Category: Ramblings


Ramblings.2010.03.01 – It takes two

Filed Under: Ramblings
Mar.01, 2010

Because of the thoroughly enjoyable production of The Sorcerer which ate my life last week I’ve been thinking about the dramatic arts a lot. As I have said before I tend to think about things too much, and directing is one of those things.

It is common wisdom in our Gilbert and Sullivan society that two artistic directors are better than one, and I’d like to discuss why I believe that is.

There are, I believe, two main reasons. The first reason is a simple matter of editorial control; if I’m directing alone and I come up with a terrible and impractical idea (‘We’ll have everyone come on stage topless!’) there is no one who has the authority to tell me ‘Mark, that’s an awful idea.’ Hopefully such ideas are rare cases, but it’s very useful that someone else has the chance to veto any terrible ideas. In an equal two-person partnership this veto power obviously works both ways.

The second, and more interesting reason why directing teams of two or more is advantageous is the increase in incidence of interesting ideas. We can model the process of directing a show as a list of decisions for each moment (whether line of dialogue, or beat of music) and each element (lighting, choreography, scenery) in the show. Each such element-moment needs a single decision – should this scene be lit with a subdued blue, or a full white? Should the chorus do a box step, or stand still?

We can also observe that each of those decisions can have some measure of quality associated with it; some decisions are great decisions – one of those ‘once-in-every-show’ ideas that everyone agrees is majestically hilarious of heart-breakingly moving – some are terrible ideas – those that have cast members threatening to leave if they aren’t changed – and most are in the middle. These are of course subjective measures of quality and I’ll deal with that issue in a bit.

One could do an experiment with a pair of directors; lock them both in separate rooms with a pad of paper, and a copy of the script and vocal score of the show and ask them to come out when they have a complete list of their directions for the show. Imagine for a second that we have an oracle who can tell us completely reliably and objectively how good an idea is, and so using that oracle we can construct a graph of the quality of direction against progress through the show.

Each director will have a number of peaks and troughs along that graph as they have good, and then not so good, ideas. When they are brought together and are asked to come up with a single directing plan for the show then, assuming they can recognise good ideas and bad ideas accurately enough, the graph of the result should be the upper bound of the two individual graphs. In other words they compare their decisions for each element-moment and select the better of the two. As long as they have a different series of peaks and troughs along their graphs then the average quality of the resulting show will be demonstrably improved.

I said I’d return to the subjectiveness question, and it allows us to bring together the two theories posited above. The quality of a directorial decision cannot be easily calculated by any algorithm. It depends on personal taste, familiarity with the genre, demographic background, and so on. This is what we mean by subjective – the measure of quality depends on the person making the measurement. As a corollary to this, I suggest that a person’s estimation of the quality of their own ideas is likely to be both higher and more static than that of other people of those ideas.

In any case, there will be a theoretical underlying objective measure of an idea’s quality (even if it’s not in prectice discoverable). All else being equal we should expect that the more people are asked to (subjectively) judge the quality of an idea, the closer it will approach the true underlying (objective) quality. Therefore having more than one person involved in the directorial decisions both increases the incidence rate of good ideas, but also helps to more accurately identify those good ideas and discard the bad ideas.

If I get time I’ll add some pretty graphs to better illustrate what I mean, but that time is not now unfortunately.

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Ramblings.2010.02.19 – The Sorcerer

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.19, 2010

Short Friday post today – I’m performing in the University of York Gilbert and Sullivan Society’s production of The Sorcerer next week so there may well be fewer updates.

To get you in the mood for the show though, here’s a couple of videos.

