Pursuing praxis

What a great research idea - use back-illumination to study regional bone density patterns in skulls! See - work is play and play is work. I can do research at bars :o). Check out these sweeeeeeet skull mounts from The Longhorn up here in… Puyallup (?) … or thereabouts. There was even a bushbuck (!!). All told, significant taxonomic diversity (Bovidae, Cervidae, Antilocapridae) for a place maybe 1500 square feet. Plus the bar had the coolest decor (bovids and cervids notwithstanding) of any bar I’ve ever seen. Rocky mountain mural on one wall, NYC skyline on another, and deciduous forest on a third. Zebra rugs on the floors, pink flowers on the chains of the green pooltable lights, mirrors over the bar area. Quality jukebox.

Yesterday (last night? this morning? I don’t remember… time does funny things when you stay up downloading audiobooks all night… but I should know that by now.)

Start over: tens of hours ago I listened to Patrick Henry’s "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech on audiobook. The Wikipedia synopsis says: 

This speech was given March 23, 1775, at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, and is credited with having singlehandedly convinced the Virginia House of Burgesses to pass a resolution delivering the Virginia troops to the Revolutionary War. In attendance were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Reportedly, the crowd, upon hearing the speech, jumped up and shouted, “To Arms! To Arms!” (Summary from Wikipedia)

Good thing people had arms to take to arms.

— 

My family is an interesting mix of anal-retentive by-the-book precise and slacker-lazy whenever-we-get-to-it. Christmas falls in the latter category, increasingly so each year. We had it today. I had to hop-to to get my gifts wrapped by the time Dad and my brother pulled into the drive, after nearly 24 hours traveling, at which point we put off Christmas till after dinner.

Tonight, passing out the gifts (some wrapped, some not; some new boxes, many re-used), I grabbed a brick-sized yellow box and proceeded to barely budge it. Someone else peered under the tree and said, "Oh yeah, I think I saw Bi-Mart selling bullets by the pound. Awesome." I slid it from under the tree and shove it at my brother, but got interrupted with:

"Wait, what caliber is that?"

"Um, 9mm luger."

"That goes to Mom."

"Oh right. Here Mom."

"And the .40 to your brother, and the other 9mm over here."

The family that shoots together, stays together, eh?

I think one year we should use just ammo boxes for wrapping, and get a picture of all them under the tree, and that can be next year’s Christmas card. Two birds with one bullet, see? har har har. Oh I kill myself. lol

I got my first pedicure today. At eight in the $*%&ing morning. Worth it though. I was telling the pedicurist about measuring bovid skulls and tracking shape development and evolution, and my desire for accurate aging methods for essentially data-less specimens. Turns out she knows about aging deer by cementum annulum rings in the teeth (she’s been hunting with her dad more than once and he knows about it), so we discussed that, and then how sunlight regulates deer testosterone levels which regulates antler growth and shedding cycles. And more, but I won’t bore you here.

Suffice to say, I like my home town. I’ve yet to meet an urban salonist who gives more than a passing rat’s ass about antelope or deer or horns or bones or teeth or how exactly I need a PhD to just measure heads. A few perk up when I start talking about testosterone. But that’s about it. Plus I went to high school with her brother, and the jerk who beat him up badly lived down the street from me.

Funny thing: a few hours later I returned to the exact same backwater street way across town to the parking lot across from the salon - to my dad’s chiropractor. But we didn’t even see the doc, instead visiting solely for the purpose of investigating his big game trophy photos on an inner wall of the office. He does the Like-hell-I’m-using-a-camera African safaris (apparently he’s also a former Army Ranger), and had pics of a greater kudu (beautiful!), a bushbuck (though I worry it may have been a sitatunga), two impala, and a gemsbok plus one I couldn’t identify! Erg how that tweaks my brain. I now am about 90% sure it was a waterbuck.

