Nautilus

I'm in love with this new magazine, Nautilus. It is named after "a remarkable intersection of science, math, myth, and culture", a mollusk with a fractal logarithmic spiral in its shell. First of all, I love logarithms! In a weird cosmic synchronicity, the random (from a list of names?) band name given to me in Rock Band was "Just a Matter of Logarithms" and you'd better believe I kept it. Second of all, I love science, math, myth, AND culture! I love all of those things! So I was pretty excited to find out about this magazine.

The first article I read, I chose because of the title, "Metaphors Are Us". (I love metaphors!) I was fascinated to find out how metaphors, empathy, morality, and neurology all come together in a beautiful and complicated mess of humanity. Our ability to feel empathy, to connect to someone else's pain and feel it ourselves, relates to very specific functions of the brain:

While in a brain scanner, you’re administered a mild shock, delivered through electrodes on your fingers. All the usual brain regions activate, including the anterior cingulate. Now you watch your beloved get shocked in the same way. The brain regions that ask, “Is it my finger or toe that hurts?” remain silent. It’s not their problem. But your anterior cingulate activates, and as far as it’s concerned, “feeling someone’s pain” isn’t just a figure of speech. You seem to feel the pain too.

Humans also appear to abstract disgust as well as pain. The insula, which processes gustatory disgust in all mammals (to make us spit out poison, for example), also activates when we think about some shameful thing we did. This "moral disgust" also relates to humans as social creatures:

Many cultures inculcate their members into acquiring symbols that repel, doing so by strengthening specific neural pathways from the cortex to the insula, pathways that you’d never find in another species. Depending on who you are, those pathways could be activated by the sight of a swastika or of two men kissing. Or perhaps by the thoughts of an abortion, or of a 10-year-old Yemeni girl forced to marry an old man. Our stomachs lurch, and we feel the visceral certainty of what is wrong. And we belong.

That beautiful paragraph makes me want to read more by the article's author, Robert Sapolsky.

I haven't finished Issue 1 yet because I was distracted by Issue 0, which I got around to reading today. I probably won't write about all of the issues, but here are more reasons I love Nautilus:

In one article, I learn that music is fractal, and so is a coastline!A fractal pattern looks the same on large scales as it does on small ones; put another way, the parts of a fractal system look similar to the entire system. I'm not entirely sure how music is fractal, but it's still cool!

In another article, I get some fascinating insight into psychological epistemology:

According to Rolf Reber, a psychologist at the University of Bergen, in Norway, “there is growing empirical evidence that people use a common source for evaluations of both beauty and truth.” The source he refers to is processing fluency, the state of being able to easily parse and understand a situation. Essentially, the more easily we can get a handle on a situation (because it’s mathematically simple, we’ve seen it many times before, it’s symmetrical, etc.), the more likely it is to seem right.

This explains so much about people and why they believe what they do! (I have just now decided to call this psychological epistemology. It probably already has a more appropriate and boring name like the "psychology of belief" but... boring.)

So anyway, this is very fascinating for psychological epistemology: the easier something is for us to understand, the more likely we will accept it as true. Simple and elegant solutions just seem right. Things that don't make "horse sense" are met with skepticism. And when we hear something over and over again it becomes much easier to believe, even when it has no relation to reality. (I'm glaring meaningfully in your direction, Fox "News"....)

A third article had me at its title, "Where Science and Story Meet", because I've been wanting to read "The Storytelling Animal" but it's not at my local bookstore. The article was not quite what I expected, but that's good; if I only ever learned what I expected to learn, then I probably wouldn't actually learn very much. Anyway, the unexpected thing I learned was that

The pleasurable feeling that our explanation is the right one—ranging from a modest sense of familiarity to the powerful and sublime “a-ha!”—is meted out by the same reward system in the brain integral to drug, alcohol, and gambling addictions. 

Not only are humans good at pattern recognition, but figuring out the pattern produces happy chemicals in the brain! Solving that equation, putting that jigsaw piece in the right place, or hearing someone else tell you something you already know is true - putting things together into a coherent story - makes us feel good, while not solving that equation or puzzle, or having a friend present you with facts that contradict your beautiful story, makes us hate math and angry at our friends. This pretty much explains why I like to do jigsaw puzzles when I'm stressed, and adds to theories I have about the psychology of gaming. (Or maybe theories other people have that I've read...)

There's more Nautilus to read, and learn and think about, but this story is over for now!

Quiet

I got the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for Christmas, and honestly I wasn't expecting that much. I had seen her TED talk and thought it was great, but I couldn't imagine how she would fill a whole book. Introverts are awesome, and everyone needs to calm down and stop talking so much - got it. What else is there to say?

As you may have guessed from the fact that I am blogging about it at all, it turns out it had some pretty interesting and unexpected things to say! I highly recommend the book to anyone who is an introvert, or an extrovert who knows introverts, or a parent of a quiet child, or a human being.

One of the more interesting things I learned was about the neuroscience behind temperament, and relatedly, why oral exams are a horrible way to judge knowledge and intelligence. If I could have told my examiners, "Look, I am a 'high-reactive' type of person, which means my amygdala goes into high gear in stimulating situations like being around people and trying new things, so in these situations my neocortex is spending considerable effort to soothe my amygdala, thus interfering with my ability to speak on the fly and 'think on my feet', so kindly bugger off, and anyway what does thinking on your feet have to do with being a good scientist, aren't good results obtained with careful diligence and error-catching?!".... then perhaps I could have saved myself a few years of stress and anxiety. But somehow I don't think it would have gone over too well. Luckily, giving scientific talks has none of the stress-inducing JUDGMENT of exams, and I usually eat some dark chocolate right before speaking. (To stimulate the release of dopamine, of course.)

I interpreted this part of the book as an explanation for why mantras work. Specifically, this quote:

In fact, a recent fMRI study shows that when people use self-talk to reassess upsetting situations, activity in their prefrontal cortex increases in an amount correlated with a decrease of activity in their amygdala. (p. 118)

Fear is a pretty basic emotion governed by the primitive part of the brain, but we can learn to get over it by activating our powerful front brain. However, the fear response of the amygdala never goes away completely, so when the cortex is otherwise occupied, such as in stressful situations, we may find that we do not have our shit together as much as we thought we did. Shit.

"Quiet" covers the basics of introversion/extroversion for people who spend too much time at parties to learn about this fundamental aspect of human personality. (JUST KIDDING extraverts, I love you! but seriously pick up a book sometime okay?) It dispels myths about introverts, such as they are always shy and depressed - though this awesome cartoon might be the best explanation of introversion. "Quiet" also talks about related aspects of temperament like sensitivity (though 30% of sensitive types are extraverts if I remember correctly), which describes people who are "keen observers" who "have difficulty when being observed or judged", "tend to be philosophical" and "dislike small talk", and who "feel exceptionally strong emotions" and "process information about their environments unusually deeply." (p. 136) Does that sound like someone you know?

There are a bunch of other insights that could be drawn from the book, from politics to the media to religion to business to education to relationships.... basically, anything that involves people, because people are either introverts or extraverts or both. So that pretty much covers everything.

But you don't have to take my word for it! Go read it yourself! If you want to. Or you can just take my word for it. It really doesn't matter either way. Do whatever you want! Just calm down.

Nostalgia

At some point in my young adult life, I vaguely remembered a story that was a favorite of mine as a kid and couldn't for the life of me remember what it was. I knew it contained a lion at the end, who perhaps lived in a castle. I suspected it was in a book at Grandma's house, but she had given those away long ago.

I desperately wanted to find this story again, but why? Sure, a lion living in a castle sounds pretty cool, but it wasn't the coolness of the story I cared about. There might not even be any castle! (I was pretty sure about the lion.) It was something about the almost but not quite remembering - the hope that finding this story would unlock a wave of nostalgia that I was robbed of, because I couldn't be nostalgic for something I couldn't even remember.

