Sci-Curious

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And now the third installment of Kapitano's Klever Komments - some of the better things I posted in discussion forums in 2004, and have just rediscovered. Seeing as there's nothing exciting happening in my present life.

Today's theme...Science.

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"My IQ is 156"

And you're still gullible enough to think that's meaningful?

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"Brains or looks?"

Looks are for looking at. It's all they're good for.

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Bio-words

'Complexity' is loosely quantifiable in terms of 'heterogeneity of parts'. A worm has a lot of parts - segments - but most of them are all the same. A crab may have less parts - leg, big claw, small claw, eye, stomach etc - but they're all very different.

And yes, it's perfectly true that adaptation can take place by losing complexity.

'Advancement' is not quantifiable, or indeed meaningful, for an entire organism. It is possible to say that the sense of smell of one animal is more 'advanced' than of another, in the sense of being able to detect odours from fewer molecules entering the nose. In this sense, dogs have more advanced noses than humans.

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Dyslexia (Part 1)

A child falls behind in school. They're diagnosed as dyslexic. They get extra tuition. They end up reading better than their classmates who didn't get the extra tuition.

Now read that paragraph again, but omit the second sentence. What exactly has changed?

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Dyslexia (Part 2) - "As a child I was great at maths and terrible at reading."

You were good at some things and bad at others. Just like everyone else on the planet.

At age 7, I was extraordinarily good at reading, and almost completely unable to do maths. At 13 I was top of the year in computing and science, but didn't get GCSE maths till I was 20.

Am I discalculate? Am I superlexic? Do I have this week's fashionable condition? No, I just enjoyed reading and had no interest at all in mathematics. I'm currently studying sound DSP algorithms, which needs a fair grasp of calculus, and lo and behold, now that I have a use for maths I can do it.

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Dyslexia (Part 3) - "There are bits of my brain-and the brain of every dyslexic-that are physically different from non-dyslexics. That's a known fact."

It's a common assertion. Put it with all the other 'known facts' and 'scientifically proven truths'. Like the one about how the left-brain is logical and the right-brain emotional, or the one about how women are better at multitasking than men.

Or the currently unfashionable one about how the brains of black people have large motor cortices and small anterior cognitive sections. These have all been 'proven', until the evidence was investigated and found to be pitiful.

Once upon a time, 'Possession by Demons' was a respected diagnoses. Then it was discovered that demons don't exist. In Freud's time, women who were unhappy, eccentric, or adulterous were labeled Hysteric. Until the 1950s, homosexuality and prostitution were commonly called 'sexual disorders'.

In the 1970s, the fashion was for Multiple Personality Disorder. Tens of thousands were diagnosed, then it was discovered the number of people with actual multiple personalities was vanishingly small, and possibly zero.

In the 1980s there were two really wierd trends - Alien Abduction and Satanic Abuse. The lack of aliens or satanists took some time to be noticed. In the 1990s, children whose boisterousness annoyed parents were labeled 'hyperactive' - it's still uncertain whether there is such a thing, and whether it's triggered by food allergies or not.

In the late 1990s, drug companies desperate for a new market invented Attention Deficit Disorder - previously known as 'kids bored by school and ignoring parents'.

And in the new millennium, any form of social awkwardness or eccentric behavior is put down to Asperger's Syndrome. For which there is no real test, and no neurological or psychological cause posited. The behavioral test is laughably vague.

Dyslexia is, at best, a very vague term describing a range of symptoms. What these might be symptoms of is completely unknown. Saying a person has trouble reading because they are dyslexic is like saying morphine causes sleep because it's a soporific.

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"Science is just another religion."

With prayers, a revered founder, miracles, a moral code, and an afterlife, yes?

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Planets

Planets tend to be oblate spheroids.

Yes, that's right. Squashed balls.

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