Prophets in the Old Testament were crazy guys. Here’s the Priest, keeping everybody in line and happy, and the Prophet would come out of nowhere, blasting their comfort and telling them they weren’t looking after the widows and fatherless, just as bad as Sodom, and what not. No wonder so many of them got killed. Or maybe it’s because, then as now, people didn’t have very good attitudes toward the mentally ill.

I know a Prophet sort of guy. He doesn’t mind nettling the authorities. He claims to have extraordinary spiritual experiences. And, if I may say, he is crazy.

“No, I really wish you wouldn’t,” I say.

“But I want to,” he says.

“No, don’t,” I say. “You’ll tell me some great spiritual story, and I’ll crap all over it and say it’s all in your head, and I don’t like doing that. It’s not fun for me.

“And unfortunately, I already know what I’m going to say, because I’ve had this conversation before.”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“I’ll tell you that your experience is important to you, but it’s anecdotal, and I’m not able to evaluate your experiences. I’d also say that feelings and experiences are not valid evidence. Evidence comes from empirical and repeatable observation, not faith.”

“What if someone told you they’d seen an angel or had a vision where God talked to them?” he said.

“Then I’d try to get them the help they needed so that they wouldn’t hurt themselves — or anyone foolish enough to believe them.”

He thinks and says, “Okay, but you can explain away anything. Are you sure you’re not just rejecting all spiritual evidence that could make you believe? What would qualify as evidence, in your view? If not your own feelings or experiences, then what?

“What if an angel appeared to you? Would that convince you?”

Well, there I was. I sometimes say I’d change my mind if I had a good reason. An angel would be pretty striking. If I say ‘no’, aren’t I really saying I wouldn’t accept any evidence, even the most miraculous? I’ve accepted scientific ideas on much flimsier evidence than what my own eyes have seen.

And yet, if the hypothetical angel did appear, it could be a hallucination. I’m not prone to hallucinating angels, or much of anything else — surely I’m not a credulous nincompoop like all those other people, right? And yet I’ve been wrong before.

But what if it wasn’t just my experience? What if I could submit the experience to critical review, and it still stood up?

And that was really the answer. If I saw an angel, I’d ask it to stick around while I get photos and video. It’d have to be an unambiguous angel and not an image on a wall or a face on toast. I’d need corroboration from some other observers besides myself. We’d need multiple sightings, under different conditions.

But angels never do that, do they? They’re shy of groups. They only ever appear to one person (or perhaps a select group of believers), under irreproducible circumstances. Just like UFOs. Angels and UFOs are both a kind of jealous phenomena, as I discussed in an earlier post.

Experiences are what our lives are made up of. It’s hard to see why they can be unreliable or even just made up. My experiences are meaningful to me, but I need to remember that I can be fooled. I could manufacture feelings or hallucinate angels if it were important enough to me to be able to do so. In this way, faith obscures.

“Language technology, eh? Are you going to fix Word’s grammar checker?” asked the technical writer.

No; I hate grammar checkers.

“Me, too. This one’s stupid. It flags good sentences, like ‘the staff’.”

The staff?

“You know, like I write ‘The staff think we should…’ and Word says it should be ‘thinks‘…”

Well, Australian English and American English have different ways of handling collective nouns, like company and family. They’re grammatically singular, but speakers of Australian English (and, it seems, British English) prefer to see the plurality of it. So in Australia you’re far more likely to see “The Motleyup Town Council welcome you” whereas American English would have it “welcomes“.

My sense is that this is changing in Australia. A dodgy Google search turns up more hits for “Australia welcomes you” than for “Australia welcome you“, without weeding out bogus examples. Which, but for work demands and laziness, I would do.

Usage guides are full of advice that no one cares about or ever uses. Ignore them and say what the population around you says. Or say.

Update: That wasn’t the best example. So I did a slightly more thorough, yet equally dodgy, search. I say ‘dodgy’ because Google fiddles with its page counts. I haven’t controlled for bogus hits.

Australia, “The family is“: about 121,000 pages
Australia, “The family are“: about 32,800 pages.
Australia, “The company is“: about about 850,000 pages
Australia, “The company are“: about about 121,000 pages.

Don’t do anything serious with these numbers. Still, this is a starting point for confirming how the singularisation of collective nouns seems to be creeping in.

What’s all this about new Macs having an Intel chip?

Two decades after the first Mac arrived, Apple said Wednesday that it would offer users of its latest models a simple way to run the Microsoft Windows operating system as well as its own.

