And Slaters Go Plop

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.

(Note: an updated version is available in a new post, Methinks it is [still] like a weasel)

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.