Skeptical Resources

My previous blog post was the story of how I set off on my skeptical journey. Here are some resources to help you along yours:

These are some organizations whose websites you should explore:

Here are some good blogs to read:

There are many, many more out there and they’re very easy to find.

You need to listen to the following podcasts:

Also check out Hunting Humbug, Skepticality, and the Pseudo Scientists.

The following are excellent resources on critical thinking and logical fallacies:

Here are some excellent general resources on skepticism:

These are a few good YouTube channels to subscribe to:

Here are some magazines worth subscribing to:

And, finally, here are a list of books worth reading (all but one as suggested by Dunning in Here be Dragons):

If you can think of any other resources that are worth adding to this list, please let me know. Thanks.

How I Became a Skeptic

I knew from an early age that I was going to be some sort of scientist. Inspired in the mid 80s by Carl Sagan and his television show Cosmos – and with both a genuine interest and an aptitude for the field – I went and studied physics and chemistry in both my O’ and A’ Levels. Around the same time I was also introduced to computers, starting with the Apple IIe in 1984 and an IBM Portable PC soon after. So when it came time to go to college I basically had to pick an area of science – pure or otherwise – that I wanted to pursue further. In the end, computer sciences won out over my second choice of electronic engineering.

My first foray into skepticism, meanwhile, came with the advent of the Internet to Pakistan in the mid 90s. I spent countless hours researching and then debunking myths, urban legends, conspiracy theories, phishing scams, and all the other crap that found its way – and still finds its way – into our inboxes. Indeed, during this time, the fast-growing Urban Legend Reference Pages on snopes.com became one of my favourite and most-quoted websites.

Outside of my life on the Internet, however, I wasn’t skeptical at all: I was religious; I believed in ghosts; I was a proponent of homeopathy and energy healing; I was all for the ‘scientific’ healing techniques of acupuncture, acupressure, and reflexology; and I was quite happy to believe in all the ‘ancient’ treatments, cures, and healing methodologies advocated by ‘experts’ or ‘healers’. I didn’t know back then that ‘experts’ and ‘healers’ meant people who had a vested interest – financial or emotional – in promoting that type of healing.

That said, there were a few things I was skeptical about and these included astrology; transcendental meditation type stuff; pyramid schemes that sold healing pills and devices; and blanket claims like “these are things that large pharmaceutical companies don’t want you to know about” – all of which neither made sense nor were supported by any evidence.

Why Did I Believe in all that Other Crap?

I think the main reason I was so gullible was simply because I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that there were exciting ideas on the fringe of established and tested science that would one day become real and widely-accepted science if only someone would take the time to investigate them properly. I didn’t know at the time that scientists had done exactly that before rejecting almost all of those ideas as crap.

I was also operating under a very dangerous assumption: I didn’t think I was particularly gullible. In fact, the reason I supported things like homeopathy and Reiki was because I had actually seen them work. What had happened was that, back in the mid 90s, my family was looking after my grandmother who had Alzheimer’s disease. We were treating her with real medicine but also, as an experiment, with homeopathic medicine.

Now the way homeopathy works in complex disease situations is that the ‘doctor’ tries out different ‘medicines’ and combinations of medicines till he finds the most suitable combination for treating and, eventually, curing the underlying problem. As a result, the medication keeps changing in order to treat and cure whatever needs to be treated and cured at the time. I understand now the brilliance of this treatment-with-no-end setup but, at the time, all I saw was that my grandmother’s illness varied from week to week and that the doctor gave her different medicines to treat her as she progressed through it. It was because the manifestation of her disease changed every week that I thought it was the homeopathic medication that had caused that change. I know now, of course, that was a case of false cause or a situation in which I confused correlation with causation. That is, just because my grandmother’s homeopathic medicines and mental state changed every week, didn’t mean that one was caused – at all – by the other. Nor did I realize that it was the medicines that were being changed as a result of her existing mental state...and not the other way round.

My point is that, as far as I knew, homeopathic medicine was science because I could see the treatment working (or not working) in front of my own eyes. In other words, this was a case of observational selection or confirmation bias on my part. Further, the doctor was a great authority figure and all the homeopathic medication that we bought was from a large, multinational company – that too, a German one – so naturally I saw it as real, proper, established medical science.

