Can you hear me now?

More simple bite size tat for you.

Have you ever been in a situation where, when on the phone, you can't hear the other person because of a room full of cunts who won't shut up or other such annoying background noise? You probably do what everyone else does and put one finger in your free ear to block out the noise. This never really works and the reason for that is that most cell phones and just about all land lines are "full duplex".

This means that the signal you hear in the ear piece is mixed with your own voice from the mouth piece - and by extension all the background noise too.

Phones were designed like this because the engineers of the time believed that if they mixed in the sound of the callers own voice into a conversation said conversation would sound more "realistic".

So, if you want to hear someone better on the phone, cover the mouth piece. This stops the above from happening and creates what is called the "cocktail party effect".
Yes, you'll still hear the cunts speaking inane nonsense in one ear but your brain can now block that out. Like when you're at a party and the room's full of separate conversations but you can focus on the one you're involved in.

A simple sketch of this is...

Voice - left ear - BRAIN - right ear - room noise.

And when on a phone with an uncovered mouth piece it goes like this...

Voice with distored room noise - left ear - BRAIN - right ear - room noise.

That's harder for your brain to unmix.

Planets make awesome ambient music

Well, hello there! It's been a while, for lots of reasons, all of which I shall not go into.

So, as I've said before, Space is fucking awesome, here's another reason why...

Below is a video of the planet Jupiter making some truly awesome ambient music. As they explain in the video, even though space is a vacuum, these sounds are electromagnetic vibrations that Voyager et al are designed to pick up.



What follows is someone explaining it a lot better then I can...

From an original CD: JUPITER NASA-VOYAGER SPACE SOUNDS (1990) BRAIN/MIND Research
Fascinating recording of Jupiter sounds (electromagnetic "voices") by NASA-Voyager. The complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from the solar wind , planetary magnetosphere etc. create vibration "soundscapes".

Jupiter is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. The entire planet is made of gas, with no solid surface under the atmosphere. The pressures and temperatures deep in Jupiter are so high that gases form a gradual transition into liquids which are gradually compressed into a metallic "plasma" in which the molecules have been stripped of their outer electrons. The winds of Jupiter are a thousand metres per second relative to the rotating interior. Jupiter's magnetic field is four thousand times stronger than Earth's, and is tipped by 11° degrees of axis spin. This causes the magnetic field to wobble, which has a profound effect on trapped electronically charged particles. This plasma of charged particles is accelerated beyond the magnetosphere of Jupiter to speeds of tens of thousands of kilometres per second. It is these magnetic particle vibrations which generate some of the sound you hear on this recording.
Visit http://www.inner-net.com/bmr/bmrpg2aa... for more sounds.

And here's a sort sonic representation of Huygens descent onto Titan.



Sounds from a left speaker trace Huygens' motion, with tones changing with rotational speed and the tilt of the parachute. There also are clicks that clock the rotational counter, as well as sounds for the probe's heat shield hitting Titan's atmosphere, parachute deployments, heat shield release, jettison of the camera cover and touchdown.

Sounds from a right speaker go with the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer activity. There's a continuous tone that represents the strength of Huygens' signal to Cassini. Then there are 13 different chimes - one for each of instrument's 13 different science parts - that keep time with flashing-white-dot exposure counters. During its descent, the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer took 3,500 exposures.

Amazing stuff.

There, I hope you liked that. I'll try and go back to this again at some stage. For now I have to read about fucking psycho-analysis. I fucking hate psycho-analysis.

Derren Brown is a witch

So tonight sees Derren Brown predict the national lotto numbers live on tv. As far as I know he plans to then revel on he did so on Friday.

Derren, who I am a fan of, has for a long time been doing a fantastic job doing what he does. He dresses his tricks up as amazing feats psychological manipulation when in fact they are no more then “simple” street and stage magic. When he starts his shows saying he uses a mixture of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship", he's setting you up. He's being honest in the techniques he uses but the ones he wants you to pay attention to our in bold. From there on out, he disguises nearly all his tricks as those of a psychological \ suggestion kind.

