No True Scotsman

The US presidential election has taken a really nasty turn in recent weeks, it has for a large part descended into gutter politics fuelling on an angry xenophobic mob. The nature of any election campaign is not to be the best candidate for the job, rather it's to be the best candidate for the election process. In this, it's hard to fault the negative campaign, if they believe they are the best people to do the job for the country then it's their duty to do all they can to get elected. The problem though with wedge politics is that election processes come to an end, yet society still remains.

Causing division in the community is suddenly not going to cease the moment the results are in; the further the wedge is pushed in, the further apart people are separated along those lines. Australia entered a very ugly societal position from just that sort of campaigning, the Tampa crisis combined with 9/11 which led to moral panic around Islam gave the perfect platform for John Howard's re-election. It also left the community bitterly divided, and 7 years on the jingoism is still causing problems. To question is to be unpatriotic, the flag was now a sacred symbol and anyone who disagreed was unaustralian. So many shirts at the Big Day Out with the slogan "Australia - love it or fuck off".

But this import from America of that extreme form of nationalistic patriotism is hardly a surprise in the post-9/11 world. And as much as I would love to blame the politicians for exploiting the deepest fears of an uncertain collective, the real blame does lie with the people. The only reason these political strategies work is because enough of the population buys into it. It's easy to dismiss these people as being sheep; easily led automatons who don't exercise any free will. That attitude isn't helpful, it's wrong and portrays them in a similar negative light to how they see us.

So back to the US where the American conservative base has done all it can to portray Obama as wrong for middle America. The Bill Ayers affair epitomises the gutter politics that is being seen nightly in the media. Why can they tie the actions of this 60s radical to a politician who was 8 years old at the time? For the same reason as those chain emails labelling Obama an unamerican Muslim spread quickly. There are those who are uncomfortable with him, and are looking for any justification to dismiss him as wrong for America.

The angry mob is now at a frenzy, mention of his name at republican rallies is receiving audience shouts of "TERRORIST!" and "KILL HIM!". One thing I have admired is McCain's attempt to diffuse the angry mob, but it may be too little too late. The lipstick-wearing pitbull that was chosen as a running mate has more than happily pushed Obama into the most unfavourable light possible, inciting the angry crowd with cutesy hate speech. McCain really needs to put his pitbull on a leash, it's his campaign and he's the one that is ultimately accountable for the actions of the joe-sixpack hockey-mum who speaks for small-town main street American values.

Now that is where the real venom has been in the last couple of weeks. There's more and more talk about the "real America", about "true Americans" who "love their country". It's nothing more than racism masquerading as patriotism. Some commentators like Rush Limbaugh at least don't have the pretence, his comments about former Secretary of State Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama dismissed it as entirely to do with race. Could it have been that Powell genuinely felt that Obama is the best candidate to take America forward? That Obama's cool head in the midst of this financial crisis and his crossing of the generational gap are assets that Powell wants in a leader? Could it be he's disgusted by the rabid anti-intellectualism and gutter politics that are part of the Republican platform? Not according to Limbaugh.

The "real American" rhetoric may win votes, it may convince the undecided voters who are concerned about Obama that he's not looking out for his best interests. Because apparently Obama is an elitist, working as a community organiser and serving on a charity board have been republican fodder. But the divisive politics is taking it's toll, both Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart have rightly stepped in to disassemble this dirty political rhetoric. Even if it doesn't work to win McCain the election, it will still be a sour taste in the mouths of every Obama-hating "true American". As Barack Obama said:

"There are no real or fake parts of this country. We are not separated by the pro-America and anti-America parts of this nation—we all love this country, no matter where we live or where we come from."

It will be a dark day for mankind if McCain is elected on a wave of glorified xenophobia, especially given his bipartisan mantra.

There's a monkey sitting at a typewriter

Mathematics is the language of science, so having a grasp on the mathematical concepts used is vital in order to understand much of what is written. Understanding the difference between coincidental and causal events is vital in order to understand statistics. Our brains work on linking causal events, if I press the 'x' key on my keyboard I expect there to be an 'x' written in my text editor. Likewise, all the keys on the keyboard have function and using that same causal relationship I can write entire blog posts. I am conveying information in a causal manner. Now what if it were random? Could a random generator recreate a post of mine, or even a single sentence?


Generating improbability
Now there's a few ways of going about this, take the sentence "mathematics is the language of science", taking the lower-case alphabet and the space character, there are 38 spaces and 27 different characters to go in each. Note that Dawkins did a similar computational experiment in The Blind Watchmaker.

• random chance - suppose you tried to generate every position and every character at once. To get the first character correctly would be a 1 in 27 chance. As would generating the second character. To generate both characters correctly would be (1/27)² or 1 in 729. To generate three characters correctly would be (1/27)³ or 1 in 19,683. To generate all 38 characters correctly would be 1 in 27³⁸ or 1 in 2.5*10⁵⁴. So for this one off event to happen, it would take an extraordinary amount of time to generate it by chance with purely random input.


• cumulative chance - instead of trying to generate it all in one go, generating each character individually could work better. Start with the first character, and there's a 1 in 27 chance of generating 'm'. So when 'm' is finally generated, move onto trying to generate the 'a'. Now each subsequent character generation is dependant on earlier chance encounters. To generate 'math' now becomes (1/27) + (1/27) + (1/27) + (1/27), or 1 in 108. For all 38 characters, it's (1/27) * 38 or 1 in 1026. So by progressively doing each step along the way, it takes away an extreme amount of improbability.