What I didn’t know at that time, however, was what homeopathy actually was. Had I known that the underlying concepts behind it were water memory, increasing the potency of medication via dilution, and the idea of like-cures-like, I would probably have laughed. Instead, all I saw were medicines that had dosages just like other, real medicines did and so I didn’t even bother to question how it all worked and, importantly, whether it worked at all. [For more, download the Skeptic’s Guide to Homeopathy pamphlet (88kB PDF file) from the Australian Skeptics]

In other words, I expected a result – as you would of any real medication – and so I saw one. The sad fact is that, thanks to the confirmation bias that I was operating under, I’m pretty sure I would have seen a ‘result’ regardless of what happened or how my grandmother’s disease progressed over the years that we were looking after her.

This pattern of confusing correlation with causation and seeing results because I expected to see results continued over the next few years. During those years I picked up some new bits of quackery and dropped others. I wasn’t particularly passionate about or really even interested in ‘alternative medicine’ but I did easily accept that there might be something in it and that it might be worth investigating further.

Things Change

My ideas about pseudoscience, quackery, woo, and religion all began to change over the last year or so. This happened for a number of reasons that, funnily enough, started with three fantastic courses that I took during my MBA:

Consumer Behaviour was the MBA-equivalent of Carl Sagan’s fantastic book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It was all about consumer psychology and influence and it taught me about human perception, cognition, and decision-making. In it we covered topics such as subliminal influence and Pavlovian conditioning, creating and changing people’s attitudes, how people are influenced (both consciously and unconsciously) by their environment, how culture plays a role in consumer behaviour, and what the ethical concerns around influencing people are. It was awesome.

Brand Management took that a step further and taught me how loyalty to brands, concepts, and ideas works in the real world. I learnt how brands are created, constructed, maintained, and killed and, as promised by our professor, I have never seen brands or the world of marketing the same way since.

Finally, Leadership taught me how to take a long, hard, honest look at myself and it gave me the capacity to analyze and then, assuming I wanted to do so, change what I saw.

Enter the Skeptical Movement

Around the time I was taking those courses, I really got into blogging and listening to podcasts. My primary areas of interest were technology and science (including astronomy) so, as you would expect, I eventually came across Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy Blog. In June 2008, Plait linked to Brian Dunning’s excellent video on critical thinking called Here Be Dragons. That video blew me away and I spent the next few weeks listening to all the episodes of Dunning’s brilliant Skeptoid podcast.

Then, from July onwards, Australia’s Channel 7 broadcast a show called The One: The Search for Australia’s Most Gifted Psychic (which you can find on YouTube) and it featured as one of its judges Richard Saunders, Vice President of Australian Skeptics. With all that I’d learnt during my MBA and my interest in film and television – because of which I know how TV shows are made, edited, and marketed – I had a pretty good idea of what was going behind the scenes in this show. So when, despite all the show’s obvious biases, the psychics proved themselves to be incredibly poor performers under even minimally reasonable scientific conditions things started to fall into place a little quicker than they had before. (There’s nothing like the power of television, huh? Funnily enough, I doubt the producers of The One expected it to have a de-converting effect on even one of its viewers!)

After some basic research into logical fallacies and cognitive biases – with Skeptoid episodes 73 and 74 as my starting point – I spent the next couple of months going over my entire life and analyzing everything I’d ever believed in, assumed to be trued, presumed to be true, or simply not thought about all that much. I remember having discussions with my wife during which I would try to come up with non-pseudoscientific explanations for whatever had been happening and finding that, as expected, the pseudoscientific explanation seemed incredibly unlikely and, in most cases, quite silly. Oh, and there were many, many more cases in which I had confused correlation and causation.

I also started listening to two awesome podcasts: the New England Skeptical Society’s Skeptics Guide to the Universe (SGU) and the Australian Skeptic’s The Skeptic Zone. Meanwhile, I started subscribing to The Skeptic magazine and, as suggested in Here be Dragons, bought and read Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World. I also read and watched all I could about James Randi – who I’d always known about but had never really looked into – and the James Randi Education Foundation. All this research was, of course, supplemented by reading lots of skeptical blogs (there will be a whole list of them in a subsequent blog post).

With all that going on in my life and in my head, it wasn’t long before the deal was sealed and I could safely say that I was a proper Skeptic (complete with a capital ‘S’ and the letter ‘k’).

