Ada Lovelace Day 2010 – Join in! (by sarah)

Last year me and Alaric took part in Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate women in technology and the sciences. We did various blog posts on inspiring women.

This year the event is back! March 24th will once again see me blogging away, come and join us - why is this important - why should women have a specific day? Because unfortunately their contributions are not always acknowledged to the degrees they should be and young girls need to see that there are other females in these areas and that it isn't just the realm of men.

It's about showing them people like themselves - I suppose positive role models 🙂

100 Stories For Haiti (by sarah)

I found about four hours before the deadline that there was a 100 stories for Haiti book project asking for submissions to help raise money for the earthquake victims.

So I hurriedly altered one of my stories and sent it too them last night - I was first stuck with a feeling that I wouldn't have anything to give them as they didn't want anything with Death, violence etc... it was the death one that stumped me - all the stories I have with the nice happy endings are ghost stories which were obviously out.

Anyway I found something and sent it off!

I had actually already mentioned something like this project as a possible money raiser after an argument about writing stories about the crisis itself.

Now I would encourage writing about suck heavy subjects as I feel they all to often get swept aside but I also feel you have to be careful and think before you fictionalise such a thing. Why? Becuase it would be easy to trivualise it.

How can you fictionalise a crisis why it is still going on? Unless you have actually been being there helping and are fictionalising your own experience - you need to research it or you will just get it all wrong. And I feel uneasy about writing about it whilst it is still a crisis - Apparently people felt helpless and wanted to show they cared - my reaction to this was simply - make an ebook of other stories and sell it to raise money then.

I'm not sure why I had such a strong reaction to this but Alaric thinks the same way too - he thinks you can't really fictionalise something like this until a yr or so afterwards.

Anyway they have now extended the deadline so if you have a story under 1000 words you might want to donate it 🙂

Intelligence, Knowledge, Wisdom (by alaric)

I see a lot of confusion between intelligence and knowledge. There's this cultural perception that a well-educated person is intelligent - and wise to boot. However, I've met plenty of people who are incredibly intelligent, yet know very little; or people who have memorised lots of information, but don't really understand it because they're not very intelligent.

So there's definitely a distinction between intelligence and knowledge, and I think there's also a third intellectual strength: wisdom. Note that I'm only analysing core intellectual strengths, too - skills like empathy are also important, but beyond the scope of this article; and thinks like mathematics are a matter of training the mind to do certain things quickly that can only be done if you're intelligent enough to master it in the first place, and have the knowledge - many skills, such as mathematics, being able to paint or to accurately outguess defenders and get a football into a goal, are also mental skills, but ones that are learnt by building upon the basic attributes of knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.

(Players of role playing games will now recognise what got me thinking about all this in the first place)

Knowledge is stuff you can memorise directly from some external source. It might just be facts - the name of the first president of the United States, the melting point of lithium, who won the last World Cup.

Intelligence is a bit harder to define. It's about being able to perceive patterns, I think. An IQ test only really tests certain aspects of intelligence, but I think it's mainly pattern recognition and being able to hold complex structures in your short-term memory that you can then recognise the patterns in.

This can be likened to being able to gain a high-altitude view of things in your mind. The gifted artist looks at people's perceptions of the world, and sees them as all parts of a bigger picture; by spotting the bits of the picture that few people are seeing, and then managing to portray that to people (which is a skill), they manage to surprise and excite us, and to broaden our horizons by drawing our attention to things we had overlooked. The gifted mathematician looks at the properties of the Lambda calculus and of Hilbert systems and notices a shared pattern, and thus comes up with the Curry–Howard correspondence, and thereby realises profound facts about the processes of computation and reasoning that are driving the development of programming languages into the future.

And, yet, I have met people with great knowledge, and great intelligence who, nonetheless, are definitely fools.

There is a certain stereotype of the short-sighted baffled boffin; the kind who invents the nuclear weapon, then after it is used in anger, splutters "But... but... I thought it would be an end to warfare! I didn't think anybody would be so stupid as to use it!". The kind who sits there cranking out great work in their narrow field, yet without even being able to comprehend a reason why, yet alone wanting to.

And, also, I've met plenty of people who aren't intelligent, know very little, yet somehow manage to find their way peacefully and happily through life, bringing something undeniably good to everything they are involved with. They clearly have some positive core attribute, but what is it?

