Amon Tobin's music isn't very immediate/accessible, so I was pleasantly surprised to hear several of his tracks used during the finale of the Australian version of Big Brother tonight tonight: The Killer's Vanilla and At the End of the Day from his latest album, The Foley Room, and Natureland off Supermodified. They used them as background music in several of the video clips they showed.
A nice line from Scott Adams' blog:
The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.
David Stenhouse looks back on a missed chance:
"When you’ve read as many books as I have, you know instinctively when something is going to be a hit. You mark my words. We won’t hear of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone ever again."
If you want to make sense of statistics for people, this is how you do it, as shown in this very interesting and impressive video.
In it, Hans Rosling uses UN statistics to demonstrate that many common beliefs about the modern-day world, such as on the nature of the divide between first and third-world countries, are wrong.
But more than the content (and whether you would agree with it or not), what it's about is how he presents it. The software he uses, Trendalyzer, seems pretty impressive. I don't mean from a technical standpoint -- though no doubt it is -- but from what it is able to do. This is futuristic software, like science-fiction films try to portray.
Graphs are animated to show how the data changes over the years, highlighting the trends. They're morphed to show a different, but related perspective. Details are drilled down into, for example to go from showing data for a particular country to data for its consitutent states. It's all interactive, and it leads to a very impressive flow: one perspective raises certain questions, so he modifies the view to try and get insight into them.
What I think is important about this kind of software is that it allows you to really demonstrate points, directly from the data -- very much showing rather than telling.
[Update: the linked page can now be accessed here]
Prosopagnosia is 'face-blindness' - the inability to recognize other humans by their faces. This page is a very effective description of what it's like, written by a sufferer.
They say good writing shows rather than tells, and that's what that pages does, using a very effective analogy -- to show you what it's like to have prosopagnosia.
If individuals were rocks, then it's like having to remember the characteristics of each rock, and try to realise when you come across this rock again, from your memories. The page uses photos of different rocks so you can see for yourself the sorts of difficulties involved.
There's a lot of complications you probably wouldn't think of, which the page demonstrates well. E.g. when someone gets a haircut - as demonstrated by the rock being obscured by a bit of foliage.
RunBot is a walking robot with a natural, flexible gait (BBC story; info). It can deal with uneven terrain, and changes changes like uphill or downhill slopes.
I think they've got the right approach. Like with Steve Grand's work, and Jeff Hawkin's HTMs, it uses a hierarchical means of control, where each level has a certain level of autonomy, and there's constant updating of the structures based on the environmental input.
RunBot has been co-operatively developed by european scientists
Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music. After a quick look, seems interesting. Maps out the myriads of genres and sub-genres of electronic music, giving a short desc of each -- and the author is not afraid to give their opinion of it -- along with some musical samples of it (usefully giving the artist and track name).
Not a huge deal, but could be helpful:
The LA police department plans to implemenent a system so that when someone gives an over-the-phone account of a crime or accident scene, they can augument that verbal account with photos taken on their camera phone, using the phone's photo sending feature.
Interesting map. Apparently Australia's GDP is comparable to Ohio's.
[Update: the map can now be found here, or at various other places]
Nice example of a non-technical explanation of a somewhat technical subjectmatter: How to explain RSS the Oprah way.
Turning innovative design towards helping the world's poor -- a New York Times article on an exhibition, currently housed in New York, of designs that strive to do this.
one of the simplest and yet most elegant designs tackles a job that millions of women and girls spend many hours doing each year — fetching water. Balancing heavy jerry cans on the head may lead to elegant posture, but it is backbreaking work and sometimes causes crippling injuries. The Q-Drum, a circular jerry can, holds 20 gallons, and it rolls smoothly enough for a child to tow it on a rope.
I've got relatives in Malaysia and have been there a couple of times, and from that I knew that Malays are, from birth, automatically considered muslims, and that they aren't allowed to become non-muslims, but I didn't know that they aren't legally allowed to marry non-muslims, as this article on an upcoming court case in Malaysia says:
Ethnic Malays, who make up just over half of Malaysia's 26 million people, are deemed Muslims from birth.
Constitutionally, freedom of religion is guaranteed. But in reality, conversion out of Islam falls within the ambit of sharia or Islamic courts. And sharia law prescribes fines or jail for those who renounce Islam, effectively ruling out the option.
Muslims who leave Islam end up in legal limbo, unable to register their new religious affiliations or legally marry non-Muslims. Many keep quiet about their choice or emigrate.
Lina Joy, now in her early 40s, was born Azlina Jailani and brought up as a Muslim but at the age of 26 decided to become a Christian. [...]
Until the entry [on her identity card] is deleted, she cannot legally marry outside the Muslim faith. The legal wrangling began when she took the department to court over the anomaly.
The LA Times reports (other) on the death of a lady at a public hosptial in the US:
She lay on the linoleum [in the emergengy room of King-Harbor hospital], writhing in pain, for 45 minutes, as staffers worked at their desks and numerous patients looked on.
Aside from one patient who briefly checked on her condition, no one helped her. A janitor cleaned the floor around her as if she were a piece of furniture. A closed-circuit camera captured everyone's apparent indifference.
Arriving to find Rodriguez on the floor, her boyfriend unsuccessfully tried to enlist help from the medical staff and county police — even a 911 dispatcher, who balked at sending rescuers to a hospital.
Alerted to the "disturbance" in the lobby, police stepped in — by running Rodriguez's record. They found an outstanding warrant and prepared to take her to jail. She died before she could be put into a squad car.
Rough sketching out...
In Knowledge as a Creole, I talked about the largely unconscious process of 'building a worldview' (though i didn't use that terminology in that post). It's a constructive process, that tries to build a reasonably coherent worldview from -- roughly -- the current state of our shared knowledge. We have very limited control over this process, and it is difficult to change our worldview once it is constructed. On the flip side, this process leads to conceptual advances -- advances that were implicit in this shared knowledge.
Clay Shirky has recently written a post The (Bayesian) Advantage of Youth [Update: the post can now be accessed here] that makes a similar point, though from a different perspective. Rather than knowledge, he's talking about technological advances (made by entrepreneurs), and he's focuses primarily how already seeing things one way restricts your ability to see advances. Also, rather than just the 'worldview' he's talking about experience in general.
...The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things.
In almost every circumstance, this would be a disadvantage, but not here, and not now. The reason this is so, and the reason smart old people can’t fake their way into this asset, has everything to do with our innate ability to cement past experience into knowledge.
...We are wired to learn from experience. This is, in almost all cases, absolutely the right strategy, because most things in life benefit from mental continuity. Again, today, gravity pulls things downwards. Again, today, my wife will be happier if I put my socks in the hamper than on the floor. And so on.
...In 999,999 cases, learning from experience is a good idea, but what entrepreneurs do is look for the one in a million shot. When the world really has changed overnight, when wild new things are possible if you don’t have any sense of how things used to be, then it is the people who got here five minutes ago who understand that new possibility, and they understand it precisely because, to them, it isn’t new.
Interestly, one in five couples get together through 'mate poaching', according to the study reported
here in Psychology Today:
Wedding announcements in newspapers rarely tell the whole story. If they did, they would occasionally read something like this: "The happy couple met through her boyfriend at the time, who is the groom's former best friend. It took four months to lure her away."
According to one study, up to 20 percent of long-term relationships begin when one or both partners are involved with others. Evolutionary psychologists call this "mate poaching." This figure holds steady across age groups and among couples who are married, living together or dating, according to psychologists who polled some 16,000 individuals in 53 countries as part of the International Sexuality Description Project. Most surprising to researchers: Sweetheart-stealing is prevalent across continents and cultures, although it is notably less common in East Asia.
Heston Blumenthal 's Roast Potatoes Recipe
This is from his excellent book "In Search of Perfection" (which I got thanks to Kerry).
They're just roast potatoes, but they're quite impressive. Much crispier and crunchier on the outside, and soft and fluffier on the inside, than you typical ones. It's boiling them for a while first that does the trick.
Sketching...
We can use simulations and games to give people the practice at tasks required to develop skills. Here's a way that 'interactive-fiction' games could be used to help people learn communication skills.
I'll illustrate by talking about a particular communication skill - the ability to negotiate effectively. There are principles behind effective negotiation, and to be good at this form of communication you need to have a mastery of them.
It's not that important what these specific principles are (see this article if you're interested in a discussion of some negotiation skills), just that there are different principles, and you can master each of them to various degrees.
Here's the sort of interactive-fiction game I'm thinking of. It probably wouldn't matter if it was textual or graphical, just that it involved a converstaion between your character and another (or others), where you are negotiating with them, and at each point in the conversation you have a selection of options for what to say next[1]. At each point there might be five different possibilities, and you have to choose one. Each choice is of the actual text that the character will say (as opposed to something more abstract such as "Ask about the red book").
The idea is that you are playing not simply yourself, but a character who had a certain level of skills. And you can run through the same scenario multiple times, but each time that character's skills improve -- either they have learnt new principles or have further developed the ones they have. And these improved skills are reflected in the conversation choices you are presented with.
Here are the ways I think would help people to learn those skills:
