Numbers are things in time
How does a number of things become a number in itself, seen as a ‘thing’? In all its simplicity, this is the unsolved question for cognitive science.
ideas
Everything, whether it be more perfect or less perfect, will always be able to persist in existence with the same force wherewith it began to exist; wherefore, in this respect, all things are equal.
What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Is it 5 — or 3?
Ask adults from the industrialized world what number is halfway between 1 and 9, and most will say 5. But pose the same question to small children, or people living in some traditional societies, and they’re likely to answer 3.
Cognitive scientists theorize that that’s because it’s actually more natural for humans to think logarithmically than linearly: 30 is 1, and 32 is 9, so logarithmically, the number halfway between them is 31, or 3. Neural circuits seem to bear out that theory. For instance, psychological experiments suggest that multiplying the intensity of some sensory stimuli causes a linear increase in perceived intensity.
In a paper that appeared online last week in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, researchers from MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) use the techniques of information theory to demonstrate that, given certain assumptions about the natural environment and the way neural systems work, representing information logarithmically rather than linearly reduces the risk of error.
photo { Rupp Worsham }
Same style of beauty. Quick of him all the same. The stiff walk. True word spoken in jest.
Courts are rarely asked to judge beauty. Such a subjective practice would normally be anathema to the ideal of objective legal standards. However, one area of federal law has a long tradition of explicitly requiring courts to make aesthetic decisions: the law of design. New designs may be protected as design patents, but only if they are “ornamental” in nature. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, “a design must present an aesthetically pleasing appearance…” This study uses empirical and experimental approaches to test the hypothesis that courts tend to favor more attractive patented designs over less attractive ones. It relies upon a data set that includes all design patent decisions from 1982 until 2010 in which a court made a final determination of validity or infringement, with every design patent at issue therein classified as valid or invalid and infringed or not infringed.
{ Journal of Intellectual Property Law/SSRN | Continue reading }
unrelated { The nuns in Catholic school taught us there was such a thing as sanctuary — the police cannot arrest a suspect in a church. Does this concept have a basis in law, or is it just a social custom that can be discarded on a whim? | The Straight Dope | full story }
photo { Helmut Newton, Van Cleef & Arpels Diamond Necklace X-Ray, 1979 }
Gentleman of the jury, let me explain. A pure mare’s nest. I am a man misunderstood.
Devising marking systems (signs & etc.) which can be easily understood by anyone, anywhere, and in any language, is never going to be an easy task. Now imagine that on top of this, the systems have to remain intact and effective for the next 10,000 years. Specifically to discourage inadvertent intruders at a large-scale nuclear waste repository.
Just such a daunting task was evaluated by two teams co-ordinated by the US Sandia National Laboratories in 1992. They produced a 351-page report detailing their findings: Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant [PDF | 20MB].
oil on canvas { Johannes Kahrs, Untitled (four men with table), 2008 }
‘I do think nihilism is kind of pointless.’ –Emily Cooke
Canadian researchers have come up with a new, precise definition of boredom based on the mental processes that underlie the condition.
Although many people may see boredom as trivial and temporary, it actually is linked to a range of psychological, social and health problems, says Guelph psychology professor Mark Fenske. […]
After reviewing existing psychological science and neuroscience studies, they defined boredom as “an aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” which arises from failures in one of the brain’s attention networks.
In other words, you become bored when:
• you have difficulty paying attention to the internal information, such as thoughts or feelings, or outside stimuli required to take part in satisfying activity;
• you are aware that you’re having difficulty paying attention; and
• you blame the environment for your sorry state (“This task is boring”; “There is nothing to do”).
Did you hear about the man with 5 penises? His pants fit like a glove.
A popular but misinformed POV, adhered to by perhaps 30-45% of the general public, is that living a radically long life would become excruciatingly tiresome due to unavoidable “boredom.” […] No one will understand what “boring” means in a century; “Boredom” will be defined as a mysterious, extinct mental condition that disappeared from human consciousness. It will be a mere sound, a rough primitive noise that got flushed down the toilet of vocabulary history.
Why do I believe the future will infinitely intrigue us?
In the past (and present), activity options were limited due to requisite drudgery of multiple tasks - should I wash dishes first, or pay bills? - but… as automation annihilates our mind-numbing chores, we’ll be provided with Time, Wonderful Time, Long Hours of Happy Relaxed Time that we devote to endless intriguing challenges and interactions.