One of the best examples of this I can recall off hand would be from his last televised live show. He gets several audience members to join him on stage. He asks them all to think of an object. What then takes place is a series of “twenty questions” but in Derren's style. So more like three.
He puts the same questions to all audience members. What he does as he asks these questions is look the audience member up and down, making it look like he's getting a read on them. In one instance he asks to see a one guy's hands. He looks at the back and front, and proclaims he's thinking rugby ball.
Of course Derren's right and you think, “wow, how did he do that?”. Was it the size of the lad, his clothes and maybe his hands, when Derren inspected them, looked like that of a rugby players. Add them all up and you think that Derren has made a educated guess based on information gleamed from his mad skills at reading people. Or maybe he somehow “forced” the rugby ball idea into the lad's head through some mad suggestion skills.

No.

As the audience members were approaching the stage they were asks to write what they were thinking down on a white board. The white board in question is on of those electronic wi-fi bad boys that can be hooked up to a computer. One of Derren's lackeys will then feed the information to Derren via his ear piece.

What happens when Derren dresses his tricks up as “psychological” is he separates himself from normal magicians. We see him as highly skilled practitioner of a science. We look at what he does and believe that he is one of a few that can pull these tricks off – unlike a standard magician, whose tricks we know are simple tricks, ones that can be bought in a box, ones we believe, if we knew how they are done, we could do them ourselves. When in fact he is no different to a Paul Dainels (who is an absolute legend anyway).

Even his feats of memory are not beyond us mere mortals. He does not have a photographic memory, no such thing exists. He says as much in his book...

“There is very little evidence to suggest that the popular idea of a photographic memory really holds. While there are a few savants who are able to hold in their minds very complex, highly detailed after-images of a scene ('eidetic memory'), it typically does not hold for long, and tends to be prone to subjective distortions rather than being photographically perfect. Moreover, most of the studies on extraordinary memories seem to show that these gifted individuals use rich mnemonic strategies...” - Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind p62

These mnemonic approaches to memory are something I wish to write about in a latter post.

It's also worth pointing out that when, on T.v., he shows how a trick is done, don't always believe him. This, sometimes, is just more dressing up. Giving you a “plausible” solution that revolves around suggestion or psychology when in fact it was “mere” slight of hand or something we might consider a little less exceptional...

"I am often dishonest in my techniques ... I happily admit to cheating, it's all part of the game. I hope some of the fun for the viewer comes from not knowing what's real and what isn't" - Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind p341

So, back to the show tonight. How is he going to “predict” the lotto numbers?

He might do the thing where he'll write them down as they're announced, and then write them behind each time. eg the first one is blank, then before the second he writes the first, before the third is read out he writes the second.

It could also be done where the lottery was played behind him, but it was delayed ten seconds, and he'll have an ear piece telling him what each number was just before it came out. (I've been told this was in an episode of Jonathan Creek.

Well, there's a few other ways he could do it but either way I'm sure it'll be entertaining.

Eat shit and live

Dysentery is, in short, when you shit yourself to death...

...if you don't get it treated.

So when you can't get to a hospital you can try this...

Furthermore, Lewin (2001) reports that "... consumption of fresh, warm camel feces has been recommended by Bedouins as a remedy for bacterial dysentery; its efficacy (probably attributable to the antibiotic subtilisin from Bacillus subtilis) was confirmed by German soldiers in Africa during World War II." In addition, sheep feces contain the same antibiotic as camel feces. There are numerous reports from German soldiers of the effectiveness of sheep and camel feces being effective cures for dysentery.

I think that's hilarious. You're shitting too much? Eat some shit.

You are small

I've, for a second time, failed to update this place for over a month. I've had a pretty horrible fucking time during said month and I'll blame that for my poor effort.

So, during this month off I haven't even considered a subject for a new post. With that in mind I'm just going to waffle on about stars and space for a bit and throw in some videos and gifs.

Space is fucking huge. It's pretty ridiculous and just next to impossible to comprehend and it's this that makes it so amazing to me. When you think about the scale of certain celestial bodies and the vast, vast empty space around them it can really put you in your place. It also gets my curiosity going something special.

You tell anyone this they'll more then likely tell you they already knew this. And they probably do. What they probably don't know is how small our planet really is. Even next to something we're all very familiar with. The Sun.

Think about how big, relative to us, the face of our planet is. It's fucking huge. It's diameter is just under 8000 miles.

