Uncertainty

You imagine that I look back on my life’s work with calm satisfaction.  But from nearby it looks quite different.  There is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm, and I feel uncertain whether I am in general on the right track. — A. Einstein, 1949

Uncertainty is healthy.  It leaves our minds open to new developments, allowing us to adapt on the fly to the vagaries of life and continue moving forward even when things look bad.  When we retain a certain degree of uncertainty about the things we know, we’re better able to consider new ideas and outlooks and to learn from them if they have merit.

Uncertainty is one of the things at the heart of science.  Whatever is pronounced a scientific fact is, in reality, being taken as so probably true that we can functionally rely on it for the moment, since so far no reason has come up to doubt its veracity and it’s been tested and shown to work against all the known data.

To become certain, to be sure you have the answers, is to abandon science for religion;  I’m not talking about Religion, the various belief systems that humanity has embraced from the start to one degree or another, but dogmatic belief.  This applies to anything from deities to politics to the latest developments in quantum theory.  If you become so attached to an idea and so convinced that it embodies Truth that you cannot abandon t in the light of new, contrary data, you have abandoned science and indeed abandoned the quest for more answers in the area of your belief because you have, in essence, pronounced them already found.

There is a place for such certainty. sometimes.  It can be emotionally comforting to believe in something, to embrace it as solid and unwavering and incorruptible.  In fact, many ideals the majority of us share are such beliefs without much hard fact behind them — the notions of fairness, beauty, liberty, dignity and honor among them.  We’d be far less noble creatures without such ideas; we’d be less than we are, diminished in some very real ways were we to abandon them and indeed, some of them are embedded so strongly in our psyches that we’d be hard pressed to if we tried.  They can guide us toward what should be, give us direction and hope (even when it is irrational to hope) and the will to strive for a better future.  Still, when it comes to matters of fact and sorting out what is, certainty can often pose a stumbling block.

Moreover, in our quest toward what should be, uncertainty can act as a moderating device, forcing us to consider fully the ramifications of our actions even within the context of our ideals.  It helps quell the drive to force one set of ideals onto someone else “for their own good” and against their will, pushing such matters off the battlefield and toward the arena of public debate.  Who kills for an ideal when there’s even a hint of doubt behind it?  Far better to compare rationales and try to convince one another that one set of ideals is inherently better than another when all involved admit to even a tiny possibility of being mistaken.

So, for all we hate uncertainty in our leaders and dismiss t as a sign of weakness, for all the bad press phrases like “I don’t know” get, and despite the tendency of many to view “I’m not sure but I think…” to be equivocating and, on some level contemptible, uncertainty and doubt are, in the end, our friends.  We need them to move forward scientificly, technologically, even ethically; they are at the heart of the quest to better ourselves and our knowledge of the universe around us.  For all our ideals, a little healthy uncertainty might in the long run prove the most disasterous to lose.

Creating a mess?

I’ve tried very hard to resist the temptation. I really have. I’ve watched the situation unfold with varying degrees of mirth and concern, and I’ve largely kept quiet about it, except to friends and loved ones.I am, of course, talking about the latest kerfuffle surrounding intelligent design and evolution. No, no, not that one – PZ Myers and Ben Stein make an interesting side show, but there’s something happening in the center ring that’s caught my interest. I’m talking about the law suit against the University of California by several Christian schools concerning UC’s admission standards and their exclusion of any biology course taught from certain creationist textbooks.

I don’t know the details – I haven’t the time to dig deeply into the matter. All I know is that Michael Behe testified for the plaintiffs and wound up having his own words served back to him as an argument for the defense in the judge’s decision – UC has decisively won this round.

Honestly, though, I’m not really interested in the particulars. What has me interested is the larger issue of creationism, masquerading as intelligent design, and the people attempting to lever it into the scientific arena using politics and rhetoric, and how ultimately these people are likely shooting themselves in the foot.

Imagine you’ve spent your entire life being taught evolution is wrong, meritless, even dangerous. Imagine that these teachings have been aimed at you by every authority figure you’ve ever known – your parents, your pastor, your teachers in the private schools you attended, all the way up through until you are ready to go to college. Hoping for a career in medicine, you pick a school with a good biology program and are accepted. And then you attend your first biology class.

