Archive for October, 2006
The ability to recognize oneself in a mirror is frequently cited as evidence of sentience. A dog may be frightened or excited by its reflection, but either way it does not appear aware that the reflection is its own. The dog’s behavior suggests that if it recognizes the reflection at all, it believes it to be another dog, appearing through a window.
If the dog did recognize itself, how could we tell? One test, devised in 1970 by Gordon Gallup, involves applying a mark to the animal’s face without its knowledge. If it can recognize itself in the mirror, it will understand that the mark it sees is on its own face. Evidence of this would be surprise, or an effort to investigate the mark, perhaps by turning to view it at different angles, or touching the actual mark with a paw. Gallup found that chimps would readily learn to recognize themselves, but macaque monkeys would not, even after several weeks of exposure to a mirror.
Human children fail the mirror test at one year of age, but pass at two. Until recently, great apes (like chimps) and dolphins were the only animals besides humans who succeeded. Now, it seems African elephants must be added to the list.
Legal scholar Steven Wise has suggested that animals capable of passing sentience tests like the mirror test should be given basic rights, in recognition of their capability for self-awareness. (I’m on a legal theory binge right now and am about to start his book, Drawing The Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights.) Wise apparently anticipated in his book that elephants would eventually pass the mirror test. However, it’s worth noting that there are intelligent animals that don’t pass, such as dogs and ravens. Some chimps don’t pass. Most gorillas don’t pass (although Koko did). In the elephant study, two of the three elephants tested failed to investigate the mark on their faces. Clearly there are different kinds of intelligence; for individual or species-specific causes, some animals may not find the mark (or the mirror) sufficiently stimulating to provoke a display of self-awareness.
For the record, I have tried the mirror test on my cat. She is very devious, and in order to commit deliberate deceit, one must know that there is a significant difference between one’s own knowledge pool and that of others - basically, you’re self-aware. So I was hopeful. My cat did not pass, although she can recognize me in a mirror and apparently knows what a mirror is (a flat reflective surface, not a window). However, cats are notoriously noncompliant with experimental protocols, so as far as I’m concerned, the jury’s still out.
Update: I just noticed that the October 30 New Yorker cover depicts a cartoon cat spitting at its reflection in a mirror. I can’t tell if the cat is genuinely afraid of its own reflection (failing the mirror test), or taking advantage of the mirror to practice its Halloween performance art (passing the mirror test). Either way, it’s timely.
October 30th, 2006
Publicity still from The Fountain, 2006
I wasn’t all that excited to see Darren Aronofsky’s new film The Fountain until I started reading press about the film. An article by Steve Silberman in the November 1 issue of Wired briefly mentions the father-son team, Peter and Chris Parks, responsible for the effects:
Parks and his son run a home f/x shop based on a device they call the microzoom optical bench. Bristling with digital and film cameras, lenses, and Victorian prisms, their contraption can magnify a microliter of water up to 500,000 times or fill an Imax screen with the period at the end of this sentence. Into water they sprinkle yeast, dyes, solvents, and baby oil, along with other ingredients they decline to divulge.
This is already such a delightful scene - kitchen alchemy, with Victorian prisms, no less - that it was nearly too much when I discovered the Parks’ studio is a 400-year-old stone building in the Cotswolds. How could this not be good stuff?
It turns out that Peter Parks has already won three Academy Awards (1982, 1987, 2004) for his technical contributions to film arts. He also worked on the Superman movie with Chris Reeve. In an interview with Jennifer Hough, Chris Parks said,
My father and I are known in the business for being able to create a unique kind of special effect. This latest project was a sci-fi movie where the director, (Darren Aronofsky) wanted to move away from digital effects to something more organic and real.
You can view the Fountain trailer here or here. I can’t say the plot sounds completely sensible, but the cinematography is beautiful. The effects I see in the trailer (alas, they only give us one full-length version) do look organic. And there are many more images and short films at Chris Parks’ own website which are pretty amazing, if a little grainy (which could well be the image file resolution - the larger trailers seem less so).
