Conscientious Objection

There is currently a political debate in the United States spurred on by Republican and Catholic histrionics regarding access to contraception. In an increasingly common marriage of convenience, Republicans and Catholics (along with several other misogynistic religious groups, but the Catholic influence here is particularly overt) have joined forces to try and prevent contraception from being provided as part of regular health coverage.

Along with the fight over whether or not access to contraception should be part of regular health care (short answer: it should) this debate has prompted the resurgence of the idea that health care workers, particularly those at religious health care institutions, should be allowed to refuse to provide contraceptive services to patients on the grounds of conscientious objection. This is just ludicrous, and I'm not sure how it keeps coming up.

1.) Refusing to provide contraception is not making a personal decision

The standard line in support of contraception is that the health care worker is personally against the use of contraception, and therefore cannot condone providing it. The thing is, this is not comparable to the conscientious objectors in wartime. The original conscientious objectors are refusing to physically go off to war, risk death, and shoot people themselves. No one is asking the health care worker to pop a pill or throw on a condom.

For the particularly thick-headed who cannot seem to understand this difference, try this: imagine going into a grocery store, waiting in one of those horrible cashier lines, and discovering once you finally get to the front that the cashier is a member of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness^* (more widely known as a Hare Krishnan). The cashier informs you that he cannot in good conscience sell you your meat, eggs, cola, tea, or coffee, as the consumption of those are against his religious beliefs, but he will be happy to ring your apples and lettuce through for you. If you want to buy the rest of your groceries, you'll have to wait in a different line. If he happens to be the only cashier on hand at the moment, you'll just have to put your groceries back and go to a different grocery store, or come back later when another cashier is on hand. Now imagine try and take that indignant response to call the manager and explain that the cashier can refrain from eating whatever the hell he wants, but he has no right to tell you what food you can buy, and imagine how much greater than indignation must be for something far more personal than what you are going to be eating for dinner that night.

2.) Not all contraception is about birth control or even sex

This is really simple: just because oral contraception can be used to drastically reduce the chances of pregnancy from unprotected sex does not mean that is the only reason for taking it. In fact, a report released this past November (link to the pdf) by Rachel K. Jones of the Guttmacher Institute claims that over 1.5 million women use birth control pills exclusively for non-contraceptive purposes. Even though it is not up to the health care worker to judge whether women should be having sex for non-reproductive purposes in the first place, refusing to provide contraceptive pills can put the health of women at risk for reasons entirely unrelated to sex.

3.) Health care has standards of practice

Health care workers are not like employees in all fields. Health care (and here I am referring to real health care, not alternative medicine nonsense) has standards of practice that are not optional for very good reasons based on an understanding of human health and physiology. The decisions for what constitutes standards of care can only reasonably be expected to be developed by health experts themselves, and legislating exceptions or specific procedures by an assembly largely made up by individuals ignorant of medical knowledge is nonsensical and potentially even dangerous.

^* Obviously this could work with a variety of religions and products.

Ben Stein is a Monster

A while ago, I published a post titled Ben Stein is an Ass. What I didn't realize at the time is that he is also a misogynistic monster. In response to the recent rape accusations against the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Ben Stein has written a horribly misguided and out-dated op-ed. It almost has to be read to be believed, but Stein trots out a long list of 'points' that run the gamut from old-school misogyny to just plain bizarre.

I don't know if I want Stein's words gracing the pages of my blog, so I think I'll just offer a quick summary of his points:

1.) Once a man reaches a certain age, if he hasn't yet been caught for a crime, he cannot possibly be now. It's like a statute of limitations, but for a man's age rather than the time since the crime.

2.) If no one with a particular subset of shared characteristics with the accused has ever been charged with a certain crime before, then the accused clearly should also not be charged with that crime, because that would make the accusation an anomaly, and what are the chances of that? That's about as likely as a bacterial flagellum evolving!

3.) Old fat men need a weapon to rape a woman. Other forms of physical or mental intimidation and coercion clearly don't exist.

4.) It's crazy to claim someone is a flight risk when he was arrested on a flight leaving the country if he happened to book the ticket months in advance.

5.) Rich, important men shouldn't have to be remanded if they graciously offer to put themselves up in more comfortable accommodations.

6.) How could we possibly take a maid's rape allegations seriously when Ben Stein has had maids in the past that have stolen some of his stuff?

7.) The media shouldn't rampantly speculate on ongoing high-profile cases. This is a point that surprisingly approaches legitimacy, but it should count extra because Ben Stein is friends with famous people.

8.) When rich people are accused of crimes, it's because poor people are jealous.

Acupuncture Takedown

At the end of last week a study was (surprisingly) published in Nature Neuroscience claiming to justify acupuncture. I say surprisingly, because many aspects of the paper are dubious. The fundamental biochemical findings were interesting and quite promising (which is presumably how the study made it into Nature Neuroscience), but the connections to acupuncture were overly belaboured and should have been harshly criticized during review. There have been three excellent blog reviews published since the article came out, and I highly recommend giving them a read:

Ed Yong's at Not Exactly Rocket Science

Orac's at Respectful Insolence

Steve Novella's at NeuroLogica Blog

The main take-home point (and why much of the language in this article should have raised flags for reviewers) is the fact that this study demonstrated at most a plausible mechanism for the localized pain relief claims of acupuncture. The actual efficacy of acupuncture as a legitimate pain treatment modality, like any other medical treatment, still needs to be demonstrated clinically (something which it has largely failed to do despite years of research), and this study has no bearing on the non-pain treatment claims of acupuncture. Unfortunately, the article fails to acknowledge the lack of clinical support for acupuncture as a treatment modality, as well as failing to acknowledge the many aspects of acupuncture which are in no way validated by these results (non-pain treatment claims, body meridians, and all the rest of the unsupported magic an acupuncturist spends years learning), all while claiming validation for acupuncture.

What angers me the most about situations like this is that negative result studies for alternative 'medicine' modalities never receive the same sort of coverage. The prestige and respect of the journal of Nature Neuroscience will now be co-opted by the alternative medicine community to justify far more than the only somewhat plausible technique of poking people with needles to provide temporary pain relief - all, of course, for a 'reasonable' price.

I'll go if you make him go too...

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a monumental jackass when it comes to environmental policy. The environment ministers he has appointed during his time in office have been inept at best, counterproductive and actively against environmental protection at worst. Harper's statements on the upcoming Copenhagen conference were no better than anyone should at this point expect, but they were still disappointing:

“I have always been clear, if there is a meeting of all major leaders involving climate change, I will of course attend,” Stephen Harper told the House of Commons Wednesday.

The "I'll go if he goes" argument didn't fly in elementary school, it shouldn't fly in the House of Commons. If an issue is important and there is an international conference (that over sixty foreign leaders are already slated to attend), you bloody well go. Dragging your feet and saying, "Well, I'll go if everyone else is going to be there, but until we know everyone is going to be there I'm too cool to show up," basically just says you don't care one bit about the issue. Which, for Stephen Harper on the environment, is pretty much the case.

Edit: Apparently, he has decided to go after all. Although I still have fairly low expectations, it is certainly a start.

New Post at Computing Intelligence

I put up a new post over at Computing Intelligence on some sloppy language in what are usually excellent science news briefs from ScienceNOW. The subject is similar to the Animal Intelligence post and its continuation I wrote a while ago, but is a little more targeted and better referenced.

