Who are you? Self-identity for atheists and skeptics.

Hi. I'm Arkady.

Who are you? Fundamentally, I mean - what part of you defines you as "you"?

This is a question that for many years has been answered simply - the immortal soul. This neatly gets around the  Theseus Paradox by creating a part of you that isn't constantly replaced (like our cells) and which doesn't decay or change, like the arrangement of our cells.

However, for an atheist or a skeptic who doesn't otherwise believe in the immortal soul this isn't a satisfying answer.

Part of the the problem with answering this is that we are ever-changing beings. You could try defining yourself by saying "I am defined as a person who does ..." This is impossible to do in practice - the list would essentially be infinite - but such problems never stopped mathematicians working with "the set of all real numbers", so there's no real conceptual problem.

However, even this isn't satisfactory - fifteen years ago I believed the greatest thing to ever happen to music was the Spice Girls. This is something that has fundamentally changed about me, yet I'm clearly the same person, if a little embarrassed about it.

A stand-up comic I've seen* jokes about this, saying he went to a motivational speaker, who told the group "every moment of every second you can reinvent yourself - become a totally new person, who you were not before." At the end of the session, as he was leaving he was asked to pay for the session, and replies "I think you've mistaken me for someone else."

Try using the excuse for not paying a speeding fine and you'll land yourself in more trouble and laughed out. Clearly we do have some innate sense of who a person is, and it is strong enough to cope with the fact that we change both materially and behaviourally. Otherwise the joke wouldn't work.

For anyone who is now thoroughly confused about who they are (you know who you are) I'd like to propose an answer: you are the sum of the actions you take.

When taken literally, and openly, there are several things this implies about how we must approach the world ethically. It means that we must take full responsibility for all outcomes of what we do - intended and unintended. It means that you have to live with your mistakes, but it means taking pride in your accomplishments. It means never saying "I'm a great writer, even though I don't write anything" - you aren't a writer unless you actually write. It means not worrying about thoughts we never act on (some people beat themselves up a lot over these) because no-one will ever know, and it means you change yourself by doing the things that the sort of person you want to be will do. It means reinventing yourself doesn't in any way "betray" your old self, or kill them.

So this week, do something you always wanted to do, but never quite got around to.

* I'm pretty sure he was called Christopher White, but there appears to be another stand-up comic by that name who is more famous, and dominates the Google results.

Why you should try acting (and some tips to get you started)

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. 

One of my favourite hobbies is amateur theatre and in two weeks time I'm going to be starting rehearsal for a production of Titus Andronicus: The Comedy.

I believe that every person, at some point in their life, should do a theatre production - especially amateur dramatics, and here's why:

1. Self confidence

Putting yourself out there on stage is always difficult. If you're going to do it, theatre is great when you have people around you who can smooth over any mistakes you make. As you ease into it, and get more familiar with the role you also get more confident with the role and that leads to confidence in yourself.

A process I've seen happen with several people is that they join our society, shy, but willing to give it a go. Although they may find the role difficult at first, rehearsals get them more and more familiar with the role, until they can do it easily, confidently. They soon find that they are familiar enough to just slip at will into this character they've been given and will start to do socially when they want to be more confident. "It's fine," they say, "it's not me, it's this character." And they typically find people like this confident character they're playing.

Over time, this process becomes more and more natural, and character traits and mannerisms that work for the character get incorporated into their "real" personality, and vice versa. As time goes on, people realise that there isn't actually a difference between the "real" them and a character they play in social settings, or where they need to be confident - the difference is entirely a construct they created to allow them to do this, where the truth is that they've just learnt to be confident.

It's not always as bald as this. Some people, through their involvement, are taught the mannerisms of someone confident so they can replicate them onstage. They then more purposefully fake confidence, until they've gained enough experience faking confidence that the real thing has overtaken it.

2. Getting used to an audience

At the top of the page, I quote William Shakespeare's As You Like It (Jaques, in act II, scene vii if you need to look it up). Throughout life we often find ourselves in front of an audience. This can be anything as simple as telling a joke around a water cooler to explaining why you should be first in line for promotion at your annual review. By doing theatre you learn how to play to the audience, how to play with the audience, how to make the point you want to make. You learn how to prepare for it and how not to overstay your welcome. How to accentuate your strengths, and how to mask your weaknesses. These are not just useful for entertaining an audience at £4 per ticket, these are life skills.

3. The people you meet

We are a diverse bunch of people. Our interests outside theatre cover almost everything under the sun, some of us are shy and others need the spotlight. We have people with disabilities, people covering the entire LGBT spectrum, all thrown together and... it works. It's very difficult to join us - even for one show - and not make fast friends. And who doesn't like friends?

Have I convinced you?

If I have, look up your nearest Light Entertainment Society, or amateur dramatics group and just show up. Several may even be able to cast you into a minor role partway through rehearsals (though, obviously, not all). When you go to audition, here's some tips:

• When playing a character, really overdo it. Anyone can read the lines, but by taking the character to the point of parody is how you get the role, as directors prefer to mould what's already there, then to get it out of somebody.
• Learn your lines early. It makes getting the character in your head far easier.
• Don't expect major roles - there's always more actors than major roles, but you can make the minor roles memorable.

Formula 1 season 2012 - a look ahead

This week saw the reveal of a third of the field's cars ahead of this week's testing in Jerez, as Caterham, Force India, McLaren and Ferrari all unveiled their cars for 2012.

There are a couple of trends in the news designs, as compared to 2011 cars both led by some small rule changes.

Firstly, the rear of the car has gotten smaller. This is a knock-on effect after the FIA created rules relating to where the exhaust of the car must be, and to how the engine must respond to the throttle. They did this because last year cars were having the exhaust blow the underneath of the car, to maximise airflow around the diffuser and to make the best use of the ground effect. This is something that the FIA want to minimise the use of because it leads to dangerous crashes like Mark Webber's (thankfully harmless) crash at Valencia 2010. What happens is that as the car lifts a bit, the ground effect sucking the car down suddenly disappears which further flicks the car upwards.

Video: Mark Webber flips his RB6. Ground effect more directly caused this crash from the same driver at 24 hours of Le Mans 1999. He escaped both crashes miraculously uninjured.

To make the "blown diffuser" work the teams had to engineer the engines to keep pumping out exhaust gas, even when the driver was off the throttle. This decreased horsepower and made the engines less fuel efficient. The new rules mean the engines are more fuel efficient and more powerful. The knock-on here leads to smaller fuel tanks, which allows teams to make the back of the car smaller.

The other rule change lowers the legal height of the nose of the car. Teams were putting the nose of the car as high as possible in order to get as much air going under the car as they could (ground effect, again). This, however, caused some very alarming crashes in 2010, and Karun Chandok and Michael Schumacher are both lucky to be alive (and unhurt) after the high nose of another car caused to go over the top of their cars.

The nose of Liuzzi's VJM03 causes it to go over the top of Schumacher's MGP W01. 10 or 15 years ago this would almost certainly have been a fatal accident, but Schumacher escaped unharmed.
(Note that this is not how new F1 cars are made.)

The lower nose of the car has seen some interesting interpretations, as most of the teams have a stepped nose:

Ferrari have an interesting idea to get the new nose 10cm lower than last year's car. I really wish I was making this up. Caterham and Force India have also gone down this route, although theirs look more deliberate and less like someone accidentally stood on the model before sending it to the factory. Source

I personally believe the stepped nose looks awful, and I can't imagine it does the aerodynamics any good at all. Even more baffling about it is that it has to create horrible turbulence, and then send that turbulence straight over the rear wing. I find it really hard to believe that this solution is really better than sending less air underneath the car but I also don't have access to a multimillion pound wind tunnel or a team of the finest aerodynamic engineers in the world.

I cannot help but feel that McLaren's far more elegant nose will prove to be faster this year.

McLaren's nose is far more elegant, but the airflow underneath the car will be reduced compared to the Ferrari. 

Having said this, if ground effect is the biggest deciding factor in creating downforce and if the height of the nose is so important, a side-by-side comparison of the Ferrari and the McLaren shows that - at the front of the undertray - the Ferrari's front is just above the height of the wheel axle, while the McLaren's front is level with it despite the fact the Ferrari appears to be sitting lower on its suspension. Maybe the "Platypus nose", as several commentators have referred to it, is the way forward after all. I hope not, but we can't really tell at all until testing starts on Tuesday.

Between the rule changes, downforce will be reduced considerably, but the teams will make back some of the difference in straight-line speed as the smaller back end of the car means less drag, and the new engine rules mean faster engines. This essentially means the new cars will be faster on the straights, but slower on the corners. This speed difference will hopefully lead to some more interesting racing, as the braking zones are where overtaking happens.

Bring on F1 2012.

A temple to atheism, and a few notes

This week Alain de Botton may have suggested plans to build a temple to atheism in central London.

He says that you can build a temple to anything that's positive and beautiful: to love, friendship, calm, perspective; as well as to Jesus, Mary or Buddha.

I've got to say I'm at a loss as to what I'd expect to find inside a temple to atheism. With religion it's obvious what you will find. Most religions have their own iconography but atheism doesn't. Religions are far more than buildings and imagery, though. They have their own philosophical and historical backgrounds, but here to atheism is lacking something - the very word means "without gods". No-one is just an atheist.  Whether they know it or not they must have some other philosophy.

Whether this philosophy is hedonism, skepticism, rational humanism, utilitarianism, Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, nihilism, one of many I've forgotten, or a mix of the above everyone lives by something and this where I'm not sure what to put into a temple to atheism.

Alain de Botton suggests it could be filled with a history of life on earth but this is skewed quite heavily towards the skeptics' movement that is associated with atheism. Associated, but not equivalent to atheism. You don't have to be an atheist to be a skeptic, nor are all skeptics atheists. Furthermore, I do don't see that this really adds anything that the Natural History Museum doesn't already provide.

I would, however, really like to see a church for atheism.

Churches can actually provide a lot for their community. As well as being a way of getting people together every Sunday the sermons offer words that many people find comforting, thought-provoking and even good advice. The local church can be a focal point for charitably minded people to meet and organize, and the local vicar is often seen as a sage source of advice for those with troubles.

While I realise that organizing atheists is like herding cats, maybe this would be useful. Things like a place to go and meet people on a Sunday morning, a focal point for charitable organization, someone trustworthy enough to ask advice from are good things for a person to have around regardless of their religion.

Atheist "sermons" would talk about logical fallacies, applying rational humanism to every day life, offer secular words of wisdom, or sing the praises His Noodleness.

I, for one, would go every week. Ramen to that.


Other news:


Sasha Laxton is a boy. This story first appeared five years ago, when Sasha was born and the parents made a point of not revealing the sex of their baby. The article linked to reports Sasha seems "remarkably normal".  He, of course, grew up as free from gender stereotypes as his parents could manage. Ultimately, it seems that Sasha was far freer to choose his own gender identity than most other Children, and I'm curious to see how this will turn out, though I suspect that his peers at school will make a point of enforcing some gender identity onto him.

I redesigned this site so that it doesn't look like every blogger account at the start. I hope it suits you.

And lastly, I've vowed to myself I'll write something every week on here over the weekend. If you come here on a Monday, and there's been no update for a week, please feel free to get into the comments and kick me into action.

A semantic argument. (Also - the answer for who came first - the chicken or the egg!)

A conversation I had recently made me think a little about how a surprising number of disagreements we have can be boiled down to a question of semantics. I want to talk about this for a bit, and then I'll give the definitive answer (literally!) to "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"

The conversation, between me and a guy trying to sell me a book that "was the first book to successfully unite Eastern and Western Philosophy" - a claim I seriously doubt. [Future topic: Advertising things as "Eastern", and why it annoys me.] - and told me it would be a spiritual awakening. [Future topic: Why am I am not a spiritual person, and this is fine.]

I explained I wasn't spiritual. This seemed to confuse him. I guess he couldn't comprehend someone openly saying they weren't spiritual in the same way I can't comprehend what it would be like to be a cat.

He pursued a line of questioning as to where we came from, and so on down. I answered as best I could with scientific answers, until we got to "And what came before the Big Bang?"

"Nobody knows, but we're working on it?"

"No," he said, triumphantly, "scientists don't know. But I call it God."

I didn't want to go down the God-of-the-Gaps route, so I asked if me meant God as The Prime Mover. He said not, but he described God as something that "is, but has no cause", and that this idea was something totally new the East could teach the West. Totally wrong, but the phrase "scientists don't know. But I call it God" stuck with me.

I realised that we could have argued about the nature of what came before the Big Bang until the end of time, and not come to an agreement because, bizarrely, we were already at some sort of an agreement: that what came before has no explanation. He left the role of explaining this to God, and I placed it on science's to-do list. That was the ONLY difference. The differences in our viewpoint on this matter purely semantic.