One of the problems with digital art, and a reason I shy away from it myself, is that it’s hard to generate organic randomness digitally. I love spontaneous textures, and in traditional media like watercolor, they’re pretty simple to create with spatter, salt, water, wax resist, or pairs of pigments that react in unexpected ways. It’s far more difficult to discipline the randomness than to generate it.
Good digital artists can also create random textures (textures that appear random, at least) but paradoxically, it takes a lot of effort to make it look unplanned. When I hear that a movie has “bad” effects, I think of scenes that are just too clean. We are disturbed by something unnaturally smooth or symmetrical, even if we can’t articulate what the giveaway is. Perhaps because our brains devote so much attention to them, faces may be the hardest effects to convincingly synthesize - check out this Wired News article by Clive Thompson on the “uncanny valley” where photorealism begins to seem downright creepy!
That’s why I love the idea of the Parks’ work. They don’t have to reverse engineer reality, because their effects are reality - microrealities captured photographically and substituted for larger, nebula-sized events.
Incidentally, the Parks team has made a reputation for their BBC-style nature documentary photography, but Chris Parks, who has degrees in both design and engineering, seems to feel the need to keep the “science” label off his more artistic efforts. From the interview: “I want people to approach the paintings like they would another piece of art, rather than as a scientific photograph.”
I don’t see any reason why they can’t be both, but I can understand where he’s coming from. I guess that’s one thing the Parks’ effects and digital effects have in common - trouble qualifying as mainstream “art.”
I’m eager to see if my own brain accepts the Parks’ art more readily than the recent uncanniness of Superman Returns. And I hope this means that ten years from now, The Fountain won’t end up looking dated in the embarassing manner of other, once-state-of-the-art films. Of course that’s assuming The Fountain is good enough that people will still be ordering it from Netflix ten years from now - which depends much more on director Aronofsky than the Parks. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
October 26th, 2006
Pharyngula: Feminism is undermining human evolution!
Pharyngula has simply got to be my favorite blog. In this post, PZ Myers refutes an annoying pseudo-expert, William Tucker, who spews a lot of bogus biology on his roundabout way to bashing feminism.
Here’s a sample of Tucker’s article:
It is precisely because females play a dominant role and males are so passive and unambitious that bonobos did not produce an evolutionary line that led to human beings. . . feminism, in its most obviously primitive forms, is undermining human evolution. Everywhere in the Western world, the emancipation of women has initially led to rising divorce rates and plummeting births.
If PZ hadn’t already ripped this idiot apart, I’d get really mad. Tucker seems to claim that the differences between the human Y chromosome and chimp Y chromosome are the root cause of our species’ divergence - basically, everything important that separates humans from chimps is male, because women don’t have a Y chromosome. Tucker doesn’t seem to understand that the unpaired Y, unlike the paired X, is more vulnerable to picking up accidental garbage during cell division - changes that are most likely evolutionarily meaningless. In fact, over time the Y is losing little bits here and there: it’s shrinking! If, by undermining evolution, feminists are actually slowing shrinkage of the sacred Y, maybe Tucker should thank them?
Best of all, Tucker doesn’t seem to think “humanity” is evenly distributed between genders. If the Y is so essential, then it does follow that Y-deprived women wouldn’t be very advanced:
In other words, what differentiates us from our mammalian relatives is changes that have occurred in the male of the species. . .
As far back as 1972, Elaine Morgan, a feminist, writing in The Descent of Woman, noted that in fact the role of females hadn’t changed much from chimp to human. Mothers nurse and care for their offspring in basically the same way chimps do. In terms of social role, there really isn’t much difference between human females and other animals.
I’m not even going to get into the way he’s misusing Morgan’s words. This guy is, bluntly, a moron. I’m so glad PZ got to him first, and much more effectively than I could have. As it is, I’ll just conclude that people who don’t understand biology should refrain from invoking it to justify their politics. The real biologists tend to get offended.
October 21st, 2006
Experts: Some women perform well in math
Talk about a non-surprise.