Our Sun, which looks kind of small to us, is quite a bit bigger then the little rock we live on. In fact it's so much bigger that Earth can fit inside it a million times. Earth, 8000 miles around, can fit into the Sun one million times. That is, in the truest sense of the word, awesome.

In fact, the Sun accounts for over 99.9% of all the matter of our whole solar system.

Our Sun, a Star, is of course one of many. And it is no where near one of the biggest.

The largest known star is VY Canis Majoris, in the constellation Canis Major, located about 5,000 light-years from Earth. It's around 2,100 times bigger then our sun. Light takes more than 8 hours to cross its circumference!

Now, below is a ace little video that puts everything into perspective a lot better then a bunch of numbers. It doesn't include the VY Canis Majoris but does have some other massive stars that. while smaller then VY, our still bigger then anything you've ever known.



It's pretty mad. These huge, huge things exist in this massive, massive universe that's mainly empty space. So, these giant masses that are so much bigger then our Sun which is in turn a million times bigger then our planet, make up - when all put together – a very small percentage of our universe. I think it's around 4% but I'm not sure, I've drank a lot of red wine and I'm not bothered to do any research.

Here's that gif I mentioned before...

(edit - I couldn't get that gif to work, here's another video, it has VY in it.)



Even with pictures trying to gauge the scale breaks your Brain halfway through.

Now, with all this delicious wine in me I best stop for now. Really, this post was just so I could get the blog going again. I'll go back to this again sometime.

Bullets

I had quite a horrible mental breakdown over the weekend, a proper mental breakdown and not some blog hyperbole, and as a result I've decided to keep myself a bit more busy over the coming weeks. This should hopefully extend to this blog too.

With all that said, off to yet another post of inane pedantic drivel...

In a somewhat similar vein to my last post, the subject of movie physics, I plan to talk about bullet sparks.

Simply put, they're a load of bullshit. Bullets don't spark like what you see in some films and most TV shows. The reason for this is very simple, they're made out of copper-clad lead or lead alloys and not steel.

It's why some hammers, used in chemical industry or other places where a spark could be very fatal, are made out of lead (or copper alloys) and not steel.

Bullets do get hot when they strike solid objects. The worst case would be if all of a bullet's kinetic energy were instantly converted to thermal energy when a bullet struck its target and all the thermal energy remained inside the bullet. This is highly unlikely but easy to calculate. I say easy...

A .45 cal handgun bullet (it's a big enough bullet, in between (ish) a standard 9mm and Dirty Harry's
.44 mag), has a mass of 0.015 kg and a muzzle velocity of around 288 m/s. Kinetic energy is calculated from the mass and the magnitude of the velocity of an object using the following equation...

KE = ½mv2

KE = kinetic energy m = mass v = velocity

Using the above equation and the values I supplied we find that such a bullet has a kinetic energy of 619 J. And if all that kinetic energy is converted into thermal energy the temperature rise is calculated as 324° Celsius.

If the bullet starts at room temperature (24° C) it will end up at 348° C. The melting point of lead is 328° C.

So, in this highly unlikely event that all the kinetic energy turns to heat, in a hope to generate a spark, the lead would melt. And molten lead looks like silver. In fact molten lead is used in films as a substitute for molten silver.

All worked out on the basis that the shot was at point blank range.

Of course bullets don't get that hot and most of the kinetic energy is lost on it's short travel.

Unlike last weeks post, where I made the point that lasers in films work how they do because otherwise they'd be boring, sparking bullets are just shit.

Subtlety can be far more dramatic­

Laserface

Lasers in most people's minds probably look and act like those found in such films like Star Wars. Multi coloured fun beams of death. Of course, real lasers don't work like that, especially in space.

First, imagine you're in a big space dog fight with all the homo-erotic undertones of Top Gun. You spot a boggy in the distance and line up your shot. You fire but - SHIT - you missed because you didn't aim far enough in front of the enemy and by the time your laser gets to it's target it's behind them.

You see this happen all the time in films. It's pretty stupid though seeing as lasers are made of light (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, to be exact) which is pretty damn fast. Really fucking fast in fact - Around 300 million meters a second.

So, when you take into account that in these space battles ships are usually only a couple of kilometers away it would only take a millionth of a second or less to reach it's destination.