I have discovered librivox.org. Free audiobooks, anyone? They’re a bit short on Aristotle, but all told (pun intended) this is a great source, and I’ve nearly maxed out my hard-drive (aided by a dozen cds worth of music as well…). Good times. Now I can be all uh-pinyonated n such. Right. Mostly I get grouchy and unhappy when I’m not doing stuff, and I’m kinda lazy, so it’s easy to be grouchy and unhappy. So now I can stare off over the basin or scratch the dog while learning about Aristotle’s Poetics or rather passively absorbing various bits of poetry. My reviews thus far:

James Joyce - Chamber Music: Some 30 mini poems centering on love, including the one with the refrain "Arise, arise…" It sounded vaguely familiar to me.
     Impressions: Easy to listen to, easy on the ears when not paying attention. When paying attention though, it seemed he covered the gamut of emotions surrounding love - ecstacy, misery, jealousy, futility, etc. If there was a progression or unifying aspect of the set apart from the subject of love (or young love) it wasn’t readily evident.
     I also noticed that he used a ton of anthropomorphic metaphors - the world, including nature, was always doing something to him or his lady, or he was exhorting it to do something for him or his lady - whether positive, negative, or simply observational. Although this made the imagery very concrete and easily grasped, I wonder if it reflected more of Joyce’s relation to the world than merely being a peppy literary device. Contrasting the sense of autonomy, efficacy and overall agency of the characters in Chambers with those in, say, Miller’s Columbus (next post), it’s like a cute but sickly puppy compared with an Iditerod husky rarin’ to go. Like puppies but…. they all grow up to be dogs, and I like my dogs healthy, personable, and able. Like my brother’s dog, Jester. In the running for Coolest Dog Ever, even if her metabolism and personability require she sleep under blankets - preferably  pre-heated blankets in the center of an occupied bed. And I hear she played football with a 2-month old chihuahua - as in, the micropooch was the football, and loved every minute of it.

Many people work in fields, on subjects and questions, that have little bearing to their everyday lives. They often say they work for the ‘benefit of humanity’ or, in their more selfish moments, acknowledge that they do it because they love it, and inasmuch as it has a bearing on human life, well it might benefit humanity to one day know this, that or the other. But the daily emotional feedback of their work is one of selfish intellectual pursuit. (Remember, here the word ’selfish’ means rational self-interest, which when done consistently results in longterm planning and earned happiness throughout).

But occasionally things pan out such that innovators and pioneers - people breaking the sound barrier of intellectual achievement - sometimes get more than just spiritual royalties from their work. Here’s a quick story about Dr. DeBakey, the man who pioneered a majority of the techniques in modern cardiovascular surgery, including the bypass and aorta repair. Think of the number of people who have benefited from this man’s mental effort - countless have had their quality of life improved, life extended, or life saved. Talk about a humanitarian.

And now, at 98, Dr. DeBakey is the oldest living survivor of one of the procedures he invented. Talk about positive feedback from reality. All investors take a gamble that they will benefit directly from one or more of their investments. Ground-breaking surgeons are in this sense investors too. By improving the pool and quality of knowledge in the medical field, he increased the odds that he would live a longer, higher quality life than he would have otherwise. Certainly other motivations contributed to his career choice, but it’s not to be neglected. In this light, we see the long-term payoff of a life of selfish action - extension and improvement of human life, including one’s own.

Merry Christmas and thank you, Dr. DeBakey.

I’m not opposed to a few well-placed tears. This I like.

Thanks to all you guys out there.  

An exploration on morality and the very idea of it from the Objectivist perspective; notes and notes to self for further thought and work.

—

Moral values (things like honesty, justice, reason, pride) are a kind of fact, or a perspective on other facts. That is, they emerge from facts when facts are looked at a certain way.

Given the axiom that Existence Exists (i.e. reality is real, and only reality is real - and the real includes both material stuff and immaterial phenomena like consciousness and emotion), and given one’s choice to live (which rests on the existence of free will), a whole code of values emerges naturally. So:

      Facts of reality + choice to live = code of moral values = morality
 

Because they are chosen values, they are moral values. Morality doesn’t exist without choice. Moral values are a subset of values in general. The values which you can’t choose are just values (not moral values). Proper digestion is a value (as you can tell any time it goes wrong) but you can’t choose it or consciously direct it (although by your actions you can influence it; healthy home cookin’ vs. week-old sushi vs. rocks vs. a whole canna beans). 

Semantics aside, this just says that if you want to achieve life (which means really livingand not just bare bones survival), there are certain things you have to do to achieve it. Makes sense. Given the facts, you must make certain choices to arrive at the desired end (life). Like it takes a certain combination of actions to make a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich; various methods exist, but they’re limited, and some are certainly more effective than others.

So a morality (a code of moral values to direct your action) that makes you choose either facts or choice won’t let you reach your goal.
      Choice only = subjectivism
      Facts only = duty/intrinicism (i.e. you have no choice in any matter; you just have to do X).

All moral codes can be summarized (and compared) by identifying:
     What: The ultimate value (the goal of moral action)
     How: The fundamental virtue (how to achieve the ultimate value; the main thing you have to do)
     Who and/or Why: The beneficiary/purpose (who benefits, or, why bother?)

A comparison of moralities:

Objectivism:
     What: Ultimate Value: Your life
     How: Fundamental Virtue: Reason / be rational
     Beneficiary/Why: Yourself / your life and happiness is at stake

(Reason is defined as the volitional adherence to reality, and is an all-encompassing virtue and activity, not a series of disconnected, piecemeal rationalizations directed towards arbitrarily chosen goals or whims.) 

Christianity:
     Ultimate Value: Fulfilling God’s will/plan/purpose
     Fundamental virtue: obedience/faith-hope-charity
     Beneficiary/why: Fulfill God’s will/ eternal soul at stake (Heaven/hell is a motivator for the latter)

(Why does it matter to God? What does he lose? Why does he give FW, then? No intelligible answer. "More perfect" doesn’t answer the question; just begs the question on the next round. The reward/punishment of heaven/hell is a necessary motivator; without it, no reason to care about fulfilling God’s will. Is also the mechanism for it spreading. I’m not as familiar with Islam, but I think you could say the same for it: Will of Allah/obedience to Allah/Fulfill the will of Allah) 

Collectivism:
     Ultimate Value: public good
     Fundamental virtue: Take orders from the collective/be a cog.
     Beneficiary/why: For the benefit of the group/ in the end you benefit through everyone

(Functionally and philosophically parallel with the Christian morality; God has simply been replaced with the group.)

Hedonism:
     Ultimate Value: pleasure, what gives you happiness
     Fundamental Virtue: self indulgence
     Why? You benefit, get pleasure, not pain

(Appealing on the surface, but has nothing to say about virtue. Effectively ignores cause and effect; treats an effect - happiness - as a primary, without regard for how it is propery and naturally produced; doesn’t tell you how to achieve happiness, or what to value. Collapses into subjectivism. Any use of reason rests on liking/desiring reason; no reason not to chuck it, by morality of hedonism).

Utilitarianism
      Ultimate value: greatest good for the greatest number
      Fundamental virtue/how: Do the math
      Who benefits/why: The greatest number; achieve the good/happiness, avoid unhappiness

(Form of collectivism; JS Mill and the utilitarianism. No real goals. No specification of how to achieve the ‘public good.’No such calculus. Impossible.)

Altruism
     Ultimate value: Other people and their welfare (i.e. not yourself)
     Fundamental virtue: Serve them -> sacrifice
     Why: Because other people are the goal.

(No real answer for why; circular. Other people are designated as the good, and any question of why is simply answered with "Because that’s how it’s defined." Substitutes beneficiary with the value. Destroys morality by removing the beneficiary. Does not tell you what the good of others is, not even whether it’s happiness or health or anything. Completely empty. Serve others for the sake of serving them. Good=good of others; whatever, anything; empty. No positive advice can be offered in this rubric. Only tells you from the start what’s not good: you. The good = not-you (others). No semblance of an action plan. No pretense of an ultimate value.)