Many years later, after my nephew was born, I had an excuse to buy children's books. (One copy for myself, one for him!) I found an illustrated copy of the Winnie-the-Pooh books and HAD to buy the DVD of the old cartoons - I had to clarify my vague memories of them getting lost in the woods, and of Tigger getting stuck in the tree. When I would visit and everyone else was tired of watching Winnie-the-Pooh, I would make them put it on, because obviously the DVD was a gift to myself.

When these relics of childhood are found again, they become more than they are. They are valued for their association with happy memories and being a kid, not for themselves. Let's face it, being a kid is pretty awesome! There's something about the initial remembering - the theme song of old cartoons, an image from a story book - that just makes us happy, no matter how stupid the book or bad the cartoon. If we hadn't watched Legend all the time as kids I seriously doubt that I would love it so much now. But now, I can say with certainty that it is objectively one of the best movies of all time. (Scientific fact.)

Eventually, buying Christmas presents for my nephew led me to stumble across Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever containing, you guessed it, my long lost favorite story: "Is This the House of Mistress Mouse?" (Spoiler: the lion's castle house was not her house!) On top of that, there were so many other stories and images that I didn't even know that I forgot! I try to read them to my nephew even if he thinks they're boring. But I suppose he is creating his own set of things to forget, to one day half-remember. I hope there's lots.

When I was reminded of Winnie-the-Pooh today, I sort of thought about writing a blog post about the philosophy in the books, but I ended up writing something else (and it turns out someone else has written that already...) Instead I will end with one of many deep and profound Pooh quotes:

“I do remember, and then when I try to remember, I forget.”

The Universe at Large

In the early days of the universe - back when it was merely a few hundred thousand years old - there was hardly any structure. The universe had just gotten out of it's "plasma" phase, a frantic and excited phase of its youth in which it was so hot and dense that light could not move around without running into electrons. This means it looked pretty much the same everywhere, a property we call homogeneous and isotropic. (Yes, the technical definition of homogeneity is "looking pretty much the same everywhere".)

Luckily there were very tiny deviations - a bit more stuff here, a bit less there - that grew over time under the influence of gravity to form structures. These tiny fluctuations were precisely measured first by COBE and then WMAP, and today Planck has joined in with the most precise measurements yet.

The Planck microwave background sky

I say luckily because if the universe were completely smooth, it would not have been able to form galaxies or planets and we would not exist! This evolution from smooth to structured is driven by the gravitational clumping of "dark matter", which makes up most of the mass in the universe but cannot be seen by our telescopes. Instead, we infer its existence through the effect it has on the movements of stars and gas via gravity.

The problem with trying to understand the universe on large scales is that there is only one. We can't move to a different place billions of light years away to view it from a different location, and we can't create a new universe to study how it evolves. Instead, cosmologists in my field (also known as "large scale structure") rely on computer simulations that solve the complex nonlinear equations of gravity for different cosmological models. These models can then be tested by putting galaxies in the dark matter halos and comparing the simulations to observations.

The results of one such simulation can be seen in an interactive browser that lets you zoom in and out on a slice through a very large simulation box. The yellow parts are the high density regions and the dark matter "halos" that in our real universe host galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Also visible are the filaments that connect the clusters and the low-density voids in between, all together beautifully representing what we call the "cosmic web" of large scale structures.




This simulation is called Millennium XXL because it is very large - almost the size of the entire observable universe! I say "observable" because light takes time to travel to us, so the farther away galaxies are the longer it takes for their light to reach us. The amount of the universe that we can ever possibly hope to observe is limited by the distance that light can travel over the age of the universe, starting from the smooth, "plasma" phase mentioned earlier until it reaches us today. The Planck satellite has measured that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, or 13,800,000,000 years!

In the interactive browser, the numbers in the bottom right box give you the astrophysical scale of the image in units of Mpc/h, or co-moving Megaparsecs, which divides out the effect of the universe's expansion. This unit is useful to express the distance between galaxies, whereas the size of our Milky Way galaxy is about one thousand times smaller (kpc) and the distance to the nearest stars is about a million times smaller (pc). You can zoom in all you want, but galaxies would still be too small to be resolved.

Have fun zooming in and out, scanning around for interesting structures, and be sure to make it full screen! If you find something cool, you can right click to save a snapshot image (as I did above).

Chavs

After reading "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class" by Owen Jones, I felt like to do it justice would require a researched college-style essay instead of a blog post. Not gonna happen! So go read it! It was a great book, and at the same time I learned a little bit about UK politics and history.

But even though I won't write an essay, I've made some notes about the pages I marked while reading. Also, most of the social commentary applies in some way to the dialogue going on in America around class, but of course there are important differences... someone should write a book about that. (Or a college-style essay!)

Racism bad, Sexism bad, Classism funny!
"Chav" is a derogatory term in the UK for working-class people. The closest thing I can relate it to in US terms is "white trash" - though of course one of the things that struck me while reading this book is that there is no derogatory term for poor people in the US that isn't also about race. (So we have that going for us?) The chav stereotype is of an uneducated young street thug wearing "Burberry" or other bling; laziness, drunkenness, violence, teenage pregnancies, racism, etc. are all traits associated with chavs. Literally the term comes from the Romany word for child, 'chavi', though people often associate the term with acronyms like 'Council Housed And Violent'. Another US analogy is needed here: council housing can be considered a nicer, British version of the projects... plus without the guns.

Jones opens the book with an anecdote: he was at a dinner party with educated, middle-class, liberal friends, and yet someone cracked a joke about chavs and everyone laughed. Why has it become okay to make fun of poor people? Why are there TV shows in the UK devoted to this very thing? I think this all hinges on the popular notion that class is a choice, or a result of your choices, as opposed to things like your race or your gender, which you are born with. This is a ridiculous and upside-down idea in the face of all the data about upward mobility (i.e. the lack thereof). But if being poor is your own fault, then it's okay to make fun of you for it, and not feel guilty. Game on!

There are probably other psychological things going on though that explain why people would rather believe people are poor entirely because of their choices than that education, race, gender, parental income, the structure of society, etc. have a huge impact on your life. Part of the story is perhaps that believing that the disadvantaged deserve what they get makes it easier for the wealthy to think they are entirely responsible for their own wealth ("I BUILT IT!!!!"), rather than accepting that they were dealt a good hand and used it well.

What is the working class?
"Interestingly, more people in Britain call themselves working class now than did in 1950," despite Tony Blair's insistence that "we're all middle class now." Stock-brokers "ask with faux puzzlement: 'I work, don't I? So why aren't I working class?'" A childhood friend which Jones considered indisputably working class "felt that being working class meant being poor, while being middle class meant being educated." (p. 141)

I think the last quote is why I marked this page. Also, after reading the entire book, I'm still not entirely certain what is meant by working-class. Maybe it just sounds better than "lower-class" (after all, we have "middle" and "upper").

The lack of upward class mobility scapegoated by the lack of aspiration
A common criticism of the working-class (I might just start calling it "victim-blaming") is that they have no aspiration - that they could make their lives better but they just don't care enough to try. Jones interviews Liam, who came from a working-class background: "I literally didn't know what university was, aged sixteen. University, to be honest, was kind of where posh people go!... It's just not what we do, it's just not on the radar... You can only ever really aspire to something if you know it and understand it." (p. 174-175)

I thought the last bit was incredibly profound. How can we expect poor people to work really hard (and spend a lot of money that they don't have... at least that's how it works in America) to get a University education when they have no frame of reference for such an aspiration? Especially now when a college degree is often a ticket to live with your parents in your early 20s rather than a ticket to a good job? In poor communities in the US, the most that kids have to aspire to is to work at McDonald's and not get shot. These are the kinds of things they can point to as attainable goals. These are the jobs they are trained for with what our education system is providing them.

The "get a job" argument, i.e. "try harder," i.e. "it's your fault you're poor"
Perhaps this is just a variant of the above "victim-blaming" excuse, both of which stem from the assumption that people have complete and total control over their own lives no matter what... But as it turns out, in the UK "the majority of people living in poverty actually have a job." New Labour (close enough to Democrats) attempted to tackle this problem, but they did it by "allowing the market to run amok," according to Jones. A Labour MP (Congressperson) describes this as introducing tax credits and redistributing wealth by forcing people into the lowest paid jobs: "In that way, you become the guilty person if you can't afford to dig yourself out of poverty. There's a Victorian, patronizing attitude towards working people." All the while, the minimum wage has been allowed to become less and less meaningful. (p. 201-202)

If there were one word to describe the 'chav' stereotype, patronizing would be it.