Plus, pharmacology will provide us with a wide menu of euphoric states of consciousness.
The sadness will last forever
According to an influential and controversial theory, autism is the manifestation of an “Extreme Male Brain.” The reasoning goes something like this - the condition is far more prevalent in males than females; people with autism think in a distinctive style that’s more commonly observed in men than women (that is, high in systematising and low in empathising); and greater testosterone exposure in the womb appears to go hand in hand with an infant exhibiting more autism-like traits in later childhood.
Simon Baron-Cohen, the psychologist who first proposed the theory, always conjectured that there may also be such a thing as an “Extreme Female Brain.” Now in a new paper, a pair of researchers in the USA have made the case that the Extreme Female Brain exists, it’s highly empathic, and it comes with its own problematic consequences, in terms of a fear of negative evaluation by others, and related to that, a greater risk of eating disorders (which are known to be far more prevalent in women than men).
photo { Andrew Miksys }
Hence the best solution is to abolish patents entirely
Our patent system is a mess. It’s a fount of expensive litigation that allows aging companies to linger around by bullying their more innovative competitors in court.
Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on ”trolls” who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be better off without any patents at all?
That’s the striking suggestion from a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working paper by Michele Boldrin and David Levine, professors at Washington University in St. Louis who argue that any patent system, no matter how well conceived, is bound to devolve into the kind of quagmire we’re dealing with today.
Thursday of course. Tomorrow is killing day. Springers.
{ Peter Turchin suggests, based on prior trends, that the US is in for a new period of political instability peaking around 2020. He finds that historically US instability has peaked about every fifty years. He also found this 50 years cycle in Roman and French history, but not in Chinese history. | Overcoming Bias | full story }
‘And so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds.’ –Schopenhauer
Imagine a clock that will keep perfect time forever, even after the heat-death of the universe. This is the “wow” factor behind a device known as a “space-time crystal,” a four-dimensional crystal that has periodic structure in time as well as space. However, there are also practical and important scientific reasons for constructing a space-time crystal. With such a 4D crystal, scientists would have a new and more effective means by which to study how complex physical properties and behaviors emerge from the collective interactions of large numbers of individual particles, the so-called many-body problem of physics. A space-time crystal could also be used to study phenomena in the quantum world, such as entanglement, in which an action on one particle impacts another particle even if the two particles are separated by vast distances.
The queen replaced the earlier vizier chess piece towards the end of the 10th century and by the 15th century had become the most powerful piece
It would be difficult to be strong at chess if you had a subnormal IQ, but you certainly don’t need an IQ of above average. I’m sure you could find very strong grandmasters with IQs around about the 100 mark, which is the average. […]
What I have noticed in very strong players, though, is an extraordinary degree of concentration. You really do have to concentrate very hard for long periods. There is a very boring phrase for that, which is hard work. That’s often underestimated, while the idea of effortless genius is greatly overestimated.
We choose to go to the moon and do the other things
The rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. […]
All bad photos are alike, but each good photograph is good in its own way. The bad photos have found their apotheosis on social media, where everybody is a photographer and where we have to suffer through each other’s “photography” the way our forebears endured terrible recitations of poetry after dinner. Behind this dispiriting stream of empty images is what Russians call poshlost: fake emotion, unearned nostalgia. According to Nabokov, poshlost “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”
photo { Nan Goldin }
Her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.
New research traces the dramatic rise in feminine pronouns in books over the past century.
Using the Google Books database, the researchers examined the ratio of male pronouns (he, him, his, himself) to female ones (she, her, hers, herself) in the texts of 1.2 million books published in the U.S. between 1900 and 2008. They suspected feminine references would represent a larger percentage of such words over time, as women gained in power and status.
They were right. But there were periods of regression, and a real shift didn’t occur until the late 1960s.
Remember when tattoos were cool?
Catching a frisbee is difficult. Doing so successfully requires the catcher to weigh a complex array of physical and atmospheric factors, among them wind speed and frisbee rotation. Were a physicist to write down frisbee-catching as an optimal control problem, they would need to understand and apply Newton’s Law of Gravity.
Yet despite this complexity, catching a frisbee is remarkably common. Casual empiricism reveals that it is not an activity only undertaken by those with a Doctorate in physics. It is a task that an average dog can master. Indeed some, such as border collies, are better at frisbee-catching than humans.
