People Found Who Don't Use Numbers: I cry bullshit

I'm incredibly dubious about this: People Found Who Don't Use Numbers, in part because you hear these claims made about remote tribes all the time and they usually end up being wrong, and also because I've read about Piraha before. Their language is really odd and (supposedly) simple, but unless things have changed dramatically since the papers I read, it's quite controversial. Literally one anthropologist was saying one thing and another was directly contradicting him. I think it's largely a problem of learning these languages that have no bilingual speakers, it's difficult to do. Granted, but that's not my only rationale.

Wikipedia backs up the story, but I'm still suspicious. Anthropological claims like this one are just of the type where I think they should be heavily scrutinized. For one they smack of cultural hubris, a kind of "they're so primitive" attitude. I don't actually think anyone believes that, but it's the kind of thing that's very ingrained into Western culture, and that kind of bias (like racism) is damn near impossibly to overcome at a subconscious level. Secondly, it's just so easy to get them wrong.

In Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought he describes a group descended from the Mayans called the Tzeltal, who live on the side of a mountain and generally refer to things as being "up the slope" or "down the slope". A linguist performed an experiment on them to see if this affected how they think (for the details see around p. 140 in the book, I don't think the details are important) and concluded that it did. In short, they "thought" in a geocentric frame, whereas most Westerners use an egocentric (axes centered on your body) or an object-centered frame (axes relative to objects near you). Anyway, another set of anthropologists (or perhaps linguists) performed a second, more careful experiment, and found that they, in fact, can use another frame of reference.

Actually, in this same chapter Pinker deals with the Piraha (they're quite famous), and thoroughly skewers the Sapir-Worf hypothesis (which is tangential to this anyway). For the full discussion see his book (I'm far too tired to transcribe it, and it's a fantastic book anyway).

But the point described in the SciAm podcast (and in the thousand articles I've seen on this today) seems to be a bit absurd to me. If these peoples don't, in the course of their daily lives, need to count anything, then why would they develop a precise language for counting?

And the claim that they "don't use numbers" is probably misleading, since there are other ways to keep track of reasonable numbers of objects. If you're a teacher on a field trip, you could either repeatedly count your kids and notice you have 23 instead of 24, or you could just notice that Billy is missing (that's how Pinker described it, keeping track of individuals one by one rather than keeping track of the number of individuals). There's no particular reason one of these systems is better than the other, until you start to deal with large numbers or complex operations. To expect an individual who doesn't (whether a Piraha or an American) to be able to just spontaneously start to do it is simply absurd, like testing the average American on calculus. They probably never learned it, they don't ever need to do it, so why on earth would we expect them to be able to?

The entire situation just strikes me as cultural elitism, like a kind of freak show, "Oh my god, how could they not have numbers!" Maybe that's not how people are actually seeing it, but that's how it seems, and I think it's absurd (that last line is SciAm just seems so incredibly condescending).

But these newspaper-level articles about indigenous peoples always infuriate me. Although, newspaper-level articles about any science do that, since they always screw it up somehow.

So I'm dubious about whether this experiment proved what they claim it did, even if it did it's hardly useful or meaningful, and I'm depressed by the coverage. All in all, a great story.

The Dinosaur Conspiracy

The extinction of the dinosaurs has long been considered a crime committed by a lone gunman: an incoming asteroid that struck the earth 65 million years ago, filling the air with sun-blocking dust. Now, however, controversy is being stirred anew as evidence suggests that the asteroid might have had a partner in crime: volcanoes, massive ones, blasting clouds of toxic gas from the bowels of the earth and poisoning much of the planet's life.

When I saw that description I had to laugh. I instantly knew that it was talking about the Deccan traps, which were actually a hypothesis for the dinosaur extinction before the Alvarez meteor hypothesis. It also says, "Their evidence was compelling...", but it wasn't really, not for about 20 years. Their evidence was good, meriting more investigation, but not compelling for a while, specifically until the crater was found at Chicxulub, before that there was still a decent battle between the volcano and the meteor.

Anyway, the article goes on to say that the Deccan traps are making a comeback, but I've read tons of papers on this, and they're entirely unconvincing (unless they've discovered something new, and it doesn't sound like they have). I wish I could remember specifics better, but there are plenty of holes in the Deccan trap model, and most it can be a minor player in the mass-extincts at the KT-boundary.

But there were a few problems in the article, like volcanic sulfur causing warming, it usually causes cooling (which is why it has been suggested as a solution to global warming). And saying that algae blooms at 300,000 years (a date whose precision I find suspect) definitely show her time-line is just weird. If the volcanoes stopped erupting at 300,000 years, the heating would last millennia. It wouldn't coincide with the bloom. Although the objections raised in the article are good enough for me, I'd be quite surprised if the traps were very important.