Once you're on the look out for it, semantic arguments are all over the place. Many politicians from all views will argue for the same things in different language, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance argues that "Romantic" and "Classical" philosophies are two ways of looking at the same thing, and don't get me started on people who debate music genres.

By doing this, it's far easier to find things in common with people. And that's always fun.

Oh, and I promised an answer to "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"

The smart-arse answer is, of course, that animals were laying eggs long before the first chicken was a glint in the Rooster's eye. But obviously the question refers to a chicken egg, right?

Or is it a chicken's egg?

If we take it as given there was a first chicken (or some degree of "chickenness", at which point we call something a chicken... it's all hypothetical) we find that the answer depends exactly on the question.

A chicken egg is one which hatches a chicken, and must (therefore) pre-date the first chicken by about three weeks.

A chicken's egg is one laid by a chicken, and the chicken must have pre-dated the egg by about four to six months.

So the answer is - it's a question of semantics.

Team Orders in F1, and Sebastian Vettel

Earlier today the FIA published their judgement on Ferrari, regarding the team orders scandal.

While Felipe Massa was leading the race, he was told to allow his team mate, Fernando Alonso past. Ferrari argue, truthfully, that Alonso is their best shot at winning a title this season, and so the move makes sense in one respect. The only problem is that team orders are explicitly banned, and Ferrari were fined $100,000 after the race for breach of the rules.

The move causes mass outrage - rightly, I think. Team orders are against the spirit of individual competition, but the rules say each team must run two drivers and compete for the championships.

In this respect, the FIA decision was probably the correct one. Any rule against team orders is totally unenforcible. The teams just have to agree a code like "Fuel saving setting Delta" or something will mean "Slow down and let your team mate past." When asked, the team says that it's a heavy setting that slows the car down drastically for a little bit, and the other driver took advantage. It may end up being totally transparent to the public, but it's defensible to the FIA.

The fact of the matter is that team orders happen. Ferrari just happened to get caught. The incident simply highlighted the fact that the team orders rule is basically unenforcible, in part because of how badly Ferrari handled it. It was clear to all that if Ferrari handled the situation slightly better they would have got away with it.

In the end, a move to scrap team orders is probably correct. Teams will recognise that blatant use of team orders will warn off talented drivers, and annoy their fans, so they will use them in moderation.



I'm getting increasingly concerned with Sebastian Vettel. Having taken a close look at his collision with Mark Webber in Turkey, I'm convinced the accident was Vettel's fault. If you watch where his left wheel is compared to the white line at the edge of the track, you see that Vettel moves over before completing the overtaking move. A glance in his mirror - or even just listening for the engine sounds - would have told him not to move over. Webber for his part was careful to leave Vettel space, and you can see he's moving right, away from Vettel just before the collision.

In Spa Vettel had a really weird collision with Jenson Button. Having watched the video over and over again, it appears that what happened was that Vettel looked up the right, and saw there was no space, so he flicked over to the left. But he did so, as he reached the braking point. The combination of steering and braking caused him to lose grip, and he lost control, hitting Button.

I hope I don't have to say, this is an extremely basic error. Steering and braking simultaneously like that is something that amateur racing drivers learn very quickly. It should never have happened. Not even to crash prone Sato.

This combined with other, rather hot headed incidents in Vettel's career, and some frankly alarming overtaking moves in Germany, I have to wander whether Vettel would be keeping his seat if he hadn't won any races.

Adverts shooting their own foot. (Game)

Game is a UK computer game shop. They sell new and pre-owned games.

Yesterday I saw one of their adverts, raising awareness of their pre-owned range. It was aimed at the FPS market. (FPS = First Person Shooter...as opposed to RPG (Role Play Game) or RTS (Real Time Strategy) - gaming is full of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms)). The advert had the words "I'm hit!!!" on the top, with the message below it "Pre-owned bullets fly just as fast as new ones."

The message is clear. An FPS game is just as good whether you buy it new or pre-owned, but the choice of slogan there is baffling. In real life a pre-owned bullet doesn't fly faster than a new one, because it's gunpowder charge has already been used, and the bullet has likely been deformed.

Furthermore, fans of FPS gaming are likely to know this.

So who is the advert aimed at, exactly?