cluelessresearch.com

So, I am reading this interesting review by University of Chicago’s Jerry Coine of a book proposing the Intelligent Design (a.k.a. the new creationist) "theory". The book in question, by Lehigh University’s biologist Michael J. Behe, basically argues that random mutations cannot lead to the complex changes we observe in the fossil record. The reviewer, then, tries to clarify what they (biologists) mean by random.

What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful.

Indifferent?!? Come on! Wouldn’t it be better to use an actual statistical term for a, uh, statistical concept? Yes, like independent. [tex]P(A|B)=P(A)[/tex]. My dictionary informs me that indifferent can mean three things: a) "having no particular interest"; b) "neither good or bad". (Both would seem more fitting to an ID proponent, don’t you think?) or c) (in archaic biology neutral in respect of some specified physical property.) Our ability to create unnecessary new terms never ceases to amaze me.

So, I decided to spend some time in back in my home country for a variety of reasons, and between the move and just watching the scenery, I haven’t been able to find time to post. I had to buy a new computer to take with me and left my desktop pc, which lately has not been much more than a glorified jukebox, behind. Moving the iTunes library from the PC to my shiny new mac was not very painful, but the songs with diacriticals in the file names (ç˜^ç, etc) didn’t load correctly on the mac. So I wrote down this evil, evil, shell script, which goes down the directory structure renaming all your files and folders substituting diacriticals with regular ascii letters.

#!/bin/sh
find .  -name '* *' | while read S1
do
    S2=`echo "$S1" | unaccent`
    if [ "$S1" != "$S2" ]
    then
    echo "renaming $S1 to $S2"
    ##mv "$S1" "$S2"
    fi
done

If you want the actual renaming to be done, uncomment the line with the command mv "$S1" "$S2" You will also need this rather useful perl script to remove the diacriticals (should be called unaccent and be on your path) (from http://ahinea.com/en/tech/perl-unicode-struggle.html)

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
require Encode;
 use Unicode::Normalize;

#$str = ;
#for ( $str ) {  # the variable we work on
while (<>) {  # the variable we work on

   ##  convert to Unicode first
   ##  if your data comes in Latin-1, then uncomment:
   #$_ = Encode::decode( 'iso-8859-1', $_ );  

   s/\xe4/ae/g;  ##  treat characters ä ñ ö ü ÿ
   s/\xf1/ny/g;  ##  this was wrong in previous version of this doc
   s/\xf6/oe/g;
   s/\xfc/ue/g;
   s/\xff/yu/g;

   $_ = NFD( $_ );   ##  decompose (Unicode Normalization Form D)
   s/\pM//g;         ##  strip combining characters

   # additional normalizations:

   s/\x{00df}/ss/g;  ##  German beta “ß” -> “ss”
   s/\x{00c6}/AE/g;  ##  Æ
   s/\x{00e6}/ae/g;  ##  æ
   s/\x{0132}/IJ/g;  ##  IJ
   s/\x{0133}/ij/g;  ##  ij
   s/\x{0152}/Oe/g;  ##  Œ
   s/\x{0153}/oe/g;  ##  œ

   tr/\x{00d0}\x{0110}\x{00f0}\x{0111}\x{0126}\x{0127}/DDddHh/; # ÐĐðđĦħ
   tr/\x{0131}\x{0138}\x{013f}\x{0141}\x{0140}\x{0142}/ikLLll/; # ıĸĿŁŀł
   tr/\x{014a}\x{0149}\x{014b}\x{00d8}\x{00f8}\x{017f}/NnnOos/; # ŊʼnŋØøſ
   tr/\x{00de}\x{0166}\x{00fe}\x{0167}/TTtt/;                   # ÞŦþŧ

   s/[^\0-\x80]//g;  ##  clear everything else; optional

   print $_;
 }

My external hard disk with my music is formated in NTFS, so I needed a way to get write access to it if I wanted my files to be kept there. I managed to do it flawlessly following these instructions. Macfuse (the tool doing the grunt work) appears to be cpu intensive, but for the relatively small music files it worked fine. If you have questions, I would be glad to write up more carefully what I did. Leave a comment (you have to be registered, but anyone can register) or email me at e dot leoni at gmail dot com .

In the United States, only in two states is prostitution legal: Nevada and (gasp!) Rhode Island. It is commonly referred to as the “oldest profession in the world”, but not much evidence is presented to support that fact. Finally, it seems that a group of Yale researchers has found some evidence by studying Capuchin monkeys.

The researchers (M. Keith Chen, and economist, and psychologists Venkat Lakshminarayanan and Laurie R. Santos) were interested in finding out if species other than humans also act in market-like fashion, and/or exhibit similar biases to those observed among us. They ended up observing behavior that might support the “oldest profession” contention, I think. You see, like a more than a couple of Homo sapiens I know, Capuchin monkeys are exclusively focused on food and sex. The researchers intended to use their food seeking behavior to study their actions when currency and trade are introduced in their environment.

The research was published at the June 2006 issue of the Journal of Political Economy (link to the paper), and has been discussed in the Freakonomics blog.

It turns out that the, ahem, other interests of the Capuchin monkeys showed up in their research as well. Stephen J. Dubner, the other freakonomic, tells the story during a keynote at the AIIM Expo:

The topper to Dubner’s stories to the AIIM audience involved an
incident in which one of the capuchins threw a tray of washers that
ended up spilling into the general population area. The monkeys, as
expected, fought for the coins and, except for one, were easily bribed
with the opportunity to purchase food in order for researchers to get
the washers back.

‘Out of the corner of his eye, Chen saw that one monkey gave a coin to
another (instead of rushing to exchange it for treats.) He thinks, am
I witnessing the first instance of monkey altruism? No. He was
actually witnessing something he said he really wished he hadn’t
seen,’ said Dubner.

After a brief grooming ritual, the monkeys who exchanged the coin
started to have sex. Immediately after the incident, the paid monkey
went over to Chen to get food in exchange for returning the coin,
Dubner said.

Well, it may not prove that prostitution actually is the oldest profession. But, in this market at least, it emerged pretty damn soon!

(via Slashdot)