Since then I have started to see the world through a completely different filter – a clear one this time – and boy is there a lot of crap out there. Just knowing a handful of logical fallacies, for example, has helped me unravel stupid arguments, see through cheap tricks (particularly marketing-related ones), and call people out when they’ve needed to be called out (even in unrelated situations).

I’ve also started to learn a lot more about science, skepticism, argumentation techniques, cognitive biases, and all the other things that help perpetuate and sustain quackery and pseudoscience throughout the world and across the generations.

Overall, my life has changed dramatically and the world now makes much more sense. I am also much happier and much more settled than I have ever been before.

So What Next?

Where I’ll go from here, I’m not sure. I know I have a lot more learning to do and, in the near term, I intend to attend the next Skeptics Cafe with the Victorian Skeptics. I’m also going through the list of things in the book What Do I Do Next: 105 Ways to Promote Skeptical Activism (edited by Daniel Loxton) to see where that can lead.

I have started to talk to other people about skepticism and why it makes so much sense but that’s going slowly. I’ll ramp it up once I’m more confident about my abilities to counter pseudoscience in real time as opposed to via e-mail and after a round of detailed Internet-based research!

In the meantime, I’ll start being much more skeptically active on my blog. (I’ve even created a new category called ‘Skepticism’ for doing just that.) The first step in that direction was writing this blog post. The next step will be listing a whole bunch of skeptical resources that are really useful regardless of whether you’re already into skepticism or are just starting down that path. I might go ahead and make that into a separate page on my blog as well.

Whatever happens, though, I’ll keep you updated.

10 Most Influential Films of the Last 10 Years

/Film’s Brendon Connelly has come up with a list of the ten most influential (English language) films of the last ten years. Read the blog post for the reasons why these particular films have been included but the list itself is as follows:

  • Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
  • The Bourne Ultimatum
  • Traffic
  • My Big Fat Greek Wedding
  • Polar Express
  • Rushmore
  • The Matrix
  • Children of Men
  • The 40 Year Old Virgin
  • Coraline

Connelly does admit, however, that the list is skewed towards the technical side of film-making and storytelling.

I would agree with some of the commenters, however, that the Lord of the Rings trilogy should have been included. I’d say that’s partly for the number and scale of special effects used but mainly for, for the first time, producing three films concurrently!

The discussion in the comments is quite lively, by the way, so make sure you check that out as well.

BBC Radio Programme on Carl Sagan

During the late 1980s – when I was 11 or 12 years old – there were only two TV shows that I was allowed to stay up beyond my bedtime to watch: Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek: The Next Generation and a re-broadcast of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Both were hugely inspiring and, ultimately, led me to study the sciences. (I finally settled on computer science, by the way.)

And over the last year, it was Sagan’s book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – as recommended by Brian Dunning in Here Be Dragons – that sped me down the path of skepticism (much more on this in a later blog post).

So I owe a lot to Dr. Carl Sagan and count him as one of my few heroes and people I aspire to be like.

Coming to the point of this blog post, though: Phil Plait writing on the Skepticblog just alerted us to a radio programme that physicist Brian Cox made for BBC Radio 4 called Carl Sagan – A Personal Voyage. The programme is about Sagan, the impact he had on people (indeed, a whole generation of scientists), and the messages he was trying to get across in everything that he did. It’s awesome and I highly recommend you take a listen.

Modern-Day Sagans

Following on from that, it is my opinion that both Cox and Plait – as well as a whole bunch of others, particularly those in the skeptical community – are modern-day equivalents of Carl Sagan.

Take, for example, Plait’s two books:

And two of Cox’s media appearances:

There’s more to come from these two, I’m sure, and it’s awesome to have others carrying from where Sagan left off.

More to Come…

By the way, I’ll give you many more science-education related links when I do finally write the blog post on skepticism that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time now. For now, though, check out:

(FYI: I first heard of Here be Dragons via Plait as well!)

New Edition of LUMS NEWSnet Published

The March 2009 edition of LUMS’s external newsletter, NEWSnet, was published recently and you can read all of it online. This edition covers about nine months worth of news and events and makes a good read.

Terrible Usability

What’s weird about it, though, is the format it’s been published in: it’s all image files. Basically, instead of taking the time to make a proper website for the newsletter or even make a PDF file out of it, they’ve converted each page of the newsletter into an image which they’ve then sliced into smaller images for faster transfer over the Internet. (Note: making image slices for online publishing is pretty standard for intricately designed websites but is highly unusual for publishing newsletters online.)