This is why I introduce the concept of wisdom. My hypothesis is that wise people have a grasp of certain fundamental patterns that underlie everything. Not the specific patterns that intelligence focuses on; more things like 'when two powerful forces are in opposition, things can slip and suddenly come out sideways'. This basic principle applies to physical forces, as well as to things like ideologies in opposition. They're patterns, and it's easy to mistake them for the rules that intelligence seeks to understand within complex systems; but there's some important differences. The patterns wisdom finds are broad. To find them, you need to look at a lot of things, rather than to look deeply at one. You can look at these things shallowly, and indeed, doing so can help you to spot the patterns without access to intelligence, by letting you "see the wood for the trees" rather than being tangled in details.

Also, they are weak correlations. They point to vague tendencies of systems, rather than to definite rules. They do not apply in all cases, even. They are more gut feelings, or intuitive hunches.

A truly great scientist combines all three attributes. They have knowledge of their field, the intelligence to understand it well enough to spot the rules, and wisdom that provides them with hunches; certain properties of a physical system may, based on past experience of such properties, lead the scientist to wonder if those properties will be conserved under rotation? Then they can use their knowledge and intelligence to do the maths and work it out, which may lead them to an interesting conclusion.

Similarly, the great artist has knowledge of the world, intelligence to spot interesting concepts - and wisdom that lets them guess how the viewers will react to their work. Nobody can know how the world will respond to something new, as we cannot know what's going on in other people's heads. No matter how intelligent you are, you'll never be able to reason the behaviour of millions of people. The best we can do is to draw on wisdom, to form hunches.

There is a stereotype of wisdom, but it's often confused with intelligence or knowledge. Sherlock Holmes is, perhaps, the stereotypical intellectual genius; his knowledge and intelligence are focussed on, but there's clearly wisdom as well. The purest expression of wisdom we find in popular media is the "wise old sage" stereotype. They're typically portrayed as old-fashioned and technophobic; they rarely exhibit vast stores of knowledge, or even great intelligence. They're usually an old-looking wispy-haired white male in a robe, spouting seemingly meaningless phrases that nonetheless turn out to be strangely insightful and useful.

This is a bit of a caricature, but with some vague connection to the reality, I think. A purely wise person would need to have been somewhat isolated from modern life in order to avoid ending up gaining knowledge, and the absence of knowledge would give them precious little complex mental structures to practise intelligence upon. But a long life would give an active mind time to figure out the deeper patterns, and build up wisdom. However, unless that wisdom didn't involve people much, I think a truly wise person would tend to have better communication skills than the traditional portrayal!

Drugs, Science and Freedom of Speech (by sarah)

I have the feeling this is going to be a long and involved rant were I may well side track myself, so hold onto your hats and here we go!

Last week Alaric told me of a Daily Mail article that had made him angry and sad and all the rest of it because of the plain stupid reporting of it. The representation of scientists alone is cringe worthy let alone the sensationalism of it. The misunderstanding that is going on between science and the public at the moment is a subject dear to my heart and the source of many of my rants as many of you know.

Now obviously I have already hit upon two subjects there worthy of their own essays or posts or what ever it is I tend to write.

But basically the main concern I have is for the independence of scienctists to actually have freedom to share their research results and opinions.

When I woke up this morning the radio was playing and the news started and what I heard frankly scared me. If scientists in an independent advisory body can not give impartial advise to the government and let their views be known to the general public and all of the public by mass media, this means then they are not independent and their results can not be trusted; they just become a tool of the governing body and the People lose a degree of freedom.

And yes I know that I'm sounding like a fanatic communist with the insertion of People there but think about this - we all of us are the people and if we are not careful we will end up in an apathetic totalitarian state, which is where we appear to be heading.

I may well be over-reacting but apathy is the biggest danger to a nation's freedom. Think on and look up how the Nazi's got into power in Germany. Think upon these things and see why I feel that in order to keep our nation somewhere that I am allowed to utter my thoughts out loud without fear of persecution I have to state my beliefs publically and fight in the only way I have (other than voting) for our rights as a nation as a people.

Ok, so what actually is my issue?

Professor David Nutt was sacked as chairman for the Drugs Advisory Council - why?