That means a single Apple computer will deftly run programs written for either the Mac or Windows, though it will have to shut down one system to start the other.

Um, why would you want to run Windows on a Mac?

• Gaming. This is probably the primary reason. Since even virtual machine solutions typically still emulate some aspects of video, to get the full performance Windows still has to be running natively directly on the hardware.
• Best possible performance. For those who want Windows and their Windows applications to run as best as they possibly can, again, running Windows directly is required.
• A desire to run Windows (for whatever reason, whether it be preference, desire, necessity, etc.) on quality Apple hardware, while also having the option to run Mac OS X.
• Other applications for which direct hardware access is required.
• Becuase you can. No reason at all other than to “do it”.

Is this a good thing for Mac users?

“We think [it] makes the Mac even more appealing to Windows users considering making the switch,” Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in a statement.

Investors seemed to think the strategy would help Apple expand its share of the personal computer market beyond the 3 percent to 5 percent level where it has stood at for many years.

What would Steve Wozniak say?

“It’s a great thing for Apple,” he told a reporter by e-mail. “I don’t see the earth being rocked, but I can now recommend Apple hardware to a lot more people. One pitch is that if Windows gets too frustrating and unbearable and unsafe, then they can easily switch.”

Well, that sounds pretty good. So will I be able to run Classic Mac applications on my Mac?

Classic applications do not work on Intel processor-based Macs.

For best results using Mac OS X, upgrade your Mac OS 9 applications to a Mac OS X version. Check with the manufacturers for more information.

So you’re saying I’ll be able to run Windows, but not Mac Classic, on my Mac?! So that some guy can play Doom?

Update: It seems there is a way to run your Mac Classic applications! First, load Windows onto your Intel Mac. Then, download this Mac Emulator that runs on Windows. And run your Mac programs. In emulation on Windows. On your Mac.

Is that weird?

The effort to buttress the temple of faith continues, with predictably tiresome consequences.

A scientist suggests that Jesus may have pulled off the walking-on-water trick by walking on ice instead.

Rare conditions could have conspired to create hard-to-see ice on the Sea of Galilee that a person could have walked on back when Jesus is said to have walked on water, a scientist said today.

My question: will religious folk love this because it adds to the scientific plausibility of Jesus’ miracles, or will they hate it because it suggests that he wasn’t able to pull off the real thing?

Or will they think about it for five seconds of dumb confusion, decide it’s not important to their salvation, and go watch TV?

Bingo.

While I’m on the topic of spam, what is the deal with the phony names of senders? It used to be they would pull name lists from censuses and combine them randomly to throw off spam-monitoring software. I knew that if I ever got email from “Constantine Q. McTaggart”, it’d be spam. (Until I met him and found that he’s a lovely person.)

Now they’re not even trying anymore — just throwing in lists of regular words. Which is why I got an email today from

Paraguay K. Emasculate

It’s just silly.

Got any entertaining spam names lately? Put ’em in comments.

I was rather concerned to see the following subject in my inbox.

bullshit teacher

I thought it might be one of my students making some kind of comment (but is ‘bullshit’ describing the quality of the teacher, or the subject of the class?).

But then I read the message. Not to worry; it’s only spam.

I should have known better; it’s a spam tactic that’s been clogging my inbox for weeks now. Automatic mail watchers can flag spam by noticing that there are 2 million copies of the same message. So spammers drop one or two random words into the subject line of the email. Random text (or lately, snippets of novels) appears in the message body, and it hides the payload: a graphic touting their odious wares. Obviously they’re trying to fool the spam filters with nonsensical but plausible text. Tough to catch.

And you can do even better. You can create realistic sounding but nonsensical text using what’s known as a bigram model (but it’s also called a Markov chain). Here’s how to do it: Take a good-sized text and examine every combination of two words. Some combinations will occur frequently, others less so. Then start stringing likely combinations together, word by word, from the most likely pairs. Here’s a few sentences that I generated using a bigram model that was trained on the Old Testament.

Take ye careless ones: look upon the son of hosts; Is not spread forth, Jehoshaphat and flourishing in Galilee with their sockets of the heavens, which satisfieth thy dominion over against them, Go, borrow of Israel, whom David reigned in the Egyptians against me, saying, Take thee the children of thy fruit, and their brethren were in the end of Egypt with the Philistines stood above women in my throne, having his dainty meats: For the Preacher, vanity unto their inheritance, according unto the tongs from among them. And the LORD is in the faces of the Redeemer is his sword against gallery in the LORD, See, I shall not hearken to anger.

It can generate pages and pages of this stuff. The sentences are sometimes ungrammatical because my model isn’t very good, but it’s not bad considering I’m building the text two words at a time.

I present the nonsense text from my spam message for your edification.

unborn plunk
an horrifying upheaval Leo of as expensive frosted in stingy, allocate was briefing
quintessential at adroit family planning to ludicrously, stilts an pipsqueak, environmental lavender, food processor
low-paid agitate as interface jointly eaves classified
confusing and muddled asst. as robin the an
cordon tedious inroads
curiously meditate, are insurgent ineptitude as vagina, harebrained in sameness the immature,. translucent
birthplace as Bible of convertible geography, lit, the unclean a the pure, the tuberculosis

I think it’s a bit Joyce.

“You may believe that spiritual experiences are just illusions,” said the Priest, “but I know what I have felt and experienced. And I could never deny it.”

“This isn’t about your ability to deny your feelings and experiences,” I explained. “The question is: do your feelings and experiences constitute good evidence? And the answer is, no, they do not. They don’t always mean what we think they mean, and we can be fooled.”

“Okay,” said the Priest, “in all fairness, I can see how some of my spiritual experiences might have been coincidence. But there’s no way I could dismiss all of them as pure coincidence.”

I’ve heard a few people say this. What they’re saying is that they’ve had experiences where something happened that seemed a) spiritually appropriate in some way, and b) too unlikely to have happened by pure chance.

But notice the assumption: that we can guess the likelihood of an event, and tell when an event is less likely to happen than random chance.

The truth, however, is just the opposite: People are rotten at guessing probabilities, especially when the probabilities are very small. It doesn’t come naturally to us.

Here’s a test you may have heard before. Which is more likely: getting killed by a shark, or getting killed by falling airplane parts?

It’s airplane parts, by thirty to one. We overestimate the risk of shark attack because we have all heard examples of shark attack. This is a cognitive quirk called the availability heuristic; events seem more likely if we can easily recall examples of them. An interesting demo here.

Another one: you’re more likely to die by a meteor impact than by lightning.

I must confess, that meteor stat surprised me. Here’s the explanation:

What is the approximate probability of a given person being killed by a meteorite?
1 in 20,000. If this statistic sounds incredibly high given that you’ve probably never heard of anyone who was killed by a meteorite, it’s because the data is skewed. Every so often an impact large enough to wipe out just about all life on Earth occurs, and in between times, pretty much no one is killed by a meteorite. So while you have a 1 in 20,000 chance of being killed in this manner, the statistic is not much different for the entire population of Earth combined. If an asteroid large enough to kill people hits, it will probably kill a lot more than a few; but there’s a 19,999 in 20,000 chance that it won’t happen in your lifetime. Hence the statistic. If I had asked what the probability was of any given person being individually STRUCK by a meteorite, the answer would be astronomically higher.

We can use statistics to calculate the probability of events that have happened. And in fact, in natural language processing we calculate the probability of unseen events using a range of techniques under the heading of smoothing. But this doesn’t come naturally to our reptile brains.

The fact that lotteries exist shows that people are awful at probability guessing. Religious belief is often sustained by erroneous guesses about the likelihood of events.

Note: I am aware that my sources are a bit contradictory on the relative probability of lightning vs. tornado. Different estimates are probably due to different assumptions.

New Scientist has an interesting article on the Pirahã people of the Amazon. The article is behind a paywall, but you can find other interesting articles here, here, and here.

The Pirahã language is a real minimalist language:

• They have no notion of time.
• Their words for colour are black and white.
• They have one word for mother and father, ‘baixi’. There are separate terms for ‘son’ and ‘daughter’, but no others.
• They have only ten or eleven sounds in their phonological inventory, compared to more than forty for English.

Also, they only have two words for numbers, which are glossed as ‘one’ and ‘two’, but which mean something like ‘some’ and ‘some more’. Most interestingly, they don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of numbers or addition, even when taught. If you show a collection of five objects to a Pirahã man, and ask him to duplicate the collection, he has a terrible time putting down as many items as he sees.

Some are seeing a return to Whorfianism, where language is a straitjacket that constrains our ability to reason, but Dan Everett (who works with the Pirahã) says that the difference is cultural — they don’t like to challenge their culturally ingrained notions. And who does?