Publishing the newsletter in this way makes life a lot simpler for them because (a) making image slices is really easy and (b) the newsletter’s original design, formatting, fonts, photographs, page numbering, etc. are all preserved without them having to make any extra effort. However this is a silly way to publish a newsletter online. Why?

Well, first, the image-only format takes up too much bandwidth and is slow to transfer over the Internet (no matter how many slices you make, transferring HTML code is still quicker). Second, though it’s nice to be looking at a well-formatted page, you are basically stuck with whatever font size they’ve decided to publish the newsletter in (in this case, 9pm Tahoma). Third, reading text as text is much easier than reading text that’s an image. For example:

Text as Text: Text as Image:
Jahanzeb Sherwani is Pakistan’s first developer (and LUMS alumnus) whose application has been accepted into Apple’s iPhone App Store. Jaadu is a groundbreaking application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you control your computer from wherever you ware in the world. page_01_10

Finally, to nitpick a little: I hate the fact that you can’t click to zoom-in on any of the photos they’ve published and the newsletter’s masthead is far too large for an online publication.

The Options They Had

The thing is, I understand why LUMS would do something like this because the online version of NEWSnet is probably not a priority for them. Indeed, they most likely wanted to make as little extra effort as possible in converting the print version to a format they could publish online.

That said, they actually had three choices for that print-to-online conversion:

First, they could have made a proper website for the newsletter. This, however, would have required a bit of work on their part because they would have had to design the site layout, create a template, and then copy all the text and images into it.

Second, they could have made a PDF version of the newsletter and made it available for download. PDFs are the Internet-standard way of publishing newsletters online because they preserve your design, layout, fonts, page numbering, and so on. They are also much better from a usability standpoint because readers can zoom in and out to adjust the print size and, if the text within them is rendered as text, they are also much easier to read.

Finally, they could have done what they did: convert the pages into images and publish those online. This, while the second-easier option for them (making the PDF is easier), is the least user friendly option for readers (or, in this case, site visitors).

Why, then, did they do it this way? I’m not sure. Image files certainly look better than a simple link to a PDF file from the LUMS homepage. And they could have been trying to cater to their six site visitors who don’t have PDF file reading software installed on their computers or in their browsers. Regardless, their choice of publishing the newsletter in this manner is, in opinion at least, a bit of a cop-out. And though I understand why they did it, the reasons for doing it aren’t very convincing to me.

Some Good Things

Among the things they did do right, however, is the fact that the newsletter’s content is both short and very interesting. Also the design and layout of the newsletter itself is quite good. So, even though it’s a pain to read, I have actually skimmed through bits of the newsletter to see what’s going on in the world of LUMS.

Sound of Music Sing-a-long-a in Melbourne

The Sound of Music sing-a-long-a is back in Melbourne this year. It’s on 15 and 16 May at the Hamer Hall (tickets from Ticketmaster, details on the Sing-A-Long-A website) and I would love to attend but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to (it’s expensive!). Besides, it won’t be as much fun without, say, either of my sisters going with me. Still, I’ll see if I can make it.

Meanwhile, have you seen this bit of Sound of Music awesomeness? It’s an Improv Everywhere type of flash mob performance of ‘Do-Re-Me’ at the central train station in Antwerp, Belgium:

Brilliant, isn’t it?  Or should I say “Charming. Quite charming.” :)

Science in Film & Television

USA Today’s Dan Vergano has written a good article, called ‘TV, Films Boldly Go Down Scientific Path’, on how film makers and television producers are making an effort to get the science that they put into their films and TV shows to be as accurate – or at least as internally logically consistent – as possible.

Naturally, what you’ll see in films and television shows isn’t practical science because real, practical science is long and arduous and sometimes boring. Films and TV shows, meanwhile, are entertainment so at the most you’ll get a montage of a scientist (or a team of scientists) hard at work. And these montages will range from the suit-construction-in-the-cave montage from Iron Man to the working-by-the-window-as-the-seasons-change montage from A Beautiful Mind to the evidence-collecting-and-processing montages that you see on CSI all the time.

On most films and TV shows, though, the actual scientific process gets skipped and you only get to hear the results (e.g. “the lab tests are in”, “forensics has shown”, and so on). Unless, of course, the scientific investigative process itself is part of the storyline like it is on shows like CSI, Numb3rs, Lie to Me, and House – all of which feature real science with only a few liberties taken to make the plot more interesting. All four of those are awesome shows, by the way.

Anyway, Vergano has written a good article and I highly recommend you read it. It even quotes Phil Plait! :)

Where is the Outrage?

The BBC’s Ilyas Khan has written an excellent article on how casually top Pakistani officials continue to treat the local fundamentalist militant threat that has grown so quickly over the last year.

Khan uses the official reaction to the recent attack on the Manawan police academy in Lahore to make his point:

Eight hours of siege, eight policemen killed, nearly 100 injured, and at the end of the day what do we know about the stand off at the Manawan police academy?

Very little, as usual.

And just as usual, analysts have continued to point out on television news shows that Pakistan has yet to stop being casual about the militant threat.

…

The question is, why do top Pakistani officials continue to make off the cuff remarks about a problem that appears to be ripping the country apart?

I don’t know the answer to that question but it saddens me to see a lack of outrage from many of those top officials. Certainly they claim to be upset by what’s happened, but they’re obviously not upset enough to do anything concrete and long-lasting about it. All they seem to want to do is apply another roll of duct tape to the problem in the hope that it’ll hold everything together.

I mean, seriously, why are analysts, journalists, and reporters the only ones – aside from the general public, of course – who are openly discussing the gravity and long-term implications of attacks such as these? And why are they the only ones who seem to be saddened by the loss of life that accompanies each and every one of those attacks?

This lack of acknowledgement (of gravity) from the top is an issue because openly admitting that you have a problem really is the first step you have to take before you can start to solve things. And it’s that very acknowledgement that doesn’t seem to be coming from the people who can actually do something about it.

Some Optimism

Mosharraf Zaidi, meanwhile, is optimistic that this most recent attack will finally get the bureaucracy to do something about the situation. In his most recent article and blog post, ‘Counter-Terrorism Through the Civil Service’, he writes:

The attack on the Lahore police training facility yesterday, which as of the time of this article’s writing had not ended, should wake Pakistan up. There is an existential monster that Pakistanis are unable to acknowledge because of the weakness of their Muslim faith. This weakness is exacerbated by the average Pakistani Muslim’s dependence on unholy mullahs whose money-ing by General Zia, radical Saudis, and the joint efforts of the CIA and the ISI is now proving to be the single gravest threat to the sustainability of Pakistan as an operational entity.

The ostrich-like reaction to terrorism is driven by the average Pakistani’s inability to debate the mullah, and an unwillingness to invest the effort and time required to tame that mullah. Abandoned and let loose by the “shurafa” that once were able to tame the mullah, and to speak his language, the mullah’s new master–the comfort of Land Cruisers and bottled water–has no scruples.

Do make sure you read his entire blog post as well as the comments the post has generated. The comments on all of Zaidi’s posts are always worth a read.

What Happens Now?

So there you have it: a reason to be pessimistic about the whole situation and yet there’s always a glimmer of hope that maybe this time people will be motivated enough to actually do something concrete to fix the problem (or at least start to fix the problem). The lawyers certainly did with their long march. How long before the rest of us wake up and really do something about the militancy problem too?

Here’s hoping there is cause for optimism over the next few days as officials tell us exactly what happened during the Manawan attack and what they’re going to do about it. As one expert commentator on Geo News said a couple of days ago: until the government actually captures, punishes, and makes an example of the people who are carrying out these acts of terrorism, the militants don’t really have any incentive to stop doing whatever it is they darned well want to. This, then, is the opportunity for the government to do just that. If they want to send a message to the militants, now is the time.

Here’s hoping…

Maliha Got Married

If you’re wondering why I published only one blog post in February that’s because I spent most of that month in Pakistan attending (and, of course, helping organize) my younger sister Maliha’s wedding. This is her and my brother-in-law, Ibaad, at their wedding in Islamabad:

From Maliha and Ibaad's Wedding

Yes, I know I’m about a month late in blogging about this but I’ve only recently gotten the time to organize the photos from that trip. This is me ‘n Nadia in Karachi, which is where Maliha and Ibaad now live:

From Pakistan Trip Feb-09

You can view all these photos on my Picasa Web Albums page in these two albums:

  1. Maliha and Ibaad’s Wedding
  2. Pakistan Trip Feb-09

Enjoy :)

Music from the Watchmen Film

I’ve seen the ‘Watchmen’ movie twice now, and though I really like the movie itself, what stands out, for me at least, is they way they used music throughout the film; particularly in transition scenes and montages.

[WARNING: Possible spoilers, especially if you haven’t already read the graphic novel]

The musical good-ness starts with the opening credits that feature Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. This was a really neat way to start the film as this montage is our introduction to the parallel reality that the movie is set in (I particularly liked the bit where Silhouette replaces the sailor in Eisenstaedt’s famous ‘V-J Day in Times Square’ photo).

The two most memorable uses of music, however, are the cold war era protest song ‘99 Luftballons’ by Nena that gets played at the start of the Daniel Dreiberg and Laurie Jupiter dinner scene and use of Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘The Sound of Silence’ for The Comedian’s funeral. Awesome stuff, particularly the entire funeral scene. Also memorable, but more because of it’s unusual placement, is the use of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ during the Nite Owl and Silk Spectre sex scene.

Then there are the more energetic songs that are used at appropriate points. These include ‘All Along the Watchtower’ performed Jimi Hendrix (but, of course, written by Bob Dylan), ‘Desolation Row’ as performed by My Chemical Romance (also originally by Bob Dylan), and ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ as performed the Budapest Symphony Orchestra (which is a nod to the helicopter attack scene from ‘Apocalypse Now’). Oh, and if you stay for the credits you’ll also get to hear Leonard Cohen’s ‘First We’ll Take Manhattan’.

Finally there’s the brilliant use of a muzak version of ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ by Tears for Fears that is played in the reception area outside Adrian Veidt’s office.

[End spoilers]

Actually, come to think of it, the good use of awesome music started months ago with the Smashing Pumpkin’s ‘The Beginning is the End is the Beginning’ being used for one of the film’s trailers.

Anyway, if you haven’t yet seen the film I suggest you do because it really is quite good. One thing, though: do keep in mind that this is not your typical, happy-ending superhero film. It’s a dark, dismal, serious movie – darker than what Batman films are supposed to be – and if you don’t go into the cinema expecting that, you probably won’t enjoy it as much.

[For more on the music used throughout the film, check out the Reel Soundtrack Blog’s feature on the Watchmen Soundtrack or the film’s Wikipedia page.]

Imran Ahmad is in America

I read a whole lots of blogs and among them is Imran Ahmad’s hilarious ‘Unimagined’ blog. The name, of course, refers to the title of Ahmad’s book: Unimagined – A Muslim Boy Meets the West. I haven’t read the book myself – I’m not buying any new books till I get a job – but I’ve heard it’s quite awesome and I hope to get it as soon as possible.

Anyway, Ahmad was recently in Australia, which is how I first heard about him. Now, though, he’s driving around the US doing a book tour which you can read about in his recent BBC article ‘Hello America, I'm a British Muslim’. He’s also writing about his travels on his blog and that’s always worth a read (even though his blog posts are rather lengthy).

Enjoy :)

Why is Science Important?

Why is science important?

Physics teacher and film-maker Alom Shaha decided to ask a whole bunch of scientists and educators that question, the answers to which he compiled on the ‘Why is Science Important?’ website that he had created for this purpose.

He then put all those answers – including, of course, his own – into an awesome video that is now available online:


Why is Science Important? from Alom Shaha on Vimeo.

Enjoy :)

[Via the Bad Astronomer]

Managing Procrastination

I used to be a champion procrastinator but, over the last few years, have gotten a lot better at managing my work schedule – almost to the point that I end up doing things well ahead of time.

The techniques I use to get around my procrastinational tendencies were mentioned in the recent PsyBlog post on ‘How to Avoid Procrastination: Think Concrete’. These are:

  • Breaking down complex tasks into concrete and much more manageable bite-sized pieces
  • Self-imposing a schedule (with deadlines) on yourself and then sticking to that schedule

Surprisingly, these techniques pretty straightforward to execute and they work really well too. Yes, I am simplifying a bit here so read the full PsyBlog post for the details. Also read this post: ‘Getting Big Projects Done: Balancing Task-Focus with Goal-Focus’.

I also have a theory on why it's easy to procrastinate on simple, low-value, 'chore'-type tasks. My theory is that these tasks don't present much of a challenge to you so, in an attempt to make your life more exciting, your subconscious delays doing them. That way, you’re forced to do them in a rush and at the last minute which, basically, ends up making the tasks more challenging and your life a little less mundane.

Of course this also happens because the tasks themselves aren’t all that important so they get put in your lowest priority queue which, by definition, means you’ll only do them when you really have to…but I’m sure my theory is also partly true. Anyone have any other theories?

The Islamization of Pakistan

This month’s Newsline has a couple of excellent articles on the Islamization of Pakistan.

First there’s an article called ‘The Power of the Pulpit’ by Mohammad Hanif, author of ‘A Case of Exploding Mangoes’ which was shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award.

Hanif writes:

Mullahs, maulvis, imamas, or ulema-i-karam as many of them prefer to call themselves, have never had the kind of influence or social standing that they enjoy now. A large part of Pakistan is enthralled by this new generation of evangelists. They are there on prime time TV, they thunder on FM radios between adverts for Pepsi and hair removing cream. In the past few years, they have established fancy websites with embedded videos; mobile phone companies offer their sermons for download right to your telephone. They come suited, they come dressed like characters out of the Thousand and One Nights, they are men and they are women. Some of them even dress like bankers and talk like property agents offering bargain deals in heaven.

Then there’s an article called ‘The Saudi-isation of Pakistan’ by Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of High Energy Physics and the Head of the Physics Department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.

Hoodbhoy writes:

The common belief in Pakistan is that Islamic radicalism is a problem only in FATA, and that madrassas are the only institutions serving as jihad factories. This is a serious misconception. Extremism is breeding at a ferocious rate in public and private schools within Pakistan’s towns and cities. Left unchallenged, this education will produce a generation incapable of co-existing with anyone except strictly their own kind. The mindset it creates may eventually lead to Pakistan’s demise as a nation state.

Both are excellent, though long, articles that I highly recommend you read.

Nadia Gets a Tattoo

Nadia’s been wanting to get a tattoo for…well, forever. Certainly she wanted to get one soon after we got to Australia (back in the middle of 2006) but there was a problem: she couldn’t decide what she wanted the tattoo to be, say, or represent.

Last week, however, she had a eureka moment and three days later, it was done:

Yes, the tattoo says ‘stet’.

Er, ‘Stet’?

So, what does ‘stet’ mean? Well, ‘stet’ is an editing/proofreading mark that means “Let it stand” or “You know that change you made? Undo it and leave my original text the way it was, thank you very much”. Author Max Barry explains it best:

On Monday I received the copyedited manuscript of Company. This means someone at Doubleday has gone through it with a red pencil and pointed out everything I did wrong …

…[If] I want, I can overrule them, with the awesome power of STET. “Stet,” I discovered while editing my first novel, means, “Put everything back just the way I had it.” (Accompanied, one suspects, by the subtext: “Idiot!”) How good is that? When I discovered this word, it was like a gnawing, hollow place in my heart had finally been filled. Looking back, I can’t work out how I ever made it through a day without it. “Max, I tidied up your desk for you.” “No! Stet! STET, dammit!”

This is the coolest and most powerful mark (read: command) that an author has over her editor and proof reader and I presume this is what JRR Tolkien used when he started spelling the plural of ‘dwarf’ as ‘dwarves’ – instead of the more commonly used ‘drwarfs’ – when he wrote his ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy [More on this here].

Anyway, here’s a close-up of the tattoo:

Isn’t it awesome? It’s simple, yet powerful and relevant on so many levels.

The inspiration for this tattoo came from two places, by the way: the Science Tattoo Emporium (that Carl Zimmer maintains on his Discover Magazine blog) and our love of geeky t-shirts (the kind you find on Think Geek). And though I am honoured to be the one who suggested ‘stet’ to her, I’m pretty sure she would have gotten to it on her own anyway.

The Middle of the Story

What was funny, however, was the way in which it finally happened. Nadia had decided to get her tattoo from Tattoo Magic in Fitzroy so, on the morning of 27 January, the two of us made our way down to Tattoo Magic to have a consultation with one of their artist and to book in a date and time for when the actually tattooing would take place (which would hopefully be some time later that week).

When we got there, however, their receptionist was out to lunch so we ended up talking to a couple of tattoo artists directly. When they saw what Nadia wanted for her tattoo, one of them said tattooing this would take just a couple of minutes and he could do it right then. After a slight hesitation, Nadia said ‘yes’ so the artist (Sean Jackson) went to his office to make a stencil that he would use to size and place the tattoo on Nadia’s arm.

Making the stencil took about five minutes, placing it correctly on Nadia’s arm took less than a minute, and the actual tattooing took less than three minutes (and it wasn’t painful). So, after having waited for two and half years to get a tattoo, Nadia walked out of a tattoo parlour with the tattoo she really wanted less than twenty minutes after she had walked in!

Also funny was that Nadia had psyched herself up for a painful tattooing experience and I was there holding her hand when Sean started to make the first line. I didn’t laugh out loud but I did chuckle inwardly as her facial expression went from “Must tolerate this pain…must tolerate this pain…” to “Er, WTF? This barely stings” :)

So there you have it, Nadia has a tattoo:

You can see more photos (including some funny ones) on my ‘Nadia and her Tattoo’ Picasa Web Albums gallery.

Tips on Napping

Lifehacker’s Adam Pash recently blogged about a new article in the Guardian called Napping: The Expert’s Guide which is a text-based re-hash of an older Boston Globe guide called How to Nap (this was published on the web as an image file).

As you would expect, the article gives some pretty useful tips on how to nap. For example, it suggests you limit your afternoon nap to 45 minutes or less. Unless, of course, you don’t get enough sleep at night in which case it might be good to nap for more than 90 minutes.

The sleep science behind these tips also helps explain my own heuristics around napping. For example, I’ve always likened afternoon naps to charging mobile device batteries:

  • If all you need is a quick recharge, either sleep for 10-15 minutes to clear your head or for 20-30 minutes to get a more useful recharge (that will help you function for a few hours longer that a 10-minute nap would).
  • If you’re tired, do a full recharge which takes about 2 hours – but make sure you don’t do it too late in the afternoon (like 4-6pm) otherwise you’ll wake up feeling groggy and goggle-eyed.
  • Make sure you’re in a quiet and dimly lit (or dark) location to get your nap.
  • Don’t let anyone interrupt you because getting woken up 5 minutes into your nap is the worst thing that can happen.

I also have a few heuristics for night time sleeping – some which I have collected over the years (from other news articles or research on sleep) and some of which I’ve come up with myself:

  • Never sleep for less than 3 hours at a stretch. Indeed, it’s almost better to not sleep at all (or take a quick 30-minute nap) than it is to sleep for only 1-2 hours at night. This tends to happen when, say, you need to pick someone up from the airport at 2am and you figure you should get an hour’s worth of sleep from midnight to 1am. No! Either go to sleep at 10:30 PM and wake up at 1:30 AM or don’t sleep at all. Trust me on this one.
  • If you’re a college student, the previous rule changes to never sleep for less than 2 hours at a stretch. The 2-hour rule was actually my original sleep rule and, as you can guess, I came up with it while I was in college. Once I graduated, developed a more regular sleeping pattern, and (basically) got older, the 2-hour rule became the 3-hour rule.
  • Make sure you get 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep at some point during the night. This is important.
  • If you and your partner sleep in the same bed (or you have a room mate), make sure you take their sleeping pattern into account when planning your own. For example, you don’t want one partner interrupting the other when the latter is deep in the middle of a sleep cycle.
  • If you’re not getting enough sleep (i.e. 7-8 hours every night), at the very least sleep in on weekends or nap in the afternoons. However, doing just that is not sufficient to completely repay your sleep debt. What you have to do is sleep a little extra every night till your natural sleep cycle is restored. That is, sleep for 9-10 hours every night till your body tells you its time to go back to your regular 7-8 hour sleep schedule.
  • Don’t drink too much liquid before going to sleep otherwise your 5-7am sleep will be disturbed by your need to go to the bathroom.
  • One good way of waking yourself up – especially if you’re feeling tired or groggy – is to start breathing deeply while still in bed. This increases your heart rate and will pump more oxygen into your blood, both of which will help make you more alert which, in turn, will make it easier for you get up and out of bed. Also, force open your eyes to let the daylight in. Your body reacts to environmental light and using your eyes to acknowledge that, “yes, indeed it is morning” helps wake you up.

If you have any napping or sleeping tips of your own, please do let me know. I’m always looking for ways to do things better.