.

The Death Star may still be out there…and if it’s not, then who’s tossing those meteors at us?

Cool Apple link of the day: predictions about the iPod from two years ago

There was a cool article in the December Analog about years without summer. The author didn’t mention 1816, but did go into some detail about 540 C.E. Other really bad weather years included 44 B.C., 207 B.C., 1159 B.C., 1628 B.C., 2354 B.C. (the Flood?), and 3195 B.C. The data came from tree rings.

Word count: 1250

I was happily writing a new, more upbeat beginning to my NaNoNovel when I realized I needed to know how many people lived on my planet. Of course, I consulted Google, where I found a nice overview of human population growth. Slightly wackier and more interesting was the exponentialist homepage, which features the 6 Billion™ population game, extensive discussion of population growth models, an explanation of The Rule of 70, and some nice tables of actual population numbers for particular growth rates on this page.

The scariest link I found was to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Whatever you do, do not let these people near your top-secret frozen smallpox stores.

[P.S.] Jerie helped me with some amphitheater research. Did you know that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is tied for biggest stadium in the world (by capacity)? I didn’t. It was built in 1909 and holds a quarter of a million people.

Word count: 1000

I’ve put together part of a gallery of Life images. The tiles section is the most useful part.

Word count: 202

I’m still staring at the Persian Rugs in LifeLab. I tried to find more information about them online, but I came up with nothing but the LifeLab Gallery itself and a passing reference in a newsgroup. The rules to make rugs are B234/S, which means that new squares are born (B) to squares with 2, 3 or 4 neighbors, and that old squares never survive (S). The effect is an inversion of the pattern every round, plus constant progress outward at the edges.

Since the gallery images are very early on, they don’t show the true beauty of the pattern. You can see a nicer one on the Apple download page, but I think I’ll put up a few screenshots of my experiments as well. I’ve been playing around making rectangular and odd-shaped rugs. Here’s the standard rug at 1000 generations:

[click image for a larger version or here for a popup]

I was also thinking that one of the early generations might make a nice Arraiolos rug design. It would be mostly travelling stitches, not to mention too geeky for words, but I’m tempted…

Veronica lent me The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a sort of non-fiction version of Connie Willis’ Bellwether. Both explain the origin of fads and sheep-like group behavior. Gladwell mentions the Wason selection task, though not by name. He goes on at length about crime and graffiti in NYC, and, less interestingly, about the appeal of children’s programs. The section on the lack of corporate structure at Gore (makers of Gore-Tex) was much too short - I still have no clue how they make decisions.

I’ve found myself skimming at points, perhaps because I find marketing dull but more likely because the argument goes around in circles. I don’t have much hope that the conclusion will draw it all together. Connie Willis is much better at gathering the loose threads.

Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and
meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by K. Conrad in 1958 (Brugger). […] According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” –The Skeptic’s Dictionary

Fiction is the art of apophenia, especially fanfiction when it makes meaningful connections the original producers neither saw nor dreamt of. The habit isn’t restricted to slash, either - non-canonical or semi-canonical pairings of all sorts arise from the fan’s spontaneous perception. Putting together a plot means making connections that don’t tend to hold in reality - from little actions that fit the theme to it all coming together on the last page.

Some people don’t restrict their apophenia to fiction - Immanuel Velikovsky made bad science out of what would have been a marvelous sci-fi premise in Worlds in Collision. Related phenomena listed in the Dictionary include Jung’s notion of synchronicity or “meaningful coincidences,” which seem to result from ESP or a sort of low-grade miracle, and pareidolia, the bad habit of seeing faces in potato chips and the Cydonia region of Mars.

I found the Skeptic’s Dictionary while looking up something else entirely, but the pseudoscience was interesting enough to keep me reading through many entries. I found that when the Skeptic was arguing against independent, falsifiable scientific data (as in I.Q. and Race or the Bible Code), he beat around the bush without ever disproving anything. Even in cases where his arguments sounded good (multiple personality disorder and the related hypnotism), a little more data would have been nice.

He chalks up the MBTI to the Forer effect (also known as the Barnum effect), the same force that makes your astrological sign seem to predict your personality. That’s from the typee’s end, though - the assessor might still be making a psychometric survey yielding a statistical correlation with people’s skills or career choices. An article linked on the page claims otherwise - Measuring the MBTI and Coming Up Short by David J. Pittenger, in the Journal of Career Planning & Placement Fall 1993. Pittenger cites evidence that S/N and J/P are correlated with one another, though he doesn’t say how.

Although the Skeptic attributes the power of the Forer effect to wishful thinking, it sounds like more apophenia to me. Conspiracy theories would also be a kind of apophenia - the persistent belief that the world is more ordered than it, in fact, is.

Link to high orbit: The Space Elevator by the folks at HighLift Systems

Today was a good day for surfing the Big Blogs, with the help of my trusty assistant NetNewsWire. The Weird Facts were legion. For example, scientists have decided that Mars has a molten iron core just like Earth and Venus. An extrovert chimes in on the extrovert/introvert divide.

When the science links run out, I turn to mac news. People rarely say they like PC’s better than Macs, but they frequently claim PC’s are cheaper than Macs. Here’s why that isn’t so. My favorite quote: The average Wintel home user spends over 50 hours each year troubleshooting their computer. The average Mac user spends less than 5.

Fifty hours is enough time to do NaNoEdMo, for example. In fact, I find that the average Windows user spends more time complaining to me about their computer troubles per year than I spend troubleshooting my Mac, even though they know they’ll be mocked for it.

Last but not least, TOS and ENT voting are going on now in the ASC Awards, and AAA is also open for J/C business.

Lego link of the day: Lego Tarot

I’m going to have to backblog (place on the blog back burner) the fascinating topic of sexual politics until I’m feeling more meta. Today, I’d like to start, at least, on the final chapter of MBTI Theatre: J/P. I was inspired to return to this long-backblogged topic by an article on introversion currently making the blog rounds.

People have trouble understanding the J/P distinction, partly because it doesn’t give rise to the personality stereotypes that extreme E, I, T or F behavior does, and partly because of the dual definition. It is a mystical truth of MBTI that the J/P preference in behavior corresponds to the J/P preference in preferences, but it’s a tough idea to wrap your mind around.

In behavior, the J/P preference distinguishes between the judging types, who like to come to conclusions and make decisions (or at least to have the finality of the decision having been made). The perceiving types prefer to leave matters open-ended, to take in all new information rather than closing off some future possibility with a hasty decision now. Judging types tend to take control of a situation and give it direction. Perceivers tend to go along for the ride. J’s like to finish things; P’s like to start things. J’s are regimented, P’s are curious.

In preference, J’s prefer their judging preference over their perceiving preference, which is to say, either thinking or feeling (T/F), whichever is in their official personality type, over sensing or intuiting (S/N). For example, an ESFJ, given a choice of approaching a matter with his sensing abilities or his feeling, will lean towards the feeling approach. An ESFP, on the other hand, will go with the sensing. The J will decide how he feels about it, while the P will investigate what concrete data she can sense in the matter.

If you’re not boggled yet, there is an added complication. The J/P distinction establishes a preference for dealing with the external world, not the internal one. For extroverts, whose domain is the external world, the J/P preference therefore determines which out of S, N, T, or F is the dominant process - the leading part of their personality. The ESFJ has F for his dominant process; the ESFP has S.

For introverts, however, the external world is of secondary concern, so the J/P preference determines which process, S/N or T/F, is delegated to the scut work of dealing with the outside. Their dominant preference is instead the one that is left free to govern their internal affairs. Thus, an INTP such as yours truly has T for her dominant process, while an INTJ prefers N.

So that’s the explanation. It’s singularly unconvincing next to the more obvious distinctions of E/I, S/N and T/F. J/P is tied into the E/I preference, further muddying the waters. While it’s easy to say what an E as opposed to an I would do at a party, it’s not so clear what an IN (introvert with N as the dominant process), for example, would do differently from an IT.

I think personalities tend to be more balanced (that is, in the middle) between J and P than between any of the other opposites, and that makes it hard for the average person to get much out of their J/P label. I’m still searching for my inner P - or is that my inner J?

Birthday of the day: Happy Birthday to Seema!

This week on MBTI Theater: the T/F Preference. T/F stands for Thinking/Feeling, the Judgment preference. The previous preferences, E/I and S/N, are pretty black-and-white, at least once they’re explained. T/F, on the other hand, covers more territory than just thinking or feeling. Thinking and feeling bear no direct relation to judgment, as far as I can tell, so using the descriptions of T and F types I’ve come up with an empirical categorization of the T/F preference.

First of all, the T/F distinction is used to distinguish people who are interested in things (the impersonal) from those who prefer human relationships (the personal). In speech, we find a distinction between direct honesty and a more social tact. You might have thought those were E/I things, but they’re here in T/F.

In the matter of opinion, the T is the classic freethinker, generating both criticism of the status quo and solutions to social problems. The F, on the other hand, tends give more consideration to the opinions of others than to her own, leading to social conformity. When it comes to expressing opinions, the T goes about it logically, following the argument from premises to conclusion. The F tends to argue by accretion, circling around the topic and heaping more information onto it at random.

So the T/F distinction is as much about sociability as logic. The biggest effect on fandom, I would say, is the personality divide between people who are concerned about the story as a thing to be judged by impersonal literary values, and those more concerned about the audience than the internal logic of a story. The baton of badfic has been passed from the S’s to the F’s. Tune in next time to see whether the J’s or the P’s can recover it from the F’s.