C'mon, Do the Locomotion

I received an e-mail containing this quote in its signature:

Most people believe that physicists are explaining the world. Some physicists even believe that, but the Wu Li Masters know that they are only dancing with it. - Gary Zukav*

Indeed, but it's been one hell of a dance, and unlike your average waltz it's had a huge impact -- both good and bad -- on this world of ours.

So what, if we don't and can't know what something ultimately is? The fact that we can survive in this world and do all the thigns we can do shows that our understanding of it is not totally broken. And we can always strive to improve that understanding.

But more to the point, why is an absolutely perfect understanding necessarily so significant? You can think of it this way: would it necessarily make a big difference to achieve that extra 0.1% of understanding if you were already 99.9% there?

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* I believe this quote is from the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics.

Why Would I Buy A CD I Can't Rip?

I've bought every Beastie Boys album except their first, and I would like to get their latest, except for the stupid copy-controlled CD it comes on. If you haven't heard of copied controlled CDs, they don't meet all the requirements of the CD standard, and thus only work on certain players and -- for some reason I'm not totally sure of -- can't be copied or ripped into MP3s. If you're after more details, there's plenty of pages on the topic out there.

The mark of the devil (aka the copy controlled logo)
Why would technology that stops copies of the CD being made stop me from buying it? These days I have all my music on my laptop in MP3 format. It's much more convenient, and has the big advantage that you can create playlist mixes of music that run for hours and can sample from any of the albums you have. I'm too used to the convenience, and compared to it, the CD's are a pain: you first have to locate the CD case you're after; you can only listen to one CD at a time, and if you want to music to go where you go you have to take the CD; you also have put the CD in the drive when you want to listen to it, and take it out again when you're finished; and while you're listening to the music the CD drive isn't available for use for other things.

I think there's something hamfistedly barbaric about trying to deal with piracy in a way that stops you from playing the music how you want to. I know all you big record company executives read my blog, so I hope you're paying attention, (with a sneer:) y'all!

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You can apparently rip these CDs with some software called Isobuster. However, according to its online help, to do this it requires the right sort of CD drive. As I understand it, the capabilities that the drive has to have don't seem to relate to specific features -- that you could look up in some documentation -- so while I might be able to find out if my drive is one of those it will work with, who knows how long that might take -- it doesn't seem to me worth the effort.

Thoughts in Few Words #10

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progression of knowledge is the removal of explanations based on essences

Strictions and Straints

restrictions
constraints
constrictions
restraints

Thoughts in Few Words #9

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As a species, we have an arrogance that makes us believe our intuitive, everyday conceptions of things must be right, that they are not to be questioned, and that they are only to be reliquished when we are forced to do so*.

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* two main caveates: i'm generalising, of course; though I've tried to cover some of that generalisation with the 'as a species' qualification; secondly, this of course doesn't mean that being an intitive, everyday conception makes it wrong.

Evidence For Giant Waves Once Dismissed As Myths

The Scotsman reports:

Monster waves that can sink a supertanker and were once dismissed as a myth abound in the Earth’s oceans, scientists have learned.

Satellite images identified more than 10 individual freak waves more than 82 feet high in just three weeks.

...

Until such evidence became available, most scientists were sceptical about freak waves. Statistics showed that such extraordinary sea conditions should only occur once every 10,000 years.

Your Steak, Sir, As Shown on the Diagram Here

I'm sitting there eating this piece of meat, doing what we all do at this time, and wondering exactly what cow (or pig, or chicken, etc) did this come from? What did it look like, where did it live, and what did it think about George W Bush? I know that this piece of meat once came from a living animal, but somehow my brain just can't concretely grasp that. That brown shape there is just too abstracted from the notion of a particular living creature. If it'd been the olden days and I'd killed the animal and chopped it up myself, or seen this done, it might be more real. But by and large, pieces of meat are, to my brain, reddy or pinky coloured blobs that come in little styrofoam trays from the supermarket.

Not just what animal did it come from, but exactly where in said animal was this piece of meat located? I mean, I know that rump steak, for example, means meat from cows arse (and I'd like to see more people facing this reality when ordering meals and telling the waiter they'd like "the cows bottom in a delicate wine sauce infused with aromatic herbs"), but where exactly in the 3D object that was cow was this piece of meat located, and relative to the rest of the cow, which way was it oriented? I can imagine this cow grazing around in a paddock, going about its business, and the image is normal except that the cow is slightly translucent and I can see this red blob there inside it, that blob being the thing which in the cow's future is destined for my stomach.

Actually, I can't imagine that. I can imagine being able to imagine it, but I can't actually bring such a picture into my mind. So, I'm thinking, what if we could? It strikes me that you could use this idea as the basis for some simple little pictures or animations. Like a cartoony picture that juxtaposes a scene of a family at home eating their steaks, next to a scene of cows in a paddock, where you can see positions of all those steaks within each of their owner-cows. Oh -- and here's a real visual possibility -- you know what they say about meat pies? Oh, it's crude, but they say it's true: all lips and assholes. What about a picture of a meat pie next to pictures of the 30 or so (just how many cows is the average meat pie sourced from? I'd like to know) cows that contributed to it, highighting those parts doing the contributing?

Digital Fiction and Renovating the DEN

Intimacies is, in the words of its developers, a -- for a good mouthy workout -- digital epistolary novel, or DEN, for an equally ugly but briefer name. Though you might not be familiar with the term, you're probably aware of the epistolary novel form: they're novels consisting of, most commonly, a correspondence of letters between characters, though which we see the story's narrative unfold. They can also consist of such things as diary entries and newpaper clippings -- see Wikipedia if you want more details.

Intimacies presents a story though a series of e-mails, web pages, and instant messages that the reader can view though a program that is meant to simulate the interfaces of our e-mail, web and instant messaging clients.

That story involves an mis-sent e-mail that leads to growing on-line relationship, and eventually to an in-person meeting with some serious consequences. The story takes place over five weeks and you get to see the e-mails between the two protagonists, as well as some e-mails between them and their co-workers, family, friends and a few other characters the story introduces (plus some related web-pages, and one or two instant messaging conversations). While its nothing exceptional, I found it a quite enjoyable read. And since there's less text than you'd find in a typical novel, its also a fairly quick read. You can download a copy for free at the website.

What interests me more than the story is the potential of the medium. I did feel that it worked better as a program than it would have been as a bunch of e-mails printed on paper. The semi-realistic interface did seem to add something. Having an inbox there in front of you and clicking on e-mails to read them seemed to help it feel more real.

What I want to consider is how we can take this further, to make it more immersive. That consideration can start with the way Intimacies was implemented. Aside from some problems in execution that will no doubt be fixed up in future versions of the software, there were some problems that detracted from the immersion.

Though the software presents a simulation of an e-mail client, in some ways it's actually quite unlike a real e-mail client. There isn't an e-mail client for each character, showing the e-mails they've received, but only a single e-mail client, whose inbox contains all of the e-mails, regardless of who they've been sent to. So while the inbox interface does give you a sense of using an e-mail program, and while it gives you a sense of the chronology of the e-mails, since you're seeing e-mails that in reality would be distributed across different e-mail clients on differnet people's computers at different physical locations, since you're seeing them all in the one place, it feels a little weird.

Thus, an obvious change would be to better represent the different characters and the e-mails they receive, by having a separate client for each character. This would introduce some other issues, such as how the proper chronology of e-mails could be presented to the reader, but I'll address that in a moment. Because all the e-mails were lumped together in the original program, it was often difficult distinguish between some of the minor characters. For example, two of the characters are the guy's workmates, and I just couldn't remember which was which. If each character had their own e-mail client, and especially if they each looked different -- different fonts, differnet arrangement, etc -- then this wouldn't be such an issue.

The story takes place over the course of five weeks. The current interface includes five buttons across the top of the window, one for each of the weeks, and below this is a second row of seven buttons, one for each day of the week. So if the reader clicks the Week One button and then clicks the Monday button, the inbox will display all of the e-mails for that day. As soon as you click that button all of those e-mails are there. Giving the user control to move between weeks and days does, I think, help enhance the level of reader-immersion. I think, however, that this temporal immersion could be increased.