Mathematica Update

As some will remember, I complained a month ago about several bugs/shortcomings with the technical computing software Mathematica. To my astonishment, I was contacted in very short order by their customer relations and then technical support staff. And that is about where it ended. I got a nice phone call from one of their technical support staff in which I explained in more detail the problems I was having and the specifics on the system I was using, he said he would look into it and contact me the next week, and that was the end of my contact with them. The only contact they have maintained is sending me invitations to online Mathematica training courses, which to me is focusing on entirely the wrong problem (though it is nice of them to offer to help me overcome my Mathematica inexperience, that is not my main problem with the software). Since my research exchange ends next week, it is a little late to get in contact with me to resolve these issues, but on the off chance that someone from Mathematica continues to stalk my blog and truly wants to help people get the best out of their software, I can refer you to other researchers who are here on a more permanent basis with the same or very similar issues.

For the record, I think Mathematica does have some remarkably useful aspects as a piece of software. It has a wide variety of graphical outputs, and supports both symbolic and numerical computation. There are times that I find it obtuse and difficult to fully control, particularly when it comes to keeping track of which variables are instantiated (and to what) in a given kernel. I also recognize that when designing software for a variety of computer configurations and operating systems there are bound to be some bugs that are difficult to diagnose and track down (such as the window resizing bug and stability issues). One change that I think would go a long way to mitigating some of the frustration inherent with Mathematica's use would be to extend the editing environment so it supports auto-saving/document recovery capabilities or at least multiple undo/redo.

Well, he could have said it...

"There is nothing so simultaneously dull and mentally detrimental as spending your Sunday morning in a church." - George Washington, 1st President of the United States of America.

Haven't heard that quotation before? That's because I just made it up. Chances are, George Washington never said that, but a lack of documented evidence for the attribution of a quotation is apparently no problem for some people. It would seem that a pair of theocratically minded citizens of the United States decided it was perfectly reasonable to make up a sentence that corresponded to their beliefs, and then slap that statement on a billboard and attribute it to George Washington.

Others carry the same message but with fictional attribution, as with one billboard citing George Washington for the quote, "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible."

"I don't believe there's a document in Washington's handwriting that has those words in that specific form," Kemple said. "However, if you look at Washington's quotes, including his farewell address, about the place of religion in the political sphere, there's no question he could have said those exact words."

I really hope some sort of truth in advertising group gets a hold of this... does anyone know of a good group to contact about this sort of thing? The blatant rewriting of history really irks me.

I see what you did there.... or not. Actually, I'm terribly confused.

I'm sorry, but even for me there is a limit to which I will take being a dork. While I have been known to make a Harry Potter reference or two, I recognize that there is a time and a place for it. This article scoffs at that place and goes barreling into the realm of the inappropriate. I know it's just a random opinion piece, but did she seriously just advocate taking legal inspiration for how to deal with the complicated issue of childrens' rights to autonomy from Harry Potter? As in Harry Potter, a fictional wizard boy whose entire personality and world outlook is written by an adult? For once, I'm not really sure what to say... I'm not even sure whether it's more appropriate to continue this rant or to laugh.

Chris Mooney and SIWOTI

I am annoyed with Chris Mooney, not, as some might guess, because every time I hear his name a little voice in my head annoyingly pipes up, "...Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs", but rather because I think he is wrong (and, as I have shown in the past, I am rather susceptible to SIWOTI syndrome). Of course, I have not had a chance to read his book, so I will concentrate my criticism on his blog. The situation would seem to go like this: Chris Mooney and his compatriot Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote a book called Unscientific America that had a section highly critical of PZ Myers. PZ Myers read the book, pointed out that he was admittedly biased but would nevertheless give an attempt at a proper review, and then proceeded to write a post of substantial criticism for the book, followed by another one. Chris Mooney responded first by pointing out a small collection of people who liked the book, and then dismissing PZ Myers' review because he was criticized and therefore not objective. Promising more on PZ Myers response soon, he then cherry-picked a (admittedly awful) comment off of Pharyngula and used that to once again dismiss PZ Myers' response.

