So, so lazy…

I am a lazy blogger, I am a lazy blogger…however, two new things coming up.

1. Mitosis – a manufacturing company based in the South Side of Pittsburgh, with its first offering, the Equus Evolution Kit, a multi-modal learning tool the helps high school teachers demonstrate the principles of evolution through 50 million years of changes to the horse foot. The kit is amazing, developed by Jason Bannister of Mechanimal, with assistance from Duquesne University…we’ve been selling them already, and I’ll have some pictures up very soon, as well as some info for interested science and biology teachers…very, very cool…

2. A puppet version of Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl…not for sale, simply to create video content that will teach good citizens everyone how civic politics works…you should see the forehead…

 

Thanks for the patience, love y’all….

P.S. Congrats again, Tim and Andi!!!!!

Coming Soon…

I know it has been more than a while, but I have something sweet coming soon from the SWS lab – soon to be available around the web (or, at least, at Etsy and Ebay, as well as direct from your humble narrator). Part science/part art – all glorious, glorious…Stay tuned, PGH watch out!

Might As Well Blog About Shoes…

…So, I’ve been sleeping on the blog game as of late, working on a book with pops, trying to keep my sanity, and using twitter to feed my egoistic desires. But, I figured I ought to come on back ’round wordpress way and spend some time posting pretty pictures and entertaining y’all with my pithy wit…or, just blogging about sneakers…

…Anyways, I haven’t been feeling Reebok much lately (this could be leftover resentment for not having big enough feet to buy the first pumps in 6th grade, but that’s neither here not there…), however, Reebok teamed up with polymath John Maeda and released these nice looking Ventilator Timetaniums. These kicks were designed using Maeda’s own algorithms and code, so…that makes them a lot cooler than shoes you would make, I guess. Not too many pairs were made (like, 100), but head over to sneakerNstuff and see if you can’t get you a pair. Because, you know for damn sure you didn’t get your paws on those Yeezy’s.

(Thanks, Freshness)

A Moderately Intelligent Post, or: Your Brain Has No Idea What’s Going On

When you tell people you study (or studied) psychology, almost without fail you can expect something along the lines of, “Hey, watch out! Don’t be analyzing me!,” or some derivative thereof. Since most people are okay enough (give or take), and I try to be decent and sensitive even to people with ridiculous beliefs (like, say, in an interventionist god), I don’t say anything like, “What in chance’s blue earth would make you think I spend any of my time thinking about your issues, or dedicating my life to learning about certain individual idiosyncrasies that are essentially meaningless to the vast majority of people who really just need some food and education options…Here, your dad was an asshole and didn’t hug you enough – his dad didn’t hug him either – forgive him, forgive yourself, done.” This is obviously sarcastic and more than a bit acerbic, but you get the point. There are many incredibly valuable therapists and counselors and psychiatrists out there who help people lead fulfilling lives…It’s just that I’ve met very, very, very few.

What interests me about psychology (in its scientific form), is its ability to bridge all possible gaps between people, whether we’re talking about different “races” (a ludicrous concept with no biological basis), different nationalities, different religious or spiritual beliefs, whatever…My first inkling of this in any form of literature was in some of the simplest examples of visual illusions: necker cubes, milgram line-tests, etc. Gradually, it became clear that the easiest way to introduce people to certain concepts in psychology was through illustrations of the common mistakes made by all people (I know, I’m glossing over huge differences, cultural and otherwise, but those just amount to different looking mistakes for the same reasons). Today, the fields of Behavioral Economics, Social Cognition, Social Cognitive Neuroscience, and a few more are basically paradigms composed of examples of systematic human biases, prejudices, and illusions.

