Random thoughts on science and religion: how to start a flame war

Every week or so I happen upon a new article about how religion is killing science. It's all a bit odd, especially the comments. I'm an outsider here and a bit biased in any case, but it's just mind boggling. All the incentives when it comes to politics and activism seem to be towards yelling something extreme at the top of your lungs. If I were smarter I'd probably just avoid the whole thing.

To me religion is - and should be - a personal thing. It's about community and spiritual well-being. If it helps you understand or do science great! If it helps you in everyday life even better! What is dangerous - and what, I think, many scientists have issues with - is trying to extend these beliefs outside of personal life. Religion should just not influence science policy and science education. Moral arguments certainly can. We probably shouldn't endorse testing bio-weapons on people, for instance. But these arguments don't need to be religious.

Anywho... *cue Jeopardy music*

If you answered (A) "within the next 10 years" you might be right! It looks like God will overtake Science fairly soon.


Interestingly, science seems to be incredibly well correlated with being in school. Which makes sense - you have to be pretty nerdy to think about science while opening presents. (Note: if you are now thinking about optimal present opening algorithms you are qualified as "pretty nerdy")


Finally for completeness...


unfortunately Google trends doesn't go back far enough to see the huge spikes in queries for when Newton, Darwin, and Einstein were publishing.

Stream Graph Code

Lee Byron made a really cool visualization algo a while ago that's been making the rounds on the internet and NYT. I couldn't find any code for it, so I went ahead and wrote some.



I'm not totally sure how much real value it adds to the data other than making it look super-nice. Maybe that's the only way to get people to pay attention to it, though. -shrug- For comparison here's some data from ManyEyes - Humanitarian aid to a few countries over time. I mashed in a legend from my last post :P



It's a bit blurry (I didn't touch things up in Illustrator), but not to bad for an hour and a half of work.

Code: streamGraph_wrapper.m, plotStackedGraph.m

Not well commented, but short enough to figure out I hope.

(the evil that is) Matlab

Oof. I just got back from a somewhat bizarre conference on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's hard to beat the location! but the conference itself was a bit of a mess. My boss and I tried to run a hands-on-tutorial using Matlab. Since Matlab is proprietary and doesn't give out nice easy-to-use trial versions, this involved waaay to much work on my part getting everything running.

Matlab really sorta sucks in the licensing department. I'm slowly trying to switch over to using Python, R, and Octave. But Matlab is just so easy for me to use! Instead of learning a bit of R I decided to write a Matlab version of this pretty sweet idea for using the Google Charts API. You just give R (or Matlab in my case) a list of numbers and countries and it spits out a map. Since Matlab (as far as I know) doesn't do mapping, it seems pretty cool.

In any case, here's an example using the same sample data (from ManyEyes) - the percentage of people who say pop vs soda in each state. And also (in lieu of my recent world travel) the annual tourism to various countries.







Here's code and code with test data.

UPDATE: Here's a quirky application of simple mapping - The Seven Deadly Sins.

UPDATE: I also may have been somewhat remiss in insulting my Mathworks overlords. Turns out there's a Matlab Mapping toolbox. Of course... that costs extra.

Amicable Academics Abhor Anonimity

Just wanted to point out some pretty cool/disturbing research on deanonymizing data. There's a new study that takes friend-lists/followings from Flickr and Twitter and shows that even after anonymizing the Twitter data you can figure out the identity of ~1/3 of people just based on their friends in the two services (via Bruce Schneier). So umm... if you think all that tweeting about sandwiches and poop is anonymous... think again!

Also, if anyone there's anyone out there not-sick of immigration visualizations the New York Times has a pretty cool one showing how immigrants settled in the US over time (via Flowing Data).

Liferoll 090302

Whew. It's been a long past few days. I'm in Salt Lake City at a ski resort conference. 14+ hrs of science a day. It's a little exhausting. It's nice to meet the faces behind the names, and there were some interesting talks, but I'm definitely going to be sore tomorrow from skiing.

Superuseless Superpowers... brilliant
Is there anybody out there?... nice post from Uncertain Principles

...it's not nearly as much fun to talk about as the other terms in the "Drake Equation." If you use the lack of detectable alien civilizations to talk about the probability of life evolving or the probability of technological civilization surviving, you're a Deep Thinker; if you start talking about detectable signal strengths and propagation delays, you're a great big nerd.

Warai Otoko and What Not

There's a really cool project over at awgh that I played around with this morning (found via hackaday). It takes a video stream and uses processing.org (the same language I used to make that immigration animation) and an interesting looking open source computer vision library, OpenCV, to detect and then hide your face. I'm a big GiTS fan - for those who haven't seen it there's a freakishly complete wiki article on the inspiration behind this one.

That's my boss's backside in the background, btw. For some reason it was intermittently marking it as a face... which was a little awkward when he noticed.

Tips...

• For WinXP you have to add OpenCV to the path manually (System Properties > Advanced > Environment Variables). Adding C:\Program Files\OpenCV\bin.


• had to copy the face detection XML to the processing project folder


• recommend adding opencv.flip( OpenCV.FLIP_HORIZONTAL ); for mirroring

Liferoll 090107

Self Awareness: The Last Frontier by VS Ramachandran - great article on consciousness and the self

...MPD [multiple personality disorder] is often a dubious diagnosis made for medico-legal and insurance purposes and tends to fluctuate from moment to moment. (I have often been tempted to send two bills to an MPD patient to see if he pays both.)

How the city hurts your brain cool article from the boston globe

...caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. [erm, right]

Greening the Ghetto article from the New Yorker feat Van Jones

Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience on Neurocritic ... nice coverage of a scandalous paper in press from Hal Pashler's group that shows how about half of social neuroscience papers are bogus. I'm also presenting this paper in journal club tomorrow :).

starting Neil Gaiman's American Gods