Although I doubt Chris Mooney will ever read this blog, in the off chance that he does, here is my response:
It is not a valid objection to an argument to say, "I criticized this person, therefore he is not objective, and therefore his criticism of my work is not valid." If I wrote an essay (baseless or not) all about some sort of horrible aspect of your character or work, and you responded to it with a series of both general and specific criticisms of my essay, would you expect me to respond to your list or dismiss it out of hand because you are "not objective"? Remember that you sent your book to PZ Myers for review, and he has offered (granted, publically) a review. To then thumb your nose at his review as not worth responding to in substance because he was criticized in your book (something you presumably were aware of when sending the book to him with an oddly redundant little note asking him to try to suspend judgement until after reading the book) brings up the suspicion that you only sent the book to him so that he would publically criticize it, thereby drumming up potential readers based on the old pearl of wisdom that there is no such thing as bad publicity. If that is the case, then you are, frankly, being an ass. If somehow you actually do ever end up reading this, take offense to my assessment of your motives, and respond, I assure you that I at least will endeavour to respond to your specific points detailing how you are not an ass, rather than dismiss any response as not objective and thus not worthy of my notice.

One More Mathematica Complaint

One thing I forgot to mention in my last post about Mathematica problems is the fact that operating the program with Num-Lock on tends to cause all sorts of problems (it is no longer possible to select a single cell, among other things). Why any mathematical program (even one that deals largely with symbolic mathematics) would be unable to handle have the number pad engaged is utterly baffling to me. Like the window resizing error, this one really makes me wonder about the professionality of Mathematica.

Edit: Wolfram responded to my post, as I describe here.

Software Complaints: Mathematica and UTORwebmail

Yesterday was an exceedingly frustrating day at the Institute, primarily driven by one piece of software: Mathematica. I know that learning how to use a new piece of software can often be frustrating, and so I have been trying to reserve my judgment. However, there are a few things that I feel justified in complaining about now, because I know they will drive me nuts for a very long time to come (and there is very little excuse for a professional software bundle to have some of these problems). While I am complaining about software bugs and oversights in Mathematica, I thought I would throw in a complaint about the University of Toronto's webmail as well (just because it has been irking me for years now, and, as has been pointed out in the past, part of what blogs are for is complaining). For the record, I am using Mathematica 6.0 on a Linux system (KDE 3.5.7), so it is possible some of the issues might be compatibility issues between Mathematica and Linux.

To start, Mathematica seems to be ridiculously unstable. I had it crash with a segmentation fault twice yesterday on startup (in other words, I hadn't even opened a file and started doing any computations yet). To make the instability worse, Mathematica never seems to do any sort of autosaving (sure, one should not rely on autosave, but it is a courtesy). The lack of an autosave is exacerbated by an inability to 'undo' and 'redo' more than a single change (and what Mathematica registers as a change is hard to predict). All that combines to make any sort of code development far more unpleasant than it ought to be (using the term code loosely - Mathematica is not really programming, which is also frustrating, but I recognize that program development is not exactly its primary function).

A relatively minor thing that has really started to get under my skin, though, is the fact that Mathematica opens a lot of windows (if you need help on the use of a function, you can highlight the function name and hit F1 to bring up a documentation window on that function - this is actually a very handy feature). This in and of itself would be tolerable, if slightly messy, but every time you close one of those windows the program for some reason resizes one of your other windows that remains open. Other than sheer unprofessional oversight on behalf of the software developers, I cannot imagine why this should happen. Even if your only remaining window is maximized, it will kick out to some oddly shaped default window size. Although this is not that big a deal (it's a simply matter of resizing or maximizing your window again), when you are frustrated with syntax or in deep concentration over the underlying mathematical motivation of what you are trying to do, it is horribly distracting.

The rest of my gripes are probably more related to unfamiliarity with the software (for example, I find the syntax to be ugly and cumbersome, but that may change), so I will turn my rant to UTORwebmail now (in fact, this is a problem with the entire UTORid system). In all the years I have spent at the University of Toronto, I have yet to figure out why the login screen times out after two minutes "for security purposes", but the only way to logout is to close the browser. Someone got that completely backward.

