And Slaters Go Plop

On the evening of October 11 this year a Maori ritual for lifting a curse was held for 22 year old Janet Moses in Wainuiomata. The ritual was attended by about 40 people and lasted until 8am the following morning where Janet finally died by drowning. She had multiple grazes on her arms and torso and a neighbour reported hearing noises like “banging on a wall” throughout the night. Her death was reported to police at 5.30pm later that day.
The family believed that there was a curse, or makutu, on Janet because some bad things had happened to people around her, i.e. a relative had become sick.

Instead of outright condemming these kinds of barbaric ceremonies, the archdecon of the Maori Anglican Church said “It’s a very difficult process. I’m personally very wary of removing them [curses]“. It appears the issue for him is not a question of whether curses exist but how difficult they are to remove.

Curses don’t exist in the real world, neither do demons, angels, tree spirits, fairies, gobblins, desert djin, ghosts or gods. They do exist however. They exist in the minds of the people who believe in them and that can make them almost as real as if they were in the physical world.

How do I know this? Two main reasons: 1. These various supernatural creatures are confined to cultural (and, often, geographical) boundaries which means they spread from mind to mind like a language or a story, and 2. There is no evidence in the physical world that they exist.

There has been a ton of study done on how the human brain is wired to personalise inanimate objects and to try to give purpose to otherwise random events. You will have experienced this for yourself if you’ve ever see a cloud or wood bark or an illusion where you immediately see a person’s face. It’s uncanny but we now realise that the tree isn’t trying to tell us something - there are lots of patterns and we’re wired to recognise faces because faces are important to us. Likewise with giving purpose to random events; a Tsunami kills quarter of a million people and we just know there had to be some reason; you win a raffle, the lottery and you get an unexpected tax refund all in the same week - someone is clearly watching over you; the eye is amazingly complex - it must have been designed by some super being, a god perhaps; bad things start happening to those around you - you must be cursed or something.

These interpretations of randomness are a result of an inbuilt pattern recognition all humans have. It’s been useful to us in our evolutionary past - our ancestors passed on these attributes in their genes because by recognising patterns and being able to recognise that other people and animals had intentions they had a greater change of survival.

We’re really very good at it but that can be our weakness. Especially when we over-recognise intentions and patterns and throw away our more recently acquired logic and reason in favour of primal fears and rituals.

So, how do we stop curse-lifting rituals from happening? Education and the teaching of critical thinking has to be of some use. Also, people like Dr Hone Kaa, the archdecon of the Maori Anglican Church, who provide safe harbour and lend authority to all forms of harmful superstition need to be re-educated or removed from their positions of influence by their seniors. If their seniors or church authorities are not willing to do this then we as a country need to stop encouraging the spread of these beliefs by removing tax breaks and any other existing privileges usually reserved to promote beneficial causes.

Superstition has been helpful to us in the distant past but it’s, literally, killing us now. Let’s drop it and move on.

I can sense the mighty stirrings of the creationist herd so let me be the first to say it. ‘Evilution’ has reared it’s ugly head again. First it was Nazi Germany and now, after a long and bloody history, in Finland a teenager has become the latest proponent of the callous hatred that is endorsed by the followers of Darwin.

From TFA:

…showing him pointing a gun and declaring himself a “social Darwinist” who would “eliminate all who I see unfit”.

This wouldn’t have happened if Intelligent Design were taught in schools. How many more children need to die?

——

On a serious note though, my thoughts go out to all affected by this tragedy, including the family of Pekka-Eric who will be having to come to terms with not only the anger of their neighbours but the loss of a son.

Today the release of the new New Zealand Curriculum was announced and I have to say I’m very impressed.

Included in the new curriculum is a new section on values where our upcoming generations will be taught: (from the website)

Through their learning experiences, students will learn about:

• their own values and those of others
• different kinds of values, such as moral, social, cultural, aesthetic, and economic values
• the values on which New Zealand’s cultural and institutional traditions are based
• the values of other groups and cultures.

Through their learning experiences, students will develop their ability to:

• express their own values
• explore, with empathy, the values of others
• critically analyse values and actions based on them
• discuss disagreements that arise from differences in values and negotiate solutions
• make ethical decisions and act on them.