The user could be given finer control over the time, along with a greater sense of its progression and the points at which occurrences such as the sending of e-mails happen. I would suggest a little console separate from the e-mail clients, showing the date on something like a desk calendar and the time on an analogue clockface. The console would also contain a button to move time forward to the next occurrence. When the user clicks on this button, the hands would move around to when the next e-mail is sent. If the next e-mail is on the next day, the desk calendar page would flip over. The reader would get a sense of how much time is passing between e-mails. The idea would be that over the course of a day, you might see something like the following: a flurry of e-mail exchanges in the morning, then a long wait for a certain reply for a few hours, which then finally comes late in the afternoon.

Once the time has been moved forwards to the next occurrence, the person's e-mail client that's received the e-mail would be displayed and the console could display that person's name. This Next Occurrence button would make sure the reader sees the e-mails in the correct chronological order.

If occurrences that the user could navigate between included both the sending of e-mails and the receiving of e-mails, then you could exploit this to do things such as the following. You could have a situation where one character has been waiting for a while for a reply to their e-mail and thinks the second character has just ignored their e-mail. Whereas, the second character sent a reply a while back but the network has been slow and it hasn't gone through. So after waiting for a while, the first character sends an angry e-mail to the second character. It'd be like in the digital equivalent of those wacky scenes in movies where each character misunderstands what's going on with the other (I'm not explaining myself very well, but I can't think of a concrete example) -- oh, wait, maybe that's not such a good idea, I find those plot elements really friggin annoying :-). But, as they say, execution is everything, and I'm sure they can be done well, whatever the medium.

The two main feature additions -- having separate e-mail clients for each character and a way to move forwards to the next occurrence -- could be executed in a number of ways, and the details I've given above are meant just to give an idea of how it could be done. There could be different tabs to access each character's e-mail client, for example.

There's also a number of small details to consider, such what to do if the user could jump to a particular person's e-mail client when they are not receiving an e-mail. Perhaps the client could be slighly greyed out, to indicate that perhaps they're receiving e-mails from other people or they're writing e-mails, but that these details, since they aren't of relevance to the story, aren't shown. Also, to make the e-mail clients seem more realistic, you could populate their inboxes with other e-mail unrelated to the story but slighly grey them out and don't let the reader open them from the inbox (because of course there's no real e-mails behind them). I haven't systematically considered all such possibilities, but there doesn't seem like there would be an problematic ones that couldn't be dealt with.

It occurred to me that another way to immerse the reader would be to let them see character's drafting e-mails. That is, to see the e-mail client and the words appear as the character types them, seeing the mouse cursor move, etc. There are of course various ways this could be done. Perhaps it would be too tedious to see this for all the e-mails, but at least sometimes it could give you interesting insights into the characters to see which parts of their replies they draft in a breeze, which things they're saying they have trouble finding the words for, and what they write but then decide to change in their drafting. It's something that seems difficult to convey with static media, and I think you could do some interesting stuff with this. Personally, I would find it interesting to be able to see how people go about writing things. That's a perspective you just don't get much of a chance to have, and from it perhaps you could learn something interesting about people.

Other Ideas for Bright Icon

Idea for Bright Icon

The Brights are looking for an icon, and here's my suggestion. Unfortunately I didn't find out about the call for submissions until recently, and they've already shortlisted six candidate designs. I know a lot of effort must have gone into those candidates, but I'm afraid that to me they all feel very unsatisfactory, which is why I had a go at one of my own. The following is the rationale behind the icon:

To me, bright means freedom. It means existence and thought unrestricted and unconstrained by conformance to the supernatural, existence and thought free to develop and grow. Thus, the arrows represent freedom to grow in all directions. The arrows also represent the three spatial dimensions of the universe we live in, conveying a sense of the naturalistic nature of our reality.

Some notes on the graphic design. That image is just meant to convey the basic idea of the design. Here are some ideas for variations. The common line thicknesses and lengths could be varied. Perhaps shading could be used to made to look more three-dimensional, though perhaps that would ruin the simplicity. While the design essentially reflects a three-dimensional coordinate system, I wanted to make it somehow unique and recognisable as a symbol in its own right, and that was the reason why I angled the lines as they are. Perhaps there are other more effective ways of achieving this end.

I actually don't want to give it a name, but it looks like all the submissions have names, so if I must, perhaps "All Directions" might be suitable. (and I just hope this design isn't already used for a company logo or some such)

Holographic Video Projector That Fits in Your Pocket

A prototype has been developed, and the researchers "aim to produce practical pocket-sized video projectors in two to five years". See TRN for the details. (via Nova Spivack).

Thoughts in Few Words #8

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what seems different but is the same

Red and White Apartments, Singapore. Taken on my visit there in Feburary 2003. 

The 5.5 kg, folding A-Bike (via Gizmodo). Can be folded and unfolded in around
20 seconds and rides on tiny, air-filled tires. Available in 2005 and expected to
cost around US$300.

Sleek aquariums: MoCoLoco via Gizmodo. The MoCoLoco page has more pics.

A Minor Comment Related to Metaphor

Just a minor comment I made on a post on the Many2Many weblog.

Learning Language in Virtual Immersive Environments

Learning a language is, at least for an adult, hard. The best thing, they say, is to immerse yourself in the langauge, ideally by hearing it and speaking it everyday amongst native speakers. But if this option isn't available, the closer you can get to it, the better. The New York Times reports (reg req'd) that the University of Southern California is developing a virtual approximation of such immersive environments.

The software has been designed to teach arabic to soldiers, and its basic details are as follows. The game takes place in a realistic environment, modeled on an actual Lebanese village. The player can move their character around the village, and interact with computer controlled villagers by speaking through a microphone. The computing system uses AI to interpret the player's vocal input and determine the villager's reaction. The player also has to control their character's body langauge, such as using an appropriate gesture when ending a conversation. The player is put in situations such as "establishing a rapport with the people you meet and finding out where the headman lives".

The article doesn't go into exactly how these details are executed, nor does it give any clear screenshots, but the concept is promising. Apparently versions of the system for other languages are planned (the next likely candidates are Dari, a major language in Afghanistan, and some Indonesian language), and the researchers behind it also see the potential for using similar immersive environments to teach other types of tasks - it should be interesting to see what comes from this.

More Than Words For Snow #6: Analog is a Perceptual Property

I unfortunately don't have time to write this up more than briefly, so I'll get straight to the point: when we call some property, such as the level of mercury on a thermometer, analog, what we are really expressing is that it's level can change in increments smaller than we can perceive. As far as I know, the level of mercury in a thermometer must ultimately only be able to express the current temperature descretely, since below a certain gradation-size accuracy would be lost out to the random nature of the jostling which is causing the mercury to rise in the first place. That is, below a certain gradiation-size the fluctuations in the level of the mercury would be due to the random directions of the movements in the jostling of the atoms rather than changes in the degree of excitement in the jostling. The thermometer seems to be analog because it seems to change in a smooth fashion, with no visible gradiation. Similarly, many things that seem analog are in fact fundamentally descrete -- record groves, film etc.

Taxing Advertising

[Update: the article can now be accessed here]

An interesting article over at Kuro5hin, whose thesis is that advertising imposes costs upon society and should thus be taxed accordingly. Here's an overview, which I've actually taken from the article's conclusion (and broken up into separate paragraphs by me):

...advertising imposes costs upon society and should be taxed accordingly. Some of these costs are well known, e.g. annoyance and loss of time and can be accepted provided that consumers are voluntarily exposed to advertising. However a great deal of advertising is imposed upon the consumer, without any compensating benefit being offered.

In addition to simple annoyance, advertising spreads inaccurate and incomplete information which distort consumers purchasing decisions, causing a loss to consumers and diverts valuable investment away from improvements in productivity and quality of goods. Advertising is not entirely bad, but it does not have to be to justify special taxation. The presence of a significant (uncompensated) harm from advertising is enough to justify the tax. Particularly since the revenues from the tax could be used to fund increased spending or to cut other taxes, such as those on labour and investment.

The government needs to generate revenue one way or another to pay for essential services e.g. national defense, the criminal justice system, healthcare. Raising this revenue by taxing bad things (ie. externalities: pollution, advertising etc.) is likely to lead to increased efficiency. So even those of us who think taxes should in general be lower, can still legitimately support this tax, provided cuts in other taxes accompany its enactment.

Read the rest of the article for the explanation.

Though I don't have the relevant knowledge to properly judge the argument, it makes a lot of sense to me and I can't see any flaws in it. At the very least, it's a type of solution that most people seem largely unaware of, and it would be instructive to see why it might or might not be usefully applied to this situation.

