Rocky Point Water Temperature and the Failure of a Defintion of Rationality

What is rationality? As good a definition as any I've heard is: someone who doesn't give away money.

A preference set [A>B, B>C, and C>A] is not logical because you would pay money to trade C for A, B for C, and then A for B until you've spent all your money to end up no better than you began. Unfortunately, one of the first results of game theory is that exactly such a preference set can be expressed by groups of (at least three) voters, each of whom has an individually rational preference set. For example, in a recent election, voters preferred Gore to Bush, Bush to McCain, and McCain to Gore.

If the human mind is composed of parts that interact or "vote" to make decisions, with no Kantian Captain making a final logical check, individual actions would be just as irrational. And thanks to Nicole, I am now convinced that rationality is overrated -- it doesn't explain human actions. The reasons we give for our actions ARE important (we can't look just at actions for meaning) even if they're not logical. If our reasons are nonsensical, that itself is no reason (or at most, a reason on par with any other possibly countervailing "reason") to discount our words.

Furthermore, logic can be used to force certain responses, for example, giving 100 dollars away: True or false: you will either give me 100 dollars or you will answer false? If you say false, you are an irrational liar, no better than the man who trades A for B, then B for C, and (because he prefers C to A), C for A. But if you say true, you didn't say false, so you have to give me 100 dollars. To which Sanjay issued his infamous "f*ck you!!!!!!!!!!!!!".

How could it be rational to give away money?

Disease and pH

What is your pH?

"Whereas the median pH value in normal tissues is 7.5, in many tumor tissues the extracellular pH is more acidic, and may be as low as 5.8 (Tannock and Rotin, 1989).

"This is a consequence of a high rate of lactic acid production in tumors even under aerobic conditions (Tannock and Rotin, 1989; Boyer and Tannock, 1992; Gatenby and Gillies, 2004).
The intracellular pH of mammalian cells is normally maintained within a narrow range, i.e. from 7.1 to 7.3, and is tightly regulated by specific ion exchangers and this also holds for tumor cells (Moolenaar et al., 1984; Boyer and Tannock, 1992). As a consequence, tumor cells are exposed to a pH gradient, which can enhance the toxicity of certain weak acid drugs and impair the uptake of weak bases (Tannock and Rotin, 1989; Boyer and Tannock, 1992;
Kozin et al., 2001; Mahoney et al., 2003; Greijer et al., 2005). The idea that cancer is a disease of pH and anaerobic conditions was first proposed by Nobel laureate Otto Warburg, more than 50 years ago.

Different proteins have isoelectric points (are most stable) at different pHs. The near-neutral pI region has presumably been depleted by selective pressure -- cytoplasmic proteins are least soluble at their isoelectric point. Proteins may be evolutionarily trapped on one side of the valley or the other.

For example, human pepsin A has a pI of 3.4, consistent with its expression in the highly acidic stomach; human cytochrome c has a pI of 9.6 appropriate to binding negatively-charged membrane phospholipid.


A theory of diet related to the effects of foods on body pH:
In addition to testing bodily fluid pH, the doctor recommends: respiratory rate and breath holding ability as key indicators of the pH of body fluids. This has to with the role of CO2 in the acidification of blood. "A person with an acid imbalance will generally have a resting respiratory rate of 19 or more and if they take a deep breath will only be able to hold it for 40 seconds or less. Why? Because carbon dioxide is used by the
body to regulate pH."

Orwellian Cognitive Science

The scariest thing about cognitive science is its discovery and quantization of human behavior -- raising the specter of controlling human behavior. Behaviorism is dormant, not dead, and at casual luncheons graduate students and their advisers wonder aloud if that wasn't the ghost of BF Skinner they saw over near the punch bowl. Advertisers already correlate our unconscious (evolutionarily-based?) color biases to make us think orange and blue detergent is cheap and powerful.

[insert more examples]

If you're not scared by biology, the science of understanding the secret underpinnings of life, you don't understand it. And if you're not scared of neuroscience, the science of understanding the secret foundations of the human mind, you don't understand it. Our only hope is that it may prove impossible to understand.

Our own physical body possesses a wisdom which we who inhabit the body lack. We give it orders which make no sense. Henry Miller

Lesson Plan #1. Relationships: Analogy and Resemblance

Relationships: analogy, resemblance

In education, we teach you what kind of assumptions you can make.
Everyone has seen the kid who sees a bird and then thinks that he can fly.
This is false.
Unless he can generate sufficient lift to overcome gravity. Orbits, bernouli, etc.

Now: correspondence. When are two things equal? Equivalent: right and left hand.
Cardinal number (e.g. 5 or infinity) natural numbers vs. transfinite cardinal numbers
Name an infinite set: the set of all natural numbers
Denumberably infinite set is given a name: aleph-null.
Other examples: all even numbers (show correspondence)
All pairs of natural numbers; [therefore rational fractions]
Arranged diagonally: ((1,1)>(2,1)>(1,2)>(1,3)>(2,2)>(3,1)>(4,1))

Aren’t all infinite sets denumerably infinite then?
No: real numbers
Start simple: between 0 and 1
Make a correspondence: 0.20746….=1
0.16238….=2
0.97126….=3

Until you have a countably infinite list. But now construct a new decimal whose first digit is different from 1, whose second is different from 2, whose third is different from 3, etc. Continue until you have a decimal that is different from the infinite number already given. Obviously you could do this at least 8 other times, and then a new order would suffice to let you do it again, and again, and again…

Thus the set of natural numbers and the set of real numbers are not equivalent
The set of real numbers is called transcendental numbers. It is equivalent both to a line (or any size) and the plane(!), or a space of any dimension.

A new tool for making bigger infinities: The set of all subsets.

What if biologists studied the wind?

"Biocultural Diversity"

"Areas of high biodiversity (diversity of plant and animal species and their habitats) tend to coincide with a high number of distinct ethnic groups speaking different languages."







The Center for Biological Diversity, a Tucson-based group, has recently acknowledged that there needs to be an Endangered Species Act for languages and cultures. For thought-provoking shock value I've included some of my favorite drawings of ice age and post-ice age Europe.

Fractals, manufacturing, and biomimicry

Fractals are interesting -- I just read a story by Oliver Sacks about a boy with autism who could draw perfect replicas of the style of a building, while making mistakes about the number of smokestacks or windows for example. Styles might correspond to some sort of fractal. I do a lot of brain dissections -- the trachea that sheath the brain are obviously fractal, and as I zoom in to get a better look at different structures I see the same patterns repeated over and over. Afterward, if I close my eyes, I see similar fractals that shift -- they are not actual images of what I saw, but imaged generated based on what I saw.

Biomimicry is an interesting field -- lately I've bifurcated from thinking about biomimicry purely in physical or visual (ie the fractals you can look at) ways to thinking about it in terms of systems engineering design. There are a number of japanese design concepts that are now enshrined in American manufacturing. Muda, Poka-Yoke, "Batch and Queue" Vs. "Just in Time" (I think there are japanese words for these also but I can't find them).

I've been thinking alot about HOW science is done, what the bottlenecks are, and how that corresponds to biology. You know the standard gene-->RNA-->protein? I'm wondering how similar that manufacturing process is to the manufacturing of cars. I know mistakes are made and that error-detection systems exist in both. Interestingly, I just learned about the "go/no-go" action initiation checkpoint in the mind/brain. At some point you decide whether or not to move your arm (about 1/2 second before you actually move it, at least in some studies) and that processing step has been localized to an anatomical substrate.

End of the World?

• Declining sperm concentrations
• 1 in 3 children in America today will get diabetes
• Cancer rates
• mental illness rates, % of kids on psychotic medicine
• 80% infected with CMV; latent but we don't know why

awesome maps and references
http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/human-conditions.php

How to Get High Free

[image from book...?]