Edit: Wolfram responded to my post, as I describe here.

Fox News Makes Me Feel Ill

I have taken the weekend off to work on another project (that will likely never be finished, but it is nice to dream), so there hasn't been a lot of activity around here. One thing that The Barefoot Bum pointed out yesterday, though, that ought to get more coverage (and outrage) than it has is Fox News arguing successfully for the legal right to lie. Yes, freedom of speech is important, but so is consumer protection. It is not within a food manufacturer's rights for free speech to print, "Lead free!" on contaminated food, so why is it any different for a news broadcaster?

I have tended to try and laugh off my abhorrence for Fox News by, for example, looking them up on Conservapedia, but this is really hard to laugh at. The more I think about it, the more I want to let loose with a tirade of vitriolic invectives (and even coming up with fancy ways of saying I want to swear and curse can only distract me so much), so I think I'm going to have to end this post here.

Spurious, Vapid, and Disconcerting at the Same Time

I have argued before (on more than one occasion, actually) that religious rights in and of themselves are fundamentally untenable when they pertain to actual action rather than mere belief. There is absolutely no reason why one person's anathema or predilection for a particular action should carry more weight than my own simply because that opinion is religiously motivated. Likewise, if that religious opinion interferes with the worldly rights of another person, rights based in this world should take precedence. My reason for raising this subject again is this article detailing how an Orthodox Jewish couple is bringing a case to court on charges of religious discrimination because a sensor was installed to automatically turn lights on and off in the hallway.

As a person who has a tendancy to obsess over odd things, I know what it is like to feel deeply disconcerted over seemingly innocuous things. For example, as an impressionable child I was introduced to the (normally) harmless childhood rhyme

Don't step on a line, or you'll break your mother's spine.
Don't step on a crack, or you'll break your mother's back

as the premise for the game of walking along the sidewalk avoiding cracks and lines. I guess either because of my intrinsic inclination to play games and follow rules, or some internalized irrational fear for my mother's well-being, it got to the point that I thought about this game every time I walked down the street. I would make up other sets of rules on other floor patterns (not so rhythmically composed, but sometimes far more interesting depending on the tile pattern). As I got older and most people grew out of childhood rhymes (and as my feet got bigger) it got more and more awkward to avoid breaking these walking rules. It was particularly awkward when walking with a group. Eventually, fear of social awkwardness ended up winning out over internally driven discomfort and I gradually began to convince myself to step on cracks and lines. When alone, I still sometimes find myself involuntarily hesitating when I step onto a cobblestone or brick street, or subtly adjusting my stride to avoid stepping on breaks between the sidewalk blocks. I can usually snap myself out of it, but I am not being fasecious with this story. It genuinely bothered me to break my internal rules of walking. It is not something I am always comfortable talking about (after all, it sounds a little crazy. It is also why I so greatly enjoy this xkcd strip, though; it makes me realise I at least might not be singularly crazy), but I bring it up to demonstrate my point.

I am not claiming that people should be unallowed to have irrational beliefs, and even subsequently irrational behaviours. However, I am saying that those irrational beliefs and behaviours should get no special treatment when they are religiously based, and must be restrained by the rights and needs of all other members of the community. I am, after all, free to walk as oddly as I want in order to meet whatever rules I come up with or hear in a childhood rhyme. Likewise, though, other people are free to ask me why I walk that way (and are free to laugh at my response or probe my motivations). More importantly, the civil authority responsible for constructing and maintaining the sidewalks is free and bound by its responsibility to the good of the whole population to use construction methods that are the most expedient and effective, regardless of how difficult that might make my subsequent attempts to avoid cracks and lines. Why should it be any different if my discomfort stems from an ancient book rather than a childhood rhyme?