In my opinion, the article responses aren't worth reading, because they're, well, sadly pretty juvenile. Of course, I'm just calling it as I see it, and you may disagree with me.

I have an additional negative effect of advertising that I'll breifly add. It's that it helps cultivate a norm whereby things can and are to be evaluated based on their apperances and based on the things they are associated with, rather than on matter of actual substance.

The idea is, we learn our norms from our environment, and advertising makes up a significant part of that envrionment. This kind of evaluation is, thanks to advertising, such a perfasive part of our lives, and I think this rubs off onto our habits and standards for evaluating everything else.

I know people will disagree with this on the grounds that we can easily distinguish between advertising and other arenas of public opinion etc where evaluation of ideas etc come into play. At the moment I'm not sure what is the best way to argue against this view, though it should be obvious that I don't think it is correct.

If Google Wrote Windows

Jon Udell on the sorts of search capabilities we ought to have on our computers:

On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would just happen. The voracious spider wouldn’t stop there, though. The next piece of low-hanging fruit would be the Web pages you visit. These too would be stored, indexed, and made searchable. More ambitiously, the spider would record all your screen activity along with the underlying event streams. Even more ambitiously, it would record phone conversations, convert speech to text, and index that text. Although speech-to-text is a notoriously imperfect art, even imperfect results can support useful search.

Leaving Governments Back on Earth

Well, that title's a bit misleading - I just couldn't resist the sensationalist sound of it. This post is actually about space flight. Never before has there been a trip into space that wasn't planned, funded and executed by a government body -- not until yesterday when SpaceShipOne broke past the atmosphere in a historic flight.

Texas Using Wi-Fi to Encourage Use of Driver Rest Areas

Yahoo News reports:

To encourage drivers to take more frequent breaks, the Texas Department of Transportation wants to set up free wireless Internet access at rest stops and travel information centers.

Thoughts in Few Words #7

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pleased to have life

Joel on How Microsoft Lost the API War

A very good article by Joel Spolsky on why the future is going to be tough for Microsoft and good for web-based software.

However, there is a less understood phenomenon which is going largely unnoticed: Microsoft's crown strategic jewel, the Windows API, is lost. The cornerstone of Microsoft's monopoly power and incredibly profitable Windows and Office franchises, which account for virtually all of Microsoft's income and covers up a huge array of unprofitable or marginally profitable product lines, the Windows API is no longer of much interest to developers. The goose that lays the golden eggs is not quite dead, but it does have a terminal disease, one that nobody noticed yet.

Your Superhero Alter-Ego Problems Solved

You've got the lycra getup, the underpants, the cool catchphrase, but you're stuck on the suitably cool name? No problem, my sparkling imagination has come to the rescue: The Advertiser. Sounds fcking hard to me. You don't want to mess with The Advertiser.

Yeah No

Apparently the phrase "Yeah no..." is an Australianism that has arisen in recent times. See the article for details. I was surprised when I saw that. I've always been pretty self-conscious about language use, and in the past I think I've been less prone than most to picking up new sayings and ways of talking, but reading that article made me realise I use "Yeah no" all the time. I had been aware of using the phrase, 'cause I seem to overuse it, but at the same time, I didn't have that much consciousness of it, if you know what I mean. Interestingly, I can't recall having heard others use it, though I'm sure that's because I haven't been on the lookout for it.

Being Bi-lingual Helps Keep Mind in Shape

The Australian reports

When bilingual people age, their brains decline much slower than those who are fluent only in their mother tongue, it was reported yesterday in the journal Psychology and Ageing.

There ought to be.... #2

...little compartments in laptops for storing things, like your set of earbud headphones.

Yeah, you can store stuff in your laptop bag, but laptop and bag often get separated by more than arms reach, and a little compartment you can easily get at could be a lot more convenient that reefing around for the item in the bag. Has anyone tried doing this?

William Gibson on Lies Exposed in Telltale Colors

Here's a link to a New York Times peice from last year written by William Gibson. I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but I think the peice was part of a group of related articles where famous people were asked what they'd like to see technology make possible. Gibson's answer was that "some voodoo thing that unfailingly highlights [in a pieces of text] outright lies, spin and misperception - in different colors".

I've been meaning to post this for a while, and I was intending to add a few of my thoughts on this matter -- on making the accuracy of claims more apparent, but that's something I'll have to leave for later.

I'd set my Mac to show me the outright lies in Pistachio, the spin in sky-blue Bondi, and the misperceptions in succulent Plum. Large swaths of news would probably be Plum, both that written by journalists and some large percentage of politicians' quotes. Perhaps relatively few Pistachio highlights would appear in the actual reportage, indicating direct mendacity on the part of a journalist, though it would be interesting to find out just how few, or how many.

Thoughts in Few Words #6

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Most of our own past is as a story whose details we recall

Words Like a Neon Light, With the Wave of a Phone

BBC News reports:

Nokia is making a mobile that lets you write short text messages in mid-air... A motion sensor in the phone makes the lights blink in a sequence that spells out letters when the handset is waved in the air...A trick of human vision turns the sequence of letters into a message that hangs in the air.... could be used by friends to talk to each other across crowded rooms or open-air concerts.... could be used to play games overlaid on city streets, as a heckling device or a novel way to interact with other devices.

New ways to communicate are always interesting, no matter how trivial they may appear to the imagination. For the pervasiveness of communication, the complexity of our lives, and the way the two are intercombined, always outstrips anything we can simply imagine.

More Than Words For Snow #5 - Implicit Categorisation

This ones' going to be a quickie... I just want to get the basic idea down, and I'm not worrying too much about expression...

This post is about how language can be used to obfuscate reasoning by implicitly categorising something as something it isn't.

An an example of implicit categorisation I came across prompted me to write this post. I was reading Philosophy: The Basics by Nigel Warburton -- which is not a bad book, BTW -- and specifically, the chapter on morals/ethics, and the part where he outlines neo-Aristotelian Virtue Theory. What this theory is, and my opinion of it, aren't important for this post and I won't be going into them -- I just want to comment on the way Warburton talks about the theory.

The text that's relevant to the example is this. Following the section outlining the basic details of Virtue Theory, is a section titled 'Criticism of Virtue Theory', in which he says "A major difficulty with virtue theory is establishing which patterns of behaviour, desire, and feeling are to count as virtues" and in elaboration of this says "the danger is that virtue theorists simply redefine their prejudices and preferred ways of life as virtues, and the activities they dislike as vices".

If we start considering that text, we can see that "establishing which patterns of behaviour, desire, and feeling are to count as virtues" (which I'll refer to as the "establishment problem") is "a major difficulty" and that this is a "criticism of virtue theory". As I will explain in a moment, when he refers to the establishment problem as a major difficulty, he implies that it is an inherent problem with the theory -- he categorises it as an inherent problem with the theory.

This is unfortunate, because the establishment problem is not an inherent problem with the theory. This ought to be apparent if we consider this for a moment. If virtue theory says that moral behaviour is based on virtuous behaviour, then we have the difficulty of determining what is virtuous. We need to determine how to turn its basic principles and tenants to more concrete courses of action. But this problem isn't particular to Virtue Theory.

It's a problem common to all moral frameworks - we have to determine how to interpret their basic principles and tenants. And regardless of the theory we can do this well or we can do this poorly. It might be argued that this is harder to do (perhaps too hard) in some theories than it is in others, but I do not see why this applies to Virtue Theory (and Warburton does not seem to argue that this is the case).

Thus if this issue of interpretation -- the establishment problem -- is common to all moral frameworks, and is only a problem when it is poorly done, then it should be clear that it is an problem that is independent of any particular moral framework, or, in other words, not an inherent problem with any particular moral theory.

If the establishment theory is not an inherent problem for Virtue Theory, then it can not be rightly described as a "major problem" for it. I've claimed that Warburton implicitly classified it as a major problem, and I want to now explain why I think his text does this. He didn't explicitly say it was -- or wasn't -- an inherent problem, but because he left the issue open and described it as a "major problem" in the section "criticism of virtue theory", the only way we can sensibly interpret his meaning is if we assume that it is an inherent problem.