Because it would appear that he said things and wrote a paper that the government didn't agree with. But he was part of an advisory body which is supposed to be independent of the government. Why does it matter if the advisory body is independent? Especially if funded by government money - you'd think that it should be controlled right?

Wrong - for research into many many things, especially stuff that has a direct influence on the way a society behaves, then it is important that the research and investigations are carried out seperately from the government in order not to 'lead' the research. You can severely skew results by accident or on purpose by designing bad experiments - this is done by having a fixed idea of what the result 'should' be and so you exclude the things that might throw a spanner in the works. You study closed groups with no outliers and controls; you do many things that subtly skew and distort the actual system your trying to portray.

And the more complex a system you're studying, the easier it is to do this.

Society is a very complex system.

Then there is the matter that if a government, through power hunger or benign intent, decided a society should behave in a certain manner which may or may not be what's best for the society or what it wants. If the advisory bodies are 'controlled' by the government then they will give the government the answers they want to hear, often with deleterious effects.

Again, look at the science of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia - yes they achieved great things but they stunted their own technological developments and their 'industries' grew only at the expense of human life.

These things may seem the distant past now but History and its study are needed to spot these patterns to stop the same things happening over and over.

Ok so what about this Nutt dude and what he said - the government want to crack down on drugs he pointed out that there was more damage being done by things like alchohol. Which is correct.

The Daily Mail for one went off alarmingly over this calling Nutt a drug tzar and completely missing the fact that, yes, alcohol causes more damage than drugs.

This surely is a well known fact - ask the doctors and A&E nurses about drunks, ask social severces about the beaten and battered children.

Look at Edwardian times - when Opium was still readily avalible - it was Gin that had the police concern, Gin that turned mothers into baby killers so they could sell the cloths to buy... more Gin.

Now I am not denying that drugs and alcohol go together; in fact they are very much links mainly because, like it or not, alcohol is a DRUG - oooo controversial but it is. It alters our perceptions, our moods and our inhibitions, it makes us vulnerable and dangerous.

It is a big factor in many rape cases, and violent acts on the street and in the home, it takes up a lot of the precious ambulance time (don't believe me? check out this ambulence drivers blog). It leads to fitting if too much is consumed - I know I had to deal with more than one person in this state.

It can even lead to hallucinations though that is obviously in the extreme.

In the sort of quantieties most of us are consuming it in this country there are long term health effects and most of them bad - most of them leading to a lot of the costs placed on our struggling NHS.

Kidney, Liver, heart etc... are all affected by it. The toxins that give you a hangover are drying out your brain (I'm serious the fluid in the 'ventricles' of the brain shrinks due to the dehydration caused by the alcohol - this is one of the factors leading to the headaches).

And people often take it with other drugs - now this leads to an interesting point - it was thought that there was such a thing as a 'gateway' drug. This being a drug that leads the user into wanting to try different and 'harder' drugs - they thought it was cannibis. They did research and found that it was infact nicotine.

And were do we find nicotine? Oh cigerettes - those over the counter cancer sticks - yes those ones. It is them that get people hooked onto the concept of trying harder drugs.

So tell me way with all the medical research alcohol and cigerrettes are legal with their HUGE cost to the NHS and legal system when cannibis and the like aren't?

Becuase they are socially acceptable? Even though one scars your lungs and kills the poeple around you and the other leads to more anti-social and dangerous behavoiour?

When I worked at the Student Union I expected to see drug use - I expected to see badness arise from it - but you know apart from a sad incident of someone using Rohipnal on a student (this ended in long involved things with the police - the person preyed on students generally freshers) the main issue was alcolhol.

To the point that even before the government intervened there where things in place to try and encourage sensible drinking and even a mini bus service to stop people walking home on their own in states where they would have been easy prey.

Especially if mixed with sporting events the alcohol could result in things getting quite hairy especially when you're a 5ft female in the first place - but I was good at defusing potential situations and I had my radio and back up.

Now we had police and bouncer license people come in and give us lectures of drugs proceedures - ie if you suspect or see them - how the bars license could get taken away etc.... So it was something I was watching for.

Now this all sounds like I am saying "ban the drinks, ban the smoking" and though I am glad that bars are now non smoking becuase I don't really want lung fulls of smoke and I was having resperatory problems when I was working every night, I do not think these things should be banned.

