Brexiteers actually welcome suffering, for no reason I can understand

There are a few problems with the article. First and foremost :

A huge majority of older Leave voters say significant damage to the British economy is a “price worth paying” to secure Brexit, research shows are mad idiots.

There, fixed it.

No fewer than 71 per cent of over-65s are willing for the country to take a big economic hit – and half would accept a member of their own family losing their job.

But I mean seriously, don't they understand that economics pays for stuff ? You know, nice things like roads and hospitals and schools ? And that we need jobs because we quite like things like, say, food ?
EDIT : From the source, "half" refers to of those who said yes or no, excluding those who said, "don't know".

I do have one genuine critique mind you :

Only over-50s voted for Brexit last year.

That's a downright dumb statement, considering the same article just talked about younger leave voters as well. It's worthy of the Huffington Post, not the Indy (which has been a bit of a mixed bag of late).

However, YouGov also identified what it called Brexit extremism on the Remain side, with 34 per cent happy for the economy to suffer if that meant Brexit could be stopped.

That's a fair comparison, but I'd be surprised if Remainers believed that the economy would take a hit, making the question meaningless. Whereas I'd absolutely believe that Leavers believe it will take a hit, because it will.

EDIT : From the source (https://yougov.co.uk/news/2017/08/01/britain-nation-brexit-extremists/) it's clearer :
a significant minority of Remain voters would be happy for the economy to suffer should it mean that Brexit were averted.
Ahh, well that indicates a potentially unfair comparison. Leaving will mean a permanent hit to the economy since there's absolutely no sensible replacement on offer for access to the single market. Whereas if the threat of leaving causes an economic hit which forces us to re-think, that hit is only temporary and the long-term damage averted.

Originally shared by Jenny Winder

#Brexit: Majority of older Leave voters say significant economic damage is 'price worth paying'
(For what?)
Only over-50s voted for Brexit last year!
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-latest-leave-voters-uk-economy-damage-yougov-older-pensioners-losing-jobs-income-taxes-a7870871.html

The problem of identity in a teleporter

There's nothing new here, but it's nicely told.

Note: I make no claim to originality in this thought experiment. A very similar sort of question was raised in 1775 by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid...

Bah, Plato got to the heart of it in Cratylus :

Names would have an absurd effect on the things they name, if they resembled them in every respect, since all of them would be duplicated, and no-one would be able to say which was the thing and which was the name.

The concept of me being me, and not some weird collection of different parts with no intrinsic meaning, is something that I will cling to despite whatever fancy-schamncy arguments you want to bring to the table. Like the idea that time flows, I'm not prepared to consider anything else. Time is an illusion ? I'm not really me ? Pffft, whatever. Still interesting to think about though.

A toggle switch allows me to decide whether the ‘old me’ on Mars is preserved or destroyed after I teleport back home. It’s this decision that is causing me to hesitate.

I’m just the result of the activity among my 100 billion neurons and their 100 trillion distinctive connections. And, what’s more, that activity is what it is, no matter what collection of neurons is doing it. If you went about replacing those neurons one by one, but kept all the connections and activity the same, I would still be me. So, replacing them altogether at once should not matter, so long as the distinctive patterns are maintained. 

So: if I put the toggle in the ‘destroy’ setting, I should survive the transfer just fine. What would be lost? Nothing that plays any role in making me me, in making my consciousness my own. I should step in, press the button – and then walk out of the receiver back on Earth.


On the other hand, what happens if I put the toggle in the ‘save’ setting? Then where would I be? Would I make the trip back to Earth, and then feel sorry for the poor sap back on Mars (the old me), who will be facing slow death by starvation? Or – horrors! – will I be that old me, feeling envy for the new me who is now on Earth, enjoying the company of friends and family?

[My answer : the experience of being you is non-physical and non-replicable. This does not necessarily imply any kind of ghost in the machine (although I don't disregard that possibility) - if consciousness is an emergent, relational property, it must be relational between specific physical things. The neurons in the copy of you that emerges from the teleporter have no direct causal connection to the original neurons in your brain. Hence they're not you and you don't share their experiences : pressing the "destruct" button will kill you. The really interesting question is what the copy of you experiences. Do they emerge thinking that they're still you, as though they've teleported millions of miles in a few seconds with an unbroken awareness ? Or are they, somehow, aware that their experience is a different one from the original you ? A very serious and intelligent examination of this problem can be found here.]


https://aeon.co/ideas/if-i-teleport-from-mars-does-the-original-me-get-destroyed

If only eugenics wasn't so evil !