If the Deccan traps had any effect on the extinction of the Dinosaurs, which is possible, it's just one of a half-dozen different factors. People have argued that they were already in decline anyway (for many different reasons), and the meteor was just the final straw.

It rather reminds me of the fall of the Roman Empire, what caused it? The real answer is never that there was one cause, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in The Black Swan, we look back and attribute causes to things, and argue endlessly over them. We might be able to find distinct causes, but we will never know the whole story, or even if there is a whole story.

Anyway, those are some thoughts on this topic.

Not a meteor!

Phil the Bad Astronomer says it wasn't a meteor that hit Peru, in fact, it may have been a SCUD missile. This explanation seems far more likely to me.

And we got a good follow-up! I am a little bit surprised.

Meteors cause sickness? Say it ain't so!

Every now and then a story hits the internet that is just so absurd (or premature) that I have to laugh. This is one such story. It claims that villagers in Peru started to become sick after a meteor hit outside town. Now the thing that bothers me is that causality is just assumed. Yes, it is possible that the events are connected, but I think it's far more likely that they're not, this sounds like a serious case of the "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, which means "after this, therefore because of this."

First off, in order for the meteor to have caused the illness, it would either have to have some kind of toxic substance on it (inorganic, the odds of an organic substance that's harmful to humans surviving reentry and being of sufficient quantity to disperse into the atmosphere are infinitesimal), or vaporize some kind of toxic substance in the ground. The first scenario isn't too likely, because meteors are mostly benign materials (rock or iron), and any toxic material wouldn't be very concentrated. Plus the meteor wouldn't be very big to begin with, I highly doubt it would be more than a few feet in size, which would make the total amount of dangerous chemicals in it tiny.

The second scenario is much more likely, but still not nearly certain. Based on the media reports the meteor displace 157,000 cubic feet of material, which is not a whole lot, just a box 53 feet on each side. Granted, it could be a lot more vaporized, but given that it had the entire atmosphere to diffuse into, even an order of magnitude increase wouldn't matter much. I don't think that amount of material would remain concentrated in the area very long, just think of how quickly smoke from fires or smokestacks disappears, but I could be wrong. Even then, the toxic material would have to be present in the soil of the region, and people would be inhaling or ingesting it anyway!

What really gets me is that none of the articles (which, despite seeing it in three different sources are all carbon copies) discuss this. They don't even mention that the events might not be related, and they definitely don't say that if they are, the toxic material is almost certain terrestrial in origin. The headline and article read as if we're being poisoned from space, and that's just stupid. And the real pity is that there will almost certainly be no follow-up article that tells what actually happened, because it'll be something mundane that won't be newsworthy! So it goes, I suppose.

Good science reporting

Here's an article from the NYT that shows that good science reporting is indeed possible. I highly suggest you read it, as it's very well done. I just wish that more science reporters would write similarly.

Hints of a breakdown of special relativity

When I saw the article titled "Hints of a breakdown of special relativity" in a SciAm blog, my curiosity was piqued. I thought it was just going to be the old, debunked story, but it's not.

The team from the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope has some tantalizing evidence that, in fact, special relativity is incorrect. They found indications that high-energy gamma rays travel slower through vacuum than low-energy rays. Here's the meat of the observation:

The team studied two gamma-ray flares in mid-2005 from the black hole at the heart of the galaxy Markarian 501. They compared gammas in two energy ranges, from 1.2 to 10 tera-electron-volts (TeV) and from 0.25 to 0.6 TeV. The first group arrived on Earth four minutes later than the second. One team member, physicist John Ellis of CERN, says: "The significance of the time lag is above 95%, and the magnitude of the effect is beyond the sensitivity of previous experiments."

Now, why exactly this would happen is way beyond my understanding. According to SciAm, it could be that there's some kind lensing that occurs due to fluctuations in the fabric of space-time that happens at higher energies. (It sounds almost like increasing air resistance with speed, perhaps that's a good metaphor the proposed effect?) This kind of effect can happen in theories of Quantum Gravity, and if this result is real, it could help constrain the possible "theory of everything".

However, it needs to be said that this is a big claim, and it could be totally wrong. There need to be thorough checks done on the work, and it would be nice if a separate lab confirmed the result. But if it stands, this could well be one of those turning points in modern physics. I can't wait to hear more, new physics is very exciting! (Or at least it is when it's possibly a real result.)