And you know I don't think the drugs should be banned either. I will state at this point that I don't take drugs and I don't smoke and I rarely drink so why am I pro-drug?

Becuase if you push something underground you give it into the hands of the crime lords - you hand our youth over to some really very dangerous people.

You drive more people to experiment because its illegal, because its taboo and they are young (or having a mid-life crisis) and they want to 'rebel'. If its not illegal I believe less of them would take the drugs or even smoke in the first place.

If there are places they can pick up safely manufactured drugs that aren't cut with fertilizer and that have easilly seen strengths, the number of over doses and deaths by toxic substances would go down. The amount of crime to find the money to buy the drugs or secure favour with the 'pimp' would decrease. It would be out in the open.

It would be safe and boring.

Drive it underground and you have prohibition america, you have gangster rule, you make everyone a criminal just by association - if you know of something going on and don't tell the authorities you're a criminal. The Police themselves become criminals under this system leading to harsh punishments and divided loyalities - this opens the route to constitutional corruption and more cans of worms than I care to write about.

So...

Why all the hoohar over a scientist stating what I thought had been known for decades now?

Would it be something to do with taxation on the socially 'acceptable' drugs?

Would it be because we are slowely losing our freedoms in this country and the mass population don't seem to have noticed? Well who can blame them - they are working hard and slogging out a life and the big picture is rarely put in the news - instead they are getting bitesize pieces of information that on their own look perfectly harmless but there is a very scary trend and when I first came across it I didn't believe that it would lead to the loss of liberty. I now fear it will.

In what I term my 'year out', the one between Uni and getting married when I was working for Alaric's step mother, the Student Union and classifying meteorites at the Natural History Museum I discovered why my fiance's parents where moving out of the country.

The reason - certain laws had been passed which Lynne considered to be against our freedom of speach - these where mixed up with the new anti-terrorist laws.

Having been raised in South Africa and having parents who where imprisioned as anti-Apartheid freedom fighters she had a unique out look on the laws being passed. It was, she said, the beginning of a slippery slope and she could not live in a country that was heading that way.

I thought at the time she was over reacting, though I saw her point. But as I have watched things decay in this country I am really actually getting quite scared and worried about it.

Mix in the restrictions on freedom, our crumbling social systems and the dumbing down in the education system and I want to cry.

Half of the issue here isn't just the freedom of speech it is the general publics mis-understanding and fear of science. And publications like the Daily Mail don't help making people think science is this scary cold subject with little bearing on real life.

This is not the case, science and technology permeate our society in lots of ways people don't realise. But I am starting to come across people with A levels and AS in science subjects who know nothing of what 'science' is and have been turned away from science by the way it has been portrayed. With changes that have sneaked into the curriculum (and I don't by they way think all the changes are bad and I like some of them but...) the essence of science, of analysising of creative thinking - infact of thinking at all, and not just being good at recalling facts, is being lost.

We have a country built on the legacy of the Victorian scientists and engineers and we are raising a generation whose school education is stiffling their thinking and creativity. This makes was an easily manipulated population but doesn't bode well for future economic and global political success of the nation as a whole. And where do we think the Drs and nurses come from? And the teachers?

Nor does it bode well for the idividuals who would be creative champions - and I believe creativity is above science and art and that to do either you need creativity. My hope is that the internet and our struggling libaries will curb this trend but they will probably only make a dent.

As I have said before - whilst I can speak out about the ills of society that I percieve, I will. On the radio this morning the Drugs commision are basically all resigning but as one of them pointed out - the resignation was announced by the home office before they'd actually carried out the threat and sent the letters or announced themselves, and this was after a meeting where they were being told the government wasn't interfering and that they wanted a relationship of trust - how can you trust something that does that?

I welcome opinions by the way so feel free to leave a comment 🙂 and wow thats over 2000 words :/

The Journey Home (by sarah)

"I've hard road to travel and a ruff, ruff way to go..."

Ok so Sunday did not see the smoothest of ways home for me - I started in Gants Hill looking out over London from Clare's gorgous flat. I had been unable to sleep - we'd obviously gone to bed late anyway having chatted half the night away and looking at her photos of Tia Land but more than that my mind raced with ideas of paintings to paint from the songs we'd sung during the day.