So what is the secret of the dog’s success? The answer, as in many other areas of complex decision-making, is simple. Or rather, it is to keep it simple. For studies have shown that the frisbee-catching dog follows the simplest of rules of thumb: run at a speed so that the angle of gaze to the frisbee remains roughly constant. Humans follow an identical rule of thumb.
Catching a crisis, like catching a frisbee, is difficult. Doing so requires the regulator to weigh a complex array of financial and psychological factors, among them innovation and risk appetite. Were an economist to write down crisis-catching as an optimal control problem, they would probably have to ask a physicist for help.
Yet despite this complexity, efforts to catch the crisis frisbee have continued to escalate. Casual empiricism reveals an ever-growing number of regulators, some with a Doctorate in physics. Ever-larger litters have not, however, obviously improved watchdogs’ frisbee-catching abilities. No regulator had the foresight to predict the financial crisis, although some have since exhibited supernatural powers of hindsight.
So what is the secret of the watchdogs’ failure? The answer is simple. Or rather, it is complexity. For what this paper explores is why the type of complex regulation developed over recent decades might not just be costly and cumbersome but sub-optimal for crisis control. In financial regulation, less may be more.
[…]
Modern finance is complex, perhaps too complex. Regulation of modern finance is complex, almost certainly too complex. That configuration spells trouble. As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity.
Delivering that would require an about-turn from the regulatory community from the path followed for the better part of the past 50 years. If a once-in-a-lifetime crisis is not able to deliver that change, it is not clear what will. To ask today’s regulators to save us from tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s toolbox is to ask a border collie to catch a frisbee by first applying Newton’s Law of Gravity.
‘A little know piece of trivia: Superman’s 2nd greatest enemy was cilantro.’ –Tim Geoghegan
A review of the development of criminal profiling demonstrates that profiling has never been a scientific process. It is essentially based on a compendium of common sense intuitions and faulty theoretical assumptions, and in practice appears to consist of little more than educated guesses and wishful thinking. While it is very difficult to find cases where profiling made a critical contribution to an investigation, there exist a number of cases where a profile, combined with investigative and prosecutorial enthusiasm, derailed the investigation and even contributed to serious miscarriages of justice.
{ Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice/SAGE | Continue reading }
Students spend a lot of time learning subjects irrelevant to almost all occupations (except, of course, teaching those very same irrelevant subjects)
We compare astronomers’ removal of Pluto from the listing of planets and psychiatrists’ removal of homosexuality from the listing of mental disorders.
photo { Ernst Haas, Colorado, USA, March 1978 }
What events might nullify these calculations?
Networks of muscles, of brain cells, of airways and lungs, of heart and vessels operate largely independently. Every couple of hours, though, in as little as 30 seconds, the barriers break down. Suddenly, there’s synchrony. All the disjointed activity of deep sleep starts to connect with its surroundings. Each network joins the larger team. This change, marking the transition from deep to light sleep, has only recently been understood in detail. […]
Similar syncing happens all the time in everyday life. Systems of all sorts constantly connect. Bus stops pop up near train stations, allowing commuters to hop from one transit network to another. New friends join your social circle, linking your network of friends to theirs. Telephones, banks, power plants all come online — and connect online.
A rich area of research has long been devoted to understanding how players — whether bodily organs, people, bus stops, companies or countries — connect and interact to create webs called networks. An advance in the late 1990s led to a boom in network science, enabling sophisticated analyses of how networks function and sometimes fail. But more recently investigators have awakened to the idea that it’s not enough to know how isolated networks work; studying how networks interact with one another is just as important. Today, the frontier field is not network science, but the science of networks of networks. […]
Findings so far suggest that networks of networks pose risks of catastrophic danger that can exceed the risks in isolated systems. A seemingly benign disruption can generate rippling negative effects. Those effects can cost millions of dollars, or even billions, when stock markets crash, half of India loses power or an Icelandic volcano spews ash into the sky, shutting down air travel and overwhelming hotels and rental car companies. In other cases, failure within a network of networks can mean the difference between a minor disease outbreak or a pandemic, a foiled terrorist attack or one that kills thousands of people.
I’m on the top of the world lookin’ down on creation
Dawkins’s name for the statistical demonstration that “God almost certainly does not exist” is the “Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.”
Astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle, who was a Darwinist, atheist and anti-theist, but who advocated the panspermia theory (in which biological material is continually being distributed throughout outer space in debris from impacts) reportedly stated that the “probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.”