Goodyear Leaving Unwanted Marks Again

Some may remember a few months ago when I bemoaned the fact that we have a scientifically ignorant hack as Science Minister. Well, Mr. Goodyear has emerged again to say something ignorant. Regarding a proposed conference on the prospects of peace in the Middle East, he complained to the funding board that "some of the participants may be biased against Israel". You know, I bet some of the participants are biased against Palestinians, too... if you are having a conference on an issue as contentious as political relations in the Middle East, you are going to have people coming into the conference with preconceptions and personal biases. Rather than a problem, that is the point of having a conference like this. It lets people air their opinions, debate, and perhaps think about the issues from another perspective. If you try to withdraw funding because people with opinions you don't agree have been invited to a conference, then you aren't so much have a conference as a one-sided party of self-affirmation. Of course, actual groups purporting dogmatic hatred and violence should not be invited. That, however, does not sound like it was the case, and I think the incident provides another piece of evidence that Gary Goodyear should not be our Science Minister. I don't have a lot of vested interest in or knowledge about the political climate of the Middle East, though, so I won't comment further on this.

Separate and Not Equal Doesn't Work Either

I thought I would share this article that was linked by PZ Myers over at Pharyngula. The article in question concerns a product called Zicam which is supposed to be a cold remedy. Unfortunately, it seems to have a propensity to destroy peoples' sense of smell, possibly due to large quantities of zinc. Of course, it is entirely possible the damage comes from some other ingredient, because the company did not have to get formal approval for their product, so who knows what is inside?

The FDA said Zicam Cold Remedy was never formally approved because it is part of a small group of remedies that are not required to undergo federal review before launching. Known as homeopathic products, the formulations often contain herbs, minerals and flowers.

The fact that homeopathic products do not need to demonstrate the same rigorous product testing as anything else we put into our bodies (food and drugs, as it were) is not only dangerous but also nonsensical. You cannot have a separate set of rules regarding "medical" (using that term loosely) products that does not require demonstration of their efficacy and documentation of their possible side effects and still proclaim to protect consumers. I do not think most people realise the lack of regulation for homeopathic products. Most people are so used to assuming that products are safe (thanks to a lot of government regulation and testing) that they expect everything available for sale to be safe. When products don't have to be tested anymore, though, you can end up with some pretty horrible results. The free pass that homeopathy has should have never existed, and it ought to be rescinded.

A Germanic Gripe

There is nothing like a bout of cold, flu, or some other such illness to make one homesick (and, as luck would have it, I seem to have picked something up over the weekend). For the most part, I am enjoying my time here in Göttingen, but there are a couple things I miss desperately. Aside from the obvious ones of my girlfriend, family (even though my family was still thousands of kilometers away from Toronto, it didn't feel as far), and not living out of a suitcase, there is one thing that I am just baffled by here. Why don't windows here have screens? What started as a weird cultural quirk has, in my state of headache and general uncomfortableness, been amplified into a profound annoyance. Flies buzzing around the room are incredibly annoying, and that is no different here than it is in North America.

Anyway, full-blown revolution or at least massive civil unrest seems to be going on in Iran, so griping about my fly problem seems a little petulant.

Fact Checking is Important

Today I leave for Germany, so I am up early doing some last minute things. While eating breakfast and drinking tea, I was watching the news and saw Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell being interviewed. During the course of the interview, the intervewer presented Mr. McConnell with some statistics displaying massive support for a government health plan. Mr. McConnel responded first with, "Well, it's how you phrased the question. Had you phrased it, 'Do you want the government between you and your doctor?', you would have had much worse support." Of course, McConnell is conveniently leaving out the fact that currently it is the insurance company between you and your doctor, and the insurance company has far more incentive to deny health-care than the government. Anyway, what followed was worse, however. In trying to explain his boneheaded rephrasing of the question, McConnell said something along the lines of, "Because that what it will be. We see in countries that have national health plans long waits and delays in treatment, and that is reflected in their life spans."