Anyway after a couple of cuppas she walked me to the station - I was sad that I still wasn't going to see the kittens that are in another friends house in the area but got to the station in plenty of time and felt good about going home to get stuff done.

The journey across London was fine with a cute little girl keeping everybody entertained on the Hammersmith and City Line and my train was on time at Paddington. But I had 2 changes instead of the none/one.

So making sure I had the correct seat reservation in my hand I moved with the crowd to the train and boarded - and there was bedlam - people arguing and being confused about seat reservations. A couple where confronting a man in orange and yellow robs with flowers around his neck and paint on the bridge of his nose. He moved once he understood it was their seat behind but they where still fussing and blocking things up so I explained it was on their ticket and on the seat and stuff and then it turned out they where upset the man had moved to another reserved seat.

But they had not told him this! And I wasn't entirely happy with how they had said it was their seats I know there was lots of people and it was busy and stuff but a little patients helps - they werent a hundred percent sure of how the reservation system worked either.

Anyway I could just see what was going to happen to this guy he would keep getting slightly annoyed people moving him on so I explained to him about the white tickets and he thanked me - he hadn't known and he went off to find an intagged seat.

Then a bunch of youngish Americans got on (the dude in the robes was from America too San Francisco) - I have to confess it was a very diverse group and I would not have thought they were all together but they where but obviously something had gone wrong one of their seats hadn't got its ticket sticking out of the top so an Austrialian had sat in it thinking it was free!

They were trying to sort this out when a shirty lady told them to move in no uncertain terms and I thought to myself - Aren't we British supposed to be polite? Aren't we supposed to be the nation of queuers? And why is it all the foriegn people who are being tourists and spending money here bulstering our economy are being a lot nicer over confusion of a system they can't really be expected to understand becuase - well its the British rail network and it doesn't work properlly.

Anyway - to my suprise I butted in again only a little bit and stuff got sorted - trueth is it was too many people for the space :/ As trains towards this part of the country were bneing few and far between.

Anyway I settled back for the 40 odd minutes only to find my head phones had broken so had no music.

At Reading it turned out there was a bus to Swindon and not a train and that my ticket wouldn't let me out of the barrier and the only staff memeber was the guy letting people in through the barriers and he wouldn't let me out. With 2 minutes to go and no idea where the 'front' of the station and the waiting bus was I was being to panic but a staff memeber appeared, let me through and looked at me like an idiot when I asked the way to the bus.

But I got there before they started letting people onboard. This was becuase it was slightly delayed.

I had not taken my pain killers due to the stomache pains I was getting but these turned out to be the standard womens thing which was one of the reasons getting to the bus had been so tight in the first place.

Bus sits hurt my back far worse than the train - this is why I don't take the coach - a lady was also sitting next to me so I couldn't stretch out.

When we got to Swindon and she stood up - it turned out she had sat in chewing gum - ooowe yuck! She hadn't noticed so I tapped her and gave her a tissue not that it helped much and then came the next bit of my strangly eventful journey.

I got on the train at Swindon though there seemed to be a little bit of confussion as to which plateform etc... and the train announcements where not coming out onto the plateform and so where muffled nonsense.

But everyone else on board was execting it to go to Cheltenham, Stroud etc... and I so I phoned Al and he set off to meet me in Stroud. And the departure time came and went and we sat there and sat there and sat there and there where no announcements and then about 40 minutes later when people had started shouting on the plateform at the staff they informed us there was no driver and it was going to a 45 minute wait until one arrived.

Then it turned out a little train was due to go to through to all the same stations in 15 minutes instead so with a bit of shoe horning and the upsetting of a large family who had sat in the bit where wheel chairs and that go where told to move so bikes could come on board - this ment some of the kids ended up sitting the opposite end of the train to the perants which the kids werent happy with.

Alot of the people had been on the bus and the over crowded Reading train and tempures were fraying abit - including my own though I ended up in a nice conversation with a girl from York.

And we sat and sat and then we were off and finiallly I got into Stoud where Al and Jean had obviously been for while :/

It is things like this though that make me want to bang everyones heads together - things would have been far more pleasent from the outset if there had not been pushy arogant people (or disgusting cretins who put chewing gum on top of coach seats!).

There isn't really a point to this post I just felt the need to write about the journey.