Chavs are all racist idiots who blame immigrants for their problems
If Children of Men taught me anything, it's that the British hate immigrants. The British National Party (one of those minor Nth parties that other democracies have) represents those sentiments. Hackney (a town? a part of London? something like that...) got a lot of votes in the 70s for the National party, but more recently they got virtually none, which a former London mayor thinks is because "you tend to get a problem of racism in an area undergoing transition." Very insightful! Jones goes on: "Hackney is one of the most mixed areas in the country, and as a result the far right has died out there." (The U.S. analogy is major cities, which are the most diverse and the most Democratic.) "But it [far right/BNP] flourishes in areas... where mass immigration is a new phenomenon... or, conversely, where there is very little immigration but a tremendous fear of it." Additionally "liberal multiculturalism has understood inequality purely through the prism of race, disregarding that of class." This is also what we often do in the U.S. but with good reason; however, in the UK, the white majority is a real 90% majority (which I learned from this book). (p. 224-225)

If you are middle-class and don't exactly have swimming pools filled with gold, you are probably worried about sending your kids to college and saving for retirement. It may seem unfair that some people are getting help from the government. You might have some reasonable things to say about that. BUT, it may seem even more unfair if those people getting help don't look like you. (I'm saying this simply as a statement of human nature and not a moral judgment.) "Why do they get handouts just because they are minorities?" is unfortunately something that real people say. It doesn't help that "affirmative action" policies in the UK are called "positive discrimination" (!!), but I will have to leave that discussion to future work.

A new sense of aspiration
"The new aspiration must be about improving people's communities and bettering the conditions of the working class as a whole, rather than simply lifting able individuals up the ladder." (p. 258)

Word.

The Universe is Void

While waiting for my sister to once again find the time to create artful interpretations of awesome facts about the universe, I inadvertently made art at work!

Most of the universe is void, containing not much matter and very few galaxies.

This is a thin slice through a simulation that calculates the evolution of dark matter particles under gravity as the universe expands. The big, colorful points are void particles, with different colors representing different voids; these are plotted over little black points of wall, filament, and halo particles that represent the collapsed structures in the universe. The voids, instead of collapsing to form stuff (i.e. galaxies form in the dark matter halos), are regions of space that matter flows away from because they are less dense than their surroundings.

It turns out that voids occupy most of the volume of the universe, perhaps around 90%, while only containing perhaps 30% of the mass. These numbers depend on the physics of structure formation, including whether Einstein's general relativity theory is correct on large scales. But they also depend on how you define a void and so could change depending on whom you ask on what day of the week. Researchers in my field are slowly converging on the best ways of defining voids in both simulations of dark matter and observations of galaxies.

So if you are wondering what I do, now you know: I study the large-scale structure of the universe, and I make art.

The Fact of the Matter

"The Fact of the Matter" by Sally Keith:

Industry sprang up.
Orange flowers surrounded the metallic poles.
The statue was a painted hawk with outstretched wings.
Sun beams spread out on wall-sized panes.
Two knights in armor were shown on the door.
People believed in me when I opened my coat.
An origami cat.
The poem a great gray wall.
The wall the softest kind of sheet.
Cosmos clustered in the median strip.
Soft pink slowed the city's strong wind.
The cosmos' stems shone electric green.
Elsewhere out flew a couple of cranes.
A beautiful boy into the velvet curtains pressed.
The stage barest black.
The hills behind it backlit, gold-rimmed.
A woman steps out and opens her hand.
Why do you weep? I ask.
She only unfurls her fingers to offer some seed.
She only bends her knees.
The world is the same. The world is the same.
The long green reeds will remain.
The wind inside is softly carving its name.

No commentary, I just enjoyed this poem - another from the PBS Newshour blog. You can watch the author read it here.