First from Topsy Turvy, the opening of Act 2 (starts about 25 seconds in):

Next an … interesting … take on the opening chorus:

And finally a unique version of ‘My name is John Wellington Wells’:

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Ramblings.2010.02.18 – Pork pie jokes

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.18, 2010

I would like to define what I call ‘Pork pie’ jokes, after a line in one of my favourite films – Topsy Turvy by Mike Leigh (the internet suggests that Gilbert never actually said it, but it’s a great line anyway). In the film W.S. Gilbert, in a rehearsal for The Mikado, is trying to inject some authenticity into the entrance of the ‘Three little maids from school’ by inviting some Japanese guests to a rehearsal. See the video below:

We see the initial choreography that the choreographer, M. D’Auban, has set. Having seen it Gilbert prompts the Japanese guests to confirm that the dance was ‘not even remotely Japanese’ and, after some language problems[1], gets the young Japanese girls to walk downstage. D’Auban still doesn’t get it:

Gilbert: That is the very effect I need.
D'Auban: And what effect exactly is that?
Gilbert: Did you not see what they did?
D'Auban: Yes, they walked downstage.
Barker:  They appeared to me to be ambling along the Strand.
Gilbert: They walked downstagein the Japanese manner!
D'Auban: They walked in the Japanese manner because they are Japanese.
Gilbert: Exactly! And that is precisely why they are here.
D'Auban: Our maids are not Japanese. However, they are very funny.
Gilbert: No funnier, however, than they would be if they all sat down on pork pies.

A pork pie joke, then, is any joke which may be funny, but is so out of place in the context that you might as well go the whole hog and just have some bawdy slapstick.

Gilbert’s point, as I see it, is that it’s very easy to get a laugh on stage – just have your actors sit down on pork pies. But just because it’s funny does not mean it should be done.

In a way it’s a different version of the politician’s fallacy – We must do something funny, this is funny, therefore we must do this.

Why should such a cheap laugh not be allowed? The Mikado is a comic opera, it is meant to be funny. Surely then anything that gets a laugh is fair game?

Well, yes and no. A pork pie joke will almost certainly get a laugh, but at what cost?

Suspension of disbelief in a dramatic work is incredibly important – you’re asking an audience to follow you on a journey into a different world, possibly a world very different from our own – where magic is possible, or people sing choruses in public, or a black smoke monster on an island can kill people. To keep them with you you need to maintain their suspension of disbelief; anything that rocks that suspension risks breaking the spell and causing an audience to recognise the absurdity of what they’re witnessing and so losing their investment in the plot.

Having an actor act out of character, breaking the fourth wall, or changing the tone of the work suddenly are all surefire ways to break this spell; if you’re watching a gritty police drama and, just as it seems the detective has reached a dead end, he pulls out a magic wand and conjures up a demon to help him find the killer, you’re instantly going to switch off (probably both mentally and physically). In the same way adding a pork pie joke to a carefully crafted and wordy comedy turns the whole affair into farce. Would we regard Yes, Minister as one of the pinnacles of British comedy if halfway through an episode Sir Humphrey resorted to fart jokes and knob gags?

Another way of viewing the folly of pork pie jokes is to picture yourself at a symphony concert – perhaps in the Royal Albert Hall – and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is playing. You are really getting into the music and your ears are tuned to the dynamic range of the orchestra – you appreciate the piano of gentle string passages and the fortissimo when the brass weigh in. Then someone plays the ‘Ode to joy’ theme on an electric guitar. The moment is lost, all the subtleties of the orchestral palatte are orevshadowed by the amplified guitar.

This is not to say that electric guitars are in any way vulgar – a virtuoso guitarist should rightly be considered the equal of a virtuoso violinist – but it is a matter of choosing the appropriate stage for such performances – horses for courses if you will. Having people sit on pork pies could be hilarious and completely appropriate in a pantomime, or farce, or kids TV show, but is woefully out of place in a comic work where clever word-play and satire are the principal sources of humour.

Pork pie jokes should be recognised by comedy writers and diretors and treated with care, and avoided where possible. You can get away with one or two small ones in certain contexts, but be wary or your whole work could be ruined.

Mark

  1. ‘If he doesn’t speak English, he’s hardly likely to speak Italian, is he?’ [↩]
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Ramblings.2010.02.17 – New improved recipe

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Feb.17, 2010

Just a mini-rant for today, but one which I think we can all get behind.

I had a rather disappointing dinner last night, partly because I was using own-brand sweetcorn rather then Green Giant (ho, ho, ho!), but more because the pasta stir-in sauce I used (classy, I know) said

‘new improved recipe!’

on it.