It seems to be extremely difficult for most people to grasp and believe evidence that might “lower” them to the level of animals (or, lately, that raises animals to the level of humans). The problem, then, is that we are animals, composed of basically the same parts and nerves and neurotransmitters and, not least, the same brain, and therefore cognitive processes, as apes and monkeys and dogs and cats. That’s fine, most people don’t need to believe any of this. In fact, this is probably a good thing, as some of the truth of the matter is incredibly depressing if you don’t pull the thread the whole way through, which is hard and takes a long time. However, for the sake of argument, and because of a terrific article I bumped into today (what, I worked all kinds of hours the last couple days, have a cold, cooked my bro and his lady buffalo burgers…you couldn’t tell I blog on idle? Shhhiiiiiiiiittt, like Clay Davis).

The above mentioned (and linked, go read it!) article is from Scientific American and is on visual illusions and cognitive neuroscience, which points out the fact that nothing we process (hint, hint) through our sensory apparatus is actually what is really out there, i.e., your brain has no idea what the world is really like. Once again, like our friends above who think we’re created in “god’s” image, the fact that we don’t know what is really going on is fine. After all, we need to survive, not comprehend the universe in its actuality (just ask a string theorist, huzzah!). I’m going to stop rambling, because I’m tired and on cold medicine, and don’t really even remember writing the last couple paragraphs. But I’ll leave you with a couple of those illusions. For the explanations, consult the article, I’m lazy. [To those of you who skipped this instead and just looked at the pretty pictures, good for you. If you read this, I apologize, but you should know by now there is nothing of value coming out of my mouth, er, my fingers.]

This one was created by Edward Adelson. The color of the squares on which A and B are printed are the same shade of gray, perceptions to the contrary.

The second example was discovered by Richard Gregory. The tiles in the picture are all perfectly level and straight, though you can’t make yourself see it that way without extreme difficulty.

Finally, my favorite, created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka. Guess what, nothing is moving. If you stare at one of the black dots in the center of the circles you can stop the illusory movement. Just bad-ass.

Live in a Self-Sufficient Helmet

I would totally live in this! Concept house designed by Victor Vetterlein incorporates wind turbines, paint made of solar cells, and rainwater collection…in theory, due to the whole “concept” thing, of course. Tons more info at Dezeen.

The Future of Everything

I just started a book, The Future of Everything [erething?]: The Science of Prediction, by the mathematician qua polymath David Orrell. Orrell was one of the guys who kind of limited the chaos affect in weather (butterfly farts, Hillary wins the election) to almost nothingness, instead attributing large discrepancies (to say the least) in weather prediction to model error, basically the gap between the pretty math model and the real world phenomenon.

The book, thus far at least, has been really interesting, well-written, and erudite-though the beginnings hover on some historical facts that aren’t completely novel, but nonetheless. Dr. Orrell’s main interests in this book revolve around prediction in wealth, weather, and health, tracing the history of prediction from around 1500 BC up through the methods developed by Newton and Kepler that remain in practice to this day (in complicated, derivative forms, I imagine). While it’s not as exciting as the opening of a new Bape store (heh), a couple chunks have popped out thus far, and I should like to quote them and offer some commentary:

“Systems where predictions are of interest-in biology, economics, or climate change-are either alive, influenced by life, or have a similar level of complexity to living beings (1). They are difficult to predict not because of simple technical reasons, which can be overcome with faster computers or better data, but because they have evolved to be that way (2). We pinpoint the causes of prediction error (3).” (italics mfjoe)

Commentary:

1. This is particularly interesting now, when we finally have the ability to recognize the complexity such systems, as well as have a pretty big new one with the Interweb to play with. As an aside, it is also telling of our lack of predictive ability that we can rarely predict how complex systems are going to end up being, per se, let alone how they will be modeled in toto and in situ.

2. I haven’t read far into the book. But the way I look at it is that we evolved to predict certain things very well, and most other things horribly at best. It’s not the system under the scope then, but the one peering through it that cause the error. E.g., I still argue with intelligent (seemingly) people about the ability to beat the house at a casino. As a great thinker, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, pointed out, a casino is the least random, chance destination on the planet. Everything is completely measured and the house always wins (even if your uncle charlie won $10K that one time). However, the games played mimic those we evolved with, and we expect them to be path-dependent (I think I got that right). Hence: ass handed to you. You aren’t more likely to win after losing in a casino a string of times. I am more likely to fall asleep as the hours I haven’t slept continue passing…that’s the gist.

3. Comes from the Popper. Since we have no real ability above chance to know or predict things, why not look for systematic causes for error, so we can start to turn those unknown unknowns into know unknowns (Thanks Rummy, best thing that came out your mouth in your life).

“One type of prediction relates to overall function and can be used to make general warnings. The other type involves specific forecasts about the future. Mathematical models are better at the first than they are the second. (1)”

1. Example of first type that I’m fairly sure is largely accurate: Any given Human, a biological system of great complexity, will expire, sometime (for the various reasons consult Aubrey de Grey, also a great offerer of the second type of prediction, of which most will turn out to be very, very far from reality-one could call these Methuselah Mouse Model Errors).

(Cop it from Amazon)

Yard Work

So, though it is approx several inches square, I do have a yard…this requires mowing. Since I don’t feel like cutting individual blades with my scissors, it may be mower time soon…

Check out this Neuton Battery Powered Mower…No emissions, 45-60 minutes of mowing…so you can save the planet while cutting small parts of it to bits. It’s pretty too:

(Check it at Acquire, Buy it at Design Within Reach)

And now for something completely different…

So, one time in History of Psychology, taught by the brilliant Lynn Winters, I got in this argument with this girl over a passage from Pynchon. Something about equating humans with molecules that don’t really have any control over the oppressive structural forces, A and B can’t do anything they just are, Knowledge and Power, yada yada…and I’m such a nerd, that what bothered me was not her quoting of the most obvious passage in Gravity’s, but that in reality, Pynchon is wrong, and it is far more absurd that that. What bothered me was the relapse into the Manichaeistic dualism that seems to continue to dominate most theory in philosophy, literature, etc., etc. It’s far more connected, empathic, and nuanced than that; definitely a gift and a curse, but what the fuck did you expect? I was reading one of my favorite blogs, Overcoming Bias, and came across a somewhat dense introduction into the shift from thinking in terms of classical to quantum physics (i.e., the physics that is much closer to the truth of the matter.) I’m just pasting a chunk of the original post by Eliezer Yudkowsky because I definitely couldn’t do it nicer. The Good Sir Yudkowsky is a member of some AI groups that I don’t know much about, and should say even less. But, I’m not a big “authority of information sources” guy (peace, popper)…and, yes, this is how I spend some Friday nights…catch up:

The difficult jump from classical to quantum is not thinking of an electron as an excitation of a field.  Then you could just think of a universe made up of “Excitation A in electron field over here” + “Excitation B in electron field over there” + etc.  You could factorize the universe into individual excitations of a field.  Your parietal cortex would have no trouble with that one – it doesn’t care whether you call the little billiard balls “excitations of an electron field” so long as they still behave like little billiard balls.

The difficult jump is thinking of a configuration space that is the product of many positions in many fields, without individual identities for the positions.  A configuration space whose points are “a position here in this field, a position there in this field, a position here in that field, and a position there in that field”.  Not, “A positioned here in this field, B positioned there in this field, C positioned here in that field” etc.

You have to reduce the appearance of individual particles to a regularity in something that is different from the appearance of particles, something that is not itself a little billiard ball.

Oh, sure, thinking of photons as individual objects will seem to work out, as long as the amplitude distribution happens t factorize.  But what happens when you’ve got your “individual” photon A and your “individual” photon B, and you’re in a situation where, a la Feynman paths, it’s possible for photon A to end up in position 1 and photon B to end up in position 2, or for A to end up in 2 and B to end up in 1?  Then the illusion of classicality breaks down, because the amplitude flows overlap:

In that triangular region where the distribution overlaps itself, no fact exists as to which particle is which, even in principle – and in the real world, we often get a lot more overlap than that.

I mean, imagine that I take a balloon full of photons, and shake it up.

Amplitude’s gonna go all over the place.  If you label all the original apparent-photons, there’s gonna be Feynman paths for photons A, B, C ending up at positions 1, 2, 3 via a zillion different paths and permutations.

The amplitude-factor that corresponds to the “balloon full of photons” subspace, which contains bulges of amplitude-subfactor at various different locations in the photon field, will undergo a continuously branching evolution that involves each of the original bulges ending up in many different places by all sorts of paths, and the final configuration will have amplitude contributed from many different permutations.

It’s not that you don’t know which photon went where.  It’s that no fact of the matter exists. The illusion of individuality, the classical hallucination, has simply broken down.

And the same would hold true of a balloon full of quarks or a balloon full of electrons.  Or even a balloon full of helium. Helium atoms can end up in the same places, via different permutations, and have their amplitudes add just like photons.

Don’t be tempted to look at the balloon, and think, “Well, helium atom A could have gone to 1, or it could have gone to 2; and helium atom B could have gone to 1 or 2; quantum physics says the atoms both sort of split, and each went both ways; and now the final helium atoms at 1 and 2 are a mixture of the identities of A and B.”  Don’t torture your poor parietal cortex so.  It wasn’t built for such usage.

Just stop thinking in terms of little billiard balls, with or without confused identities.  Start thinking in terms of amplitude flows in configuration space.  That’s all there ever is.

And then it will seem completely intuitive that a simple experiment can tell you whether two blobs of amplitude-factor are over the same quantum field.

Just perform any experiment where the two blobs end up in the same positions, via different permutations, and see if the amplitudes add.

(Overcoming Bias)

Darwin has a Blog

Alright, well maybe old Chuck Darwin isn’t really blogging, but the Cambridge University Library is making available previously cloistered material from the father of evolutionary theory. Darwin’s notes for On The Origin of Species, as well as 20K more pieces of archive material are available at Darwin-Online.

As far as science goes, The Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection is as close as I’ve seen to Law (in scientific nomenclature). No other theory has produced such robust fields of knowledge, while easily accommodating seemingly unexplainable phenomena. I’m not here to argue science’s validity and value here, and won’t, only to say that if it wasn’t for the development of modern scientific methodology we would still be drinking the cholera water, living a shitty life in a one-room hovel, eating out of a trough with 10-35 of your cousins and layabouts, killing and getting killed fairly randomly, etc. etc. etc. They definitely didn’t have live-strong bracelets and designer jeans, coffee and chocolate, speed-dating and twitter.

The danger with with science is, of course, when it is misunderstood as an ideology with content. Science doesn’t have content, or a “body”, of presumptions and non-critical beliefs. It’s a hollow methodology used to find out what we don’t know, in the hopes that we might learn something sometime. And a hollow methodology is exactly what is required when dealing with homo sapiens, primates with extended pre-frontal cortexes, who basically make all decisions and movements based on unconscious machinations (not like Freud, like Bargh), socioeco-structural shaping, and marketing pressures (peer or otherwise).

What does all that mean for us moving forward? Fucked if I know. But, speaking personally, it lets me move through the world and really grasp just how beautifully imperfect everyone is, how impressive it is we can live alongside large groups of strange animals without killing and harming them that often, and every once in a while connect with someone else in a way other primates and animals can’t do. Evolution and science taught me that we’re all so close genetically, that biologically-speaking, the ability to empathize with almost anyone is almost a certainty if you can empathize with yourself. Evolution took away my fear of mortality, as well, because I’m sure I’m an animal, part of this whole (little) cycle we have going on on Earth, and it doesn’t require any level of faith or miracles. I fit here, if only for a brief spell. If religion gets you through the night, connects you with family and friends, than it has definitely achieved its goal, and I’m always glad to see someone comfortable in their own beliefs, no matter how far they are from mine.

For a great contemporary look at Evolutionary Theory, check Dan Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Dennett rules, I’ve read almost everything he’s written, and DDI made clear for me some issues of probability, determinism, and just how the hell all this might have emerged.