Strangely enough, despite being 36 years old this year, the upcoming Malaysian general election is the going to be the first one for which I will be in the country as an adult of voting age. Since Malaysian politics bore me in general so this post won’t be about that. Instead, this post will deal with a good question posted by someone in the general LYN stock market trading thread: historically speaking, how does the local stock market respond to elections? Are there any patterns at all? Out of curiosity, I spent some time making charts of the KLCI for the six months before and six months after each of the four previous elections. So here they are:
The Rifters Trilogy
So it took some time, but I’ve finished Peter Watts’ Rifters trilogy, consisting of the novels Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth. That’s quite a lot of text, especially the last book which is as hefty as its name suggests, so much so that the dead tree version was split up into two volumes for commercial reasons. After liking Blindsight so much, I just had to read more stuff by Watts even though I knew this prior work wasn’t as well received. Unfortunately even with reduced expectations, I found the trilogy disappointing. It has a ton of cool ideas and a unique post-apocalyptic setting but the story as a whole just doesn’t gel together.
It’s hard to describe all three books in one post without delving into spoilers, so potential readers might want to keep out. The story begins in the middle of the 21st century. Due to global warming, the end of the cheap energy era as fossil fuels finally run out and global conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, the future is decidedly not rosy. Rising sea waters and frequent environmental catastrophes have caused the coasts of North America to turn into refugee zones. Cyberspace grows increasingly wild as self-evolving malware become ever more sophisticated.
Recent Interesting Science Articles (Feb ’12)
February may the shortest month of the year but there’s certainly no shortage of interesting science-based news. Maybe because it’s a leap year?
- The New York Times has a story about how Alzheimer’s spreads from brain cell to brain cell like an infection. What’s particularly interesting here is that it’s not being spread by viruses or bacteria, but by distorted proteins known as tau. I pay special attention to all news articles about Alzheimer”s as it’s an especially terrifying disease to me.
- Also from The New York Times, the next article talks about how people who suffer from dyslexia, which is usually associated with impaired reading and learning ability, may benefit from unexpected side effects. In particular, people with dyslexia seem to have superior peripheral vision and can process an entire image at a glance, as opposed to specific details in an image, more quickly. The article then goes on to speculate if these improved abilities have any real world applications.
- Nanotech robots circulating in your blood stream to fix your body has been a science-fiction staple since at least the 1966 film, Fantastic Voyage. This article from BBC News covers research into an attempt to build similar devices out of strands of DNA molecules. Unlike the film, the proposed DNA robot doesn’t come equipped with a tiny surgical laser. Instead, its mooted use is to deliver exactly determined dosages of drug molecules to pinpoint sites in the body.
- Everyone knows that 2012 is a leap year, but did you know that there are also leap seconds? As this article from The Economist explains, leap seconds are inserted into our timekeeping to account for the very slight discrepancy between the strict definition of 86,400 seconds in a day and irregularities in the Earth’s rotations. Without this contrivance, our account of time would eventually fall out of sync with perceive day/night cycles, though hundreds of years for it to become noticeable in day-to-day life. This system however may soon be coming to an end as it is inconvenient for computers around the world to have to manually reset their time every so often whenever a leap second needs to be added. Instead, the powers that be seem likely to allow the discrepancies to add up and fix them in one go later.
- When we think about planets, our first impression is that all planets are like the Earth, in that they are part of fixed system orbiting around a star. This article from the Stanford Report says that this picture is probably untrue and that by far most planets that exist in the universe are actually nomad planets that wander through space without orbiting a star. Such planets may even be big enough and have enough of an atmosphere to support life, relying on radioactive sources and tectonic movement to generate heat energy. Attention all science-fiction writers, update your space exploration paradigms, stat!
Favorite Films (No. 3)
Once again, more than two years have passed since I last time I wrote one of these posts. Check out the first of these from back in 2007 here and my update from 2009 here. All the usual caveats apply: favorite films are not best films and the date that this post is made has nothing to do with the release dates of the films featured herein. Always consider these lists to be an addendum to previous lists, not a replacement. And since everyone hates reading long prefaces, let’s get right down to it and just refer to the previous posts if you’re still confused.
Spoilers may follow so consider yourself warned.
Continue reading Favorite Films (No. 3)
Blindsight
One of the QT3 and now Broken Forum regulars mentioned Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight in passing in the dualism / nature of consciousness thread I’d previously referenced. This was when the discussion turned to the subject of p-zombies and it turns out this novel has a thing or two to say on that particular topic. Since the book is available for free on the author’s website it was easy enough to check it out. It’s been such a riveting read that I’ve done little else save finish the book over the past few days. It was only after I’ve finished the book and looked up more info on the author that I realized he’s the same guy who briefly got famous on the Internet last year for being infected with necrotising fasciitis, complete with some very lurid photos on his blog.
Blindsight’s premise is a first contact scenario set in the near future. One day, over sixty-five thousand micro-satellites show up unannounced to presumably perform an exhaustive survey of Earth, destroying themselves in the process. Now if this were Star Trek, that would be the cue to break out the champagne bottles, sing kumbaya and welcome the aliens with open arms. But Watts comes from the Stephen Hawking school of extraterrestrial contact, not Gene Roddenberry. As a character in the novel states, technology exists only to tame nature and nature is basically everything that is not your own species. Therefore technology implies belligerence.
The Book of Eli
I was probably among the earliest to hear about this film if only because the story was written by Gary Whitta, a prominent QT3 member, and he posted about the project years before it made it onto the silver screen. It sounded like a standard Hollywood action movie, with some religious overtones that I usually dislike, so I didn’t make watching it a priority. So when I finally did watch it, I was pleasantly surprised by how much nuance it has and how intelligently it handles the religious theme.
For those who don’t know, Whitta was involved in founding the UK edition of PC Gamer magazine, so he has deep roots in videogaming way before he made it big in Hollywood. He’s also a big fan of Fallout 3 and as a gamer, I’m ticked by how it was an unmistakable source of inspiration for this film. There’s the obvious monochromatic look of the film for one thing and the concept of a heavily-armed lone wanderer walking across the post-apocalyptic landscape on a vital quest. At one point Eli is walking along an elevated highway and is nonplussed to see that it has shattered, a scene perfectly replicated from Fallout 3.
On qualia and free will
Since the QT3 community splintered, I find that I’ve been spending more time on the erstwhile refugee forum, Broken Forum, recently. While QT3 isn’t exactly dead, it does feel that Broken Forum has more interesting stuff now and the Politics & Religion subforum feels more pleasant and less pointlessly antagonistic. Anyway, the subject of mind/body dualism popped up the other day, I felt inspired to write some short posts in response. It’s been a while since I last participated in a philosophical discussion so I thought I’d clean up my posts and expand on them here.
I’m not going to go into a complete description of the topic. If you need to, Wikipedia offers a perfectly good summary of the basics. Or if you feel up to it, David Chalmers has a good overview of the entire topic, though he is of course probably the leading proponent of dualism in modern philosophy. Instead, I’m just going to examine two of the most interesting objections to physicalism I’ve seen in the thread. Neither of the objections are very strenuous. I guess physicalism and the scientific worldview are too well entrenched by now. So they’re more like niggling doubts rather than outright objections, but here we go anyway.