In fact, there's a second example of implicit categorisation in that passage. By describing the establishment problem as a "major problem" under the heading of "Criticism of virtue theory", and by not elaborating on the what a major problem means in so far as it is a criticism, it is implied that is a major problem that can be counted as a criticism of virtue theory. For it is not necessarily the case that a major problem with a theory has to be a criticism of the theory. For example -- and to take an example that fits in with the theme of morals -- there are major problems -- difficulties -- involved with trying to be a good person, but this doesn't mean these problems constitute a criticism of trying to be a good person.

I'm now going to try getting closer to the heart of this issue of implicit categorisation. In effect a "subject" (the establishment problem) is something that could be interpreted in a number of ways, and is being referred to as a particular type of thing. However, rather than explicitly calling it that type of thing, it is implicitly being referred to as that type of thing. The reference is implicit because the there is no explicit link from the referrer to the referent, and that there is no explicit statement about the nature of the link between the two, that is, of what the referrer is saying about the referent.

The link and the meaning of the link are implicit because they are derived from the following: 1) the referrer being the heading of the section 'criticism of virtue theory' and 2) the referent (the establishment problem) residing within that section and saying something negative about the theory, which leads us to think that we have grounds for critcising the theory (this is the meaning of the link).

We are drawn into this implicit categorisation because this categorisation is the only sensible way to interpret the writing. For if we were to categorise it differently to the implicit categorisation, it would mean that the point the writing was making would be wrong, and there is no apparent reason why it is wrong -- it seems like a fair and adequate point being made. This is, of course, a warning about the dangers of not looking any beyond what things apparently seem to be, and about the importance of considering what things say not what you think they mean -- but those are other stories.

Popper's "What is Dialectic?" As Example of Language-Thought Interaction

I just read Karl Popper's paper "What is Dialectic?" in the Conjectures and Refutations collection of his writings, and it seems like an excellent example of the interaction between language and thought and the problems that can be thus caused. I'd highly recommend taking a look if you're interested in these matters.

Jon Udell on Logging Information in Software

Another excellent, forward-looking but practical article from Jon Udell: Smart logging can capture a wealth of compelling data. The trick is in deciding what to log. Also an accompanying, and equally good, weblog post, elaborating on the state of logging in Windows.

Odd Todd Not Bad

Odd Todd's a web-based animated cartoon I just came across. Seems decently funny, based on the toon I had a look at.

Blaming Being Illogical's Not Always Sensible

"You're being illogical"
"Your argument is illogical"
"My argument is completely logical"

Logic, or a lack thereof, seems to the standard mark of evidence held up for or against an argument. So, it supposedly goes: an argument is invalidated by being illogical, validated by being logical. If someone is drawing an invalid conclusion or presenting an invalid argument, it's because there is a fault in their logic. This explanation, I want to argue, doesn't always make sense.

Logic can certainly take the blame in some situations. For example, a person may take p to be true and ultimately know that if p is true then q must also be true, but still deny that q is true. Or they may beg the question, by assuming the conclusion they're trying to justify. But frequently, mistakes can't be blamed on logic.

Perceptual problems and inaccurate knowledge can be at fault. I won't talk much about the former here, but will note that Edward de Bono has (see his book "I am Right, You are Wrong"). Logical rules such as "if x then y" (e.g. "if the afternoon sky is red then the weather will be fine in the next day") represent knowledge about the world. They say that the world is such that a red sky in the afternoon is an indicator that the weather will be fine the next day. "if x then y" is an encoding of knowledge.

Flawless logic can lead to mistakes, if the knowledge encoded by statements such as "if x then y" is inaccurate. While it may seem obvious that flawed knowledge can lead to mistaken conclusions, this reason seems frequently overlooked. Someone may be accused of overlooking a simple fact, but in cases where there's a more subtle problem with their knowledge of how the world works and is, their mistake is far more likely to be attributed to being illogical.

This actually takes us back to the issue of perception. I'm sure we've all experienced situations where a conclusion seems obvious to us, but not matter many times we enumerate the facts and outline the chain of reasoning, the other person just don't gettit. The conclusion that's usually drawn is that the person is "illogical", as if there's some problem with their logic.

Illogical they may be, but more frequently, I think, they just have different knowledge of the world. The other person's logic may be impeccable, but they may have quite different knowledge -- quite a different view of the way it is and works -- giving them no reason to accept your conclusions and leading them to different ones. They're perceiving the situation differently. Thus, effectively criticising their view would require criticism of their underlying beliefs (knowledge) about the world.

It would be useful to investigate the frequency of the various causes of mistakes in reasoning. The conclusion that I've drawn from my experience is that perceptual and knowledge problems are far more common than logical problems, but this is something for systematic investigation to determine (it may have already done so!).

What I can say is that when we see that statements like "if x then y" are primarily encodings of knowledge, it's easier for us to see that any long chain or reasoning is primarily composed of knowledge, and thus that if we're looking for the causes behind mistaken conclusions, knowledge should be a big potential candidate.

An Origami-folding Robot

A PhD student has developed for their thesis the first robot capable of folding origami (EurekaAlert).

As the article points out, Origami folding is deceptively simple and requires quite complex movements, particularly to deal with the supple flexibility of paper. Origami folding requires the simultaneous coordination of multiple sets of motion. As the student's supervisor says "Origami defies description by our current mathematical tools".

I think this work highlights the current state of the art in robotics and how far we've got left to go, and it suggests that if we if we can tackle some of these more fuild types of movements, a lot of intresting capabilities will be opened up to us.

The Copenhagen Interpretation and The Theory of Evolution

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics [1] makes more sense to me than the Copenhagen interpretation. The latter seems a too ad-hoc -- why should reality give the notions of 'measurement' and 'observer' such fundemantal status? I can't say I know that much about quantum physics, but then -- and assuming my understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is accurate -- my criticism is not based on the details of the physics.

A stronger way of framing my objection occurred to me recently (and I've been wondering what, if anything, has been written about it). This is the view that the Copenhagen interpretation goes against the theory of evolution. Surprising as it may seem, the theory of evolution should have the higher priority, for it is more fundamental. It would be easy to misinterpret my statement that the theory of evolution is more fundamental as saying it's more fundametal than quantum mechanics. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying, I think it should be considered more fundamental than any type of interpretation of quantum mechanics, which themselves are not reliant on the details of quantum mechanics (or at least the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't seem to be).

I'm not here to argue the validity of the theory of evolution nor of its universality, as plenty of people have done a good job of that, notably Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett; I'm going to take it here as a given. From an evolutionary viewpoint, our universe started out with no real organisation, just "random interactions", and through evolutionary forces working over the progression of time the organisation we see in the world today has been constructed. This means that concepts such as observers, measurements and consciouness once did not exist, and have come into existance through the piecemeal construction of evolutionary forces.

From this point of view, the Copenhagen interpretation seems too arbirary. The Copenhagen interpretation makes it seem that the workings of nature presuppose the existance entities that did not appear on the scene until things were well underway. Now, I know this doesn't say demonstrate that the Copenhagen interpretation is wrong, but I do think it highlights something people don't think about when considering how we might interpret quantum mechanics, and I do think it makes the Copenhagen interpretation seem a lot more arbitrary.

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[1] interestingly, Hugh Everett, the developer of the Many-Worlds interpretation, was the father of Mark Oliver Everett, "E", from the band the Eels.

More Than Words for Snow (4): Ridiculing Them With Their Own Argument

In my last post on this topic -- of how language can shape thought -- I promised a follow-up, but this isn't it! I have been working, here and there, on that followup, but it's taking longer than I had thought, and it's not done yet. (The first two posts on this topic can be found here and here).

This post centers around a simple example. Imagine that person A has presented the following argument to an audience:

If a person's argument has property Q, then it is an invalid argument, and as such, is worthless.

Person B raises an issue with this, and after explaining it, sums up by saying "If something's has Q then it's worthless".

We can look at the two statements in logical terms. A's comment is "If has Q, then invalid argument, then worthless". B's comment is "If has Q, then worthless". The content of B's statement can be derived by A using standard logical operations. In logic, if we have a statement saying "X then Y then Z" implies that "X then Y". Thus, B's comment says nothing that A's didn't. B's comment seems such an obvious consequence of A's that it seems a little pointless for them to have even said it.

But B knew what they were doing. In fact, Person B had a distaste for A's idea, and was using their comment to hold up A's argument as being silly. I'll explain why in a moment, because before I can do so I need to divulge something I've been holding back about A's argument. A's argument is such that the connection between the premise "If something has property Q" and the conclusion "is invalid argument" is not intuitively obvious.