Here you sit, learning, for example, that biologists figure out what particular bits of the genome actually code for something useful in part by comparing genomes across species and looking for the bits in closely related species that haven’t much changed, as these are the parts that result in damage to the organism if they break. This is something that would not work if we weren’t related to the organisms we compare our genome to; it wouldn’t work if evolution were false. What does this realization do to your world view?

Here you have every authority figure in your life telling you one thing, then compelling evidence that they were flat out wrong in this one very important area. Doesn’t that call into doubt everything they’ve ever taught you? Wouldn’t you be inclined to start questioning the entirety of their teachings, right up to the existence of the God they hold so dear? Very likely – I know I would. (But then again, I was born questioning, so your mileage may vary!)

By sheltering their children from the idea of evolution, aren’t they maybe setting their children up for massive disillusionment and to question the idea they hold most important, the existence of a deity itself?

A thought on Joy….

If they could make noise, there would be few things in the universe that would sing more joyously than feet recently released from the confines of shoes too long worn.

*happy sigh*

A journalist, a musician, and a geek walk into a bar….

I love hanging out at the pub.  There’s just something about sitting in the corner with a good book sipping a lovely beer and listening to the music, watching all the little dramas unfold around you.  Here, a couple is hooking up, the man furiously attempting to impress the woman with a monolog of all his achievements, the woman obviously weary of the man’s egoistic ramblings and not liking him very much, but going to blow him in the parking lot later anyway just because she wants a little affection.  Over there, one of the regulars is breaking up with her boyfriend….again.  They break up about this time every week, yet always leave together at the end of the evening.  Everywhere, talk and noise and people doing people-things — that’s the real draw of the bar.  It’s prime people-watching territory.

Sometimes you meet interesting folks there, and discussions take off unexpectedly.  A few months ago?  I met Allison the lady lumberjack and we chatted about competitive axe throwing, and I got an invite to pop over to the Maine Lumberjack Show to see her compete once they open for the summer.  I’ll have to see if I can make it!

Tonight, though, as I was leaving the bar I found myself drawn into accidental conversation with a slip of a creature, brown haired and willowy and immediately likable whom we’ll call “Cat” in this entry.  She was there with the band, having a drink at the bar and making almost worried pronouncements over the newspaper spread ont he bar in front of her.  “News is dead” was the gist of what she said “or so the people I talked with today think….”

This caught my interest, of course, and before I knew it, we were discussing the news media and how the internet affects traditional news outlets.  Turns out she was a freelance writer with an interest in the sciences, and she was referring to a meeting she’d had with some folks at Some Major Local Newspaper where several were pronouncing the imminent demise of the major news outlets.  Revenues are down!  Readership is falling!  Oh no!

Cat was skeptical of the doomsayers, but clearly worried for her future.  She writes for a living and there are plenty of stories out there if one just wants to go find them, but the number of traditional outlets for publication are dwindling, so it’s getting hard for a freelancer like her to get published (and subsequently paid).  Not to mention being _heard_, which is in its own way more important than mere food on the table.  She was fretting not only over the changing news market but about her own future place in it, and wondering how best to bridge the gap between old media and new constructively.

I suggested that traditional news can learn something from the “bloggers” (I hate that word — it’s an awkward, ugly kludge, but it appears we’re stuck with it for the moment) and news aggregator sites like Fark, Digg, and Slashdot.  Because the internet gives everyone on it the ability to be heard world wide, there’s no dearth of information and viewpoints out there and for many types of events, average joes like myself can step in and report news, sometimes as well or better than the pros can.  Particularly easy prey are the happenstance, where someone just falls into a story, and “local color” and opinion pieces.  News of the odd.  Not-News.  Editorials.  The ‘nets are rife with this sort of thing — it’s everywhere you turn.  There’s so much of it, in fact, that it has become almost devalued.  That’s where the aggregators come in;  they add value to the stories they pick up by filtering them through a community of more or less likeminded folks and gathering the results in one spot for easy perusal and comment.

