arks or prisons?

In my latest feature in Current Biology I've explored the ethical quandaries around animals being held captive in zoos and aquariums. Starting from a binary of the animal ark vs animal prison kind, I discovered that there is a third dimension to it as zoos are increasingly also using their expertise to help animal conservation in situ, i.e. in the natural habitat where they belong.

Read all about it:

Can zoos offer more than entertainment?

Current Biology Volume 25, Issue 10, pR391–R394, 18 May 2015
Open access

Expatriate animals in Lille, France (own photo).

censorship in the UK

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has banned this ad:

according to this report in the Guardian, and I'm having a huge problem with this decision. The posters don't show anything at all apart from the drink, just words, and (as the ad slogan itself suggests) any associations are purely in the mind of the beholder.

If we've reached the point of not being allowed to use words that have several meanings because some readers may associate them with a meaning that they themselves will then find offensive, I think we've arrived in a kafkaesque nightmare of censorship. If people are offended by their own thoughts, it should be their own problem, right?

To use a visual analogy, if looking at a lighthouse makes you think of male genitalia, that doesn't give you the right to ask for images of lighthouses to be banned. The association is exclusively your own problem.

And that's essentially the point that the ad itself tried to make in a playful way. Clearly some people at the organisation in charge of such things were unable to grasp this subtle philosophical point.

paradox lost

My review of the book Paradox: the nine greatest enigmas in science, by Jim Al-Khalili is out in Chemistry World online:

FREE ACCESS

It also appears in the print issue on page 69 (together with lots of other book reviews, worth checking if you're hunting for presents ...).

Lady Gaga and philosophy

To my utter shock and bewilderment, I have just found out that neither of the two publishers that run book series on popular culture and philosophy has yet published a book about Lady Gaga and philosophy. In fact, searching the exact phrase “Lady Gaga and philosophy” I got only two hits, one to the twitter profile of someone who lists her interests and ends the list with these two items (as you would), and the other to a philosophy blog which also notes the lamentable absence of this title.

So, while we are all waiting with baited breath to find out what the serial philosophers will have to offer once they have woken up to the semiotic treasure trove that is the work of Gaga, I’ll start compiling a few suggestions of topics they may want to consider:


Is it music? Why Mozart might have written “Bad Romance” if he were alive today (for more about this, see here)

Is it art? The school of gagaism and its position in the development of occidental art

Baby you were born this way: The quest for sexual identity in the 21st century.

I’m in love with Judas: Gaga vs. God

Scheiße Scheiße be mine: the language and languages of gagaism

P-p-p-pokerface: The semiotics of make-up and masks

I am my hair: Hair style as a cipher for personality in postmodern society

I’m on the edge of glory: Feeding the reward system in the age of individualism

Papa paparazzi: Iconography and perceptions of fame

Monster ball: Identification and motivation of fans and followers

Gossip girl: The education of a cultural icon


All suggestions for additional chapters, and indeed authors, welcome.

I notice that Open Court have among their forthcoming titles "Rolling Stones and philosophy" (due to join a male-only club of artists like Bruce Springsteen and U2), so they are clearly catching up and might get round to the Gaga title in a few decades. My favourite title on their list of 59 books is "Woody Allen and Philosophy: You Mean My Whole Fallacy is Wrong?" (2004). The competitors at Wiley-Blackwell have Metallica as their only musical entry. Gaga apart, I really do think one of them should have covered the philosophy of Alanis Morissette by now.

Update June 2012: Open Court now list "Lady Gaga and philosophy" among their future publications, but without a date, so I'm guessing it will be 2013 before it comes out.

Update April 2015: Open Court still has it under "Forthcoming Titles: 2015 and Beyond" at the bottom of the list, now with a release date of 2017. These guys should get their priorities in order. Still no news from Blackwells.