When you are going to make a statement like that, know what the hell you are talking about. Canada and France both have life expectancies beyond the American life expectancy (According to the UN estimates, both Canada and France have an average life expectancy of 80.7 while the U.S. has one of 78.2). Likewise, countries that have a mixture of government and private health care (but a predominant emphasis on the government provided health care) like Norway and Japan also have longer life expectancies (Japan has an exceedingly impressive 82.6 years and Norway 80.2). While a few years seems quibbling, it is still a few years in the exact opposite direction implied by Mr. McConnell. I wish journalists would challenge politicians for sources a little more often.

Animal Intelligence

As I mentioned in my last post, things haven't gone particularly well for me recently. As part of an attempt to ease myself back into the hustle and bustle of not feeling shut down, I picked up one of the popular science books on my shelf that I have been meaning to read for over a year now: Synaptic Self by Joseph LeDoux. It didn't hold my attention for long for a variety of reasons (some of them not entirely its fault), but one thing that quite bothered me about LeDoux's style was his habitual grouping of human beings in one set and all other animals in another. Such a species-centric view is quite widespread within general discourse, but it is also unfortunately rife within the field of neuroscience where there really is no excuse. As far as I can tell, it is a carry-over from the western theistic philosophers (Descartes and his ilk) that continues to pervade our thinking for no good reason. In the same way that angry evolution-deniers splutter indignantly that their ancestors "weren't no ape", there seems to be a general antipathy toward the suggestion that human beings share their realm of cognitive functions with other animal species.

The reason such an attitude bothers me more when it comes from a neuroscientist than a layman (though it still irks me coming from those without a neuroscience background) is because your average neuroscientist really ought to know better. The vast majority of our knowledge of neurophysiology comes from non-human species which we then extrapolate to ourselves. For example, we know more about the visual cortex of the macaque monkey than we do about the human visual cortex. For such an extrapolation to work, however, we must necessarily share the same domain as those species from which we take our starting data. Of course there are cognitive differences between species, but I think the quintessential human ingredient, the nature of humanity if you will, that people have been searching for in literature and the sciences for centuries only exists if one is willing to attach reams and reams of caveats, addendums, and qualifications. Claiming sole ownership of an ethereal conscious soul that imparts a whole new level of cognitive function for the human race is quite simply unsupported specieistic bullshit.

I could go on at length about this topic, and I am actually fairly surprised I have not mentioned it before since it is something that has been on my mind since the very beginning of this blog (my selected internet pseudonym, after all, is intended as a somewhat sarcastic allusion (hidden within the Russian language) to the apparent love affair a predominant number of neuroscientists seem to have with the human brain). Despite the temptation to ramble on, however, I really should be studying tonight, so I am going to end my rant here. I will most likely pick it up again in the future, particularly if readers take exception to any of the unqualified vitriol I have haphazardly spewed here (for example, I know a lot of people seem to hold Descartes in quite high esteem). In the nature of full disclosure, I did make up the word specieistic, and I apologize for my unimaginative cussing. It may still be a while before I am back to my usual self, so my writing for the next little while might be a little cumbersome.

Note: This discussion was subsequently expanded upon here.

Sneaky, Sneaky

It has been an exasperating day. While I will leave out most of the details (I doubt anyone cares to hear about the minor annoyances with which I have been plagued), I thought one of the stories at least deserved to be told. It was only two days ago that I complained about a particularly brazen request for me to do another student's work. While I found that story vaguely amusing in its audacity, I now have another story of attempted use of the marginal products of my intellect, only this one is as conniving as the other was blatant (and, somewhat ironically, comes from the same course as the first. What is wrong with the people taking that course this year?).