Environmentalism:
     Ultimate Value: the environment/nature/the natural=not made by or affected by man (i.e. not man)
     Fundamental virtue: preserving and protecting nature
     Beneficiary: Nature
     Why: Because it’s the value

(Parallel with collectivism, so parallel with Christian morality, except God has been replaced with everything non-human and not the result of human action. Again, it’s inherently a negative: the value is identified by what it is not, not what it is. For if you identified it positively (living organisms and their organic and inorganic environment) you’d have to include humans in it, and this is clearly NOT what the extremist/purist environmentalists (a la ELF, ALF) do. Also, the fundamental virtue is not a specific course of action. It amounts to "whatever achieves the value", that is, the ends justify the means, and what is right is what works, and what is bad is what doesn’t work. ELF is consistent with this. And the beneficiary and purpose are circular (see also Altruism), as the beneficiary has been replaced by the value, resulting in an effectively arbitrary value. "It’s a value because we say it is". On top of that, the beneficiary of this moral code is something to which morality doesn’t apply: the non-human. All this amounts to a moral code whose purpose is to sacrifice humans for no human gain, i.e. for the purpose of sacrificing human life and well-being. It’s an anti-life morality.)

Kantianism is the full, consistent expression of this sort of morality:  

Kantianism:
     Ultimate value: There is none
     Fundamental virtue: Obedience to virtue/duty for its own sake, not for a reward
     Why: A crazy question; there is no real ‘why’. Just duty for the sake of duty (not for your happiness, or reward of heaven, or God’s plan; completely negative)

(Makes altruism look positive. No value. Action for the sake of action, duty for the sake of duty. "If Mother Theresa was an exemplar of selfless action, and she can expect to go to heaven for it, isn’t that selfish? Isn’t holding out any little hope of reward later on selfish, no matter how selfless the action?" Yep. And Kant says that’s bad; to benefit yourself at all is to be immoral. For him, there is no purpose outside duty. Why? No answer. Kant: an unknown side of self commands the known self "somehow." It is altruism stripped of all history, pretense. No aim towards life, happiness or the good. "Just do it." I’m told there are very few true Kantians, but they’re hard to argue against because they engender guilt. If you accept this mechanism of producing guilt, then you can’t get out of the argument on any level. By doing this, this morality binds good people who seek to do the right thing, and sets free people unconcerned with morality at all.)

(I feel my soul rebelling, cringing, dying a little bit just thinking about this kind of morality, trying to imagine it and internalize it, step into that frame of mind long enough to understand it. It is death. And it makes sense to run.)

—

* Primary reference: Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, by Leonard Peikoff. But by no means is all of the above in there; not by a fair shot. But the basic structure of moral anatomy is, and other productive discussion, though it’s usually too concise for me to get all I want from it without assistance.

"Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it can’t be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone." ~Ayn Rand

How many times have I failed to recognize this? Too, too many. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of words worth of effort, spent. Fruitless and pointless. Worth remembering.

Onward. 

I once knew a lady named that.

Nevertheless, today I’m referring to the South American ratite bird, Rhea americana, which can be described as a gray-white mini-ostrich, standing maybe 5 feet tall and weighing 60-70 lbs. A labmate procured a headless frozen rhea (how many times has that phrase been uttered in the history of mankind?) and offered to share the experience of dissecting it. He’s after the leg bones, for comparison of bird/ratite bone microstructure (aka histology) with that of dinosaurs. And other peri-lab person wanted to measure wingspan and look at shoulder and arm joints, and another labmate wanted the heart (still not sure why…). And how often do you get to dissect a rhea? That’s right, never. So about 10 of us showed up and helped thaw and pluck and photo the thing. Fair bit of work. Probably twice the size of a very, very large turkey. Finally it was warm enough (and featherless enough) to skin and begin dissecting the legs. After much ado, we procured the desired longbones of the leg, and left the rest for the next day.

I opted out of today’s festivities for work though, so I can’t report on the internal structure of the bird, although we got a few glimpses yesterday (like the clavicular airsac, what I’m guessing is the superior vena cava, plus the esophagus and trachea, plus the external sternal callosity, and the remnant claws on the stumpy digit left on the wing). Despite some great shots with my new camera, I will refrain from posting them here. If some people are grossed out by dressing a chicken or gutting a fish… well this shouldn’t be any worse. But I expect the psychological element of it would outweigh the coolness factor in many cases.

Haha, maybe I should make a myspace page for the rhea. Wonder how fast it would get deleted. Hm, let’s find out! point people to Dr. Vector’s post (as well as his post yesterday) where he’s already posted some images, licketysplit. Warning: visceral material. (See also his emu dissection - a considerably… fresher experience).