We have NOT broken the speed of light

We have broken the speed of light, the article's headline boldly proclaims.

No, we haven't. I absolutely guarantee it. First, let's look at what they did:

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons - energetic packets of light - travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Well there's not really anything here. My first guess was that this was some issue about Quantum Entanglement, but it might not be (and that doesn't offer FTL communication anyway, that's just a sloppy interpretation of what's happening). If this is about entanglement then it's not news, this has been done dozens of times, and it doesn't break SR.

But if it's not about entanglement it doesn't matter, because there's no way light traveled faster than light. It reminds me of someone who asked me if humidity can be above 100%. My response was, "No, because can't hold more water than it can possibly hold."

Light always travels at the speed of light, and the speed of light varies based on the medium the light is in. This comes straight from Maxwell's Laws (see here if you're interested in why), and it's what inspired Einstein to think about what light would look like if you ran alongside it (of course, he figured out that no matter how fast you were running it would still go at the speed of light). Special relativity comes straight from Maxwell's laws, and if something is found to violate SR, then Maxwell's laws aren't correct.

Now, it's always possible that our current knowledge of the universe isn't correct, even something as old and well-established as the fundamental theory of electricity and magnetism. But the more established and well-tested the theory, the less likely this becomes. It's like evolution, sure it could be wrong, but it almost certainly isn't. The same is true of Maxwell's Laws, they've been so thoroughly tested to such insane limits that if they're wrong it would shake physics to its core (given that those four little equation form an entire section of physics, and form the foundation for relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics, the other being QM).

So while it's possible that these two researchers have broken the speed of light, I highly doubt it. Besides, if you look at their setup the have light traveling one meter, which happens in about 3 nanoseconds. I think it's more likely that they measured incorrectly (that there's some error in their experiment) than that half of modern physics is wrong. If I never hear about this monumental discovery again, I'll be pretty sure that I'm right.

Update: A different article has more information, this one attributes the FTL travel to quantum tunneling, which is a process by which a particle goes through an energy barrier that it classically shouldn't be able to go through. I'm not very experienced with this phenomenon, but my understanding is that this still doesn't violate SR since it's not actually moving that distance, the wavefunction has just spread over to the other detector. Since the wavefunction covered the whole distance anyway, the particle wasn't localized before measurement, so it can't be said to have traveled FTL in any real sense (keep in mind that could all be wrong). But it's so hard to say what's going on based on these news reports, they don't include reference information and I can't see it here anyway, so I can't check any actual paper for an idea of what's going on.

In any case, I still stand by my original assessment that this isn't revolutionary, but as always, I could be wrong.

UPDATE 2: Wow, I should have checked Eureka Alert a while ago. Here's a reasonable explanation of what happened. It was indeed tunneling, and it also does not violate SR. As is typical with science reporting, the reporter seized upon the most fantastic interpretation of the results, and not the sober analysis presented at the end. We did not break the speed of light, end of story.

I Love Science Reporting: Fossils challenge old evolution theory

I saw an article on Fark titled, Fossils challenge old evoluton [sic] theory, and thought, hmm, this might be interesting. But in the first sentence, there's a gigantic annoying misconception on display.

Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved.

No, we already know that our evolution, and all evolution, is like a bush and not linear. We've known that for decades, and anything that purports to "show" this is just more in a large pile of evidence (which is great, but not when it's portrayed as a discovery).

And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a briefcase-carrying man.

Why even mention that? I guess it's good that they say "further discredits", but I'd rather they use even stronger language to convey how absurd that "iconic image" is.

The old theory is that the first and oldest species in our family tree, Homo habilis, evolved into Homo erectus, which then became human, Homo sapiens. But Leakey's find suggests those two earlier species lived side-by-side about 1.5 million years ago in parts of Kenya for at least half a million years. [Meave Leakey] and her research colleagues report the discovery in a paper published in Thursday's journal Nature.

This is good science (or at least it could be, I can't read Nature here so I can't read the paper), but I fail to see how two species living side-by-side for a long period of time implies one didn't evolve from the other. That's the entire idea of sympatric speciation. I also thought this had been known for a while (and I'm more certain that several different Australopithecine species lived side-by-side). Maybe I'm wrong (I'm certainly no Leakey), but this just seems like a non-story to me, more of a minor refinement than anything.

But there is an excellent quote from the article:

"This is not questioning the idea at all of evolution; it is refining some of the specific points," [Susan Anton, a New York University anthropologist and co-author of the Leakey work] said. "This is a great example of what science does and religion doesn't do. It's a continous self-testing process."

Hear hear!