Oh, and as bonus material, here are my random thoughts on the new album, jotted down a bit hastily after the first two or three times playing it:

Would I still enjoy this album if it had arrived in a brown cardboard sleeve and I knew nothing about the artist?
Actually, I think I would. Not all tracks are great, but there is an interesting variety and I sense the genuine artist's urge to express herself in many details. I'm not wildly excited by the first three tracks including the title track, but love the middle section starting with Judas (which I read as an attempt to recapture the glory of Bad Romance).

As someone familiar with several European languages, I find Scheiße interestingly disturbing - it mangles fragments of half a dozen languages into a meaningless but attention-catching pidgin pudding. Gets me every time. My attention tends to wander off after Bloody Mary, and come back for You and I, strangely.

Surely it's not to everybody's taste and will irritate many, but that's what art is supposed to be like. So please ignore the hype and try it with an open mind.

united colours of Oxford

review of

Isolarion
By James Attlee
University of Chicago Press 2007

The Cowley Road area, aka “East Oxford” is Oxford’s hotspot of cultural diversity, with migrants from almost every nation in the UN, and a diversity of shops to match. James Attlee, who lives in the area but works in London, so retains a somewhat detached perspective while being able to immerse himself, has recorded his impressions, experiences, and even hesitant attempts at involvement with local politics, under the leitmotiv of a “pilgrimage.” His travel doesn’t have to take him out into the world, he argues, as the world has come to the area where he happens to live.

The first of three parts is dominated by his reports, travel-writing style, of experiences he has sampled along the road – ranging from the Brazilian art gallery to the new-agey immersion pool. In the second and third part, musings on history, philosophy, religion take over, making the whole, as the author admits on the last page “as much an allegorical as a physical journey.”

This is all quite fascinating for us who live less than a kilometre upstream from the start of Cowley Road, but seeing that the book was published by the University of Chicago Press, one does wonder what readers in Chicago may make of it. Even for us who know the territory, a map would have helped.

I’m sure the book is exactly as the author needed to write it in order to make sense of his experiences relating to the area where he lives. Personally, I might have liked it even more if he had been more of an explorer and less of a pilgrim. An explorer might have sampled all the diverse experiences on offer on the Cowley Road, from the mundane to the wildly exotic, a bit more systematically, maybe charting the course of the road completely, rather than escaping into philosophical asides.

For instance, the nice Italian chap (presumably the owner) at the small bike shop CycloAnalysts doesn’t appear in the book, neither is any of the other bike shops included, nor the Daily Information offices, or the videosyncratic shop (which has now given way to an old-fashioned record shop, bucking the trend). Neither the musical instruments outlet nor the numerous charity shops get a look-in. Definitely space for a sequel there.




Scene from last year's Cowley Road Carnival.


PS Memorable experiences I have had along the Cowley Road include concerts by Marina and the Diamonds, The Noisettes, Bat for Lashes, and Imogen Heap. I've also bought an inordinate number of bikes there, including a tandem and two unicycles, and have visited the Ultimate Picture Palace on a few occasions, though it's not my regular cinema.

obscure search terms will find ... me!

My blog enjoys a reasonably good ranking in Google’s PageRank system, which decides which sources appear at the top of a list of search results. This means that from time to time, Google does actually send people my way. Naively, I might have thought that those googlonauts who touch down on my site would have started their voyage with search terms relating to the big issues that I write about, such as nanotechnology, genomics, autism, bioethics, etc. On second thoughts, however, one realises that such topics are also well-represented on sites that are still a few rungs higher up on the ranking ladder, including those of the BBC and major newspapers. The traffic that’s left for me is looking rather different and possibly more interesting.

When I realised that my visitors had typed in things like “philosophy of greed” or “think logarithmically” rather than biochemistry or nanotechnology, I started a month-long observation of the Google searches leading to my blog, of which I can now reveal the results. The only words I have excluded from the ranking are prose and passion – their presence in the title of my blog means that I get ranked highly in searches involving these words, even though people who look for prose pieces about cancer will not be very happy with the results my blog can offer. (I think the over-representation of “Prose of …” searches actually reveals a real flaw in Google’s algorithms; people setting up such things should realise that the title of a blog may be chosen in a roundabout way and may not literally specify the content of the site.)

So here comes the countdown:

In 6th place, Oxford – typically in combination with more unusual terms, including “Parson’s pleasure” which is the title of this blog entry. One customer’s search for “naked dons parson’s pleasure” led to the same entry, of course.

5th, an eternal favourite, and one that alerted me to the eccentric qualities of the search terms that lead people my way, is “greed philosophy” (or, more rarely, greed combined with other terms, such as “How is greed Neanderthal”). The relevant blog entry doesn’t really answer any deep philosophical questions about greed – it is in fact a short appreciation of a book by Naomi Klein.

4th, Sale el Sol – fair enough, that’s a video of a live appearance by Shakira which I embedded in my blog here. Oh, and there have been reports that this will also be the title of the album to be released later this year, so no wonder there are lots of searches.

3rd, another eccentric favourite, is “shark images” and other shark-related stuff. All I did was to write a blog entry about the Headington shark, an Oxford landmark somewhat off the beaten tourist track.

2nd, various members of the Strada family, including Katharina Strada (mistress of emperor Rudolph II), lumped together under Strada searches, and presented here.

And the unlikely winner is …

the Spanish painter Ana Medem, sister of film director and auteur Julio Medem. Ana died very young, and Julio used her paintings in the film “Caotica Ana,” which I reviewed here.

Obviously, having all these (relatively) popular search terms included in one blog entry will completely confuse the Google bots. So if you arrived at this entry hoping for insights regarding Ana Medem or one of the other five top topics, please follow the links provided.

For the future, what I really need to do to attract a larger audience via Google, is to cultivate more eccentric topics and to flag them up in my titles. Paradoxical but true. I should start a series about obscure composers right now.

the dark energy of William Shakespeare

Literary types around here are falling over themselves to assert that the guy from Stratford really did write those plays. There is a new book out that ridicules all other theories, and it's got glowing reviews everywhere.

Not knowing much about this whole debate (or non-debate, as the Stratfordians hasten to call it), I am getting the impression that they do protest too much. The fact is that we know far too little about the biography of the Stratford man to be sure about how the plays came into being. And as with scientific problems, where there is an embarrassing lack of information, the field is open to wild speculation. Someone on "The Review Show" compared the Shakespeare "non-debate" to the evolution debates in the US. This comparison is outrageous, as we have tons of data confirming evolution, but virtually no data about Shakespeare's intellectual life.

If we're looking for an analogy in science, I would suggest the dark matter / dark energy conundrum. Current knowledge very clearly tells us (via several independent lines of evidence) that we know nothing about some 97 % of the mass-energy content of the Universe, and scientists have come up with a whole zoo of hypothetical exotic particles and other tweaks to the known laws of physics (eg modified versions of Newton's laws) to address this problem. All are speculative, but they can guide research that may one day find the missing bits.

Similarly, we have a > 90% knowledge vacuum concerning the inner life of Shakespeare and where he may have found inspiration for his works. So I, as a literary-minded scientist find it quite natural that this vacuum gives rise to wild speculation, which may inspire research that may one day resolve some of the mysteries surrounding the bard.

large human collider

I love the news feature by Zeeya Merali in the current issue of Nature, The Large Human Collider (even though I thought of this title first, used it for our home-built ice rink, back in January!).

The author describes how, at the Large Hadron Collider, "sociologists, anthropologists, historians and philosophers have been visiting CERN to see just how these densely packed physicists collide, ricochet, and sometimes explode." One of the social social scientists interviewed said she went there to observe "the language, taboos, and rituals of this exotic community."

The basic idea is that at just under 3000 participating scientists for the ATLAS detector alone, the community seems to have passed a critical size to qualify as a culture in its own right (though social scientists have also looked at the previous, smaller collaborations). Also, considering the cost of the LHC operation, the 20 or so social scientists that observe the physicists are practically free (and funded by different research councils, anyway).

Now that makes me think, what if the whole thing isn't really about the physics, and someone has just tricked the physicists into it, in order to conduct an experiment analysing the collision of human minds? I'm sure there is a viable plot for a Dr Who episode in there somewhere.

benign delusions, useful compulsions

I really love this quote which I found on twitter yesterday:

The best you can hope for in this life
is that your delusions are benign
and your compulsions have utility.

It comes from an equally insightful blog post from the creator of the dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, and was posted by @lmg, whom I follow because he's the hero of this story.

If I ever write up "my philosophy", this quote will have its own chapter. And maybe I can print my own greeting cards with an edited version, such as:

May all your delusions be benign
and your compulsions useful ones.

I am, of course, a compulsive writer and under the delusion that people want to read what I have to say, and I am very grateful that my delusion is relatively harmless and my compulsion just about useful enough to pay the bills.

life philosophy

after stumbling around randomly for over four decades, I have finally figured out my priorities in life / work, or mission statement, or philosophy, whatever you want to call it. My main reason to formulate this was that most people over 30 seem to divide their time into life and work, earning money in one part of their time, to waste it in the other, and that doesn't make any kind of sense to me. I tend to do exactly what I want to do, and then if I'm lucky I find someone who pays me for it (if not, never mind, I can always put it on my blog!).

So here's my mission statement, conveniently condensed to tweet format (at 133 characters there's even place for a hashtag, any suggestions?):

I’m a science writer aiming 1) to educate and entertain myself, enabling me to 2) educate and entertain others, thereby 3) encouraging people to pay for 1 and 2.

the trouble with water

In the most recent instalment of the Oxford History of Chemistry Seminar, I was intrigued by the story of the "distance problem" which remained unresolved for the entire length of the 19th century. As Hasok Chang reminded us, electricity and the electrolysis of water was known at the beginning of the century, and people were puzzled to see that if the two electrodes of a battery are immersed in water, a few inches apart, the oxygen will only develop on one side and the hydrogen only on the other. If it was true that water was a compound of oxygen and hydrogen, and if that compound was split up by electricity, how could the fragments turn up in different places ???

According to Chang, who is preparing a book about the history of research relating to water, the problem was debated throughout the 19th century, with wildly different hypotheses being brought forward. So for a long time there was a pluralism of interpretations, not a paradigm shift in Kuhnian terms.

It reminded me a lot of today's big open questions such as dark matter and dark energy, where we also have a very colourful collection of hypotheses but simply haven't got the right tools (yet) to get a definitive answer. Maybe if he manages to make the distance problem in water more widely known, this would help people understand that science doesn't always have a definitive answer for everything. After all it is important to understand the uncertainty in science, e.g. the uncertainty as to what will happen with the H1N1 "swine flu" virus.

Caotica Ana

Julio Medem's 6th dramatic film is a feminist travelogue in time and space. As the heroine travels away from the cave on an island (features reminiscent of Lucia) where she grew up, she becomes aware of a connection to other women who lived before her and died a violent death.

A review in epd-film this month calls the movie "a dream as described by a mathematician". As usual Medem brings his very own geometry of time and space, with multiple layers of philosophy that one has to peel apart by repeated viewing.

What's new here is the strong presence of art. Ana's paintings in the film are in reality those of the director's sister, Ana Medem, who died in an accident in 2000. Over 50 other artists have contributed work that can be seen in the film.

Another revelation is the lead actress Manuela Velles, with her debut performance. Celebrated by the spanish press as "Medem's new muse", she does have the quiet radiance of a typical Medem heroine and reminded me very much of Emma Suarez who appeared in his first three films.

Links related to the movie can be found in its Wikipedia entry

ten questions

My latest book review appears in yesterday's issue of Chemistry & Industry, p.30. It is about Michael Hanlon's book: Ten questions that science can't answer (yet).

