The sexiest picture I've seen in years

That's Falcon9_Mission20 first stage - after having reached 100 km, 5000 km/h, 16 km downstream, separating the second stage, turning around, and flying back - landing, vertically and under power, at Cape Canaveral almost exactly on the target.

As the first stage is approximately 70% of the cost of launches, this is a very, very big deal for space flight.  With the upcoming launch of the Falcon Heavy - which has two of these as "boosters" around a third segment, all of which can potentially be landed the same way - we may actually see affordable major development in space.

The choice of right

Morality is fundamentally irreligious.

I don't mean that religious people can't be moral.  I simply mean that the basic fundamental of morality has nothing to do with religion.

It is, in fact, entirely aesthetic.

Many people like to go on about their reasoning or rationale for various moral choices - whether religious or not: there's a major topic in atheism about building a rational morality.  But all of these systems come down, at one point or another, to considering life to have value.

And therein lies the sleight of mind that most people miss.

If you think life is valuable or important because your god says so, with no personal involvement, you aren't really moral - you're obedient.  You've made no personal decision about right and wrong and merely follow orders.

Even in that situation, though, I know of no active religion that doesn't have some element of self-determination - of freedom of choice - within it.  And if there is choice, then there is the ability of the individual to decide whether or not to follow the dictates of the religion.  What's the basis of that choice?  Why does someone choose to follow the rules vs. disobeying them?

It's an aesthetic decision: an expression of personal taste or preference.  It's not justifiable in any way, no more than preferring the color blue or the taste of chocolate.  That aesthetic decision is, really, the fundamental moral act for the religious.

For others (like atheists), the choice is a bit more direct: rather than adding the layer of choosing to value life (or not) because some deity does, they simply make the choice on their own.  Again, it's often couched in vague or loose terms, and rationalizations are often presented if not simply the assumption of self-evidence ("of course life is valuable; everyone knows that!").  But it's still, at its core, an aesthetic choice.

Once you've made that choice - or, if you're like me, and drill down a little deeper and make it there - you can use whatever framework of logic or reason to build up the rest of your morality.  Or, if you're religious, you just adopt the framework of a religion and can avoid spending much time analyzing the details (or do, if you feel like it).  One can build a rational or religious (or both) morality upon the basic aesthetic decision, but it's impossible to build either without that aesthetic decision.

If you believe that there is no such choice - that it is impossible to not choose to value life or whatever you see as the basis of morality - then you're back to mechanical obedience and morality cannot exist, whether it's obligatory obedience to a god or forced behavior due to physics and chemistry.

Hiding in plain sight

I like taking pictures.  I'm not a professional photographer, but it is a hobby I enjoy.

Someone meeting me on the street wouldn't know this.  Most of my coworkers don't even know this.  Heck, many of my friends haven't seen my photos.  Every time the subject of photography comes up, I have the option of mentioning that I do photography.  Occasionally, someone else who knows will say it for me.

Now, photography isn't really a controversial topic (unless you're in a media class), so the question of whether or not to out myself as a photographer isn't really important to anyone but me.

(And yes, you may see where this is going, but bear with me.)

There are many facts about ourselves that we choose to reveal or conceal in different environments, most without impact beyond ourselves.  The choice is (mostly) ours on how much we wish to include others in our lives and how much of our lives we wish to include in our relationships with others, be they coworkers, friends, family, lovers, or anything else.

Some facts, however, are far more controversial.  Sexuality is an obvious one, and one with which I'm very familiar, but it's not the only example: mental or non-visible physical differences, disabilities or disorders are another (do you tell someone you have a hearing aid? that you take prozac every morning? that you have a sixth toe?); another might be transgenderism.  Even things like marital status or level of education can be points of conflict in different environments.

With respect to sexuality, there are active social forces in many places including the United States that are very against anything other that basic man/woman relationships.  These forces are (at least in the US, but I see it elsewhere as well) losing power slowly, but they remain major sociopolitical factors for the moment.

There's an argument often made, especially by individuals in the gay community, that anyone who is gay ought to come out: it's often framed as a kind of debt, that such people owe it to society to be visible and proud and such.  The argument is legitimate: the more gay persons are visible in society as regular, everyday people, the harder it is for the opposition to demonize the group as a whole.