I can’t be alone, can I, in feeling a sense of fear and dread when I read that on the label of a favourite food product? It does, by and large, mean ‘new not-quite-as-good recipe’, doesn’t it?

The problem with that message as a concept is that the people you’re telling it to, your existing customers, presumably liked the previous recipe just fine. That’s why they buy it! Does anyone load a jar of sauce into their trolley saying ‘well, I’ll buy it for now, but until they change the recipe it tastes pretty shit to me’? No, people buy a product becasue they’ve maybe tried a few different varieties and settled on that one, or just tried that particular one once and liked it.

This is one of those times when marketing people have been asked to make some bad news more palatable to consumers and they decide that the best way is to treat us like fucking idiots and pretend that it’s actually a good thing, and that they’re doing it in order to serve you better. NO! What’s happened is the maker of my favourite brand of stir-in sauce (which might rhyme with fuck-me-oh) wanted to cut costs by using cheaper ingredients but their taste testers said it tasted worse. Oh well, just polish the turd and say it’s a ‘new improved recipe’.

It’s not improved just because you tell me it is.

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Ramblings.2010.02.16 – Collaborative working

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.16, 2010

This is a (very belated) response to Joel Spolsky’s article about giving programmers separate offices.

I strongly beleive that communication is good, especially when you have new team members unfamiliar with the inner workings and coding style of a large and mature system. If I’m new on a team, or in a company, and ask a question of a real developer I work with, they might realise that I’m asking the wrong question (c.f. Raymond Chen’s regular advice about people asking the wrong question – for example here, here and here) – if I search Google I’ll find the answer, but I might fundamentally be going down the wrong tack. This will cause even more lost time down the line as subtle, hard-to-find bugs have been introduced.

StackOverflow is littered with people asking a specific question (‘How do I achieve blah in Javascript?’) with answers that say ‘You can do it like this, but why not just do it in CSS instead?’ or similar. It’s very easy to think yourself into a hole while programming and not notice or realise that you’re going down the wrong path (not to mix metaphors too hideously). By speaking to a real person they are much more likely than a web search to say ‘hang on, why would you want to do that?’

As a response to the Joel’s argument that a huge amount of time is wasted by a simple request I’d say if you work sensibly that shouldn’t be a huge problem; if you make notes as you go along, and ask people to wait while you tie up loose ends before asking you something then there’s no reason to lose very much time at all by leaving ‘the zone’. I don’t personally know of any developers who go into some kind of zen trance while programming, or whose eyes turn white – a short question shouldn’t ever disturb your mental stack too egregiously.

I say far better to foster an environment where everyone feels free to ask questions of others and is happy to answer others’ questions. Programmers are introverted enough as it is!

Mark

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Ramblings.2010.02.15 – Computers from the ground up [1]

Filed Under: Computers from the ground up, Ramblings
Feb.15, 2010

This is the start of a series, I hope, of articles building up the fundamentals of how computers work, and how we program them to do all the neat stuff they do.

The first thing to introduce is the concept that underlies the entirety of software engineering: Abstraction

Abstraction

How do we manage to walk? Walking requires a precise control over the muscles in your legs and arms, combined with a complex feedback loop from our senses telling us about uneven ground ahead, or when our left foot has touched the ground so we can begin lifting our right leg. When you stop to think about it it seems an impossible task, and yet we do it without thinking about it every day. How do we manage it?

The answer is that when we were young and learning to walk we had to solve all of those problems – which muscles to move in which sequence to go from crawling to standing up to walking, how to keep our balance and so on. This requires a lot of trial and error, and concentration, to achieve. But once we’ve worked on it and found out the best way to move our legs to get around, that gets filed away in our brains as a ’solved problem’. After that, any time you want to walk, your brain doesn’t have to consciously remember all the individual steps, it just invokes its stored ‘how to walk’ pathways which go off and do it automatically.

Having mastered walking you can build upon the concept to do such advanced things as running, dancing, playing football and so on. You can do these more complex things because your brain is free to concentrate on them rather than focussing on moving the muscles in your legs correctly.