This is something that traditional newspapers can do readily; instead of (or in conjunction to) publishing on the web, they can offer a printed journal for those the ‘nets have left behind, making up for dwindling revenue by turning for more and more of their content to the (ugh!) “blogosphere” (*shudder*  Another hideous word for an otherwise nifty thing!).  By letting the web do what it does best — color and opinion — the papers can concentrate their resources on on something they have that the bloggers currrently largely lack….access.

There are rare exceptions right now where bloggers have the ability to get to public figures, talk to those “in the know”, and gather data outside that readily available to the general public.  Ain’t I Cool News, for instance, seems to have a few folks that can get behind the scense to report on the latest movie developments, and many of the tech review sites get early looks at new hardware coming out thanks to the awareness of manufacturers to the growing power of the ‘nets.  Most of that access is limited to particualr venues, however;  so far there’s no real equivalent that I know of to a Press Pass online.  And a Press Pass tends to open some of the doors that John Q. Public has trouble walking through.

Traditional news has leveraged this through news services in the past — the AP newswire, passing along their access to news sources to small-town papers that wouldn’t otherwise have it, is a prime example.  News services can embed reporters in places the rest of us can’t readily reach, and devote resources to digging deeper, perhaps, than the average citizen can, and that translates into more value.

This only lightly touches on the things we discussed tonight;  Cat was sharp witted despite the beer and offered more than a few observations of her own, especially concerning those niche stories that would never get reported were it left to the big news corporations.  I think the woman has little to worry about as the journalistic world changes around her.  Yes, ad revenues are down and readership is falling;  readers on the net tend to snag one story and hie off to other things, not sticking around to peruse your other online offerings.  The future for traditional news outlets is going to be tough.  It seems, though, that by stepping back from fluff pieces (allowing us netside to dominate there — we’re good at it!) and concentrating on their strengths (good editorial practices, filtering the dross, and focussing their dwindling resources on access and depth outside the reach of the common blogger), traditional media has a long future ahead of it.

Just my two cents…..and thanks for sharing that beer, Cat and E! 

Hey….eggs!

It’s really hard to tell the moment opportunity knocks on your door, locating the turning point when interesting events start falling like dominoes one after another into your life. Forinstance, I recently shared a beer (or two) with a pair of physicists from a Large Boston University and found myself offered an internship in their lab, helping them perform some simple (but interesting!) experiments all obliquely related to high-energy physics — testing effective detectors, following up on a passing observation someone else made some time ago regarding radioactive metals, and some work concerning high energy particles interacting with atmospheric gasses. I’m being deliberately vague here, since I won’t start work with them until May and I don’t know how much or how little it’s appropriate for me to say about the work they’re pursuing quite yet, nor do I really know what my role in the lab is going to be. Itr’s really beside the point, really, because you see — a little over a year ago I was homeless. I’ve spent the last year doing kitchen work in an Irish pub. I’m a college drop-out, a former English major with little formal education in the sciences (but a lifelong interest in them with a great deal of time devoted to perusing the likes of Scientific American and Discover and Sky and Telescope….and soon, very soon now, I’ll be doing useful physics and, with luck, have my name on a few published papers.

I can’t tell you where it started — perhaps sitting down for that beer with my lady and her coworker/friend and those two physicists was the turning point. Perhaps it was the moment that my lady and her friend were discussing what I might find for work down in the Boston area should I move there and the friend suggested “Hey! I know some physicists…”. It could be any number of moments with any number of contributing chance factors at work, but where I put it, emotionally anyway, was the moment I hit “enter” on the email I’d written to this quirky, intelligent, wonderful woman whose profile I saw online on a popular news-aggregator site and thereby met m’lady D.

Before that moment and her response, I was resigned to my current life — largely alone, muddling by, crippled by staggering debt left behind by an ungrateful woman whom I’d supported for eight hellish years, trying to find a way to have a relationship with my daughter without playing through the ex’s emotional games using our little girl as a pawn. I felt my life was dead-ended and that the best I could ever hope for was more of the same — a mere half-existence rather than a full and maeningful life. I longed for more, for love, for a path toward those lost childhood dreams of writing, of exploring the skies, of uncovering and sharing fundamental knowledge of the universe around us that I had always thought so far out of my reach. I wanted someone who understood me and wouldn’t tear me down for stopping to look at the reflections in a pane of glass and wondering how the light is bounced back or how those reflections might change (whether internal reflections might create interference patterns, perhaps?) using different light sources over a wide range of angles. Someone who might see my curiousity as a benefit rather than a curse, and who might tolerate my urges, perhaps with a longsuffering sigh, to tear things apart to see how they work.

I never dreamed that that email would introduce me to a woman that not only would tolerate such things, but would join me in them. The email exchanges were fast and grew exponentially to the point where we were having to prune them back just to preserve time in the day for the necessities like work and food and, ocassionally, sleep. Soon it became evident that we had to meet face to face, that there was something here worth exploring, and to turn away from those possibilities we were both starting to see in each other would be the height of insanity. So we met, and we fell hard for each other, and suddenly my life was turning in a wholly unexpected direction as it entwined with hers.

She’s changed my life, just by her very existence. Previously, I stumbled from bad relationship to bad relationship, thinking that the best I could ever hope for was some measure of acceptance for my eccentricities and the quirks that define who I am as a human being. She’s made me realize that there is possibility for more, much more than that, that there was someone out there all along who I could share with, no holds barred, and who would revel in the part of me that’s always poking and prodding at the universe. Even if our young relationship fails — I don’t think it will! — I will walk away with the knowledge that there are women like her out there and I will never settle for less again.

Moreover, this remarkable woman has clawed her way from a similar place to where I was when I met her to a successful career in the sciences; she not only understands the curious part of me, but the part that was resigned and hopeless, and has shown me that it is possible to change one’s lot with just a little effort. She’s pointed out ways I can shape my life into something that suits me rather than just adapting to whatever circumstances are at hand and being happy just to survive. She’s shown me that returning to college is not an unrealistic goal, that a degree in physics is within my reach, that post-grad and doctorate studies and a career of poking at the universe are aactually options I can pursue.

So…when the opportunity came to meet with the physicists and chat, I leapt at it. A year in Boston to establish residence before starting school, a year spent in a lab, doing meaningful work and educating myself before jumping through the academic hoops that stand between me and my degree, getting my name (possibly) on a few papers and so maybe opening a few doors to scholarships and schools that might otherwise have been closed to me…..

The potential is blinding, though it is, of course, too soon to count the chickens. All I know is that I’ve somehow managed to land in a basket chock full of pretty eggs and that, checking them against the light, a surprising number of them appear to be viable. Maybe, just maybe, with a little care and help from my friends and loved ones…..I can get some of them to hatch.

Well, it’s a start.

Hi there. You don’t know me yet and I don’t know you and it’s hard to tell where this whole blogging thing will go. There are so many voices out here already that I expect to get largely lost in the noise. I’m not even sure what my goals are in starting this blog, except that I’ve lived through interesting times, and that maybe, somewhere out there, someone might gain something useful from what I have to say. It may be hubris on my part (don’t we all have just a little, believing ourselves to be uniquely important?) or it may be nothing more than a vague hope. Regardless, I’m going to write a few thoughts here now and again, talk about whatever’s on my mind at the moment, and maybe say something useful to someone out there somewhere.

Why the name “Bending Metal”? There are many reasons for it, from my interest in metalwork and circuit bending to enjoying the occasional metal music, but the single biggest reason is metaphorical. Most people view metal as hard and unyielding — strong as steel! Iron hard! — when in reality it flows when struck, as my limited time over an anvil has taught me. You can push it around like clay if you apply the right forces to it. In fact, its very strength is related to this flexibility. And, as I’m starting to learn, life is the same way. Whenever you’re stuck, feeling trapped, thinking that your life is rigidly defined…..you can bend it into a different shape with just a little luck and a willingness to try. I’m in the process of bending my life now, twisting it into a new, exciting (to me!) direction, and the adventures along the way are going to play a central role in this blog, acting as an underlying theme to bind it all together.

Metal bends. Life bends. All it takes is the will to start.