I mentioned Sarah Palin’s fight with the polar bear a few weeks back. Today the Guardian have some more details for us:

The Republican Sarah Palin and her officials in the Alaskan state government drew on the work of at least six scientists known to be sceptical about the dangers and causes of global warming, to back efforts to stop polar bears being protected as an endangered species…

Read the full Guardian article here… (it gets more ridiculous as you read it)

According to Wikipedia, a cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgement that occurs in particular situations. In other words, sometimes people make wrong or irrational decisions based on selective use of information or misinterpretation of a situation. Well known examples include hindsight and bandwagons.

Our brains sometimes can’t be trusted to make the right decisions based on the available information. In fact, we don’t even make decisions based on an absolute (or “discrete” to use the maths term) concept of right or wrong but a fuzzy scale (see fuzzy logic) of more or less right or wrong. As we assimilate more information, our disposition to choose one or other of two option shifts on a scale and sometimes irrationally.

There are some decision making processes where this analogue approach is beneficial, hence the invention of artificial neural networks in computer science to try to model this behaviour using computers which are fundamentally digital.

This is pretty interesting and bears some thinking about. Why, in certain circumstances, are people predisposed to act in a way that doesn’t make logical sense?

For some interesting further reading, here’s a handy list of cognitive biases from Wikipedia.

The Large Hadron Collider (the latest particle accelerator at CERN) will be switched on this Wednesday and might destroy the world (read the full risk assessment here or a summary here). If it doesn’t, I wonder whether we’ll feel the UK’s £500m investment was worth it.

In the 90s particle physicists were racing to detect the top quark so that we could confirm that part of our current best model of small things. They were successful in 1995 and won themselves a Nobel prize but apart from that I can’t name any real benefit to humanity that has come from proving that the top quark does indeed exist. I’m all for trying to understand why our universe is the way it is but I can’t help feeling the money could be better spent.

Then again, the US military’s budget for 2007 was about £220 billion (that’s over £400,000 a minute, by the way) so maybe spending £500m on doing some (possibly) harmless science isn’t so bad.

Also in today’s news: Save the world, eat less cow – UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport.