Are chimps closer to humans or gorillas?

Check out my post on my other blog, "Stuff My Prof Shows Us". It says that chimps are more closely related to humans than to gorillas.

Great quote by Steven Pinker

I'm listening to an audiobook version of How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. It's excellent, if long (over 26 hours!). But it's a tour de force of human behaviour, with explanations from both neurology and evolutionary psychology.

Near the beginning of chapter 8, entitled "The Meaning of Life", Pinker writes,

Given that the mind is a product of natural selection, it should not have a miraculous ability to commune with all truths. It should have a mere ability to solve problems that are sufficiently similar to the mundane survival challenges of our ancestors.

According to a saying, "If you give a boy a hammar, the whole world becomes a nail", if you give a species an elementary grasp of mechanics, biology and psychology, the whole world becomes a machine, a jungle and a society.

He goes on to say that religion and philosophy are, in part, the application of mental tools to problems they were not designed to solve.

The Yoga Nazi

Sorry, but if you're Catholic then yoga is out of bounds. Why? According to this page,

Yoga is incompatible with Catholicism because the best known practice of Hindu spirituality is Yoga.  “Inner” Hinduism professes pantheism, which denies that there is only one infinite Being who created the world out of nothing.

So if you're Catholic, or even Christian, Jewish or Muslim, then NO YOGA FOR YOU!!

Glad we got that sorted out.

Choking Game: Mum on 570News

My mum was interviewed by Jeff Allan on 570 News. Here is the interview.

 

Science vs. Religion, in a nutshell

My IEEE-EMBS Lecture

You might be wondering what IEEE and EMBS stands for.  IEEE is an international engineering association.  EMBS stands for the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, one of IEEE's many societies.  The Waterloo student EMBS chapter holds invited lectures now-and-then, and I was happy to give one of those lectures today.

I had a choice: I could do the safe thing and talk about image registration, a topic that I've published in, or I could talk about my real passion, the brain. I chose to talk about the brain. The title was "Computational Neuroscience".  The image on the right is the poster advertising the talk.

The lecture went well (from my perspective, anyway).  Addie was nice enough to lend me her kitty stuffy so that I could demonstrate what a neurophysiology experiment entails.

I was gratified to see the lecture hall fill up.  The room wasn't very big, but it felt nice to know that some people were willing to stand for an hour to hear what I had to say.

My take-home message:

Your sensations, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories, intentions, beliefs... are all patterns of neural activity in your brain.

Don't believe me? You'll just have to go to my next lecture.

7 Billion People

October 31, 2011, is the day that UN forecasters estimate the earth's population reached 7 billion people. Man, it wasn't long ago that the population was a mere 6 billion (1999).  Heck, I can even recall 5 billion (1987). And though I don't remember it, I was 4 years old when the earth reached 4 billion (1974).




The CBC "Offbeat Math" page has some interesting ways to interpret how many people that is. One that struck me is that if we were ALL at a concert - standing room only - we'd take up half of PEI. That doesn't seem like that much to me. But if we all stood hand-in-hand, we'd form a chain 7 million km long, nine times the distance to the moon.

Finally, the web page has a video interview with Joel Cohen, a math biologist from Columbia University. He makes it clear that we are prospering on borrowed time. One of the interviewers says that growing world population is a boon to the stock markets, and a dream scenario for investment in general (I can only assume that he's playing devil's advocate, and asking what other people might be wondering). Prof. Cohen repeats his stance, that this rate of growth cannot continue and current prosperity is at the expense of future generations.