The title of this article, as usual, is misleading. The study served not to verify that some women can do math (duh), but to demonstrate the powerful effect gender stereotypes have on women’s math performances. In this study, women who were told that men are innately superior at math did worse on a subsequent math test than women who were told gender doesn’t affect math aptitude. Even women who are merely reminded of their gender in a math-free context do worse! It kinda makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
This study follows on the heels of a Canadian study by J.P. Rushton that got a lot of press in September. Rushton is just the latest of a pack of researchers arguing that men are demonstrably smarter, including controversial Brits Lynn and Irwing, who claimed in Nature that men have an advantage of ~5 IQ points. I haven’t yet read Rushton’s article (no access to the journal, Intelligence) but apparently Rushton and his team based their conclusions on SAT scores, which I find suspicious. Not everyone takes the SAT, only those intending to go to college, and more women take it than men. The extent to which students prepare for the SAT also varies. Back when I took the SAT, I was under the naive impression it measured innate ability. I didn’t study or review for it at all - what would be the point? When I did quite well on verbal but only moderately well on math, it was exactly what I, and everyone else, expected. After all, I’m pretty smart for a girl. I’d been told so often that girls aren’t as smart as boys, especially in math.
It kinda makes you wonder how many of the girls taking the SAT expect to underperform because of their gender. (If you believe overt gender bias has been eliminated from our schools, then you must live in a very different region of the country than I).
I’ve completely internalized the idea that I am “bad at math.” I refuse even to balance my checkbook. Every time I consider my own math abilities, I recall my 6th grade math teacher, Mr. Florence, who told me I was a stupid girl and made me cry in front of my entire class. I can’t remember how I felt about math before Mr. Florence, but after a week with him, I was definitely “bad at math.” The As I earned in college calculus and physical chemistry count as absolutely nothing against the humiliating memory of his class.
It kinda makes ya wonder.
October 20th, 2006
As a Dorothy Sayers fan, I’m flat out horrified by this vintage cover art for Strong Poison
. (Amazon)
Unless I’m mistaken, it appears the seductive blonde in the painted-on dress is meant to be Harriet Vane. (Harriet was a paragon of intelligence, independence and wit, an Oxford graduate, and a most “decided-looking brunette.”)
If the artist had to vamp her into a pulp starlet, couldn’t he at least have let her keep her natural hair color? Grrrr.
October 19th, 2006
I had to post this image from my recent trip to the Cloisters in New York. The Cloisters hosts most of the medieval art belonging to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and this is an illumination from a medieval manuscript. Unfortunately I didn’t note the manuscript’s name, but I believe this particular illumination depicts a scene from Revelations. It’s probably meant to be scary, but I think it’s charming.
The image captivates me because it seems so modern. The playful way the monsters’ bodies blend into one another as they cavort around the page, their copious teeth bristling and their orange eyes bugging — it looks just like the work of Maurice Sendak! Upon returning home and examining my copy of Where The Wild Things Are, I’m even more amazed at the family resemblance. What do you think?
October 17th, 2006
Life of Pi
(Amazon)
I know it’s been a few years since this book was published (2001), and I have no excuse for not reading it sooner. But damn, it’s well-written. Like The Little Prince, it’s painful but beautiful to read.
Life of Pi is such a unique creature, I find the Library of Congress categories to which it has been assigned (found on the copyright page below the ISBN) absolutely bizarre and beside the point. Check them out:
1. Survival after airplane accidents, shipwrecks, etc. - fiction.
2. Human-animal relationships - fiction.
3. Pacific Ocean - fiction.
4. Storytelling - fiction.
5. Teenage boys - fiction.
6. Ocean travel - fiction.
7. Zoo animals - fiction.
8. Orphans - fiction.
9. Tigers - fictions.
What kind of taxonomy is that? It’s like sticking The Little Prince under: 1. Extremely small planetary objects; 2. Foxes; and 3. Roses - the cultivation thereof!
We need a new category, about how we each build our own life story from the experiences spread before us. How a multiplicity of stories can be simultaneously true. How a story can have both a happy ending and an unhappy ending, and can make you cry even as you pick it up again to read it from the beginning. Then I can check out every book in this category, and read them all.
October 11th, 2006