An intuitively obvious connection won't require any explanation. If I say that "If you leave your door unlocked at night, then there is a greater chance your house will be robbed" the connection between the premise and the conclusion is intuitively obvious. But if I say that "eating certain high-fat foods can help you lose weight", hardly intuivtively obvious, you'll be wanting some explanation to show how that could be, otherwise, it's likely to sound a bit ridiculous.

The logical structure and truth of a statement is unaffected by the obviousness of the connection between the elements of that statement. That B's comment is a derivable consequence of A's is no way effected by the not-at-all intuitively obvious connection in the first step of A's argument.

I'm almost ready to put it all together now. I can now return to the statements made by A and B, and present them again in light of what we now know. In A's talk, they spent a fair bit of time explaining why that not-at-all intuitively obvious connection between "If something has property Q" and the conclusion "is invalid argument". Some people may have been convinced, but others not. After explaining why this they are thus invalid arguments, A went about explaining if something's an invalid argument then it's worthless.

Having heard A's reasons, an audience member was in a position to understand why "If has property Q" then "is invalid argument" (whether they bought this argument is another matter), and they were also in a position to see why "If is an invalid argument" then "is worthless". Thus, as a consequence of this, there were in a position to see the argument as a whole, and that "If has property Q" then "worthless" (which happened also to be what B said).

We can now see why B's statement was meant to ridicule A's argument by making it look silly. If A had just said "If has property B then it's an invalid argument" without explaining why, it would've sounded ridiculous. B's is making A's argument sound even worse, by making it look like A's simply stating "If some has property B, then it's worthless". B's statement left out all the supporting argument, and just presented to statement to the light of intuition. To intuition, the conclusion that "is an invalid argument" sounded ridiculous, but the conclusion "is worthless", which is a much stronger conclusion, consequently sounds even more ridiculous.

...and I'd spend some more time working on this post, to try and make the point clearer and to flesh out some conclusions, but it's getting quite late (it took me about an hour to write the post you see here, so it's now ten to one in the morning). I'll leave you with a point I hope to flesh out more in the future: the content of a statement matters, but so does the form in which it's presented.... that latter may not matter when it comes to content, but it does when it comes to interpretation... interpretation can make a big difference... interpretation matters.

An Alternative to Footnotes I Haven't Seen

To footnote or not to footnote? That's a question commonly faced by non-fiction writers. There's a number of answers to this, all of which address the issue of how to deal with information that's of relevance but which clashes with the main flow of the text. I want to describe an approach I haven't seen before (which may or may not already exist), but first I'll recap the approaches I'm aware of.

I can think of five different approaches, most of which are variations of a few basic themes. If footnotes at the bottom of the page are not included, a reference may still be included in the text, but the note itself may be relegated to the end of the chapter or the end of the book. Alternatively, such notes are left out altogether, and yet another solution is for notes to be included at the end of the chapter/book but not being referenced in the main text. In this case, the text the note applies to is identified by a page number and sometimes a short quote to identify what the note applies to.

Now for the approach I haven't seen before. It follows the same line as the "no references in text, but the notes are included at the end of the book" approach. With that approach, the quote of text included with the note can help you to know what the note applies to, but it usually doesn't include enough information for you to appreciate the note in full, so you have to skip back to the relevant page then go back and read the note. The approach I'm suggesting ought to avoid the need for this skipping back and forth.

The idea is to make the notes section self-contained. The entry for each note would, as a lead in to that note, recap on all the relevant ideas from the book. This way we still avoid breaking the flow of the main text, but in addition we also avoid breaking the flow when reading a note. I'd also suggest this notes section be placed at the end of each chapter, so its there for you to read immediately after reading the chapter. Done this way, the notes section would have a narrative feel, like the author was recaping on what they'd been talking about in the main text and pointing out where what they said there needs qualification, references to further information, and so on.

So I guess the question is: is this approached used anywhere, or has it been tried but found lacking in some way, or is it still waiting to be tried out?

Breakthrough in Growing New Teeth From Stem Cells

Scientists at Kings College in London have been able to, in mice, "coax stem cells to grow into teeth within only a few weeks" (ChannelNewsAisa).

The article says that "[t]he procedure entails taking stem cells from a living being, nurturing them in a laboratory until they form a ball of new cells known as a bud, and inserting the bud into the gum where the new tooth is needed". The scientists who developed the technique hope to "make the technology available to the general public within five years".

Eugene Eric Kim's Manifesto for Collaborative Tools

Eugene Eric Kim has written A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools, in which he argues that there is a pressing need to improve our collaborative tools, and this need boils down to being "people-centric when designing and building applications, and [working] with other developers to make our tools more interoperable." The article elaborates on these themes and points to some directions for addressing the issues. He ends with a handy list of references to related work. I agree that it's an important issue, and I think he has some worthwhile things to say. Some of my comments on it follow.

Regarding interoperability, this is how we should be trying to make tools work: "[y]our PIM application may already allow you to link a person's name in your calendar to that person's contact information within the same application. However, it should also allow you to link to that person's contact information in another application, to the email with directions to the meeting place, to the document containing the agenda, to the instant messenging transcript where you arranged the meeting, and so forth, all independent of the tools or file formats being used."

I think his notion of a shared conceptual framework, as a solution for the interoperability issue, is an important one. To illustrate this notion, while there a numerous relational database systems, they all have at their core the relational model, and can all speak SQL. Kim suggests that a shared conceptual framework for collaborative software "would provide a common vocabulary for thinking about and discussing these tools, and would also reveal opportunities for standardization". He goes on to provide some good examples of the elements that could go into such a framework, including backlinks ("links from other documents pointing to the document in question"), fine-grained linking, and a standard document model ("do for documents what relational algebra and SQL did for databases").

Kim suggests that XML, in itself, is not the best way to provide the kind of features he talks about. His criticism of XML is of it being a syntax for representing information: "[t]he syntax used to express a document is ultimately irrelevant. What's needed is a standard way to express and manipulate the fundamental constructs of a document, regardless of the syntax". He then explains why a better solution would involve "a standard language for expressing graph-like data models (such as RDF) and standard APIs for manipulating these data models". In such a solution "the actual syntax of the data would be rendered mostly irrelevant". What it would enable us to do is "things such as [creating] a link from a word processing document to a function in source code without having to translate either document into some intermediate format."

Kim notes a useful bit of practical advice in relation to user interfaces. As Kim points out, the user-interface is one obvious way to make software more people-centric. When considering why the software user-interfaces are not better, he claims that "[t]he problem with usability is not a lack of good ideas; it's that most of these ideas never make it into real applications" and suggest one solution would be for [r]esearchers [to write] plugins for widely-used open source applications, such as the Mozilla Web browser, instead of developing prototypes from scratch", also suggesting that "[o]pen source developers should be scouring academic publications for ideas, rather than simply duplicating the user interfaces in commercial products."

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A minor niggle, but I was a bit surprised to see him make a rather unfair claim against the semantic web idea "[w]hile the futuristic applications promised by the Semantic Web have failed to crop up, some of the resulting work is quietly making an impact in different ways" - unfair, because if we're talking about its practical impact its clearly still rather early days!

Quote on Preserving First Impressions

(Added, 23.5.04: Paying attention to initial impressions of phenomena helps preserve an accurate account of them. Without such recording, our later recollection is typically a gross simplification yet we rarely realise that they are. Thus preservation is important if we are attempting to explain the phenomena, for we want a detailed and accurate account of what we are to explain, or similarly if we in some way need to reason about the phenomena. Too often people will look back at their recollection of a phenomena, thinking it is accurate and sufficiently detailed, while it is not, and end up developing an explanation that only covers toy situations and is useless -- often even as a starting point -- for explaining the real things in the world).

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Lafcadio Hearn, quoting Basil Hall Chamberlain, in Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan

Do not fail to write down your first impressions as soon as possible, they are evanescent, you know; they will never come to you again...

I didn't actually come across this quote through that book (which I haven't read), but through its mention in Peter Carey's "My Life as a Fake". I think its point is of importance in trying construct a coherent picture of anything, particularly your own thoughts. I'm not sure yet how to make my point, and my main purpose in jotting down this quote is so as to not forget it.

