Category: Science

Life One

This article might introduce a new and interesting concept to some, which is interesting, yet is confusing a conventional and intuitive notion of life with a more general definition.

I think trying to define life so it fits our intuition about the term, RNA-hypothesis can be necessary and sufficient. Darwinian evolution on the other hand is a more general concept that can potentially go beyond the life on our planet. It might be encoded into the physics of the universe. In that case self-organization, growth, reproduction and complexity can take place in many other contexts from computer viruses to ideas and from social memes to a potential/theoretical/extraterrestrial “life”. (As the article agrees)

My point here is that one random appearance of such physics may have given birth to RNA-based life on our planet that we can call Life One. Accepting the RNA hypothesis, that it evolved once, and that all its instances are relatives, there wouldn’t be much debate on what’s Life One. And Life Two or Life Thousand, theoretically predicted or really observed, wouldn’t confuse us.

Zero Gravity

Gravity makes you look different. Take a picture of your face when your head is upside down and see for yourself. Don’t use a mirror cause you shouldn’t be hanging down as an observer. That’s another effect. Enjoy Kate Upton posing in zero gravity and let’s hope there will be no gravity in heaven, as there will be no time…

Poem:

Sweet tea is sugar free.
Fuck the ones who disagree!
I traveled the world in the seventies.
Everybody was looking for such tea!

Predicting Love and Politics

The awkward moment that you realize you already know things almost not many know, yet you commit mistakes none of them would make.

p.s.1. I had always said from early days of social networking, that a website like Facebook can come up with the best dating advices, far better than any dating website, only if they want to use it that way. For one apparent reason: They have the data. Indeed they have so much data that no dating website even finds it important or useful. Check this example. I warn it may hurt if you fit the data individually!

p.s.2. This other article doesn’t really tell you how, but it tells you it’s possible to predict a revolution. Four years ago Bruce Bueno predicted in a TED talk what will happen to the Iranian nuclear negotiations. It all happened just in a longer period. He doesn’t go into details but you get some idea.

Darwin, Erdős, Mystery

Here it is argued that Darwin was wrong about dating cause women can be as promiscuous as men. Then it brings examples of revisions in studies like in the number of sexual partners that were previously reported quite higher for men than woman and further research does not show this gap.

Just a quick mathematical thought on that. The average number of lifetime sexual partners can not be a good measure for sexual attitude as the sexual attitude may be different in genders but this number has to be equal between them (Graph theory: total out-degree equals total in-degree in a bipartite graph, aka high school prom theorem and in this case works also for average rather than total as both sets are about the same size, read more):

Beyond the abstract world of graphs, men may like casual sex more than women, or not. Whatever the case is, the average number of lifetime sexual partners in straight couples must be exactly equal. There are dozens of studies reporting this number for men versus women as 7 vs. 4, or 12 vs. 7 or … They are all wrong. The error could be due to sampling. Either improper statistical sampling, like leaving out sex hubs such as pick up artists and prostitutes, or local sampling, i.e. in the community asked the numbers were 7 to 4 at a cost of another community having it as 4 to 7. The error could also come from the fact that that genders lie about it: Women report it lower and men higher. And let’s say it’s not even a lie. Men and women estimate this number differently.

Anyhow such ratio not a good measure for a sexual attitude comparison, simply because sex happens between the two genders. So they didn’t really need to put so much effort to perform new research to prove this number is equal as Boromir says:

One does not simply walk into the male side of a heterosexual bigraph to count the outgoing edges to the female side. And if does he doesn’t go to the other side to count the incoming edges, wrong, to come up with two different numbers! And even if he does, he wouldn’t report this error as some shocking result!

And about replacing mean with median: It is only introduced to fix the tautological problem. That can be even more problematic: the median is reported lower for women, which could arguably be even higher, due to the different skewness of the degree distribution between the two genders. That depends on if there are more sexual hubs in men or in women. Which basically asks if we have more womanizers and sex machine in men, than more prostitutes in women? A median is neither a measure of sexual attitude.

So such results doesn’t necessarily prove ultra-Darwinians wrong: In an extreme yet consistent scenario a male may evolutionarily have the desire to mate a thousand females lifetime and a typical female may be hardwired to pick the one and the best. Both fail! It’s simply not possible. Men don’t have more sexual partners than women but want it. Women don’t want as many but they get it.

Remember religion suggested heaven when it firstly encountered death. Trying to please everyone with such limited resources and mathematical barriers, solutions like afterlife 72-virgins are the only way of explaining such statistical difference.