Last week I received an email from some person (let's call him Mr. D) I had never heard of before, saying he had gotten my email from a friend, and was currently working on the final assignment for the course in question. Mr. D then went on to claim that the assignment was different from last year's, but he wanted to see my solution to last year's anyway so he could see the approach I used. I was a little perturbed by this email, especially since I had actually already seen a copy of this year's assignment and it was virtually indistinguishable from last year's. The lack of specifics on who exactly had given him my email also gave me some misgivings, so I decided to let the email sit for a few days while I decided what to do. Before I reached a decision, however, this fellow decided no response meant it was a good idea to resend his message to make sure I had seen it.

I decided to respond to the second one, if only to figure out who might have given this guy my contact information. I told Mr. D that I had read the assignment and it was fairly similar, so I wasn't comfortable just sending him my code (though I also pointed out my code did not actually work completely, and therefore might not help him much). I did say, however, that if he had any specific questions or wanted to send me his code, I would take a look at it and see if I could help him out (as has happened before, this might actually have ended up in me sending him the code he so desperately wanted to receive if it could be illustrative of an answer to a specific question). I also asked him who had given him my email address.

His response was kind of startling. Apparently, the subject of my aforementioned Monday rant had just mentioned my name in passing, and Mr. D went ahead and searched for me in the university directory (I didn't know that existed in any sort of publicly search-able way). Seemingly unaware of how this could sound mildly disquieting, he then compounded the creepiness by asking for my phone number since it was easier to ask his questions over the phone rather than through email. In what seemed like a genuine manner, though, he asked if I could at least send him my code after the due date since he was very interested in the subject. While I'm not sure that my code would bring anything of value to the table, I brushed off the creepy parts of the email and latched onto the last (decidedly less creepy) request, saying that was no problem.

I thought that would pretty much be the end of it, until Mr. D sent me another email today saying, "Please try to send the material Thursday night / Friday morning so I can look over it before I start focusing on other courses." The thing is, and Mr. D should have known I would be aware of this considering the number of other people I have contact with in the course (including the professor), they have an extension on the assignment until Sunday. Sending him my code Thursday night or Friday morning is in no way sending him it out of interest's sake, and I imagine Mr. D is very well aware of that. Sneaky, sneaky, Mr. D. Your clever scheme might have worked, too, if it weren't for those meddling other students who are emailing me to ask legitimate questions.

I am not amused

While in my last post I mentioned the need to get back to work (specifically to modifying the simulated environment in which I am putting my robots), events have conspired to distract me for a little while longer. You see, I am annoyed. Last year, I took a course which I greatly enjoyed. I have talked about it quite a bit to other students, so there are many people who are aware I took it. As it is being offered again this semester, I happen to know (sometimes quite vaguely) several people taking the course, and have therefore been getting gradually increasing amounts of email asking for help (I suppose because I am known to reply to requests for help). As with all times when I offer help to other students, I try my utmost to keep from crossing the line from helping to cheating. To keep the story short, the last problem set they are working on this year is almost identical to the one last year that I attempted. My program never actually worked completely, but it had a fairly reasonable structure and had at least part of the problem solved. In the course of helping one of those 'vaguely' known students currently taking the course, I sent him a copy of my code, explaining that there was a problem in it that I had never solved, but that it should provide him with some explanation for the trouble he was having with setting up the problem and organizing his program. Imagine my surprise and annoyance, then, when I get an email this evening acknowledging that I had most of the problem solved, but asking if I perhaps had an idea of how to correct the snag that remained preventing the program from working completely. Leaving out the fact that I explicitly told him I had never figured out what the problem was and that I haven't worked on the code for a year, I am still indignantly pissed off that he would ask me to provide him with the entire solution to his problem set. The only reason I shared the code with him in the first place was because it wasn't working, and would require a full understanding of the problem to fix (which he shouldn't be trying to do in the first place, since generating his own program to solve the problem is the primary exercise of the problem set, and when I sent mine to him I assumed standard student programming etiquette of never reproducing other peoples' code in your assignment without express acknowledgement). Anyway, I think I'm done this rant... I am annoyed, but I also thought it was a vaguely amusing story out of sheer audacity. Sometimes people surprise and confuse me.