I subscribe to an email list that is currently re-hashing hilarious student responses:

A student identified the tail of the shark [the caudal fin] as "the cuddle fin."  (It probably co-evolved with internal fertilization, right?)

Oh man, I love science humor.  

I promised pics. Here is the finished product - a gingerbread skyscraper. Not the first (see www.capitalismday.com for the original inspiration) but possibly the first in Berkeley, and certain the first proposal for Berkeley Bank & Trust (a la BB&T, a fantastic company).

And given that I hadn’t even begun thinking about this till 3pm, I’m sure next year’s will be much, much better. I’ll figure out how to make gingerbread and frosting look like metal and glass, and we’ll replace any would-be Greek columns with wrought-iron black licorice columns. Oh yeah.  

TJ Rogers. Cypress Semiconductor.

I may become an investor yet. I’m slowly beginning to agree with Francisco: You don’t have to be a genius to make money in the market, so long as you understand the cause of money and wealth - look at the philosophy of the company, the mind of its leaders, and you’ll be able to find the diamonds among the gravel.

Leaders like this make me happy to work. Even though I don’t do computers. It’s good to live in a society where men like this can succeed.  

  Oh hell yeah:

 

An armored cricket heavy with eggs stood its ground.

Continuing yesterday’s theme of convergent evolution in bovid phenotypes.

How often have bovids evolved to look pretty darn like an ox? Pretty darn often. You’ve got the real oxen, our lovely domesticated Bos taurus and other cool mostly-wild cattle (the yak and gaur, among others). They are in the same group (tribe Bovini) as the African buffalo (Syncerus caffer caffer) and the Asian water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis, the heaviest bovid, at up to 1200kg - that’s 2640 lbs!). These are all closely related, and only count as one evolution of oxen-ness, since their common ancestor probably looked much like an ox.

But then there are the elands (common and Derby’s), which are lumped with the much more slender-bodied tragelaphines, which are pretty antelopey. And of course the eland, despite its size (up to 1000kg - yeah that’s 2200 lbs!), retains some of the speed (clocked at 42 mph) and much of the jumping ability of its antelope ancestors. 5 foot fence, from a standstill? No sweat for the eland. I’ve read young ones can jump out of enclosures with 7 foot walls. Dannnngggg….

Then there’s the muskox, which as I just said is in the sheep and goat tribe, Caprini. I’d hypothesize a cold-weather origin for the ox-body look, but I’m really not sure. The African/Cape/savanna buffalo argues against that, being the only member of its genus and living in the African plains, and not on mountains (although a radically different sub-species, the forest buffalo, is about half its size, red, and likes to chill out in forests. Very strange).

And finally - though this may be a stretch - there are the wildebeest (also called the brindled gnu and white-tailed gnu), which look (to me) like somewhat more slender bison, with their big heads and pointy-forward horns. 

I dig twisty horns. I think they’re cool and they boggle my mind. For me, they are in the same class of experiences as riding 35 floor elevators on the outside of buildings (thanks Chris!). Well, pretty darn close. And bovids have independently evolved twisty horns several times. The following critters are probably separated by upwards of 25 million years of evolution, with 5 million as a likely lower bound. That is, none of their common ancestors, that long ago, had twisty horns. The Ultimate Ungulate pages have good general info on ecology, body size, geography, and stuff like that if you’re interested, plus pics of females for comparison. Check ‘em out:

The greater kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros), which is in the same tribe (i.e. below sub-family, above genus) as the Derby’s eland and bongo, other favorites of mine, the Tragelaphini.

The addax (Addax nasomaculatus), which is closely related to the oryx and sable in the Hippotragini tribe (that means "horse goat" in Greek, I believe).

The Markhor (Capra falconeri), which is in the sheep tribe, Caprini, and named for Hugh Falconer, a great British naturalist of the 1800s who did a lot of work on the Indian subcontinent (among many other places). Check out also the Nubian ibex (much like the other ibexes, which rock), and the muskox, which isn’t an ox, but a giant friggin’ sheep-goat thing.

— edit

I missed one! The blackbuck (Antilope cervicapra) which is from the Indian subcontinent. Also a bit of a loner, phylogenetically.