• evolving chance - back to generating in one go. By starting at an arbitrary point and tweaking the string, eventually it will come up with the right answer. The mathematics for this is not easily expressed, though it can be expressed in code.

The results
I wrote a java program to simulate these different processes. The source code is available here for anyone wishing to run it themselves. Feel free to modify it, and push it to it's limits. It's very much a cobbled together hack-job, there wasn't much focus on having a clean interface. It's there to show I didn't make the results up, and while the randomness of the PC will mean that the numbers will not turn out the exactly same as mine, they are a good approximation of the procedure.

• random chance will not generate a computational answer, computer randomness is based on seeds so it will run infinitely without ever finding the answer. If it were truly random, then it would still take an almost infinitely long time. I ran the program quite a few times and there wasn't even a fragment of any word that could be considered English.


• cumulative chance has yielded similar results to the mathematical prediction of an average of 1026 iterations. Running it 10 times, I had the following results: 1058, 867, 1077, 1403, 776, 943, 1081, 893, 945, 880. This is an average of 992 iterations for the result. Doing it again for 10 iterations yielded the result 1028. A third time with 100 iterations yielded an average of 1008. A few more times and I did get 1026 as the average over 100 iterations. The practical application of statistics correlated with the theoretical application.


• evolutionary chance brought an even quicker result. By adjusting the amount of mutation (a mutation rate of 1 would mean 'd' could only change to either 'e' or 'c', 2 would cover the spread from 'b' to 'f'), the length of time could decrease. The results for running it 100 times on different mutation rates were as follows:
  

A run through with a mutation variance of 5
Iteration: 1 tptvelwhiqt irsirfpokxpub skrjcgrhcslt
Iteration: 2 - qrtyekzgimy iunhtirkibrubetjuhelueerot
Iteration: 3 - nqt efxfiru irmkojmmkdquddqesjeoxieoov
Iteration: 4 - rmtzedthiov ivmoohqrkdsufencsfhquiesly
Iteration: 5 - whteedtiity iyktnkpulfnudjmcrfgnuiewpz
Iteration: 10 - tftjeclaiww ivdtocswahguajjo fodwieurb
Iteration: 20 - hvtheixaifs in tfwlladguarexffqjpievcr
Iteration: 30 - natheoetias is thyhlamguadeohfinsieucx
Iteration: 40 - mathematigs is th tlacguaoepcflnniescg
Iteration: 50 - mathematics is th uladguauewdformiemce
Iteration: 60 - mathematics is thdilajguabe lfdskiebce
Iteration: 70 - mathematics is thwtlacguaje ofksniefce
Iteration: 80 - mathematics is thkjlauguape of syievce
Iteration: 90 - mathematics is the language of snience
Found iteration 97 - mathematics is the language of science

And what of those monkeys?
The first two methods would be simulations of how a monkey would type: the first method would be the equivalent of letting a monkey type the entire post and have it start from scratch over and over if there would be any errors. The 2^nd method is like the monkey using the backspace key each time it got something wrong. The evolving algorithm is unlike random chance, it's to illustrate that information of almost infinite improbability can emerge over a far shorter space of time.

Including white space, my posts average around 7,000 characters. By the time a post is finished, the amount of characters I press is probably a lot higher when taking into account typos, spelling and grammatical errors, deletion of poor sentences, and proof reading. All up, it wouldn't be entirely unfair to say I do about 10,000 key strokes per post. Now if I do 200 keystrokes a minute, then it would still take me 50 minutes or so to get the post to where it is now. To evolve or generate something like this by chance is theoretically possible, but practically impossible.

This is why when we see a code or information we know there's intelligence behind it. To look on the great pyramids, the symbols contained therein are the product of intelligence and intent. Anyone who has had previous dealings with the written word would be able to understand the symbols are the same construct. To go back further into human history, the same could be said of cave paintings. It is not the refined symbolism of the written word, but it's evidently communication. Other forms of communication do exist that are not so obvious, smoke signals for example. There are times too when we can mistake natural order and randomness as communication, the stars say astrology is a joke and our futures are not etched into the palms of our hands.

We can infer meaning from non-meaningful processes, this is the problem with the statement "all codes are a product of intelligence". We see patterns all through nature, improbable shapes, repetition, improbable assortment, all of which come from natural processes. One of these patterns is the pattern of DNA, the double-helix structure that has the instructions on the building blocks of life. How could this occur naturally? Well, that's for another entry. The importance of the tests above what to highlight the difference between random chance and a cumulative or an evolutionary process. It was to show that improbable events can be created quite quickly using select processes.

Welcome To The Universe

I'm really looking forward to this series, AndromedasWake has made several high-quality videos so far. It's always good to see the time and dedication people are putting into furthering the cause on knowledge on a place like YouTube, goodness knows public understanding of science is severely lacking.

Fanning the flames of hatred

Will we ever progress in society when there's pride in being an ignorant racist?

The Atheist Blogroll

Kelosophy has been added to The Atheist Blogroll. You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.