I have a couple of problems with this.

The first is an emotional/boundary problem: it's my sexuality.  It's part of who I am, as an individual.  To whom I express or reveal that part, and how much, and when, is entirely a decision that only I can and should make.  No one has a right to force me out of the closet (no, not even if I'm a raging hypocrite - sexuality is not a weapon to use against someone), even with the best intentions.

The second problem, though, is one that goes back to being a photographer.  It doesn't matter how many times I tell people I'm gay: there's always someone new coming along who doesn't know.  We often speak of "coming out" like it's an event, a touchdown or a party (or a disaster), but it's not.  It's a process that has to be repeated over and over and over.  Coming out never ends.

Do you realize how much of a burden is being placed on someone by insisting they must come out?  For someone like me, who isn't "obviously gay" and is regularly assumed to be straight, should I wear a button that says, "Hi! I'm gay!" everywhere I go?  Do I need to preface every initial meeting with someone with a detailed description of my sex life?

Even for me, it's a burden.  I frankly don't care if people know that I'm gay - no more than I care if they know I'm a photographer.  I'm not ashamed or hiding the fact.  But the effort it takes to constantly be coming out, to constantly be answering the questions that everyone asks (and they're always the same questions), is huge.  That effort is more than I care to make most of the time; most relationships just aren't worth it.

And it's just as true, if not more so, for all those other hidden facts about people.  I don't tell everyone I know that I'm ADHD, or dyslexic, or OCD, or slightly sociopathic, or allergic to alcohol and strawberries, or...  All of these things come with an added degree of effort to maintain any relationship in which they're mentioned.

I understand the sociological context of the "come out, come out, wherever you are" mentality.  And I very much want the world to be a place where people feel they are safe to come out, whether it's about being gay or diabetic or transgender or Autistic or even a photographer; that "want" bears with it a social burden that must be born by someone in society.  But I don't think that anyone - anyone - has an obligation to come out in any scenario, nor that anyone has the right to "out" someone else in any scenario (with the possible limitation of something life-threatening).

Stop the harm

Every decision to act is a cost/benefit analysis, even if we aren't aware of it consciously.

The difficulty comes in deciding what the actual costs and benefits are, and how to quantify them relative to each other.  What is the cost of a broken heart today versus one in three months?  How do we measure the benefit of a random smile?

One thing most people agree on is that a cost born involuntarily is worse than one born voluntarily; in practical terms, intentionally or accidentally forcing a cost on someone is ethically worse than intentionally or accidentally taking one on yourself.

Applying this logic to incidents of violence is generally fairly simple: if you see a fight, you try to stop it and prevent anyone - assailant or victim - from being hurt, even if you don't know what they're fighting about.  Now, we have a legal system that is moderately successful, so we have the advantage of knowing that even if the attack is somehow justified, stopping it likely won't stop the eventual justice.  Even without that, however, it simply makes the most sense to stop the harm first and worry about the rest of the factors afterwards.

When we try to apply this same logic to incidents of discrimination or bigotry, however, that basic calculus seems to get lost somewhere.  We often hear that we should work on helping the perpetrator with education or debate, being "nice" to them rather than chastising or confronting them.  Rather than helping the victim, the arguments often change to minimizing the harm to the perpetrator.

If person X is doing something that harms person Y, it shouldn't matter if the harm is a physical attack or an discriminatory act: the ethical responsibility is to first stop the harm to person Y.  Once that's done - once person Y is no longer being involuntarily subject to harm because of X's actions, regardless of what those actions are or how X is being affected by those actions - we can then look at X's situation and try to determine the most ethical course of action with them.  The harm has to stop first.

If we neglect this duty, if we allow harm to continue to be inflicted on victims while trying to somehow make the act of stopping the harm more palatable or less inconvenient to the perpetrators, we are complicit in the causing of the harm.  We're no better than the perpetrators.

In simple terms: you don't ask the guy attacking people with a knife if he has a bad relationship with his mother or why he's doing it.  You tackle him, disarm him, and then worry about his motivation.  The same is true if the knife is, instead, language, power, or privilege.

The Yellow Clarinet

The illusion of control is a very important thing.

How many superstitions about bad luck are there?  The number 13, walking under a ladder, breaking mirrors, real flowers on stage - there are numerous (probably too many to count) variations on what should or shouldn't be done to influence the luck on has.  Some of them seem kind of obvious - walking under a ladder doesn't seem terribly brilliant to start with, as something or someone might fall off, but I'm not sure how many people need to be advised not to randomly break mirrors (it seems, at best, a fractured hobby).  Some of them likely arise from random collusion of incidents or from historic prejudice.

Most people think most superstitions are silly - except their own.  I know hardened atheists and skeptics who knock on wood.  Of course, the "mote in my eye/twig in your own" phenomenon is fairly common among various belief systems, and they are, after all, a kind of extension of the same phenomenon: the need to exert or at least pretend to exert some control over the random events in one's life.

But there is a more practical, more sinister side to this illusory sense of control.

How many times have you heard, "It's his own fault he got mugged - he was in that part of town after dark!" or, "Tsk, she would have been fine if she hadn't been wearing a dress like that" or similar statements?

It's the same thing: this notion that the person (in this case the victim) had control over how the situation played out.  While this may be true to an extent, in situations where the person is the victim of a crime, there is only one person who had 100% control over how the events played out:

The criminal.

The concept is known in psychology as Defensive Attribution Hypothesis - the notion on the part of the bystander that "if only she/he/they had done (something) different, this wouldn't have happened."  The "goal", if one can call it that, is to determine causal mechanisms for the event that the bystander has control over and, therefore, that the bystander can use to prevent the event from happening.  It's a psychological defense mechanism: "this can't happen to me because I'm in control."

The primary problem, though is that if the bystander is in control, then so was the victim (at least theoretically), which means that, according to the bystander, the victim is at fault for being robbed/attacked/(insert crime here).

On the surface level, this is ridiculous.  I hear, in the virtual echo chamber of the internet, the audience saying, "Well, of course not, but..."

No "but".  No qualification.  The only person who has control over - and thus responsibility for - committing a crime is the criminal.  One can speak of ways to reduce risk - after one has plainly and unambiguously acknowledged this fact.  One can talk of how to defend one's self - after one has admitted that the need for defense is entirely because of the attackers, not the attacked.

The illusion of control is a very important thing.  It helps people to maintain at least a fleeting sense of security in a world where very few things are guaranteed.  However, it is an illusion.  Try to remember that the next time you wish someone "break a leg" or hear about a woman being raped.

This is how science works

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2012/09/25/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/

The basic premise is that a bunch of scientists put a dead salmon in an fMRI and demonstrated brain activity.

Yes, in a dead, frozen salmon.

So in the final results, the authors compared the normal multiple comparisons, with the multiple CORRECTED comparisons. When they used the multiple corrected comparisons, the dead salmon showed nothing. When they did the multiple comparisons without the correction, the salmon showed significant increases in “activation”, coincidentally, in the brain and spinal cord. This shows the importance of correcting for multiple comparisons and avoiding false positives

The original poster almost didn’t make it to a conference, but when it did, it made a major splash, and reactions were very positive. Some people like to use the salmon study as proof that fMRI is woo, but this isn’t the case, it’s actually a study to show the importance of correcting your stats.

And the poster, and the paper that was eventually published, may have had an effect on the field. The authors note that at the time the poster was presented, between 25-40% of studies on fMRI being published were NOT using the corrected comparisons. But by the time this group won the Ignobel last week, that number had dropped to 10%. And who knows, it might, in part, be due to a dead fish.

Yes, that's right, a frozen fish - and the analysis of it - may have improved medical science.

The takeaway point, though is that you can do your data collection correctly but screw up your  analysis and still end up with a bad result.

Or, sometimes, you're looking in

Curiosity (inside its sky crane) as it parachutes down to the surface of Mars, as seen from the Odyssey orbiter

Off the planet, past the moon, across space, through the atmosphere, under the parachute, released from a sky crane...

... nothin' but net.