And Slaters Go Plop

…is your Dad with a cap on sideways.

This week saw the launch of the new Sign On campaign. The essence of it is that world leaders are meeting in Copenhagen later this year and by signing up to Sign On we are letting John Key know that we want New Zealand to agree to set a target 40% reduction of emissions by 2020.

The reasons I support this campaign are threefold:

Firstly, the science behind the need for a 40% reduction is clear and strong; anything less is not going to be enough.

Secondly, I don’t have the willpower myself to achieve a 40% reduction and I believe this is one of the roles governments perform; to constrain some of our harmful and selfish urges and to reward behaviour that is mutually beneficial.

And, finally, I see great technological opportunities for our civilisation should we find the motivation to innovate. I’m confident we’ll come up with energy, transport, agriculture and production technologies far superior to what we have now. We just need the will to do so. As I heard someone say, the bronze age didn’t come about because stones became scarce; bronze was a better technology. I think that there is another age waiting for us beyond the oil-and-deforestation age.

I also like the fact that the campaign is saying nothing about how we ought to go about achieving a 40% reduction. That can wait. First we need the will to make a commitment and then we can act on the best advice from our scientists, politicians and economists to see how we will best achieve this target.

So, if you share my opinions on this, head on over to the Sign Up website and add your name to their list of participants. And perhaps let your local MP know where you stand on the issue too. Hopefully enough people will step forward to let our prime minister know that we taking this seriously.

Last year I entered and completed the Auckland Half Marathon. When I started training I could barely run non-stop for 10 minutes but by the time the day of the event rolled around I was able to run the entire 21km without stopping or being hospitalised.

This year I’m doing it again and trying for a better time but thought I’d publish the training regime that I found so useful on the off chance that someone else reading this might benefit.

The essence of the regime is to build up the strength of your muscles in small increments with plenty of rest in between challenging runs to give your body time to heal properly. Most of the runs are only minimally more challenging than the previous ones but the general idea is that you should be able to comfortably chat throughout most of them. It’s a good idea to have an event to work towards and to start the regime 14 weeks out from that event.

All figures are in minutes. Run as slowly as you like but try not to stop. Days marked with (*) indicate hilly runs for building up extra strength (optional). Don’t run if you are sore and think you might do yourself damage. Get some good running shoes and perhaps lightweight shorts and a shirt. Don’t worry about missing some runs but try to keep up with the Sunday ones.

Good luck! It’s totally do-able and you’ll feel pretty amazing after having completed it.

In the last week I’ve encountered my first real taste of the recession. One of my clients went into receivership and liquidation last Friday owing me $18,000 and it’s unlikely that I’ll be getting anything once they’ve liquidated their assets and paid off their secured creditors, etc. And to make matters worse I’ve had to pay around $5000 tax on it because a large portion of it was declared as earnings in the last financial year. I can’t claim that tax back until I can prove beyond doubt that I’ll not receive the money owed to me which will take at least a year.

Still, I have my health, my family, my friends and my home. And it’s only money at the end of the day.

Neil deGrasse Tyson succinctly sums up the scientific method:

Do whatever it takes to not fool yourself when trying to understand the world around you.

(Thank you Ken!)

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ’tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

In attempting to discredit evolution by natural selection, creationists have often described the impossibility of random mutations in DNA being capable of anything beneficial as the equivalent of a tornado in a junkyard accidentally building a 747 or a group of monkeys bashing the keys of a typewriter to successfully write the works of Shakespeare.

And they’re right. If evolution was merely random mutations then it would be unfathomably impossible for life to evolve as it does. But here’s the rub: no evolutionary biologists claim that random mutations alone cause the diversity of life we observe. This is where the crucial natural selection part comes in. Evolution occurs by random mutations, most of them neutral, where any beneficial mutations are selected for by the environment and those successful mutations go on to have more children who will likely inherit those beneficial mutations. And so on and so on.

To illustrate the point, back in 1986 Richard Dawkins in his book, The Blind Watchmaker demonstrated a simple program which he named ‘Weasel‘ as a reference to the concept of monkeys and typewriters and the above quote from Shakespeare. ‘Weasel’ starts with a jumble of letters, spawns ‘children’ from them (i.e. multiple copies), each with slight mutations and selects whichever ‘child’ is the most similar to a target phrase to spawn a new generation of children.

The point of the program was not to demonstrate every aspect of evolution by natural selection (that’s rather too much to ask of a small page of code), just the power of mutation when combined with a selection process as opposed to brute-force random chance.

Below I’ve created a simple version of Dawkins’ program that is limited to a single word and which will, due to the limitations of Javascript and browsers, only attempt a maximum of 500 generations. Have a play around to get a feel for how random mutations can result in very non-random outcomes when there is a selection criteria combined with heritability.

Full screen version

If you know how to run Python and want to check out a version closer to that of the original ‘Weasel’, take a look at the one created by fellow blogger and PhD student in evolutionary genetics, David, over at The Ativism. His is not limited to 500 generations like mine and he includes the newer concept of the option of ‘locking’ successful mutations.

Fight!

Sal and I like to avoid TV shows while they are, er, showing on TV and, instead, like to get them out on DVD and blob out for days on end without the constant stream of adverts and without the delay of a week between episodes.

For many years, people who’s opinions on films I value greatly have been telling me I really ought to get into Battlestar Galactica (BSG). I’ve never been into watching sci-fi but enjoy the occasional well-written sci-fi novel so it made sense to give it a go. And so we did.

Now, for fans of BSG this is probably going to hurt a little. I apologise in advance.

The coolest thing about sci-fi (as compared to, say, fantasy) is that you sort of have to work within the limits of the known laws of physics which is not all that limiting as it leaves the imagination wide open for some really creative concepts. Sure, some boundaries are overstepped, mainly the whole issue of getting around in this giant universe of ours where almost every sci-fi writer will invoke some form of instantaneous zipping from place to place. But, other than these understandable exceptions, most of the concepts should be plausible.

BSG is a bit quirky in that people still use telephones with cords aboard their space craft but are capable of teleporting willy-nilly across the universe. I quite like this aspect though. It works. It’s also got some interesting interplay between characters. And for those who have not already given thought to what makes a human a human and whether a being that is made qualifies there are some intriguing concepts too. However…

A good friend of mine said “the coolest thing is the way the space fights don’t make any noise!!1!”. But, Simon, they do make noise. All the time. Even their little side-puffers make little side-puffing noises. For frack’s sake, they managed to get this right back in 1968. Perhaps the lack of noise is only in comparison with the skwarking of the fighters in Star Wars but they definitely still make noises in the noiseless vacuum of space in BSG.

And what’s with the fact that every bit of paper has it’s corners clipped? Is the printing ship run by bored-but-OCD staff? I’ve operated a guillotine in a print shop and there’s a very valid reason for why books and other forms of paper have corners.

There is a scene where Lee has landed on a windy and forsaken planet and is dragged along the ground by his parachute, painfully hitting his legs against rocks. He struggles to cut the cords of his parachute and finally manages to do so before breaking any more bones. You can feel his sense of relief. I turned to Sal and said, “well there’s something, if this had been any other cheesy sci-fi he’d have narrowly avoided a massive precipice”. I spoke too soon. Right then the camera pans out and up… strike three, you’re out.

So, I’ve reached the end of season one. Sal abandoned it halfway through but I feel I’ve given it a fair trial.

And in the red corner. We’ve just got out the first DVD of season one of Dexter, we’re only two episodes in and we’re hooked. Dexter is a sociopath (or is that psychopath? I never remember the difference) who lacks feelings but charmingly, yet insightfully, understands the social niceties ordinary people need to get along. Oh, and he butchers people who’ve (literally) gotten away with murder.

I feel a little bad for bagging BSG. It’s got a lot going for it and my frustrations are slightly exaggerated for the sake of the telling. But, alas, it’s up against Dexter for a share of our viewing time and Dexter has neatly dismembered BSG and kept a drop of its blood on a slide as memorabilia.

Dexter wins.

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Here’s a video that has been on the InterTubes for a while now but it’s a good example of tilt-shifting done properly. Well, almost properly; the helicopter during the rescue should have remained in sharp focus as it was on the same plane as the section of water which was in focus. I also like the fact that it’s sped up a bit as it adds to the feeling of the surreal. Nice song too.

Tilt-shifting is a photographic effect where a faraway shot is artificially blurred in such a way as to give it a depth of field effect usually only found in close-up photography. This is because lenses (cameras and eyes) have different depths of field depending on how far away the object is. [A good demonstration of this depth of field effect is to move your head closer to the screen, close one eye and hold your finger up halfway in between your eye and these words. Focus on the words and you'll see that your finger is fuzzy. Now, leaving your finger where it is in relation to the screen, gradually move your head back and you'll see that both the screen and the finger become reasonably sharp.]

When used properly it can produce surreal shots with a hint of cutesy nostalgia.

Now, wind the clock back to the mid-nineties and to the glory days of lens flares.

An often unwanted effect of photography in bright light was that little orbs  (i.e. lens flares) would appear on the photo due to the source of the light hitting the lens directly. It wasn’t long before photo editing programs like PhotoShop realised that some artists were using this effect to give a shiny thing a bit more ‘bling’ and before you could say “Bob’s your sugardaddy” wannabe artists (myself included) were putting lens flares on anything and everything. Including things that didn’t shine. Like fur for example. Want to make your cat look more expensive? Put a big ol’ lens flare on its shoulder.

Return to the present and we have the same thing happening with tilt-shifting.

If you have, say, a photo like the above, the tilt-shift effect works pretty well because when you track vertically up the image the actual horizontal depth of field is fairly consistent. But imagine the same photo where one of the people in the crowd in the foreground is holding up a banner that takes up half of the right side of the photo. Applying a gradual blur-everything-vertically-away-from-the-middle will mean that the bottom of his banner will be blurred (as it should be because he’s in the foreground and the focal point is somewhere out on the field) but the middle of the banner will be nice and crisp which simply never happens in real miniature photography.

The crux of the matter is, inappropriate use of tilt-shifting is exactly as silly as whapping a lens flare on your cat’s shoulder. Learn from my lens flare crimes. Just because it can be done it doesn’t mean it should be done.