Archive for November, 2009

…is on hold while I move. But we’ll be back with all the craziness you know and love within the next few weeks.

Sow the seeds of chaos, that probabilities may flow,

Lord Khaos

…even if you don’t read the article in the link, click it to watch the vid. Amazing stuff.

Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you’ll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you’ll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.

The rest is here.

…proof that it’s bullshit.

It of course stands to reason that some apocalypse or another will eventually hit our planet – scientists are predicting a rise in solar flares that could disrupt or even destroy our electrical grid, the magnetic poles are due to shift around, and even the long dormant volcano in yellowstone is due to erupt any day now. But that’s science, taken with a grain of salt, not mystical prophecy from a misunderstood culture.

…needs to die.

Honestly. Pop music is bad enough, but with this technology you can be a tone-deaf bimbo *cough* Britney Spears *cough* any damn pop star *cough cough* and you can be ‘engineered’ to be perfect, taking away from the talent that a real musician should have. This vid here talks about the auto-tune in terms of an internet meme more than calling it music industry bullshit, but it’s interesting and it has Weird Al in it, so, of course, it rocks.

…is pretty bullshit.

Sure, if you create something you should have some measure of control of how it’s distributed. But honestly, the steps that these companies take nowadays are ridiculous. We see in this article that the fears are old, stemming mostly from selfishness and greed.

In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton’s Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to “musical taste” itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.

“From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,” he wrote. “And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.”

The rest is here.

…makes you smarter.

Well, it correlates to better decision-making. Why is this not taught in our schools?

In the present study we provide the first empirical evidence that viscero-sensory feedback from an internal organ is associated with decision-making processes. Participants with accurate vs. poor perception of their heart activity were compared with regard to their performance in the Iowa Gambling Task. During this task, participants have to choose between four card decks. Decks A and B yield high gains and high losses, and if played continuously, result in net loss. In contrast, decks C and D yield small gains and also small losses, but result in net profit if they are selected continuously. Accordingly, participants have to learn to avoid the net loss options in favor of the net gain options. In our study, participants with good cardiac perception chose significantly more of the net gain and fewer of the net loss options. Our findings document the substantial role of visceral feedback in decision-making processes in complex situations.

Read the whole thing here.

…is not a release, but a burst of activity.

Electrical readings from seven patients who died in hospital suggest that the brain undergoes a surge of activity at the moment of death, according to a study just published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine.

Palliative care is a medical approach that aims to make dying patients as comfortable as possible. As part of this, doctors from George Washington University Medical Centre’s intensive care unit were using standard alertness monitors for seven patients that include EEG measurements of the frontal lobes.

The monitors are commercial devices designed to help anaesthetists monitor how ‘awake’ patients are, and they combine the electrical readings from the brain into a single signal that reflects alertness.

For each of the seven patients, the researchers noticed that at the point where blood pressure dropped to zero there was a surge in brain activity. The graph on the right is from one of the patients and shows a typical activity burst.

The rest is here.

…being a conformist sheep will destroy the world!

Quick! Call the anarchists!

The capacity to learn from others is one of the traits that have made humans such a global success story. Relying on it too much, however, could have contributed to the demise of past populations, such as the Maya of southern Mexico in the eighth and ninth centuries and Norse settlers in Greenland 1,000 years ago.

Over-hunting, deforestation and over-population are well-worn routes to societal collapse. Now, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and Pete Richerson of the University of California, Davis, have modelled how different learning strategies fare in different environments. They found that conformist social learning — imitating and emulating what the majority are doing — may also cause the demise of societies. When environments remain stable for long periods, behaviour can become disconnected from environmental demands, so that when change does come, the effects are catastrophic¹.

The rest is here.

…is good for the mind.

In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

The rest is here.

…in yet another case of “research can prove any-damn-thing”…

In “Time to Eat the Dog? The Real Guide to Sustainable Living,” authors Robert and Brenda Vale argue that resources required to feed a dog — including the amount of land needed to feed the animals that go into its food — give it about twice the eco-footprint of, say, building and fueling a Toyota Land Cruiser. Noting that a cat’s pawprint was roughly equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf’s, “New Scientist” (www.newscientist.com) asked an environmentalist at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, U.K., to independently calculate animals’ environmental impact, and reported that “his figures tallied almost exactly.” The study apparently didn’t take into account the emissions of either the SUV or the dogs.

“If you look at a large-size dog, they can live 10-14 years, and it certainly wouldn’t surprise me,” Don Jordan, director of the Seattle Animal Shelter and President of the Washington State Federation of Animal Care and Control Agencies, said of the study. “There’s a lot that goes into manufacturing and producing food to care for dogs during the course of a life.”

…honestly the line between ‘great’ invention and ‘dumb’ invention (anything hawked by Billy Mayes springs to mind) is paper thin. Still…

READ IT HERE.

…for electronics!

Pay particular attention to the first paragraph – electronics are becoming more like brains.

In the 18 months since the “missing link of electronics” was discovered in Hewlett-Packard’s laboratories in Silicon Valley, California, memristors have spawned a hot new area of physics and raised hope of electronics becoming more like brains.

Now the same team have upgraded a standard silicon chip with a layer of memristors to show that the novel component can play nicely with existing computing hardware.

That suggests it may not be long before they reach the market. And that in turn is good news for manufacturers, who need to find a new way to keep computer power growing: the methods that have shrunk computers in recent years look to have reached their limits.

The rest is here.

…to make science cool again?

Ghostbusters 3 has been lusted after since the second one nearly two decades ago. Lately there seems to be the will to get it done, but the project continues sputtering around in development hell with Dan Akyroyd declaring that he’s already tuning up Ecto 1 and on the other side crotchety Bill Murray insistant that it’ll never get done. But Bill, we need it to get done. The world needs Ghostbusters 3 and I’m here to tell you why.

Science is in trouble.

On film our heroes are underage douche bags who befriend robots or children with mystical powers or worse, vapid bimbos who lust after fangless vampires. Peter Parker the awkward but brilliant student from the comics has been replaced by Peter Parker that emo kid who whines about relationships. Batman is still a detective, but he steals all his best gadgets from the hapless, underpaid inventors in his mega-corporation’s cellar. Indiana Jones, former man of science, hides inside a fridge to escape a nuclear explosion. Wolverine is a product of science, but he’d like the scientists who did it dead and spends most of the time trying to stab anyone who knows how to use a particle accelerator. Dr. Robert Langdon wastes his degrees solving cases to help shore up fervent religious belief in the corrupt Catholic Church. Star Wars has turned into a religion in which people worship microscopic aliens. Watching Jesus being beat to death by Mel Gibson’s camera was a moviegoing event of unparalleled scale and the less said about The Chronicles of Narnia’s Christ obsession the better. In WALL-E it was science that made everyone fat and in The Matrix we’re all just batteries plugged into science’s mechanical menace. Paranormal Activity is the number one movie at the box office this weekend because it makes a world full of mysticism and evil spirits seem like reality, a reality beyond our control.

The rest is here.