Ah, Alex Jones. The kind of twit who makes you think, "damn, I wish eugenics had worked". Or possibly, "but Alex, how are you able to talk ? Don't you need that brain cell to keep your heart beating ?" Honestly, I'm not able to understand how people who take Alex Jones seriously are able to make it through the day without clobbering themselves to death with a poodle, or something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyGq6cjcc3Q

London's early attempts to outdo the Eiffel Tower

Fascinating series of crazy designs. While, "we must frankly admit that none excels the Eiffel Tower in beauty and grace", they certainly exceeded it in madness.

Charles Baillairgé, City Engineer of Quebec City, had the most novel approach to dealing with wind pressure. His 1,600-foot circular design was fully enclosed and was expected to withstand most winds. But, as he put it, “The factor of safety would be increased if the glazing were to be blown out in a hurricane.” Never mind any personal injury from glass shards being blown about.

Other designers also suggested locomotives, one even trained mules, but none so quintessentially Victorian as Max Am Ende’s gothic tower, which featured “a Spiral Railway, worked by steam.” In order to maintain the decorum so highly prized by Victorians, the railway would offer first-, second-, and third-class carriages.

The design by J.H.M. Harrison-Vasey would, at 1,820 feet, be hard to miss and not much of it appears to have escaped decoration. He eschewed elevators and proposed “a spiral road of about 2½ miles under which a descending Railway is constructed, the incline of both being 1 in 20.” Perhaps the most intriguing feature was the “captive parachute to hold 4 persons, led in guides…fitted in one of the corner towers, and regulated by a brake.”

https://parisianfields.com/2014/11/16/a-doomed-attempt-at-out-eiffelling-eiffel/

Justice and tolerance are neither the same nor mutually exclusive

It's not intolerance we shouldn't tolerate, it's injustice. Many forms of intolerance have nothing whatsoever to do with justice : someone may refuse to watch an entire game of golf, and quite rightly so because it's feckin' dull. That intolerance isn't injustice. If they extended their own opinion of golf towards others, however, if they banned other people from watching golf because they themselves didn't enjoy it, then that's injustice. Plato's definition of justice as "minding one's own business" has some merit.

Justice and toleration are different things, though they aren't mutually exclusive. Tolerating someone's opinion is one thing, tolerating their actions quite another. Holding an opinion doesn't inflict injustice by itself, but actions (which can include, in some circumstances, the expression of that opinion) can. Tolerating injustice is to allow injustice to continue. Justice is in some cases necessarily very intolerant; in others it demands tolerance.

The intoleration of injustice can mean many things. It doesn't have to always be the extreme condition of legislation or banning. It can start with simply refusing to participate in certain actions and speaking out against them.

It's no good wailing about how people are intolerant, because intolerance isn't an evil in itself. Injustice is what you should be fighting against. Those who seek to restrict the rights of others and then claim that it's unfair that people are seeking to prevent them have missed the whole point.

Ultra diffuse galaxies : failed giants or very ambitious dwarves ?

I have a detailed post about this in draft. Something to finish over the weekend !

In general, UDGs appear to have more globular clusters than other galaxies of the same total luminosity, by a factor of nearly 7. These results are consistent with the scenario in which UDGs are failed galaxies: they likely have the halo mass to have formed a large number of globular clusters, but they were quenched before they formed a disk and bulge. Because star formation never got going in UDGs, they are now much dimmer than other galaxies of the same size.

The authors suggest that the next step is to obtain dynamical measurements of the UDGs to determine whether these faint galaxies really do have the halo mass suggested by their large numbers of globulars. Future observations will continue to help us pin down the origin of these dim giants.

On in other words that means this newly-discovered population of galaxies could include significant numbers of giant, almost-dark galaxies. Just how screwed that would leave our theories of galaxy formation depends on the numbers. But AFAIK this method of using the globular clusters to estimate the total mass of galaxies like this has not been well-calibrated, so a high degree of caution is warranted.

http://aasnova.org/2017/07/21/globular-clusters-for-faint-galaxies/

Hagfish slime, because you needed to see this

Ewww. But not as eww as I thought it would be.

http://youtu.be/pmaal7Hf0WA

VR telecon sounds nice but I just want to stop shouting at people

Facebook is developing a virtual-reality chat room, which it hopes will be the most "immersive" way for people to communicate online. It is promoting the software for its Oculus Rift kit, which has struggled against competition from PlayStation VR and HTC Vive. The BBC's Chris Foxx asked Facebook's Rachel Franklin why people would prefer to make a virtual reality call, rather than a regular video call.