It's been proven that the human mind cannot precive two events that happen within around 3 thousandths of a second of each other as separate events . So you'd never have to wait for your laser to hit, it'll all look like it happened at once, in your mind.

Now, let's say your enemy has super amazingly quick reactions and can hit some gay hyper drive system once he spots your lasers. WRONG. He won't be able to see the laser until some light from the firing gun has reached his eyes and by that time he'll have died a horrible death.

Add to all that the fact that all lasers in space would be invisible because, seeing as space is a vacuum, there is nothing for them to bounce off of and become visible.
Lasers you see at gigs and other such events have a load of smoke, dry ice and other such particles in the air to react with. This creates the long colourful laser beams you see at your discotheques.

The thing I think is the funniest though, when you cast this hyper analytical no fun geek logic to cinematic space epics, is that with all their amazing technological insights and breakthroughs that are but the fevered dreams of a mad man to us, they haven't developed a space ship with a perfectly mirrored hull, that would simply reflect the lasers and hence make them invulnerable to such attacks.

This isn't a post criticising these types of films for not being realistic, god forbid. If these films applied the laws of physics with such a stringent attitude, they'd be fucking shit and boring. They're unrealistic on purpose and with good reason. I just think the idea of laser combat in space, when broken down, kinda funny and redundant.

Looks shit hot though.

- Thanks to Steven Poole and his awesome book Trigger happy for the 'inspiration' for the above post -

Prion disease no.1

Jesus, even when I come up with a way to make my life easier I some how manage to fuck it up. Procrastination or out right laziness, either way this post should have come days ago.

Now, I'm going to be real lazy and just outline a bit about a disease that effects the most interesting organ in the body - the brain. At this point I feel I should detail why I find the brain so fascinating but, as I said, I'm going to be lazy and leave that for some other time.

The disease is called Fatal Familial Insomnia. It's a super rare autosomal (a non-sex chromosome) dominant inherited prion disease. A prion is a infectious agent born form mutated protein. Another example of a prion disease would be Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) also know as 'mad-cow disease'.

In Fatal Familial Insomnia the thalamus part of the brain gets pretty badly fucked up and degenerates in a spectacular fashion. The thalamus is responsible for many functions but it plays a key role in sleep and wakefulness.
As the disease goes to town on this part of the brain the patient's progression into complete sleeplessness is untreatable, and ultimately fatal.

Doesn't sound like a nice way to go if you, like me, love your sleep. Also, as your body is deprived of sleep some truly horrible and strange things begin to happen. I'll go into that in a second...

The gene responsible has been found in only 50 families world wide since the disease was discovered by an Italian doctor, Ignazio Roiter, in 1974. He found a family where two women had appeared to die from insomnia. When Ignazio (legend name) looked back through the family medical records he found a history of insomnia related death. When another member of the family fell ill in 1984 Ignazio studied the patients deterioration and after his inevitable and no doubt horrible death the patients brain was flown to the US for study.

As I said before, the body deprived of sleep doesn't just give up and die, it goes pretty mental. Here's how the disease presents.

The age of onset of symptoms varies a bit, between 30 to 60 – average of 50. It seems though that the disease will usually onset in the later years – after childbirth.
You might think, given the description of the disease, death comes relatively quickly. In fact, it takes between 7 and 36 months.

It breaks down into four stages.

In the fist stage you begin to suffer from increasing insomnia. This leads to panic attacks, paranoia and new phobias. This will last for around 4 months.

Next, comes the insomnia induced hallucinations as your panic attacks become much more noticeable. This lasts around 5 months.

Then comes the complete inability to sleep, followed by rapid loss of weight. This lasts for about 3 months. (I need to look into this more as a 'complete inability to sleep' can not last for 3 weeks let alone 3 months)

Finally you succumb to dementia during which the you become unresponsive or mute over the course of 6 months. This is the final progression of the disease, and you will subsequently die.

All in all a pretty horrible way to go.

Now, like I said this is an insanely rare disease and the chances of you having it are are so small they're up there with me featuring on the cover of a Men's Health magazine.

An out

I'm still working on taking out and putting back in RX-7 engines. It's fucking hard, painful work.
Nuts and bolts in these impossible positions, all requiring the force of 100 men, each who have the strength of 10 men, to loosen. When I do get it lose, because I'm putting my whole body into it, my hand flies into some sharp metal or plastic. That can fucking smart. It's up there with standing on a plug in your bear feet or stubbing your toe on the bed.