This is the best news I’ve heard for a long time. Just a couple of days ago I was discussing the education system with my brother-in-law who is a teacher and I expressed how I wished that kids were taught values and critical thinking.

I’m extremely happy and if this post is ever read by anyone who has been involved in the new curriculum I would like to pass on my personal thanks - you’ve restored my faith in our system.

I look forward to a new generation of critical thinkers!

Well, the waiting is over - here are the results of the Primary Perception Experiment:

Over the last six days I have been regularly standing in front of six envelopes containing a leaf each and focussing positive thoughts on just one of the envelopes that was chosen at random by the throw of a dice.

I got Sally to open the envelopes and place the leaves on top of their corresponding envelope. I then asked her to pick which one she thought looked the healthiest and whether it was markedly healthier than the others. She picked leaf number six (which appeared only slightly healthier probably due to the fact that it was the biggest leaf of the range) and stated that it wasn’t markedly healthier than the others. She then opened the envelope with the number of the leaf I was focussing my attention on and confirmed that the leaf corresponding to that number was not noticeably different to the others.

Here are the leaves after six days.

Leaves 1, 2 and 3. Number three was the randomly selected leaf that I lavished positive thoughts on for six days.

Leaves (3), 4, 5 and 6. Leaf number 6 was the one picked as being the healthiest by a very slim margin.

Conclusion:

There was no noticeable difference between the leaf that was the focus of positive thoughts and the others. I remained optimistic throughout the experiment and even began to suspect that it was actually working about half way through due to the observation that the envelope that the leaf was in that I was focussing on appeared to be warping less than the others. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when it came to the ‘reveal’.

The friend who initially suggested this experiment mentioned in response to my request for thoughts on the setup that publishing photos of the leaves at the first step may have tainted the outcome by allowing any people who saw the photo to have interfered. I suspect that even if this were the case you would have to have at least six people projecting their positive thoughts to each of the leaves for the experiment to have turned out so evenly. And surely proximity would have an effect?

From this experiment I would have to say that the theory that projecting positive thoughts at a detached leaf keeps it from deteriorating faster than other, similar leaves was a failure.

If anyone knows of a reason why this experiment may have been flawed I would suggest that you try the experiment yourself (minus the flaws) and, if you have success, rerun the experiment a couple of times. If you consistently get positive results please let me know - I would love to give it a try.

Until then I’ll avoid the embarrassment of standing in front of dead leaves and thinking positive thoughts.

I have a couple of good friends who believe that there is some kind of interconnection between living things - commonly called Primary Perception.

I had lunch with one of them yesterday and he said he’d tried an experiment many years ago where he had placed a number of leaves in separate envelopes and focussed positive thoughts on one of them over a period of time and when he removed them from their envelopes the one that had been the focus was noticeably more healthy than the others.

So, I decided that it would be a fairly easy experiment to replicate with a fairly simple claim to test. Rather than dismissing it out of hand, and in the name of true scepticism, I am going to perform the following experiment and record the results regardless of the outcome:

The claim:

If you think positive thoughts toward a pruned leaf over a period of time the leaf will respond by remaining healthier than the control leaves that don’t receive the same positive focus.

The setup:

I have selected six similar-sized new-growth leaves from a single area of a hedge and cut the stems at the same location.

I numbered six identical envelopes and got Sally (my lovely assistant) to randomly place a leaf in each envelope and seal the envelopes.

I then threw a dice to choose which envelope I will focus my attention on, wrote the number on a piece of paper and sealed it in an envelope in the drawer beneath the leaves. No one else knows which number was thrown.

In Progress:

I will continue to send positive thoughts toward the leaf in the selected envelope over the next week or so without opening any of the envelopes. The thoughts will be a mixture of happiness and goodwill toward the leaf as well as thoughts of nourishment and growth.

When the time is up I will get Sally to take the leaves out of their envelopes and have her determine if any of them look noticeably healthier than the others and which one/s they are. Without knowing the results I will then tell her which one I was focussing on and she will tell me whether there was any correlation. I will then take photos of the results and update this blog posting (probably on Wednesday 24th October).

If the results are that the one I was focussing on is noticeably healthier than the others it will be counted as a probable success and I will repeat the test to see if I can replicate the results. If I can replicate the results I will probably commit a significant portion of my life to researching the phenomenon.

If anyone has any issues with the methodology or any suggestions please let me know.

[edit: I've published the results in a new post]

“Man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.” - Thomas Jefferson 1822

After experimenting with CakePHP, Zend, Ruby on Rails, Django, Turbogears, Pylons and DotNetNuke I have given up on lumbering MVC frameworks. The kind of work I do is either too small or too specialised and using a MVC framework is either massive overkill or I have to spend days trying to hack the code to join a database table in just the way I want it or connect to a webservice.

This kind of sweeping statement is not going to earn me a lot of friends. The people who are into these frameworks are devout to say the least.

Probably my biggest gripe is that the whole idea of a MVC framework is to have separation of Model, View and Controller but if you ever build a site using one of these frameworks and attempt to uncouple these components you’ll quickly see that the touted separation is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The idea of having a templating language is inspiring but the fact that there is no defined standard for templating means that Smarty only works with PHP, Kid only works with Python and so on. I take it back; XSLT is a standard but it’s got to be the ugliest, most convoluted language out there.

Defining your model is exciting when you’re starting a Hello World project from scratch but can be pretty tiring when you’ve had to make it fit an existing database that doesn’t conform to the pluralised, *_id-ised requirements of your particular framework. And on top of that you have to relearn your particular framework’s substitutions for the SQL you’ve already had to learn. “DRY” anyone?

Don’t get me wrong, the MVC way of working makes a lot of sense. I use mod_rewrite call a Controller file which in turn feeds data from my Model class to my View class. But I don’t make my Model speak anything other than SQL if I’m accessing a MySQL database and I use <?php ?> blocks in my templates if I’ve chosen PHP as my language du jour. Why learn two additional, less powerful languages?

I agree that there are many situations where you would be better off developing a large website using a traditional MVC framework but I would be under any illusion that it’ll be any more flexible a year down the track.

For me, redemption would come in the form of a standardised templating language and a standardised set of classes for models that easily integrate into existing databases as well as being able to generate new ones.

If you’re creating a small or a fiddly website then I would advise you separate your data from your logic from your presentation but steer clear of the lumbering behemoths that occupy the MVC space at the moment.

A false dichotomy (also known as a false dilemma) is where you are asked to choose an option when there are, in fact, more options available.

An example of this would be where I may tell you that Bob claimed he got an email from Jane saying that she is a Librarian. Here I would then ask you if you believed that Jane was:

• A genuine Librarian
• A lair
• A lunatic

You are being made to choose from a selection of options that do not cover all the possibilities. What about:

• The email might have been spam that looked like Jane sent it
• Jane might not exist
• Jane might have misspelled “Libran”
• Bob might have been lying to me
• Bob might have misread “Libran”
• I might have been lying to you
• And so on

It’s important that when you are presented with a finite number of choices that you make sure that those are the only choices available before jumping on any bandwagons.

It’s always good to end on a quote from a great thinker:

“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause)”. - George Dubya Bush

Applause.

After a recent conversation with a friend who has been quite taken by a couple of the many water-powered car / free energy concepts I decided to research the topics properly.

Common traits amongst people who make free energy claims are:

• There is a grand conspiracy - the CIA has been making people ‘disappear’ or some such
• Scientists are too set in their ways to accept revolutionary ideas
• Big industry is suppressing the technologies

Something else all of the free energy people have in common is that they are not willing to release their discoveries to the general public for verification.

Here’s my advice to any would-be free energy proponent: Make your discovery public.

It’s that simple. If you reveal your secrets all your problems with the CIA will go away, scientists will be put to shame for being so hard-headed and the big petro-chemical corporations will be brought to their knees.

You’ll win eternal fame. Your name will be held in higher esteem than Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein. You will change the planet (for the good) for all time.

I guess what I’m saying here is “Put up or shut up”.