I'd settle for a video call where I spent less than 10% of the time shouting, "HELLO ! CAN YOU HERE ME ? YOU'RE BREAKING UP ! THE PICTURE'S TERRIBLE TODAY !"

Ultimately, VR with realistic avatars might be useful for social calls, but not yet. I can imagine this cartoony style having interesting applications for games, though.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-40726880/inside-facebook-s-virtual-reality-chat-room

Banning transgender people from the military is a pure distraction tactic

Well screw you sir. Screw you.

US President Donald Drumpf says transgender people cannot serve in "any capacity" in the military. He tweeted that he had consulted with military experts and cited "tremendous medical costs and disruption". The Obama administration decided last year to allow transgender people to serve openly in the military. But in June, Defence Secretary James Mattis agreed to a six-month delay in the recruitment of transgender people.

The timing of this transgender ban is almost as interesting as the move itself.

Why now? With the Drumpf administration being buffeted by the Jeff Sessions political death watch, the ongoing multi-prong investigation into the Drumpf campaign, the healthcare drama in the Senate and the impending Russian sanctions bill, perhaps the administration decided this was a good time to change the subject and rally conservative forces to his side.

Republicans have long used cultural issues as a wedge to divide Democrats and energise evangelicals. As one White House insider acknowledged, this is straight out of that playbook. While Mr Drumpf campaigned as sympathetic to LGBT rights, he needs the traditional religious conservatives to stay loyal to him now, more than ever.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40729996

The differences in dogmatic thinking in theists and atheists

Two studies examine the personality characteristics that drive dogmatism in the religious and nonreligious. They show there are both similarities and important differences in what drives dogmatism in these two groups. In both groups, higher critical reasoning skills were associated with lower levels of dogmatism. But these two groups diverge in how moral concern influences their dogmatic thinking.

"It suggests that religious individuals may cling to certain beliefs, especially those which seem at odds with analytic reasoning, because those beliefs resonate with their moral sentiments"; " Emotional resonance helps religious people to feel more certain—the more moral correctness they see in something, the more it affirms their thinking. In contrast, moral concerns make nonreligious people feel less certain."

Appealing to a religious dogmatist's sense of moral concern and to an anti-religious dogmatist's unemotional logic may increase the chances of getting a message through—or at least some consideration from them.

While more empathy may sound desirable, untempered empathy can be dangerous... "Terrorists, within their bubble, believe it's a highly moral thing they're doing. They believe they are righting wrongs and protecting something sacred."* At the other extreme, despite organizing their life around critical thinking, militant atheists, "may lack the insight to see anything positive about religion; they can only see that it contradicts their scientific, analytical thinking.".

* I'm not sure how this relates to "empathy", it seems if anything to require the exact opposite of empathy.

It would be interesting to do a proper psychological study of militant atheists and the devoutly religious. Personally, I'm dogmatically convinced that they're basically the same. At least, there's a particular subset of militant atheism that defines itself by its non-belief. It's simply a belief that no deity exists rather than a deity exists, but the core of it is the same.

The studies, based on surveys of more than 900 people, also found some similarities between religious and non-religious people. In both groups the most dogmatic are less adept at analytical thinking, and also less likely to look at issues from other's perspectives... Decreasing empathy among the nonreligious corresponded to increasing dogmatism.

The more rigid the individual, whether religious or not, the less likely he or she would consider the perspective of others. Religious fundamentalism was highly correlated with empathetic concern among the religious.

Perhaps they're using a more specialised definition of "empathy" then, like that recent paper which defined "intelligence" and "critical thinking" as two different things (quite properly, I thought). Otherwise I'd say that "considering the perspectives of others" is a very good definition of "empathy".

The researchers say the results of the surveys lend further support to their earlier work showing people have two brain networks—one for empathy and one for analytic thinking – that are in tension with each other. In healthy people, their thought process cycles between the two, choosing the appropriate network for different issues they consider. But in the religious dogmatist's mind, the empathetic network appears to dominate while in the nonreligious dogmatist's mind, the analytic network appears to rule.

And why has phys.org started doing this ultra-annoying thing of magically incorporating "read more at www..." when copying and pasting text ? Who in deity-of-choice's name thought this would be a good idea ? I certainly don't feel any empathy toward that arsehole, that's for darn sure...

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-people-theyre.html