Also, a lot of shit falls into my eyes when I'm under the car. Rust and dust mostly. One time I opened up the clutch inspection plate and there was a load of spider eggs inside. Thankfully they didn't fall into my eyes...or any part of my face. Squirming and freaking out underneath a car that's an inch away from your face and is precariously balanced is not an option. Unless being horribly crushed is also an option.

Anyway, to the point of this post...

To stop this blog from going completely dark I'm going to get a wee bit lazy and write about some quick simple things. Mainly interesting medical conditions and diseases.

I hope some will be worth a read and I should be able to post a couple of times a week..

Also, I might write a bit about big brother seeing as I've decided to watch it this year. Although after 4 episodes it seems to be a war of attrition I'm not going to win.

Bah...

Seems like I have to go back to work on removing RX-7 engines with the old man. This will eat up my time and it looks like the next post won't be with us for a few more days at least.

That is unless my brand new medical condition I just found out I had a few days ago stops me from doing the work. In a way I hope it doesn't because if it does, well, this condition will be with me until I'm 40 I was told by the doctor.

That's preety shitty. And to have something stop me from doing just about anything "rough" for the next 15 years would really piss me off.

Anyway, in short, the blog will be hit with another delay.

Edit - It's just been brought to my attention that I made it sound like I have a very serious problem. It's not that bad but it's a fucking nuisance. You all don't need the details.

Big silly words you'll never see again

The longest word in the English language is something I had a very brief look into a around a month ago.

I was watching one of E4's landfill “100 best” shows, this one on musicals, and a writer of a certain piece of saccharine fucking nonsense laid claim that a word in this song took the place of the longest word in English. This annoyed me.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is a stupid, piece of coined non-sense and even as I write this has a big wavy red line underneath it – even still it does appear in many a dictionary. Thankfully it does so as a proper noun. This means that many would not consider it a contender for longest word.

This in turn asks the questions, what definition do we use for a 'word' and how should length be compared.

Chemical names are usually stupidly long. Where do we draw the limits on coinage and construction?

Well, I'm not going to get bogged down in all that shit and instead I'm just going to list the longest words – from those coined to those of chemical names.

The first one is what many might consider the true longest word in the English language as it is a non-coined, non-technical word – Antidisestablishmentarianism. (28 letters)

It's a constructed word which I'm too lazy to break down now but give it some thought and you can do it by yourself, it's quite easy really. Just start at establish.
Anyway, the word itself means “the movement or ideology that opposes disestablishment”.

And really, you could expand on the word further and have antidisestablishmentarianisticalized and you can continue the fun by adding prefixes to that...

The next word, while still non-technical, is coined. Floccinaucinihilipilification (29 letters) - "the action or habit of estimating as worthless".

I don't what to talk about this word any more because I hate it. It's something I can see Will Self using to belittle me because he's so fucking smart and so smug light fucking bends around him.

In a reverse of the above, non-coined but technical, Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism (30 letters) is next in-line. It's normally written as pseudoPHP.
In short it's an inherited disorder similar to Pseudohypoparathyroidism. A medical condition.

Now, to combine the above two, we have the next longest word, a technical and coined word, Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (45 letters).

It was coined in 1935 by Everett M. Smith purley to be the longest word ever to appear in a dictionary and to this date it is. It's own definition reads "a fictitious word alleged to mean 'a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.'"

There's then a huge word, 183 letters long, coined by some Greek called Aristophanes in his comedy “Assemblywomen”. It was written around 390BC...

Lopadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimhy-
potrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakechymenokichl-
epikossyphophattoperisteralektryonoptekephall-iokigklopeleiolagoiosiraiobaphetraganopterygon.

Fucking non-sense.

Apparently it means a dish made up of all different dishes. God, I'm pissing my self with laughter. That must have been one hell of read back in the day.

Then finally, the longest, most stupid word in English, clocking in at a stupid 189, 819 letters, of which I will not be writing here, or even copy and paste here, is a protein called Titin or conectin.

It's the largest known protein and because of this, if you use the names of each amino acid found within, you get this big stupid word. Kinda like calling a sponge cake by all it's ingredients stuck together.

