This photograph looks so much like a painting it is amazing.

[From Licorne (Monoscope)]

So, I wasn’t really that interested in watching Dr Who. Except apparently there is nothing else on any of the other stations at the time it is on, which is a Saturday early evening. So, in the last month, I’ve been tuning in. It just shows you how I don’t have a social life, too.

And the episode aired last night was fantastic. Statues that are really Quantum Assassins, that turn to stone when any living creature looks at them, so they look like statues. But if you look away, then they can sneak up on you, and kill you.

And the time travel aspect was cool. Closed loops of time, effect predating time. Timey-wimey stuff.

Looks like my Saturday nights are now booked. At least 7:30 until 8:15 p.m., anyway.

What a cool Mum!

[from xkcd]

Worthless • Dido • Café Del Mar • Volume 8

One of his recent podcasts/radio segments was called “Pluck for Luck,” and discussed four-leaf clovers. The funny thing he said almost slipped past my attention the first time around:

Stressors can come in a variety of forms. Drought, rain, aphids, Leprechauns, …

I had to listen to it again, just to see if I’d heard it right!

As I’m known to do, I take exception (or get annoyed) with particular segments. The two podcasts I listened to today irked me especially.

The first was a discussion of Placenta Brain, and the general consensus was that it doesn’t exist. I know of this phenomenon by it’s alternative name, Mummy Mind, and I have seen it in all of the women I am close to who have borne children.

The general theories go like this: somehow (possibly due to hormones) women become different during pregnancy, often exhibiting behaviours they wouldn’t normally, like leaving their car running when running an errand, and being surprised to see if running when they return.

I would go somewhat further than this. Bearing children permanently damages their minds. My sister, who was a perfectly normal, intelligent person, suddenly started making inane comments about all sorts of things. Something which she had not done before giving birth to my favourite nephew.

I had grown up with my mother making crazy statements (often obvious ones) and had just put this down to it being her. After my sister had her baby, if occurred to me that Mum had been smart in her youth (her school reports, and discussion with friends and family from that era confirm this) and had simply lost her marbles (not totally) after giving birth.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my mother and sister very much. I don’t profess that they are totally bonkers, just not as “sharp” as they used to be. And giving birth seems to be, for both of them, the turning point in their lives as intelligent individuals. More than just the impairment during pregnancy, I think it seems to linger…

•

The second podcast was an interview with a Jewish Psychiatrist practicing in Israel, and treating both Israelis and Palestinians. This seemed to set him off on a good path, but he started to throw in some pretty inane language himself, particularly some of the Jungian Jargon (Always Alliterate!!!) and I quickly lost respect for him. It’s the first Podcast for a long time I have skipped the end of.

His discussion of recurring dreams was a particular annoyance of mine: I can’t find the exact quote in the transcript, but it was something like:

The thing about recurring dreams is that they are telling the mind something. And the fact they repeat is because the mind “just doesn’t get it.”

I’m still of the impression that dreams have very little relation to reality. If we can see something in our dreams, it is only because we want to. Dreams are like “random events”, or spring cleaning of the brain’s circuitry. Any relationship to real life is only because there are all these events, images, sounds, memories, and our mind just attempts to fit them into what it perceives as reality. Forcing the facts to fit a theory, as it were.

Anyway, he started to go on with a bit of rubbish after that - I’d arrived home (hardest ride I’d had for a while, pretty much head-wind all of the way home, with a bit of a rise for the last kilometre or so), and often while I continue to the end, I skipped it.

•

Now, before I get too many nasty comments about the first part - please note that I’ve deliberately played it up a little. My family are not loopy (perhaps just a little, but that’s a whole other story). I’m merely stating the anecdotal evidence I have seen about cognitive deterioration during, and indeed after, pregnancy. And, I have some other cases, but I’m saving them for my paper on the topic… after all, Fraud, ahem, Freud, Jung’s mentor, based all of his theories on a handful of cases.

I’m not getting them as Podcasts, since the ones on iTunesU are already pre-tagged, and the courses I’m getting are not currently running, so I don’t need to automatically get new ones.

The only tagging fault I’ve found is that they are missing:

Which I think are important for this type of thing.

I’ve also noticed some Podcast/downloads via iTunes can be paused and resumed, unfortunately, these ones can’t.

Finally, a neat point is that it automatically creates a new Playlist, and a new Playlist Folder.

Snow • Alex Lloyd • Black The Sun ★★★

This site begins with three puzzles requiring a little bit of knowledge to solve: the first one took me a matter of minutes, although I had to use Google to find who actually said the quote. Reorganising the puzzle pieces was pretty simple, and my first guess (of Einstein, who died in 1955) was incorrect. The second puzzle took a little longer, but only because I didn’t have access to a 1 dollar bill. Again, Google helped out in finding out the latin phrases on the back. I didn’t bother with the date, as there were only a couple of characters used in this simple substitution cipher that were from this section of the key. Then, as there were a finite number of possible answers to the puzzle, I just tried several of them before I lucked on the right answer. I can’t even remember what answer I put in…

The third one took some thinking. Originally, I had tried one method, and for some reason got fixated on this. It wasn’t until I thought a little more about it, and expanded my ideas a little that I solved it. I had at this stage obtained a small audience of students, and they were very impressed with my solving of the puzzle. I can guarantee that in total, the three puzzles took me around 20 minutes to solve. And that was with some breaks as students needed assistance. If I’d been at a machine with a python interpreter installed, I probably would have done it in about 5.

Finally, I was into the website proper. I read a little about what cforce.org was from the about link, but then happened on the link just above it. This opened up a new page, with three symbols that can be drag-n-dropped into two spaces, which then activates a button. Depending on the combination of the symbols, a different page is loaded.

Since there are three symbols, and there needs to be at least one symbol in a space to activate the button, there are twelve possible pages that can be loaded:

- 1
1 -
- 2
2 -
- 3
3 -
1 2
2 1
1 3
3 1
2 3
3 2

Where - is no symbol, and 1,2,3 are the three different symbols.

This however, just creates more confusion. Several of the pages have email messages, with the addresses suppressed, and rather cryptic content. One contains a list of images, of people (I assume previous members of cforce) with their faces blacked out. Another has a movie, which I didn’t watch, and yet another has a page filled with 1s and 0s. I may get around to decoding this, if I feel like it.

There is also a page with a list of articles about games like iLoveBees, which was created by a company to help promote Halo 2 before it launched. Online games, which cross over into real life. Think of The Game with Michael Douglas, and take out the life threatening aspect of it, and that seems to sum it all up. These articles are referenced in one of the email messages I mentioned above.

The other pages contained various images and text - one had a fancy JavaScript setup where hovering over a portion of the invisible image made another part visible. I’ll get into this with Firefox and make all of it visible if WoW doesn’t finish downloading soon. Yet another had a group of white and black boxes arranged into a grid.

So, what’s it all about then? It seems to be a site run by a student club/association at a University somewhere, that pride themselves on being somewhat smarter than the general population. As usual, Uni students always think they are smarter than they actually are. I know, I used to be one…

Everything Freud did that was new was not true,
and everything Freud did that was true was not new.

I can’t remember exactly where I heard it, and my books are all in storage from when I moved house over 12 months ago, but I just love it. Google tells me Schamcher said it was “a Norwegian doctor,” but I’m unable to find anything concrete.

So why the sudden resurgance in Freud? Apparently, there’s some 140 year anniversary - can’t remember if it’s birth, death or something else, but in the past week, there have been two programmes on Radio National that have mentioned him. I haven’t listened to the All in the Mind programme, but the Science Show mention was pretty scathing:

Freud decided that these accounts by Emma Eckstein, and other women like her, of having been seduced by a man in their childhood were simply fantasies, they were the product of hysterical, unconscious lying, self-deception.

What’s quite interesting is that this quote, and the whole interview in this episode is from twenty years ago. Freud has consistently been outed as a fraud, and has in many cases set back Psychology and Psychiatry back decades. Still we have not learned, and people continue to believe that because Freud said something, it must be so.

Even a quick search for some articles criticising Freud on Google resulted in more that sounded like an attack on his critics, rather than actual well balanced criticism. Little mention is made of the extremely limited sample size of his studies. I recall some mention that his theories were based on evidence presented using four patients. Possibly, these could have been representative, but that is a fairly small sample by any account.

Similarly, Freud pushed for his theories to be scientific, but they are anything but. They aim to explain everything, similar to creationism, and are not falsifiable. That is, like creationism, two opposing outcomes, which must be mutually exclusive, can both be explained by the one theory. It is not possible to make proper predictions using theories like this. And that’s using the vernacular theory, rather than the more scientific meaning of the term.

Freud’s beliefs and teachings were misogynistic, and hark back to a darker time. They discount the evidence provided, and the article linked to above seems to indicate that Freud was aware his theories were based on flawed information. This is worse than a deluded creationist who truly believes that God created everything, as it shows a willingness to tell nasty little lies to further one’s own work, or protect one’s friends. This is deplorable, especially as it was at the expense of others.

Similar in scope to Aristotle, Freud has caused severe problems to the rate of development of a branch of science. Perhaps we have caught on to the flaws and falsehoods in a shorter time frame, or Freud’s influence is less because of the already large body of knowledge in other fields, but Aristotle’s ideas led to the dark ages. I’m glad this was averted post-Freud.

•

I think I got a little carried away towards the end of this, but I enjoyed writing it, so I’m going to leave it all there.

Last friday, I found this out.

Some students, a couple from Scotch College, and a couple I take to be from Underdale High School, got off the train at my station, and one of them proceeded to run back towards the nearest level crossing. He squatted down over the state railway line, which seems to be marginally lower gauge than the local system. I was getting relatively close to where this boy was, but I don’t think he’d seen me. He reached his arms out perpendicular to the tracks, and pressed something, I assume a coin, onto each of the tracks.

The lights then began to flash, and the gate started to come down.

By this time, I had approached to being about two metres away from the boy. He saw that I wasn’t one of his cronies, and jumped up. A car had pulled up at the tracks, and thinking a train was coming, had stopped. The driver had their window down, and the boy said to him that no train was coming.

I continued to walk, but as I was about 10 metres past the crossing, I took my phone out, and turned around and very blatantly took a photograph of the group.

I very shortly turned around the corner into the street I walk down on the way home, and I think the gang had begun to disperse, perhaps fearing I had called some sort of authorities, as I did hold my phone to my ear.

•

So, what is it that makes the signals know when a train is coming?

I assume that there is some sort of Ohm-meter, that measures the resistance between the two rails of the track. Normally, this would be very large, as they are not connected. It should, in theory, be almost infinite. That is, it should be an open circuit.

When a train approaches, it acts as a conductor between the two rails. Since the rails have a resistance of some sort, albeit quite small, it would be measurable over the distance a train needs to be away from the crossing to trigger it. This, and the fixed resistance of the actual train would be a threshold. When this threshold is breached, and whenever the resistance of the system is less than this value, the lights would flash, and the gate would come down.

The whole time the train is going past, it would hold the resistance below this value. After it has gone past, and exceeded a certain distance, the resistance would then have gone above the threshold, and the system would revert to the open state.

I’m not sure where I read about this, but these images are awesome: Photos by Igor Siwanowicz