This is the essence of abstraction; solve a basic problem once and you can use it as a building block to solve more complex problems with no additional work. The beauty of it is that once you’ve solved a problem once, you never have to worry about it again.

In computing, as we’ll see, some time ago people had to work out a way to get a computer to a) remember bits of information, and b) perform basic calculations on that information. These are quite complex problems involving very low level electronics. But now, with those problems solved, I as a programmer don’t have to worry about it. I know that if I ask the computer to add two numbers together and store the result it will do it. I don’t need to think about how it does it, which leaves my brain free to think about the problem I’m currently trying to solve.

With that in our minds, we’ll start at the most basic innards of a computer and in subsequent posts build upon those ideas to reach the heights of current computer science.

Transistors

The building blocks of all modern computers are transistors. The best way to think of a transistor is as a controlled gate – imagine a gate-keeper who sits by a gate who has a little light next to him telling him when to open it. When that light lights up he opens the gate and a stream of cattle, or cars, or football supporters stream through. In an electronics context a transistor has three connections; when a current flows to one of the connections (called either the base or gate) it triggers the transistor to allow a (potentially much large) current to flow between the other two connections (called either collector and emitter, or source and drain).  Look at the following circuit diagram:

Operation of a transistor as a switch

Operation of a transistor as a switch (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor)

The transistor is the lower circle symbol, with a bar and arrow inside. When the switch is pressed a current flows down through the 1k resistor into the base of the transistor (this current is labelled IBE in the diagram). This small current at the base allows a larger current (ICE) to flow between the collector and emitter (and thus through the lamp which then lights up). The advantage of this arrangement is that you really don’t want to have a huge current running through a switch – if your finger happens to touch one of the wires connected to the switch you’ll get a nasty shock! With the transistor you can use only a small amount of current over the switch to activate the transistor but still have the large current you need to make the bulb light up flow when required.

This gets more useful for computers when the idea of a logic gate is introduced:

Logic gates

Logic in this context means calculations involving true and false values. For example

A AND B => C

C is true if both A AND B are true (the => means ‘implies’), otherwise C is false. A, B and C can stand for any yes or no question, so if we had A = ‘Socrates is a man’, B=’All men are liars’, and C=’Socrates is a liar’ then the above becomes (translated into English):

If ‘Socrates is a man’ and ‘all men are liars’ then this imples that ‘Socrates is a liar’

A logic gate is a device which takes one or two yes-or-no inputs and uses them to decide whether to output yes or no as a result. It’s output is determined by a so-called truth-table. Here’s the truth table for the AND-gate, where F = false and T = true:

A B A AND B
F F F
F T F
T F F
T T T

So the output of the AND gate is only true when both of its inputs is true. In every other case its output is false.

There are a handful of other logic gates. For example the OR gate is true when either (or both) of its inputs is true:

A B A OR B
F F F
F T T
T F T
T T T

These gates form the basis of all computation – with them you can add numbers, multiply numbers, decide between different code paths and many more. How this is achieved is a topic for another day – stay tuned!

In the next part of this series I’ll show how transistors can be used to construct logic gates in circuitry, and then how logic gates can be combined to form things such as counters and memory storage. Ask in the comments if anything above is unclear and I’ll try my best to clarify it.

Until next time,

Mark

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Ramblings.2010.02.12 – How the news works [2]

Filed Under: How the news works, Ramblings
Feb.11, 2010

The BBC are at it again.

Ban on Valentine’s Day cards at school

Let’s go to the horse’s mouth and see what the Council have to say about it to begin with (though of course the BBC chose to add this at the bottom of the article):

He said: “Ashcombe is a primary school and they believe that children under the age of 11 are still emotionally and socially developing and therefore cards declaring love can be confusing.

“Any families wishing to send cards are asked to send them in the post or deliver to home addresses by hand.”

The Mail gives this quote from the headmaster to sum up his position:

‘Some children and parents encourage a lot of talk about boyfriends and girlfriends,’ he said. ‘This often leads to children being upset when they are “dumped” and other fuss which interrupts their learning.

‘The school believes that such ideas should wait until children are mature enough emotionally and socially to understand the commitment involved in having or being a boyfriend or girlfriend.

‘For this reason, we do not wish to see any Valentine’s Day cards in school this year. Any cards found in school will be confiscated.’

Seems reasonable – cards can still be exchanged, just not in school. I’d also say the argument that pre-teens are too young to have any idea about love, let alone declare it to classmates, seems a sound one.

Wait, what am I saying, it must be PC gone mad!

Says a parent:

“It’s a tradition, I can remember when I used to receive cards from boys in school. It’s a lovely thing to do.”

Yes, it is a ‘lovely thing to do’ when you do get cards. When you’re a picked upon pre-adolescent without the emotional capability to process such things, and everyone else in your class gets a Valentine’s card, and you don’t (or just get a joke card accompanied by barely disguised sniggers), it’s an awful experience.

Her argument goes along the same ridiculous lines as a hypothetical ‘Well I can walk up stairs perfectly well, it’s a lovely thing to do. Why do we need to install all these pesky ramps everywhere, clogging up the street?’. Sometimes – I have to break it to you – rules are put in which might slightly inconvenience the many in order to greatly improve the lives of the few. Is that a bad thing? Is it so terrible that if your

“six [year-old] … had a little girlfriend since nursery”

you now will have to take him round to the girl’s house to deliver the card rather than have him take it to school, so that those kids without that kind of relationship with the opposite sex don’t feel excluded?

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe also criticised the move.

She said: “It’s only a bit of fun once a year and it doesn’t mean anything to kids that age.”

This is Ann Widdecombe, expert in child psychology, is it? How the fuck do you know it doesn’t mean anything to ‘kids that age’. Have you spoken to all of them? She continues:

“I just think it is rather silly. Haven’t they anything better to worry about at that school?”

Ah, you’re probably right. The headmaster has probably spent the entire last 12 months solely focussed on whether to allow Valentine’s day cards and how best to stop the fun of all the little kids. Rather than, you know, observing that the tradition has in previous years caused some emotional stress to some of the pupils and deciding that this year, overall, it’s better to have a blanket ban. A decision which might have taken 15 minutes out of his day.

The Mail, of course, have a similar line. And the comments are what you’d expect:

Mail readers reply

Mail readers reply

So no-one’s fussed either way about the environment, LizH is downmodded for agreeing with the school, and Tony makes a gay joke. Sigh.

Mark

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Ramblings.2010.02.11 – Lazy Link Thursday

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.11, 2010

I don’t have as much time today to write a full post, so I’ll take the easy way out and give a smattering of links I’ve enjoyed recently.

Fabulous Adventures in Coding – Making the code read like the spec

Eric Lippert is probably my favourite computer science blogger (even narowly beating the mighty Joel Spolsky) as not only do his interests in language design and linguistics intersect quite nicely with mine but he manages explains very complex topics in incredibly clear and concise ways, and still have the odd humourous side comment. If you’re not a software engineer and don’t care about identifying cycles in type hierarchies then just read the following few paragraphs:

First off, what is this thing called the “reflexive and transitive closure”?

Consider a “relation” – a function that takes two things and returns a Boolean[1] that tells you whether the relation holds. A relation, call it ~>, is reflexive if X~>X is true for every X. It is symmetric if A~>B necessarily implies that B~>A. And it is transitive if A~>B and B~>C necessarily implies that A~>C.

For example, the relation “less than or equal to” on integers is reflexive: X≤X is true for all X. It is not symmetric: 1≤2 is true, but 2≤1 is false. And it is transitive: if A≤B and B≤C then it is necessarily true that A≤C.

The relation “is equal to” is reflexive, symmetric and transitive; a relation with all three properties is said to be an “equivalence relation” because it allows you to partition a set into mutually-exclusive “equivalence classes”.

The relation “is the parent of” on people is not reflexive: no one is their own parent. It is not symmetric: if A is the parent of B, then B is not the parent of A. And it is not transitive: if A is the parent of B and B is the parent of C, then A is not the parent of C. (Rather, A is the grandparent of C.)

