2012 Round Up

As the end of the year draws near we approach that time when journalists the world over start getting all retrospective and nostalgic about the passing of another 12 months. Whilst it seems like this is a reasonable enough tac to take the reality is that it is a quick, easy and lazy way to generate another week of output on the cheap; and who am I to argue with such a proud tradition? So here, having gone to absolutely no effort whatsoever, are a collection of some of the better photos from the blog over 2012. Some of them are taken from the most popular posts of the year and some of them are just ones I like. Normal service will resume in the New Year. Enjoy!

This is one from a post on how to incorporate textures into images, the photo itself is from Porto.

This shot of Tower Bridge could be improved by returning early morning when the sun would be off to the left and less harsh.

This close up of a leopard is from a post on abstracted animals.

Although the town itself is forgettable Tulum is one of the most impressive archaeological sites I've been to.

Chichen Itza, the second most visited place in all of Mexico.

This shot of a hummingbird is a bit out of focus but was the best I managed to get and the culmination of a lot of effort.

I just love the colour palette in this picture.

Sunset on the South Bank: heaven.

From the same post as above, once the sun had gone down we went to the top of One New Change for this amazing view of an icon of London.

This panorama of Mount Esja is quite beautiful when viewed blown up, even if I do say so myself.

This is one of Sue's favourites from our trip to Vietnam.

What Does Monday Taste Like To You?

I've been getting a lot of feedback over the past few days on last week's foray into the world of science. I've been relieved to find that it has been overwhelmingly positive on the whole and it's certainly brought a lot of new traffic to the blog. But nothing is ever perfect and I have also received some constructive criticism, which is always welcome. One such criticism was that I need to be careful of my tone, I mustn't give the impression, for example, that I think people who disagree with me on certain topics are idiots.

To be clear, I absolutely do not think that. There are any number of reasons why some people hold different views to other people and that they are idiots is only one of them. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of idiots out there but there are also lots of people who just haven't given any great consideration to many topics, or haven't had the benefits of a mainstream education, sometimes there are topics where the evidence doesn't clearly point in one direction or another and we just have to wait for more data to come in before we can be certain (this does not include ghosts or astrology), and there are also people who have grown up in a culture where they have been encouraged to think things which are not necessarily, shall we say, accurate? But when I write this I have a certain audience in mind. I'm not looking to convert true believers into atheists, I don't want to have to explain to someone why the apparent position of balls of plasma light-years away doesn't have an effect on the personality of humans on our rocky planet; I'm speaking to people that believe the Earth is billions of years old not thousands, that all life evolved from one common ancestor and that bacon sandwiches are awesome. My writing about photography has always been aimed at people who are interested in an honest portrayal of the natural world we inhabit and the societies we have created within that, I don't see my science writing as being any different to that.

One thing I will say is this; never take my word for anything I write here. Have a think about it, question it,  do your own research into the topic, ask yourself if it sounds likely and what mechanism might be behind it. I am more than capable of making mistakes, mistyping, or getting completely the wrong end of the stick. I would encourage you to take this approach whenever anyone tells you anything; always try to think critically, you'll learn a lot about the subject at hand but also about yourself and the people you interact with.

Having established as much, though, there is still a lot of scope for frustration and disagreement. My natural inclination is to focus on the detail of any given topic whereas other people might like to speak in broader, more general terms. Those people find my way of arguing to be overly narrow and pedantic whilst I find theirs loose and woolly to the point of being meaningless. But imagine you had another way of seeing the world altogether. What if you could smell colours or hear printed words? What if you could taste the days of the week and see numbers that people spoke to you? Such people do exist. They are called synaesthetes (SIN-iss-teets) and are affected by the condition synaesthesia. Literally this means 'joining of the senses' and it's actually a pretty good description of the condition. Some people will taste words; others hear colours; others will see spatial representations of sequences, for example, they'll see the numbers 1-10 running left to right in front of them, 11-20 will run upwards, 21-30 will be over their left shoulder and so on. Over 60 different manifestations have been reported.

When Franz Liszt first began as Kapellmeister in 1842, it astonished the orchestra that he said: 'O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!' Or: 'That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!' First the orchestra believed Liszt just joked; more later they got accustomed to the fact that the great musician seemed to see colours there, where there were only tones. One of my favourite physicists, Richard Feynman, is quoted as saying, 'When I see equations, I see the letters in colours – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.'