Article: Bush's Quiet Multilateralism

A pretty reasonable sounding colmn over at Newsweek:

Bush's Quiet Multilateralism
The administration loves global cooperation when it comes to trade. So why can't we try it when lives, and not just lucre, are on the line?

Simple and Effective Lecture-theatre Interaction

PAUL CARON, a law professor at the University of Cincinnati, uses them to break through what he calls the "cone of silence" in his classroom. For Wendy Tietz, who teaches accounting at Kent State, they are a way to encourage teamwork and give credit for class participation. Melissa Wilde, a sociology professor at Indiana University, says they help her students feel a connection to the subject.

For these and other professors across the nation, the newest aid in the classroom is a small wireless keypad, linked to a computer. Students answer questions not by raising their hands but by punching buttons, with the results appearing on a screen in the front of the room... [read the rest at New York Times ...there's some intesting consequenes of using the technology.]

Richard Dawkins on Science Writing: Next Step, A Nobel Prize for Literature?

Novelists may win the plaudits, but they don't have all the good stories...
Richard Dawkins gives advice to entrants to a competition for young science writers.

...Choose science, and you have something important to write about....Not just important but fascinating. Not just fascinating but open-ended: you'll never run out of subjects, where the effort of simplification repays the writer as richly as the reader. Einstein said: "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." Any fool can oversimplify. Far from talking down, flatter your reader. Don't apologise for elitism, encourage your reader to join the elite. Don't shrink from choosing the exact word that says it best, even if it drives your reader to the dictionary. A dictionary never harmed anyone, and a word can excite by its very unfamiliarity... [read the full article on Edge]

Thoughts in Few Words (5)

Before I can begin I must clarify my thinking.

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(Previous thoughts: 1, 2, 3, 4)

Thoughts on Our Thinking Tendencies, Redux [-]

A few days ago, I talked about how it seems we have a tendency to see situations in terms of certain types of things ("subjects", such as the game of football) rather than in a "contextualised fashion" (such as the importance put on the game of football, rather than the game of football itself). Writing that has helped me clarify my thoughts, and here I present my current views.

I would describe those ideas in terms of the following. There is in inherent degree of difficulty associated with perceiving a particular type of thing (a physical object, relationship between things, etc etc). The degree of difficulty of perceiving a type of thing can stop us from doing so. We seem to have an inherent capability for perceiving particular types of things (physical objects are of course one example), and I believe we have to learn (though it may not be though explicit learning, perhaps just experience) how to explicitly perceive the more difficult types of things.

What we explicitly perceive in a given situation is, in addition to what we can explicitly perceive 'innately', those types of things we have 'learned' to see, modulo what we can't see because of our present cognitive load - after all, we only have so much mental capacity (I'll have to try coming back to this issue in the future and be more precise).

There are some questions that need to be answered about this. What governs the degree of difficulty? I'm not sure, but I would think the two major factors would be: temporal resources required for the processing required to perceive that type of thing, and secondly, our evolutionary history (where the temporal factors are really a subset of the evolutionary factors). I give that as a second factor because of the role evolution played in shaping our mental capabilities. Also, what are the different types of things that are there to be perceived? Both these things also deserve a fuller treatment in the future.

These difficulties in perceiving certain types of things can be seen as 'constraints on perfection', to use Richard Dawkin's term (or at least seems to be his). That term is the title of a chapter in his book "The Extended Phenotype" in which he gives the various reasons why an evolutionary adaptation may not be able to come up with an ideal 'solution'. An example of such a constraint is the need for the adaption to modify the current design of the organism rather than being able to go 'back to the drawing board'. In this context, a 'constraint on perfection' is a constraint on thinking that draws it away from the ideal.

The Illusion of Unlimited Free-Will

I'm not really going to talk about the issue of free-will here. I'm going to talk about the conception of unlimited free-will. The difference between the two is that, with free-will -- at least in terms of common conceptions of it -- you are free to make your own decisions, whereas with unlimited free-will you can always have 100% full control. In unlimited free-will, your all-powerful will is a resource you have at your disposal, and you just need to show enough determination or resolve to apply it. And should you not be able to muster this determination this is a because of some weakness, some lack of resolve, on your behalf. With the distinction between the conceptions of free-will made hopefully made clear, the rest of this post will be concentrating on the notion of unlimited free-will.

I'm not sure how many people explicitly subscribe to the view of unlmited free-will, but I do have the impression that most people tend to implicitly belive it. I suppose I won't need to say my view of unlimited free-will, becuase I've given the game away with the title given to this post -- I think it's an illusion.

It certainly feels like unlimited free-will exists. You're trying to cut down on fatty foods, but, damn it, those chips as tasty little buggers. You know if you'd just had just exercised a bit more willpower you could have held back. You know you're definitely capable of exercising that level of will -- in fact, you've done so plenty of times in the past. Sometimes you've exercised an enourmous level of will power. There was that time that you could have easily gotten away with a tidy sum of money that you almost certainly would have gotten away with -- it was so tempting, but you knew you had to hold back because it was the right thing to do. So if you can hold back then, you could hold back when it comes to some measly chips!

If you have the capability to exercise an enourmous amount of free will, an amount of free-will that is potentially large enough to overcome any desire, then it would seem you do have some sort of unlimited free-will. I'm going to argue that this is in fact wrong. It is an illusion. My argument is basically this. Your mind is a battleground between a number of drives and desires. They are not necessarily all against each other, but at least certain gruops will be in conflict with each other. You have your inbuilt, instinctive desires, to do with food, mating, and so on. And you have your concious desires (to be pedantic, I think 'desires deriving from experience' might be more accurate, for they don't necesarily have to have been conciously chosen or conciously accessible, but I think that's besides the point). The role these opposing forces -- with instinctual and concious desires on both sides -- play in decisions you make is the key to my argument.

In my view, will does not spring from some source of your "resolve", as if this resolve was something you just had. We should pause for a moment to consider this "resolve" (or whatever you want to call that ability you have to apply your will), because the notion that will comes from your resolve is very circular, and this should give us reason to be suspect of it. Saying that you've got something like resolve from which your will power springs is really saying you've got the will to apply your will. Where does this original will come from? Where do you get the will to apply it? And so on, and so on... I suspect the only way you'd be able to resolve this regress would be to resort to some sort of mystical explanation.

Rather, in my view, your will arises from the battle between conflicting desires. The temptation to steal some money is pushing you in one direction, but pushing back against it in the other direction is the your desire to "do what's right" and the concern you might get caught. You don' t have some well-sprint of resolve to apply your will to overcoming this temptation, you simply have a stronger desire to do the right thing and to avoid being caught. That is, I'm saying what we call resolve comes from the strength of the forces opposing the desire or temptation. There is no pure source of this resolve -- it is simply whatever oppposing forces populate your mind. There is no single source of this resolve either -- your resolve against any particular temptation will simply be whatever forces opposing that particular temptation there are in your mind.

Even supposing my argument might be correct, what good does it do to claim unlimited free-will is an illusion? Wouldn't that just diminish our feeling that we are in control, and if so, what good could that do? If you're thinking that pushing this view is not a good idea, I can tell you that I'm afraid I think exactly the opposite! I think that the notion of unlimited free-will has been extremely destructive and counterproductive, strange as that may sound. In short -- becuase I don't have time to try and explain myself fully at the moment -- I think it provides a great excuse for all kinds of things (because you can just blame people for not exercising their will, which they could if they really wanted to), and it's a major barrier to actually doing something to build up your will-power (rather than doing something that could diminish the forces on the side of temptation and to strengthen the forces on the opposing side, you're just meant to "try harder", whatever that's meant to mean).

Integrated Language Tools

When I was growing up, I hardly ever looked in a dictionary. It didn't seem worth the effort, having to walk out to the living room to get it, spending the time to find the entry and then having put it back again. Nowadays, having a permenant Internet connection, if there's a word I don't know, I'll immediatelly look it up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The point is, convenience can make a big difference.

Despite the utility of on-line dictonaries and thesauri, I think there's a lot further we can go. We could provide integrated access to all the various types of language tools out there - domain-specific dictionaries, idiom dictionaries, slang dictionaries, cliche dictionaries, translation tools, etc [*]. Ideally, we could simply select a particular word, phrase or body of text and immediately access any of this language-related information. No doubt such integration will come.