My opinion about the book is nicely summarised in the title of the review:

Right answers for wrong questions

which I think is close to the title I suggested (I may have written "wrong questions, right answers"). Given the quality of the 10 questions, which I grouped into 2 real scientific questions, 4 philosophical ones, and 4 policy questions, the book is surprisingly good, in fact.

greed is bad for your mental health

It's always been kind of obvious to me, but apparently not to Tony Blair -- that greed doesn't make people happy. Psychologist Oliver James has explained this in a little more detail in his book "Affluenza" which came out a bit over a year ago, and now in a companion volume, which is a bit more academic, and which is called "The selfish capitalist: the origins of affluenza." Basically, James says that countries with a more social-democratic model of capitalism, such as Germany, have half the rate of depression and similar mental illness as the US, UK, and those that follow the "greed is good" philosophy of Blatcherism, so he concludes that a culture based on excessive greed and inequality is bad for people's mental health.

Basically, you'll probably find all the arguments in the works of Erich Fromm from the 60s and 70s already (e.g. To have or to be?), but if you need them spelled out in the modern context, take a look at these:

Affluenza (paperback edition) reviewed by Nicholas Lezard
The selfish capitalist reviewed by Madeleine Bunting
Selfish capitalism is bad for our mental health (an essay by Oliver James)

cent ans et un jour

how very rude of me to have missed the 100th birthday of Simone de Beauvoir yesterday. I believe I have read all her novels as a teenager, but I never got round to reading Le deuxieme sexe, which sits on my shelf waiting for me.

playing dumb

There is an interesting comment on women playing dumb when trying to snare a man:

Men want us lobotomised
In speed dating I did a lot better as a simpering, giggly florist than as a dazzlingly literate lawyer
Tanya Gold
Saturday December 29, 2007

As you can see from the 321 responses, it must have hit a sensitive spot. (many are from offended blokes!)

I largely agree with the sentiment expressed in the piece, and have observed this kind of dumbing down myself on occasions.

The fundamental flaw in this "investigation" is, however, that sensible men who appreciate women in the bright-to-brilliant range of the spectrum will most definitely never ever attend a speed dating session. Or any other kind of meat market. So if the author really wants a man to discuss Heidegger with (which I somehow doubt) she should drop by the nearest university's philosophy department rather than any seedy bars.

trust me on the sunscreen

I'm a huge fan of the "Sunscreen" speech which secured a UK no.1 hit for film director Baz Luhrmann in 1999. If I'd been asked to write a speech addressed to high school or college graduates, it would have probably ended up very similar.

Favourite lines include:

Do one thing every day that scares you.
[although I only do that about once a year!]

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.


I didn't know anything about the history of this recording though. Only this week I found out that the thing has its own Wikipedia entry where the whole back story is explained. Fascinating stuff. I'll put that on my "I wish I'd written list", right next to Cien an~os de soledad and 99 Luftballons :)

the natural philosophy of greed

More insights from Naomi Klein, as to why greed has become the only game in town:

Thanks a million, Ayn Rand, for setting the greedy free
The trickle-down theory beloved of Greenspan and his ilk is less a philosophy than a handy excuse for avarice

Now she should talk that greed thing through with her agent and publisher, because I would have bought her book if it wasn't so bloody expensive ... :) Oh well, I'll just wait for the paperback.


PS (July 2010) Seeing that this page seems to pop up frequently when people google for the terms "philosphy + greed", I'm thinking of adding some value to it. While I haven't studied the philosophy of greed as such, I have written a (tongue in cheek) piece about the thermodynamics of greed. Specifically, I find it puzzling that, while the third law of thermodynamics states that overall disorder must increase, so all "sorting" activities must be paid for by creating random mixtures elsewhere, the economy tends to be driven by forces that make rich people richer and poor people poorer, so reduces entropy. That piece was published in German in Nachrichten aus der Chemie in April 2007 and will feature in my next German book due to appear in 2011. Might do an English version for the blog, watch this space.