If an organic chemist wants to tell me that's a poor comparison, please do.

A short version of it missing the middle, a lot of the middle, looks like this - Methionylthreonylthreonyl...isoleucine.

And that's your boring lot.

Every time I set out a topic to write about I plan to draft and redraft and I never end up doing that. The above was all written in one go in a twenty minute session so sorry if it's a mess.

Correlation and the cause

A month long hiatus was never my plan but over that time I've had exams and assignments to concentrate on, unfortunately. So with those commitments over my head I couldn't find time to do adequate research for any posts. Yes, I do research for each post...all two of them. I couldn't find time for a lot of things in fact.

It seems I simply started the blog a bit too early. Now, though, I have a lot of free time ahead of me so I should be able to get a post out at least once a week. With pictures and links and other improvements. How exciting, eh?

Anyway, to get back into the swings of things I'll post a short little entry on an important aspect of the scientiftic method – the fact that correlation does not imply causation.

Simply put, this is a phrase used in science and statistics to emphasize that just because there's a correlation between two variables, this is not proof that one is the cause of the other. An idea that's simple enough to grasp but you'd be surprised how often people can be fooled and overreact when shown a correlation and told it's the cause. An asshole called Dr. Wakefield used a certain correlation to imply that a Autism was caused by the MMR vaccine. I'll go into that a little at the end.

But before I do, I'll just outline a couple of examples where if you were to use the logical fallacy - “correlation does imply causation” - how you'd look like an idiot.

During either the Korean War or the Vietnam War, I can remember which, in one base there had been an insane amount of crashes involving soldiers on motorbikes. The army conducted a study to see if they could find a reason, a commonality between all these soldiers and why they were crashing their motorcycles.

The results of the studies... Tattoos. The single thing all people involved in these accidents had in common was tattoos. The idea that it was the tattoos causing the crashes was ridiculous. It could be argued that people who get tattoos are more likely to ride motorcycles and take chances. And people that are more likely to ride motorcycles and take risks are more likely to crash motorcycles. But to say a tattoo is the cause. You'd be a fucking retard.

In a widely-studied example, numerous epidemiological studies showed that women who were taking combined hormone replacement therapy (HRT) also had a lower-than-average incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD), leading doctors to propose that HRT was protective against CHD. But controlled trials showed that HRT caused a small and significant increase in risk of CHD. Re-analysis of the data showed that women undertaking HRT were more likely to be from higher socio-economic groups, with better than average diet and exercise regimes. The two were coincident effects of a common cause, rather than cause and effect as had been supposed.

Thanks to wikipedia for that example.

Now, to talk about Wakefield who conducted a study on the links between the MMR jab and Autism. When his reports were released in 1998 implying that the jab was in fact a cause of autism people went bat shit retarded and refused to give their children the MMR vaccine. A truly stupid decision that borders on child abuse and I say that with minimum hyperbole.

The findings are now widely believed to have no credible scientific basis at all but we still have people who refuse to give children the MMR vaccine. You can read more about the whole controversy here.

Thing is, if you approach cunt Wakefield's findings using the scientific method (read common sense), it falls apart pretty quickly.

The use of the jab while Wakefield was doing his research was widespread – the odds that the autistic children that Wakefield was using for his study had got the shot were huge. This doesn't mean the shot was the cause. There would have been a load of other commonalities between these children that meant just as little.

People seem to refuse to think a lot of the time.

You stink but not like that

I've heard people talk about pheromones, in regard to humans, from time to time. The belief in human pheromones is odd to me seeing as we're an extremely vision orientated species and the idea that we would need these silent chemical triggers to illicit response in others seems redundant. We are far too complex an animal to use such a system to communicate and that's why such systems are found in insects (and a small few vertebrates and plants).

It also seems most people tend to refer to sexual pheromones when talking about human pheromones but there are plenty other types of pheromones that exist - including alarm and food trail pheromones.

Now, if someone were to tell you that we have alarm pheromones you'd probably question such a hypothesis.
Why would we emit a silent chemical trigger to warn another of danger when we can shout, jump around etc? It's obvious that we have better systems of communication then that of pheromones.

So why do the vast majority of people believe in these phantom sexual pheromones?

Christ, there's loads of reasons why. Word of mouth and pseudo pop science would be the two biggest reasons \ problems.

When you look at some of the studies that have taken place to find human pheromones (not just sexual ones) it all gets a bit messy. While it can't be said for definitive that humans do or do not give of any pheromones it still seems unlikely that we do.

The most famous such study was performed by Martha McClintock. She investigated the synchronization of menstrual cycles among women based on unconscious odor cues. The results seem to suggest such a phenomenon does occur - however recent studies and reviews of the McClintock methodology have called into question the validity of her results.

Sweat is the closest we have to the idea of a human sexual pheromone. In 2008, it was found using MRI scans that the right orbitofrontal cortex right fusiform cortex, and right hypothalamus respond to airborne natural human sexual sweat, providing neural evidence that socioemotional meanings, including the sexual ones, are conveyed in the human sweat.

So, it seems to be a fuzzy subject. Some of the 'pheromones' found in humans don't operate like pheromones do for other animals. We will never base an attraction or future mate on a pheromone. While there are smells, orders and scents we all like and that exist everywhere they are never the basis for attraction.

My whole point really is that causal \ practical discussion of human pheromones is pointless.

How wrong we can be

When it comes to probability, our intuition tends to lead us the wrong way. A lot of the world of probability works in a counter intuitive manner. Because of this a 'gambler's fallacy' works its way into our thought process when trying to predict how certain events will unfold; from the roll of a dice to the lottery.

This is something I plan to talk about a lot over the coming posts but seeing as I'm still burnt out from my silly bourbon drinking last night I'm going to keep this short. What I'll leave you with is one of these cognitive 'illusions' taken from Derren Brown's book 'Tricks of the Mind'. It's paraphrased so apologises for not having the same wit or writing skills as the man himself.

Imagine there's a disease. This disease if contracted will condemn you to certain death. But the chances of you catching it are very slim, 10, 000:1.
There exists a test that can tell you whether or not you have this fatal disease. You go to the doctor to take the test where you are informed that the test will deliver a correct negative or positive 99 percent of the time.
A week later you get the results in the mail and to your horror the result is positive.

What are your chances of having the disease now that you have this information?
99 percent surely? In fact your chances are less then one percent.

Unless you've heard this problem before or have studied statistics the above conclusion is naturally jarring. It doesn't make sense. But with these kind of cognitive mind fucks you can't go on instinct – your intuition. You have to break it down.

First, the chances of you not having the disease are huge – 9,999:1. Now, let's say 1 million people take the test. Only one hundred people will have the disease. Ninety nine will have got a correct positive while just one will have gotten back a false negative. Now, on the other side of the coin 999, 900 will not have the disease but 1 percent will get the false positive (9,999 people)

So are you more likely to be one of the 99 who have the disease or one of the 9999 that don't and received a false positive?

You're over a hundred times more likely to be in the second group.

To begin...

Christ, don't ever, ever, drink whisky the same day you were under a general anesthetic. Beside the fact that you'll get absolutely fucked up to the point where rivita dipped in mayonnaise seems like fine dining – it also gives you one motherfucking head raping headache in the morning.

Anyway, during that little escapade last night I started this blog. I tried to write a post explaining the name but, being in the state I was in, what I wrote was gibberish. Half sentences. Sentences that moved to the next before they were finished. Using the word cunt so frequently it started to act like some sort of weird grammatical metronome.

Just a mess really.

Then I changed the blog's name.

So, for my first post I'll tell you why I started this blog and what I plan to write about. Seems a pretty vanilla way to kick things off.

I love to talk about what interests me. Who doesn't? But I find the things that really grab me don't grab other people the same way. Or at all. Also, I drink a lot. Because of this when I try to get people interested in what I'm interested in I tend to make little sense and get some facts and figures wrong. I hope with this blog I can get my point across with a bit more clarity and consistency.

So what interests me? Quantum physics and all Science really, Psychology, Video Games, Whisky and Whiskey (the former is Scotch while the latter Irish), some T.V., Medicine, Japan and it's culture, Photography, Probability...and a few other things.

I hope what I share here will interest whoever might end up reading it and I hope the blog will be more about the positive and less the venom spitting, ranting on a soap box type stuff which you find everywhere on the interweb.

I'll still manage to fit in a rant or two, I'm sure.