It is possible to take a nontransitive relation like “is the parent of” and from it produce a transitive relation. Basically, we simply make up a new relation that is exactly the same as the parent relation, except that we enforce that it be transitive. This is the “is the ancestor of” relation: if A is the ancestor of B, and B is the ancestor of C, then A is necessarily the ancestor of C. The “ancestor” relation is said to be the transitive closure of the “parent” relation.

I think that’s about as clear and concise way to define closures over relations anyone can write. If you really want your brain to flip then read his series of articles on covariance and contra-variance – mind blowing. Or if you want a bit of lighter relief, read his rants

Sceince, Reason and Critical Thought – Skeptic Park

Since learning about the BCA v Singh case through the authoritative Jack of Kent’s blog I’ve become rather too obsessed with skepticism/liberlism – I haven’t changed my political thinking very much (maybe moved from just right of centre to just left) but these writers seem to speak the same language as me and argue things I generally agree with, so I’m happy to stand under their metaphorical collective banner. Crispian Jago’s blog is the light relief in the crowd – in one video he wagers that ‘if homeopathy works I’ll drink my own piss’ and then proceeds to prepare a homeopathic solution from said urine and drink the result. Genius.

In the above linked cartoon he turns well known skeptics into South Park characters. Have an explore around his site for more gems.

Charlie Brooker – Christmas is the season of awful adverts

An article from a real newspaper – the Grauniad Guardian. As is all too well known to anyone who knows me, I’m quite a fan of Mr. Brooker, and I think this stands as one of his best rants. Particularly the following:

Watching Marks and Spencer’s Christmas ad is like sitting through Children in Need. Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Myleene Klass, Jennifer Saunders, Twiggy, James Nesbitt, Wallace and Gromit . . . it’s so chummy and cosy and thoroughly delighted by its own existence, I keep hoping it’ll suddenly cut to a shot of a deranged crystal meth user squatting on the cold stone floor of a disused garage, screaming about serpents while feverishly sawing their own hand off at the wrist.Instead it jokily tries to undercut itself by including a cameo from Philip Glenister, standing in a pub to prove what a bumptiously down-to-earth Mr Bloke he is. His job is to stand at the bar claiming that the best thing about Christmas is the sexy girl from the Marks and Sparks ads running around in her knickers. Then it cuts to the sexy girl from the Marks and Sparks ads running around in her knickers, as though this is somehow as iconic a Christmas image as Rudolph’s nose or the little baby Jesus. Listen here, M&S: few things in life are more pukesome and hollow than a self-mythologising advert – so next year do us all a favour and just shake a few sleighbells, flog us some pants, and then piss off back to your smug little shop and be quiet.

Classic.

Enemies of Reason – My parcel hell

Another rant to be finishing off with, this time from Anton Vowl (who’s catchphrase should really be ‘reading the grotty, seedy newspapers so you don’t have to.’) – an angry, angry man. For extra comic value try reading his diatribe on getting parcels delivered in the style of Christian Bale’s famous shouty-fest[2]:

You tried? Oh good for you. What do you want – a fucking round of applause? How about I whine to you about a series of unsuccessful ‘attempts’ to pay you the money I owe you?

Proper service should be resumed tomorrow.

Mark

  1. [A Boolean is a true or false variable - Mark] [↩]
  2. On that topic wathc this. It’s brilliant:

    [↩]

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Ramblings.2010.02.10 – Two off the top of my head

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.10, 2010

Watch one of my favourite Mitchell & Webb sketches. Go on…

I am currently reading ‘The Diet Delusion’ by Gary Taubes and it’s a fascinating read. It’s aim is to as fairly and honestly as possible analyse the past 50 years of reasearch into our diets and try to come to a scientifically informed conclusion about how to eat most healthily. Trying to eat healthily is something almost all of us aspire to do to varying degrees, but this is a fruitless endeavor if we don’t know how to eat healthily. Common wisdom of course is that fats, especially saturated fats, are bad and cause obesity and heart disease, and that we should get more of our calories from other sources such as protein and carbohydrates. But reading Taubes it’s clear just how much of that common wisdom is at best scientifically shaky and at worst actively dangerous.