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* In addition to all of the language tools I'm aware of, I think it would be very useful to be able to access more specific information on the relationships between synonyms. For example, if synonyms could be ranked in terms of how general or specific the concepts they describe are relative to the current term.

Having 17cm Scissors Left in You After an Opeartion

Last night on tv I saw a shocking report about a woman, Pat Skinner, who had 17cm surgical scissors left inside her after colon surgery, and had to put up with it for 18 months until the problem was diagnosed. She's now trying to take legal action, and is -- surprisingly, you'd think -- having troubles doing so. The story has been covered by various news sources, including TheAustralian, Canada.com and TheTimesOfIndia.
The transcript of the show I watched is available at the 7:30 Report Website.

The thing that really struck a nerve with me was how much trouble she had getting people to belive she was in real pain and that there was something wrong. But it's not just her - so many people over the years have had real, serious problems, and yet people thought they were just making it up. Worse than just having to put up with the problem, they were treated like fools for having it. Fibromyalgia is one example
(unfortunately, I couldn't find the excellent site on it I'd read a few years ago).

Here's an except from the report I saw on tv:

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Pat Skinner complained to her specialist and her GP.

She couldn't stand, sit or lie down without being in extreme pain.

PAT SKINNER: I did complain and I was told, you know, it takes time.

This was the thing I kept hearing.

It takes time to recover.

I think they thought that maybe I was making a fuss.

I think, yeah.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: You felt guilty about that?

PAT SKINNER: Yeah, I think they felt, well, you know, you're going through depression.

ANDREW GEOGHEGAN: Pat Skinner was put on anti-depressants and given counselling which was particularly galling given that she had worked as a professional grief counsellor herself.

...

DON SKINNER: My wife instigated the X-ray.

That's the amazing thing that in all this time, not one person would suggest the fundamental thing like an X-ray.

As you can see, this sort of thing really gets to me! I strikes a particularly strong personal nerve because I've had really chronic health problems (related to my jaw alignment) that went undiagnosed for many years, and the problems that have come from it -- the extent of which no one really belives. In my view, most people try to pigeonhole you into whatever categories they're used to seeing, and if they can't, then either you're making it up or its your fault. People have a really strong tendancy to blame things on your personality, rather than even accept that it could be something you don't have any control over.

Thoughts on Our Thinking Tendencies [-]

A quick write-up of some thoughts on some tendencies we seem to follow in our thinking. Nothing rigorous.

Two people are in conversation. Person A makes a comment to Person B about their country's favourite sport. Person A says that people in the country are way to devoted to the sport, and place way to much importance on it. Person B responds claiming that just because Person A doesn't like the sport, they can't say that it's right or wrong.

While Person B's response may be right in its own way, it is flawed as a response to Person A's point. Person B's response is framing the issue as an aesthetic one, and implying that Person A was saying it was wrong to like or play the sport. What Person A was saying was not so much about the sport, however, but about the level or importance or devotion accorded to it (e.g. because the level of devotion given to it draws resources away from more important issues).

I think Person B's mistake is quite a common one: I think we have a stronger tendency to perceive issues in terms of the subjects involved -- the sport itself -- than to see it in a "contextualised" fashion -- the importance accorded to that sport by the society. In the case of Person A's statement, they're talking about a property of the relationship between the sport and the society.

I'm not sure yet exactly how I'd define "contextualised", but by it I mean things like: seeing things as a system, and seeing the properties of the system, seeing the processes going on, seeing the relationships between the elements of that system, and seeing the nature of our own perception of the system.

Things and Talking About Them

Jon Udell writes, on songs, movies and other things: "We crave access not only to intellectual products, but also to other people's experience and understanding of those products." Absolutely! And moreso, in my case.

I think I enjoy movie reviews (Filthy Critic, The Movie Show) more than the movies themselves. I've spent so much time on sites like Amazon.com reading book reviews, and I used to spend a lot of time in newsagents reading music and computer game magazines.

I think I like the discussion about things so much, partially because its like a form of gossip, and partially because it builds up a sense of anticipation about things, which is much easier to do than its fulfillment.

The Google Operating System

Kottke, quoting Rich Skrenta:

Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It's running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It's looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.

While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.

This computer is running the world's top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world's biggest computer and most advanced operating system?.

Our Digital Prostheses' Expanding Awareness

Two recent news items:

AT&T Wireless has announced a music recognition service (DailyWireless, via Slashdot). If a song's playing on the radio and you want to know its name, you can use your mobile to dial the service number, hold the phone up to the sound for a while, and voila, it'll tell you the song name. According to the DailyWireless article, it's pretty accurate.

You're in a big city, you're lost and you want to know where you are. With the software service being developed by Cambrige researchers, you can take a photo with your mobile of where you're standing, send the photo to it, and it'll tell you where you are (and give you directions for where you want to go, and so on. NewScientist). The system has some useful capabilities, because from the picture it can tell which direction you're facing, and can incorporate this information into the directions (e.g. "Turn 90 degrees to your right, walk 100 meters...").

Thoughts on the Algorithmic View of Reality [-]

Here I'm continuing on with the topic of viewing reality through algorithms, which I talked about in my last post.

Finding decent examples and building a vocabulary/model to talk about them is what I'm trying to do at the moment. Here's some in-progress thoughts. I'll call the view that gives prominence to objects over algorithms the Objectual View (and the alternative view the Algorithmic View).

Characteristic of the Objectual View, things happen as a result of a directly perceivable cause-and-effect, where we can see that an object or a group of objects is causing some thing to happen. Typically, the cause follows directly after the effect - that's why we can directly perceive it. The Objectual View seems to be the way we're designed to see the world; we have to learn to see it through the Algorithmic View.

In the Algorithmic View, things still happen as a direct result of cause-and-effect, but the chains of cause-and-effect are less visible. I haven't yet nailed a clear picture of what's going on, but I can describe some of the cause-and-effect relationships that might be present in these cases. Unfortunately, I'll have to leave an explanation of these relationships for a later point in time. These are cause-and-effects that cross over levels of organisation, effects that accumulate through some chain of interactions, effects that run, or seem to run, contra to the "purpose" of an object (in the case of entities with intentions, these are often 'ecnomic' in nature). Often the effects will be temporally distributed from the causes.

When considering the Algorithmic View against the Objectual View, I think I can, as a first cut, distill it down to the following. There are various rules of cause-and-effect working at various levels of reality. Rather than cause and effect being two points connected by the arrow of causality, we could visualise it as a tree, with causes being leaves, combined causes being branch points, and the ultimate effect being the trunk. Rather than connected points of cause and effect spanning a distinct chunk of time, the tree, from leaves to trunk, may span physical distance, time and lie across the workings of unrelated proceses, and it can do so, and still result in the ultimate effect, as long as that distance, time, and those unrelated processes, are not enough to throw out the algorithm and stop it from causing the effect. That is, the algorithm is not 'implemented' by a single thing, and can be very dispersed (that is, by interactions that occur here and there, with all sorts of things happening inbetween). What we have touble appreciating, is that they doesn't need to be any co-operation, any working towards the effect.

Another way of thinking about this is that there are various ways that Algorithms can be implemented by lower-level entities, and these range across a spectrum from 'most direct' (two end-points connected by cause-and-effect') all they way to very 'dispersed' implementations. As we move across this spectrum towards the more dispersed implementations, we are loosening the constraints on how directly the algorithm is being implemented.

It's clear that this kind of thinking has been around for a while. Emergent systems, emergent laws, systems-based thinking all share this type of view. It crops up in places such as evolutionary theory, economics and no doubt many more! What I'm wondering, though, is how strongly it has been reduced to its essential nature and how forcefully (that is, directly and explicitly) that nature has been stated?

Oh, a part of the picture I've missed out in the above description is how these algorithms can exist in the first place. That's definitely part of what makes it hard to see things in this way. I'll try talking about that sometime soon.

Perceiving Reality Through Algorithms [-]

Recently it occurred to me that a lot of my thinking seems to be grounded in perceiving reality primarily in terms of algorithms rather than objects. Most people seem to do the opposite. I would argue -- and I will try to in the future -- that reality really is most accurately seen as a bunch of algorithms, and that it is wrong to give a special status to contiguous objects. It might seem that I'm talking about the fundamental nature of reality here -- at the level of physics -- rather than everyday reality, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm talking about reality on "all levels". Take economics, for example. A lot of economic thinking requires perceiving of things in terms of algorithms, and often runs contra to the more intuitive perception of reality in terms of individual objects. I think there's a lot of other examples, too, but I'm not going to try and develop a list right now.