Whilst not all synaesthetes become legendary composers or Nobel Prize winners there certainly isn't any great cause for concern. Whilst seeing sounds and hearing colours can be distracting to young children initially it seems that the vast majority of those affected grow to use it to their advantage and consider it a blessing; if they've even realised that not everyone senses the world in the same way that they do, that is. Depending on the form the synaesthesia takes it can help with mathematics, time management, better memory recall and other such tasks. I'll try to explain how shortly.

It looks clear now that there is a tendency for synaesthesia to run in families but no specific gene has thus far been found. Also, it doesn't tend to be passed on from father to son and so there has been speculation that whatever genetic components are involved may be on  the X chromosome; however, 2 cases of father-son transmission have now been documented. To me this suggests that it is likely to be a polygenic disorder i.e. caused by more than one gene. Whilst this means there are more targets to be found the reality is that polygenic disorders are notoriously difficult to pin down; examples of well characterised polygenic disorders are rarer than unicorn tears. It should be noted that the form it takes isn't passed on, a mother who tastes colours might have a son who smells words - not a sentence I ever thought I would write.

How exactly this phenomenon comes about is not precisely known at present. For a long time it was thought that it was a simple matter of 'leakyness'; e.g. visual signals stimulating the auditory cortex. The electrical signals caused by stimuli that would normally be interpreted in one part of the brain were just spilling over into adjacent areas; but this doesn't really hold together as parts of the brain that become mingled aren't necessarily next to each other. It appears as though there are structural differences in the brains of synaesthetes; there is good evidence that they have more grey matter than the average and that there are more physical connections than the average between their neurons, not just between the sensory areas but generally throughout the brain. There is also increasing amounts of evidence that higher level brain function can be brought to bear on the phenomenon. New associations can be learnt and applied to previously unknown situations; for example, people with grapheme-colour synaesthesia (the most common form) can be shown an alphabet they have never encountered before, like the glagolitic, and learn a completely new set of links between colours and the symbols. This process can be both organic and directed and can happen in less than ten minutes. This would suggest that several separate systems are all involved in synaesthesia and is another excellent example of the plasticity of the human brain.

I mentioned earlier that being a synaesthete can have it's advantages, let's look at a few examples. Look at the picture below, try to look at the picture on the left first. Not very interesting is it? Just a whole bunch of 5s randomly strewn about. The picture on the left is a little more interesting, it is identical except that colour has been added. All of a sudden it is very apparent that it isn't just a mass of 5s on the page, there are also a few 2s thrown in. You would have eventually spotted that in the original picture if you'd had a good look at it, but it required only a fraction of a second in the next image (admittedly, as red and green were used, colour blind people will have struggled with this one). People with grapheme-colour synaesthesia pick up on the 2s far faster than the rest of us do.

So what practical applications are there for this? Look at this next picture below of some simple sums. We can all do these, they're at a pre-school level, but children tend to grasp colours before they do numbers and those children who also have grapheme-colour synaethesia will have an extra level of association to latch onto that will likely propel them to the head of maths class. If they learn to harness this to it's full potential then maybe that's one way how we get people like Richard Feynman. You may also imagine how Liszt saw the colours of the notes of his composition rising from the orchestra; if you also had an idea of the colours you wanted to invoke as you composed then this could potentially be an extra tool with which to fine tune the piece as compared to those of us who have to just listen very carefully.

The first reference I can find to synaesthesia was in 1880 by the legendary Francis Galton, so we have known about this for quite a while and as awareness of the condition grows it is now thought that as many as 4% of people could be affected, which sounds like a lot, but many don't even realise they are unusual. The question boils down to this: Is this an entirely new type of phenomenon in the brain or merely an extreme form of something very typical? This is a question that crops up time and time again in neurology and hopefully in many cases we will be able to resolve it as we slowly get a handle on what baseline brain activity really is, if there turns out to be such a thing. One final example, look at the picture below. One of these shapes is called Booba (stop giggling) and the other is called Kiki. Decide for yourself which is which. I know which way I went and I can be fairly confident of which way you will go; the jagged shape on the left will be Kiki and the more rounded one on the right will be Booba (stop it). That's how 98% of people assign them.

So is this a very low form of synaesthesia that we all share? Is it a phenomenon that is unrelated but gives a similar sort of outcome? Is it more of a cultural effect to do with the shapes our mouths and lips take as we pronounce the words Kiki and Booba (see me after class) and the way we associate them with the symbols in the picture? The answer is: we simply don't know. But I do know how we'll find out; through careful observation, rigorous application of critical thinking and leaving your preconceived ideas at the door: through science.

For more information on synaesthesia I have provided links to some of the sources I used. Google will also lead you to some of the support groups that exist like the UK Synaesthesia Association.

All images used with permission under the Creative Commons License

http://www.journalofvision.org/content/9/12/25

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18550184?itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum&ordinalpos=2

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19028762

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_alphabet

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427393.800-is-synaesthesia-a-highlevel-brain-power.html

The City of Arts and Science: A New Beginning

I have a confession, and a grave one at that.

There was a time, not all that many years ago, when I used to believe in conspiracy theories. You know, like the JFK assassination and that the moon landings were hoaxes, I also thought there might be something to astrology, bigfoot and alien abductions; there was even a brief period when I was a 9/11 Truther.

It's all very embarrassing for me to admit to this. Just thinking back to those times makes me physically cringe. It's mortifying. I mean, each one of those things on its own would be bad enough but to go in for them all? What was I thinking? Well; I wasn't thinking. I now think that the various beliefs I held stemmed from a combination of factors: a lack of confidence, lack of critical thinking skills, misplaced faith in charismatic people I admired, a hefty dose of anti-American sentiment, reluctance to take responsibility - it's so much easier to blame the universe if your life isn't working out how you want it to, so much easier than working hard and applying yourself. But the truth is that the universe doesn't give a shit about me and my life. It was getting along just fine before I turned up and it will continue to do so long after I'm gone.

The DNA molecules I analyse at work are somewhat smaller than this

Looking back, one of the things I find most curious about it is how I was able to compartmentalise my thoughts. I was an intelligent person with a degree in genetics and yet still I spouted all sorts of rubbish in my spare time. I wasn't a complete fool, though; there were areas of lazy, illogical thought processes that I managed to shrug off quite easily. Despite pressure to fit into the Catholic mould I found that religion never made any sense to me. The first time I read the bible was as a child, religion never made any sense to me. I would read about a miracle and just think: well, how could that have happened? Omnipotence isn't a good enough answer; if nothing else it's just plain intellectually lazy. The second time I read it through I just found myself getting increasingly disgusted with the level of self-contradiction and hypocrisy crammed onto every page. And it's not like it's even original, it's just a collection of poorly told myths and rip offs as brazen as the Bronze Age that spawned them.

L'Hemisferic

For the life of me I can't remember what it was that made me finally shake off these mental shackles; it wasn't any one thing, I think I must have just finally started using my brain. Of the myriad benefits of my awakening I think my favourite is that all the space in my brain that was taken up by the obscene mental gymnastics required for fallacious thought, such as thinking that the US government could conspire to blow up the twin towers when they couldn't even keep a Presidential blow job a secret, is now free to be filled with something altogether more exciting and useful: science.

I was always a science geek, even as a young child but, embarrassingly far into my twenties, I had allowed it to cohabit with too much groundless nonsense and ideology. In the years since I have consciously learnt as much as I can about the fallibility of human reasoning, about the ways our brain can fool us, the way confirmation bias influences us, logical fallacies and the importance of the scientific method as the only tool we have to actually know anything for certain. All through my childhood, and even in the depths of my youthful intellectual transgressions, science has always been the topic that has got me most excited. Any and all science, I'll read anything I can get my hands on; not just the stuff I'm really into like genetics, astronomy and particle physics. The other day I lost an entire evening reading about the geology of spherules. I'd never even seen the word spherule before but as soon as I did I had to know as much as I could about it.

The opera house; a cross between the heads of Megatron and the Stig

When I first set up this blog, nearly two years ago now, I had to come up with a name for it. Travel, Photos and Thoughts is what I came up with. I deliberately left the word thoughts in there knowing that there may well come a time when I wanted to talk about more than the places I have gone to with my camera. To an extent, that time may be arriving. Due to a damaged foot I'm not currently able to get about all that much and I have taken very few photos in the last few months. As I write this I'm supposed to be going out with The London Photowalk group that I have written about previously but I am unable to do so and it could be many months before that changes. Whilst I do have a bit of an archive that I can draw on it won't last forever and so I need a strategy. My plan is two fold; to try and explore my local area more so that I can keep taking photos, but also to expand my remit, if only temporarily. I don't know exactly how it will work yet but it'll definitely still involve pictures although they may be taken by the Hubble space telescope, the Mars Curiosity rover or a fancy electron microscope instead of me. Let's just see how it goes.

Giant space alien carcass?

Everything we know about the physical world - everything - we know through science. Combine that with our culture and the joy we find in the beauty of aesthetics and we have gone some way to identifying what distinguishes us from the rest of the animals, Art and Science. Which brings me, rather circuitously I grant you, to what was supposed to be the main thrust of this article: Valencia's Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias. For nearly our entire history as a species we have been willing to move heaven and earth to move earth closer to heaven. For millennia, the pinnacle of human scientific achievement were the shrines we built to religion. The cathedrals of Europe, the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, the temples of south east Asia; all required a massive amount time, effort, resources and scientific knowledge that was rarely applied to other fields of endeavour, excepting, perhaps, war. A century long building program would be embarked upon at a time when life expectancy was about 40 and no one would think this a strange thing to do. Although it all seems a bit mental now I, for one, am very pleased that they did because many of these structures remain to this day and are a long lasting testament to human creativity and ingenuity. But something I'm also very pleased about is that it is now not considered unusual to put a similar amount of effort and resources into the celebration of science and the arts; this is what has happened in Valencia.

For the 2,000 years that Valencia has existed the river Turia ran through it's heart, but the river was prone to frequent flooding and one particularly bad incident in 1957 left the Valencianos knowing that something had to change. They weren't messing about either, their solution was to move the river. The Turia now spills out on a flood plain to the south of the city and the long, wide, snaking riverbed was turned into a sunken 9km municipal garden filled with acres of parkland, athletics facilities, sculpture, children's play areas and fountains. At the far eastern end of this complex, just before it meets the Mediterranean Sea, is the City of Arts and Sciences. This comprises of many buildings, the highlights of which are the The Palace of Arts, which is primarily an opera house and incorporates one of the most amazing feats of architecture I have ever seen; L'Hemisferic, which is an enormous IMAX style cinema that envelops the viewers with a screen that seems to surround you; L'Oceanografic, home to the largest aquarium in Europe and some truly ridiculous fish tanks; and, my favourite, the Museum of the Sciences, an astonishing building with 40,000 square metres of space in which to demonstrate the diversity, joy and excitement of the world of science.

The building is remarkable, it looks like something between a giant, pre-historic whale skeleton and the corpse of a gargantuan, alien insect. But all in white. I did my best to get a picture of this in all its monstrous glory but the temperature was in the high 40s. I'm not kidding, this was Valencia in August, we would go out for breakfast of a morning and be grateful it was a chilly 27 Celsius. In this sort of weather I burn in ten minutes, if I'm not careful, so I would slink from shade to shade like some sort of anti-lizard desperately eking out what little protection from the onslaught of the sun my Irish heritage could afford me.

Architecture on this scale tends to lend itself to the abstract

Inside, the exhibits are heavily weighted towards the interactive end of the scale and children certainly seemed happy to conduct their own experiments like good little empiricists. One large section contains a huge forest of the chromosomes 30 feet high as if it were an altar to the gods of karyotyping; there are the obligatory sections on space exploration and electricity and even one on the science behind Marvel comic characters. One nice touch was a sawdust-filled incubator that had a ready supply of chicken eggs so that, for those willing to be patient, you could watch a chick's first efforts in life as it forces its way out of its shell-bound world. Simple, but both exciting and inspiring in equal measure.

I think I could have spent the entire holiday just exploring these buildings, they certainly need two full days to do them any sort of justice; yet this is just a small portion of the city. Valencia has a large and vibrant Old Town that, itself, needs at least another couple of days of exploration to seek out all the hidden gems on offer, something I will likely detail in a future post. Until then, enjoy the science.