Unfortunately Taubes is a little coy in his writing, often not being upfront with his findings[1]

I’m only about a third of the way through so this isn’t a full review of the book in any way[2] but there’s a matter I want to discuss today that has already arisen.

The Mitchell & Webb sketch above I think perfectly captures the problem discussed at length in the book, which might be best summarised as the problem in responsibly reporting science to the public and in using cutting edge research to inform public health policy. The problem Raymond Terrific and the boffins in the sketch face is that Raymond wants to reduce a very complex discussion to a short answer – ‘answer can’t be as long as the question’, ‘Well, there is no yes or no answer./WHAT!? I can think of two yes or no answers just off the top of my head!’[3].

Of course we recognise that the question of God’s existence cannot just be answered with a simple yes or no. But journalists and governments, when distilling scientific findings to the public, need a definite and unambiguous message to convey – ‘high cholesterol is bad’ we’re told in headlines and government health leaflets, even though evidence suggests that the reality is more complicated than that; in fact high cholesterol seems only to be linked to increased rates of cardiovascular death in men, total mortality rates (including all other chronic conditions) seem actually pretty unaffected by cholesterol, or suggest that excessively low cholesterol is more dangerous in men and women than high cholesterol. In fact there’s compelling evidence that high cholesterol (within reason) is safer for women than low cholesterol. The graphs reproduced in the book from the 1990 NIH conference on the subject [4] are shown below to highlight the somewhat surprising results:

Graphs showing effect of cholesterol levels on various mortality rates

Cholesterol levels against mortality rates (Click to expand)

Observe that for all causes of mortality except cardiovascular mortality, it is actually better to have a higher level of cholesterol than to have a level below 160 mg/dl. The graph for total mortality (top-left) indicates that overall your chance of dying due to any cause is largely unaffected by blood cholesterol level.

The need for punchy headlines and easy to follow health advice means that these subtleties more often than not go unmentioned. This is coupled with a desire to publish and publicise early; if preliminary studies show that polyunsaturated fats lower incidence of heart disease then that conclusion is vociferously jumped on by health authorities and advocated to the public, even if a full batch of clinical trials haven’t yet been performed to verify that argument’s validity. It appears that all links in the causal chain of saturated fats causing high dietry cholesterol causing high blood cholesterol causing atherosclerosis (clogging of the arteries) causing death from heart disease are far from conclusive – so even though it may be true to say eating fewer saturated fats reduces the cholesterol in your diet, this has not conclusively been shown to reduce either your blood cholesterol or your likelihood of suffering from heart disease or dying from it. However this is now so ingrained in public wisdom that hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions, see this chain of causality as inevitable as putting your arm in a fire leads to a burnt arm.

I suppose diet is an almost unique case in public health; when a new drug is developed no one has previously used and relied on it, and so delaying its widespread approval until thorough and conclusive clinical trials have been undertaken is a no-brainer. But everyone eats. If a large number of people are right now eating a diet which seems to be dangerous to their health then they deserve to be told right now. But you can’t starve people for the years it takes for proper clincal trials, so you almost have to give the public your current ‘best guess’ as to the healthiest diet – and what’s more stick to it, or it seems like weak indecision – ‘Eat this! No, wait, eat this instead!’

I heartily recommend you read Taube’s book if you want to more thoroughly understand the debate, the current research, and how best to approach your own diet. When all’s said and done it is misleadingly simplistic to say ‘never eat this’, ‘it’s always better to eat this’ – far better to understand as best you can the subtle interactions our diets have with our bodies. So, yeah, do that.

Mark

  1. I was always taught that when writing in a scientific context one should announce the findings immediately – you’re not writing a crime thriller – put the results in the abstract! [↩]
  2. I hope to write more about it in future [↩]
  3. Still one of my favourite jokes. [↩]
  4. Report of the Conference on Low Blood Cholesterol: Mortality Associations, Circulation, 1992;86;1046-1060 [↩]
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Ramblings.2010.02.09 – Pim’s Wager

Filed Under: Ramblings
Feb.09, 2010

To be or not to be – that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. …

… To die, to sleep⎯
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.[1]

We turn today to a subject that in the last year or so has become dear to my heart – atheism. I might discuss my ‘conversion’ at some other time, but that time is not now. Today I want to propose Pim’s Wager as a (only slightly jokingly) refutation of Pascal’s famous wager:

Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

On first glance perhaps a compelling argument; you’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain by believing in God, says Pascal, so you have no logical choice but to believe! From a game theory perspective the choice is obvious:

You believe in God You don’t believe
God exists Eternal happiness in Heaven! Eternal damnation in hell!
God doesn’t exist You look a bit of a tit. Correct, but still no heaven.

Many people far more eloquent than I have very convincingly and completely destroyed this argument, not least of whom being Richard Dawkins[2]. I don’t really want to attempt a pale imitation here.

What I do want to do is mount a counter wager that argues almost the exact opposite and that in fact it is ‘nobler in the mind’ to reject religion, certainly organised religion. I’ll restrict my argument here to Christianity, the religion I am most familiar with, but to a greater or lesser extent this argument applies to all the major religions, mutatis mutandis.

To begin with, we note that almost all Christians will say that their religion preaches on such moral high-grounds as compassion, mercy, self-sacrifice and humility. The Christian thing to do is to stand up for one’s principals inspite of opposition, to stand up for the weak and oppressed despite personal risk.

We can also observe that almost without exception every major branch of Christianity has at some point in its history committed attrocities, either large or small, that every right-thinking person should abhor, and many to this day continue preaching dogmas which directly damage the lives of real people[3]. Laziness prevents me from going into them here, though Christopher Hitchens’ magnificently vehement God Is Not Great should suffice to convince you of the general truth of this assertion.

My wager is that, if you accept the truth of the previous two paragraphs, then paradoxically the Christian thing to do is to renounce Christianity. By doing so you are ‘taking arms against a sea of troubles’ – standing up and saying that you disagree with what organised religion has done in God’s name over the centuries and disassociating yourself with those deeds, even though it might risk your chance of eternal happiness in heaven. Is that not an equivalent gesture to the Christian martyrs who suffered death rather than renounce their religion? Is it not noble to sacrifice your personal happiness and comfort to defend the weak and oppressed? Is that not what all good Christians should aim for?

On the other hand, by ’suffer[ing]/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ and remaining a loyal subscriber to a Christian denomination, you are in a very real way tacitly condoning the reprehensible actions of your church in exchange for personal gain – a ticket to heaven. Is it going too far to suggest that that is a selfish attitude?

I am not in any way suggesting that the millions of Christians in the world are selfish as I suggested above; I very much doubt many people have actually considered their religion in such a light or would draw such a direct link between membership of a church and the condoning of its entire history, but I do believe it is a question every Christian should ask themselves. If you are a Christian, be one for the ‘right’ reasons, because you believe the teachings of Jesus Christ help us lead more loving, caring lives and that His love can provide you solace in your times of need. Don’t be a Christian because, like Pascal, you worry that if you don’t you’ll spend eternity in Hell. Such an argument seems, to me, to go against what most people would say are Christianity’s fundamental teachings.

Returning to the Hamlet soliloquay above, I have taken a certain amount of liberty in highjacking this most famous of Shakespeare speeches for the purposes of my atheist argument but I hope you find its use is not entirely unjustified; the central dichotomy in the speech is between action and inaction, between laying down and accepting your lot in life, and fighting against ‘a sea of troubles’ for what you believe in, and ultimately between the pains and pleasure of life, and the possible pleasure or pain that waits us after death. It is a dichotomy that we all must face, Christian or not, ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause.’

Mark

Shakespeare

  1. Hamlet, Act III [↩]
  2. Central to his refutation is that you can’t ‘will’ yourself to believe in something just because it’s the logically safest bet. Such willful belief is inherently spineless [↩]
  3. The Pope’s repeated assertion that condoms somehow cause AIDS still beggars belief. [↩]
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