John Sperling is putting his $3 Billion fortune into life-extension research

Not a bad article at Wired

More Than Words for Snow (3): Birth Control and Selfish Genes

In some ways, I'm not very happy with the writing in this post, and some of the problems I've had writing it I'll put down to the awful problems I'm having with my back, which make it so hard to think clearly when I'm sitting down at the computer....

I've talked before (here and here) about how the structure of our language and thought can easily mislead our thinking; here's another example, derived from Richard Dawkin's excellent book The Selfish Gene.

It's known that most birds regulate their clutch size -- the number of eggs they lay -- and it seems as if they do it for the good of the species, so they don't overtax the available resources. Dawkins argues, however, that this seemingly altruistic behaviour is in fact better explained as the result of the workings of selfish genes.

How could this behaviour arise from selfish genes? If the selfish gene view is correct, shouldn't we be expecting the birds to be wanting to have as many eggs as they can, so their genes are propagated as much as possible? Why then would these birds be limiting the number of eggs they are having - why would they be practising birth control? It's hard to imagine!

Actually, it's not that hard to imagine if we frame the problem in a more appropriate way. It's hard to imagine because of the way I've put things. I don't mean to say I've used some sort of special language-trick, however; what I mean is that we can, if we are not careful, be subtly mislead by the language we are using. To see what I mean you'll have to read on and see the details.

So what have I done to misleadingly frame the issue? What I've done is exemplified by the use of the term birth control. But what is wrong with that? If birds are laying less eggs than they could, are they not practicing a form of birth control? Would we not say that if people were limiting the number of children they have they are not practicing a form of birth control?

Perhaps we can clarify the problem by considering what we mean by 'birth control'. I think the essence the term's meaning can be captured by the following: birth control is limiting the number of children born; birth control controls (limits) the population; if you want to go about limiting the population you need to practicse birth control. It's hard to think how this meaning for birth control could be wrong, but it is -- in fact, as Dawkins explains, birth control can have exactly the opposite effect!

Dawkins says (pg 116):

[Each] selfish individual [chooses] the clutch size that maximizes the number of children she rears. If three is the optimum clutch size for swifts, what this means [is] that any individual who tries to rear four will probably end up with fewer children than rivial, more cautious individuals who only try to rear three. The obvious reason for this would be that food is so thinly spread between the four babies that few of them survive to adulthood.

That is, birds are practicing birth control in order to increase the number of children they have!

Lets now consider how and why the language has been getting us confused. How can birth control limit the number of children and also increase the number of children? The answer: it depends on the context. In the case of humans, at least in countries with a high-standard of living, birth control will limit the number of children. This is because baies have a high chance of surviving into adulthood, so any child born will increase the population and any child that isn't won't. In the case of the birds, and no doubt many other creatures, however, child mortality may be high, with the chances of a child surviving being dependent upon how much time and effort the parent(s) can devote to it. And thus having more children may, because you can't care for any of them adequately, mean you end up with less surviving children.

That's an explanation of how it's possible for birth control to either limit or expand the number of children, but how was it that we got confused in the first place? It was because the problem was framed in terms of number of children born, that this was simply the causal factor that effected population size, and that an increase in births meant an increase in population size (or, put the other way around, that an increase in population size comes from an increase in births). If we'd been careful about what we were thinking, we would have realised that we aren't really interested in the number of births but the number of children that survive. We'd assumed that the two meant the same thing.

We assumed the two meant the same thing because we didn't really think about the relationship between number of children born and population size. If we give the issue a quick think over in terms of the concepts such as 'giving birth to children' and 'population size', it's seems quite natural that there's a direct causal relationship between them, and if you take this answer it's hard to look at it and see why it is wrong. But there's a big difference about thinking about the concepts and really thinking about what the situation could be like (thinking 'what if the mother had twenty eggs rather than three?'). If we'd really thought it through, it ought to have been easy to see that having more children born could mean less children surviving.

I was originally planning to have a second part to this post, where I would discuss where our thinking had been going wrong, in terms of some vocabulary I've been developing for talking about this kind of stuff. But now I'm going to do that in a separate post which I'm going to start writing next.

Simulations, All

I've been reading Richard Dawkin's book about evolution, The Selfish Gene. It's apparent that a lot of ideas about evolution are tested out through computer simulations. Of course, it's not just evolutionary theory where computer simulations are heavily used - there's other areas such as Economics, Physics and Meteorology. But despite the fairly widespread use of simulation, despite its utility, may people seem to consider it somehow lesser than other techniques for understanding the world.

Many people would consider verbal or mathematical means of understanding the world superior to simulations. I believe the argument is that simulations seem so paltry against the complexity of the real world, with the assumption that the other techniques are much better at dealing the nature of the world, perhaps because they don't try explicitly representing it. Against this idea, it occurred to me before -- and this probably has occurred to others -- that all thinking is fundamentally simulation.

Any reasoning about the world -- verbal, mathematical, etc -- involves some conception of the way the world is. In short, when you're reasoning you're manipulating this model in some way in order to see what it can tell you. What does this have to say about the relative efficacy of a computer simulation? That's something I'll consider another time.

This post is really just a quick sketch - I want to come back to this and consider it more fully another time, but now it's beddy-bies time and I need my beauty sleep :-).

An Example of a Mental Bias Towards the Physical

A while back, I gave a glowing review of Harold McGee's The Curious Cook. This post is about a single sentence from that book, which I'm using to illustrate a facet of the way our minds seem to work. This post doesn't provide a complete argument - at the moment I'm just trying to collect examples in order to build a fuller case, one that I'm hoping to present in the future. And you might find its conclusion rather lightweight - but after all, it's only a single, small example...

In the book's article on making mayonnaise, he explains how a microwave can be used to kill the salmonella that can sometimes be found in eggs. A microwave is suitable for the task because it can kill the bacteria without destroying the "rawness" of the egg yolk, which is important for making mayonnaise. It can do so because it can cook yolks at precise "temperatures" for a precise duration of time.

"As for the cooking itself, after years of owning a microwave oven, I finally found a task that it alone can accomplish well. On the stovetop, it's very difficult to ..." (pg 99)

It's easy to nod along with what he's saying, and I think it gives us a glimpse of something interesting about the way our minds work to see why he's not really right. When you think about it, a task that microwaves alone can accomplish is the task of heating something up quickly. That's not to say the results are always fantastic, but if it's speed you're after, a microwave is your best bet.

That microwaves can heat things up quickly is a rather obvious fact, and yet you may have noticed that its doesn't come obviously to mind when you read the quoted sentence. Why is that? I think the reason is that our minds have a bias towards thinking in terms of physical entities over more abstract properties such as the duration of something. "Cooking something fast" is definitely valid as a task a microwave can alone do well, but it's far less obvious a task than something physical such as "frying something", "baking a cake" or "making rice".

There's an objection to my argument that you may have found yourself thinking. That is, that when he said "I finally found a task that it alone can accomplish well" he was only talking about physical tasks such as "frying something", "baking a cake" or "making rice". I can't say this wasn't the case, but even if it was, I don't think it really says anything against the point I'm making.

If he intended the sentence to refer only to physical tasks, then perhaps it's illustrative that he didn't feel the need to qualify himself, despite the raher obvious thing microwaves do well (cooking things quickly), even if you don't consider that a task. And regardless of how he intended it, it's still illustrative if people still read that sentence without realising the possibility of a task being "cooking quickly".

Example of Rejecting the "Ridiculous"

People will often reject a notion on the grounds that it's "ridiculous". I want to eventually write a longer post about this, but for the moment I'm just collecting examples. Tim Cahill provides one in his book Remote Journies Oddly Rendered. The particular story in the book recounts the time he camped in Yellowstone National Park near a set of remote geysers, and it notes:

Early white explorers sent back accounts of the boiling water and steam erupting from the earth. One eastern publication, in 1870, rejected what now seems like a solid descriptive manuscript with the words, `Sorry, we do not print fiction.’ And it was in 1870 that men who wondered at the supposedly fictional geysers first expressed the thought that the entire areas would be set aside as a National park. (1st ed, pg 200. Note that in the US the book seems to be called "Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered").