random poem : Ambulences, Philip Larkin

Ambulances


Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable insided a room
The trafic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

exposing rhetoric...when the going gets tough

Since they definitely work to some extent, it's probably a good thing to be aware of, and alert for, rhetorical devices.

Such perfect sounding phrases are very persuasive...but perhaps a useful counter action, to lay their actual logic bare, would be to swap the terms used, and to see if it is the content or the form which is swayin gus.

So, for example with the well known 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going' (using antimetabole - the repetition of words in successive clauses, but in transposed grammatical order), one could change it to produce a similar sound bite, but with the opposite moral  "when going on is stupid, the stupid go on".

It is perhaps understandable why Aristotle once suggested story tellers should be expelled from Athens, since manipulation via the telling, is the most insidious danger of all.

Amis on mortality

• "Your wonder of life increases towards the end because it is tinged with a leave-taking feeling that it's not going to be there for very much longer."
• [past becomes like an Empire....when there's more happened then to come] (paraphrase)
• Bullet train of midlife : "days drag by, and years fall away like leaves"

Martin Amis 

Seneca on this vale of tears

"What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears."

Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone unveiled

Samsung has unveiled its latest flagship smartphone - the Galaxy S3.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-17935684

Another shiny-shiny new piece of gadgetry on the market, with the Galaxy S3 marking the next round of smartphone generations - quad-cores, super displays, mega megapixels etc.

Despite my fawning interest in the latest gadgets, I admit I do think that when it comes to smartphones I'm nearing 'feature-saturation'; while for years always had a personal wishlist of things I'd like to see on my phone, being honest currently in my tablet and phone I think I have pretty much all the things I'd really use (tho not of course all the things that would be nice to have). This is not to say all the generations have just been pointless gimickry, things like wifi tethering, good multitasking, media streaming and copious memory were all in my view valueable new elements, but overall I've suspected that the latest range of was due to include mere improvements on such existing funcitons, rather than additions of new really useful ones.  In particular I thought quad-cores weren't something I really needed on a phone. However, having looked at the latest S3 features, I think I might actually be proved wrong:

The most notable (to me) features :

• 4.8 screen with 309ppi Super AMOLED display. Probably about as large and detailed as need get in my view (maybe too large, will have to hold to decide)
• 1.4 GHz quad-core with 1GB of RAM
• smart power system whereby front camera tracks eyes and dims screen if detects you're not looking at it. Could be a nice feature if works seamlessly.
• video-in-corner to allow do other tasks in parallel. While might seem pretty useless, personally have often been watching a documentary or something and want to scribble a note, thought etc. in parallel.
• streaming to TV, streaming from PC
• 50 GB of dropbox space
• mirror function : send screen output to another device. Very cool for gaming (and reminds me of the main reason I broke with Apple: because on my IPOD touch the TV out was disabled by fiat - but supported by hardware as evidenced by jailbreaked versions -  from outputting games to TV)
• 8MP camera with flash. Probably nearing as good as one can get with the squashed optics on a phone (at least without some new step change in technology)
• voice control seems to be the big new thing, and Samsung has it's own version S voice (to rival Apple's Siri) but I'm still not convinced this will really work out - tho admittedly have yet to try the latest systems
• some deal with renting movies via the phone (good when coupled with stream to tv option)
  

Apart from the ability to write a message without interrupting a video, the areas where I think such (and presumably other 2012) phones do stand out is in movies and gaming. As someone who often rents movies on itunes and connects my ipod to TV to play it back, the possibility to rent on the phone, and stream to the TV is very appealing. Furthermore as an occasional gamer, but not committed enough to buy the latest consoles, the play on screen with phone as controller, backed by high processing power, is indeed something that I woudl actually consider a bonus, and not just a gimmick.
And of course while happy enough with my current phone camera, 12MP plus flash,plus processing features while not a quantum step (and already probably in plenty of recent phones) does bring this area to perhaps it's final level.

So all in all surprisingly impressed by the latest Galaxy, and just hope that large screen fits in my Christmas stocking (and budget) :-)

news nibbling - think before you read

Throughout history information has been the driver of progress-  the more we knew, the more we could do. While in previous ages it was only a lucky elite who had the time and resources to be involved in this process , the impetus was always a common human drive, which is why the internet, perhaps the ultimate information gathering and disseminating technology, has been seized upon and spread into every area of modern life. We are hard wired by evolution, and encouraged by culture, to discover and learn, and the one hunger which is considered always 'good', is the hunger for knowledge.

But is it possible that we could have too much of a good thing? Reading an piece on concentration recently I identified all too well with the statistics on how much time is diverted into online distraction. While of course we all click occasionally on light and meaningless topics, funny youtube links etc. the real point is that most of this time is not necessarily spent on such frivolous 'junk' but on seemingly worthwhile matter, like news, comment or reports. But the article's description of 'the long tail of information porn' made me realise that ultimately there might be not too much difference between this supposedly worthy weighty stuff, and the lighter dross, since both tap into innate urges for the novel, the desire for new facts to tickle our fancy, even if an intellectual one. These cravings are now amply catered to via the internet, and it is perhaps worth considering if there are parallels between the way we satisfy, and satiate, ourselves informationally, and how modern advances allowed us to go from simply providing for, to pandering to, other urges. Our dispositions were shaped by our evolutionary history, and the problem arises when a drive matched to a scarce natural resource, is confronted with artificial plenty. The classic example of this is our taste for sugary and fat things, and how this healthy drive is driven unhealthily  haywire by the hyper-sources of these substances modern society has created: fast food to sweets. Even though we know too much is bad for us, we are driven to start, for evolutionary emotional reasons, and find it hard to stop for rational ones.

It is possible that a similar (if much weaker) story is now starting to play out with information. Last year I encountered for the first time the phrase 'psychological obesity' and it struck me as encapsulating the dangers perfectly. Could it be that we are getting so used to gorging ourselves on information, and over relying on the mechanisms which deliver it, that we are at risk of missing out on the real benefits that underlie it, and which made it an evolutionary goal? It seems ludicrous to suggest that more information is anything but a good thing, but maybe in harsher times and societies the same could be thought about food, and what would seem to be the insane possibility of eating too much. The point is what we learn is only in important in so far as it contributes to what we actually know, and what we can do with it. Just as food is only a resource to enable the production of energy, to be able to DO things, information and even knowledge itself is only a means to an end. Since it worked for most of our evolutionary history nature has used the shortcut of embedding in us the emotional drive for the means, but now that the normally required levels can be surpassed, we must use our rational self-control to focus on the meaning instead.  We need to realise that we cannot drift through the new oceans of information scooping up data like whales with plankton, since as in all areas, we can over consume and like the obese body disabled by too much resources, we won't be able to use even some of them properly.

There is however probably a psychological side to this problem, since apart from the drive for gain, their is our powerful aversion to loss. Faced with a deluge of data we need to choose what is most important and relevant to us, but to choose somethings is to discard others, and this we hate doing. In the material domain we (mostly) have grown to appreciate we can't actually have it all, at the same time, but we are less used to such limitations in our mental worlds. Furthermore this involves one of the more personal and poignant kinds of loss, since to choose to know is to choose what to be, and we are particularly reluctant to close off possible futures, possible selves. Choice is hard, which is why we find it easier to surf endlessly on the tsunami of information, rather than swim in any particular direction. We feel like we're doing valid travelling, but really we're going nowhere.

To really move forward we not only need to obtain information, we need to process it, and apart from the requirement of manageable amounts, we also need to develop the mental mechanisms and habits to do so properly. Again the internet and other technology are a double-edged sword, since while they provide us with valid and valuable tools and shortcuts, they do not (yet, and for the foreseeable future) provide the complete answer. To use data we need to know more than just how to access it, which webpage or search tool will find it for us, but how to interpret it, and how it relates. While I may not need to know the exact dates of events leading up to say the first world war, knowing where to find them will never allow me apply this information in another area. Only if I have analyzed the history, thought about the chronology, recognize the patterns, will I actually UNDERSTAND what is otherwise simply a sequence of events, and be able, for example, to spot parallels and resonances in current situations. Wikipedia means I do not need to clutter my mind with the minutiae, but I can only use it do to help me once I have already understood the meaning.

Unfortunately this takes time, and effort. We must choose what we want to know, and then educate ourselves, and there is no taskbar which can speed this process up for us, since we need to allow our minds to mull and manipulate the data, and bring its unparalleled pattern matching powers to bear. But in this too the mood of the internet is against us, because the constant drive for the new, means constant changeover, and little time for such consideration. I was struck once by a comment a travel blogger made to me about how even when writing about places and societies that were hundreds or even thousands of years old, in the blogosphere there was a mentality that if it was not immediate, not in real time, it somehow was less relevant. When writing about a trip along the ancient route of the silk road, he felt like there was a demand for him to post while on the move,, from phone or netcafe, even though the thing being written about had not changed for centuries. The web audience feels that anything written in the past or retrospect, is somehow already dated, and this is not just removed from what is needed for proper knowledge, but anathema to it.  I admit I succumb to this prejudice myself often enough, for example if choosing a new psychology book to read anything more than 10 years old feels somehow outdated and less worthwhile than a newer text. While of course theories develop, a classic remains a classic just because it achieves an insight that lasts, and it could be argued that a decade old book that is still around, has proved its worth by its endurance against something new which might be a flash in the pan. Ironically the effect of the modern zeitgeist is to trap us in the now, while the point of deep knowledge is to allow us to escape to the past and future as well.

So, the upshot of this is I feel that it wouldn't be a bad thing to impose on myself a bit of a 'digital diet'. Just as one can count calories to manage one's weight, I think one needs to become an information connoisseur. To know anything I need to accept I cannot know everything.

Terror Management Theory and God shaped holes

How awareness of our mortality may be a major driver of civilization
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climbing-mount-immortality&print=true
I particularly like the concept of "Terror Management Theory - awareness of one's mortality focuses the mind to create and produce to avoid the terror that comes from confronting the mortality paradox that would otherwise, in the words of the theory's proponents psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, reduce people to 'twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to the demands of their immediate surroundings.'"

This reminds me of the quote from Salmon Rushdie  about us all having a God shaped hole inside us which we are constantly trying to fill, and that art, creation, suggests itself to us for this purpose : "I, too, possess the same God-shaped hole. Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature"
 
When googling this, I found a follow up quote from Rushdie which is also worth repeating : "I used to say: "there is a God-shaped hole in me." For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important."

Samsung slogan : "Happy forever"

Like that one (seen on billboard in documentary in Seoul). Something forced smile asian about it, but still with an admirable optimism it would be wrong to scorn. Reminds me a bit of the "danger cliff" sign I  saw in china, with its cheery "nice to live!" accompanying exhortation. Happy forever, in fairy tale gadget land...

billboard philosopy : you're not stuck in traffic, you ARE traffic

nice little quote which captures how easy it is to ignore our own role in problems, and blame other people.

Aristotle, actions speak louder than reasons

From Story, by Robin McKie :
"As Aristotle observed, why a man does a thing is of little interest once we see the thing he does. A character is the choices he makes to take the actions he takes. Once the deed is done his reasons why begin to dissolve into irrelevancy."

Life maybe, but probably not as we know it

The perennial issue of the possibility of life on other planets was in the news again with the report that estimated there might be tens of billions of planets in the Milky Way with the right (i.e. earthlike) temperature to support life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/mar/28/billions-habitable-exoplanets-milky-way

While it's always thrilling to think about alien life, and day dream about interplanetary communication, unfortunately any hope of such 'contact' effectively ruled out not by fancy and fascinating questions of whether life could evolve elsewhere, and how it might do so, but by the much more mundane and boring issue of scale.

As the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy said, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space". The problem to me is not that there might not be aliens, but if there are they are probably to far away to ever meaningfully interact with them. The Milky Way is up to 200,000 light years across, which means even if there is a distribution of life throughout the galaxy, the chances are the worlds would be several thousand light years away. This would mean even if we did get a signal from somewhere else, it would take many thousands of years for any signal of ours to get there, and the same time again to get a response. This would be a true intergenerational conversation, the only real-world example of which that I can think of is Julius Caeser finding a letter from an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh, and his reply being delivered to Hosni Mubarak.  And of course even if we did hear, and could return a "message", the odds are the original civilization wouldn't be around long enough to hear it. It's impossible to extrapolate from our own history general rules for how long a species, let alone a civilization, might exist, but it is reasonable to assume, from previous extinctions due to catastrophic events, and even our own unsustainable consumption of natural resources, that there is a limited 'window' during which any species capable of broadcasting an inter-stellar communication would actually exist, and that window would need to be exactly offset to our own window by the amount of time it takes for any signals to get here.
This is illustrated by perhaps the most insightful and deep element in the Star Wars movies, setting the events 'a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away'. Apart from being the ultimate disclaimer, it illustrates how much more advanced civilizations than our own, might be a possibility, but only in the distant past.

Overall i think there are 4 main points to consider when talking about 'aliens'.

1) What are the chances there is life somewhere else
Given the size of the universe, and the fact the life is at basis repeating regularities arising from the existing regularities of the universe, then I would think that it is a near certainty that life exists in many places, even if we might not at first recognize it as such
2) What are the chances of lifeforms we would recognize - i.e. animals
Again given that evolution is a regular process, then while it might proceed in different directions, at different rates, in other environments, it is reasonable to assume that if the starting regularities are similar, than some basic features, tendency to size, movement etc. would be common. So again it is highly likely that at somestage, somewhere, there are alien 'animals'
3) What are the chances of conscious life
This is a harder problem, since we don't know how or why we have consciousness, so can't determine how evolutionarily inevitable or likely it is. Personally I would be of the view that it is likely there is , at least one if of many, evolutionary chain of progression of the form reaction-movement-'intelligent' reaction-consciousness since only as part of such a chain does consciousness make sense, since I consider it too ingrained in us to be merely epiphenomenal. So the chances of this are also high, though of course the incidence might be significantly less than (2) and (1).
4) Would we ever interact with alien intelligent life
Unless there are ways to communicate and travel which circumvent the limitation the speed of light seems to place on distances between stars, then I think this last point is vastly less likely than any other, in fact as close to zero as is imaginable.
But of course the travel limitation only seems unlikely based on our current understanding of physics, and it would be arrogant to think this is anything but wildly imcomplete. Even still, the window of opportunity restriction would still apply, so overall I think the odds are between incredibly unimaginably unlikely, and not very likely at all.

At the end of the day, apart from the sensationalism, would proof of any of these points really matter?  (1) would be groundbreaking, but would it be any different from finding bacteria in volcanoes? (2) would be impressive, but any different from (1)? (3) Would be illuminating, since would show consciousness must have some inevitability to it, and be an insight into understanding how it comes about, but apart from confirming what we already suspect, unless we could examine a similar but different consciousness, just knowing about  it wouldn't help so much. Of course (4) , if at the impossible level of scientific fiction, would make a difference, since it would provide just the kind of similar but different examples of intelligent life that could help us understand better our own instance of it. But unfortunately this last point, the only one that really would make a difference, is impossibly unlikely.
ET phone home? Maybe, but if he could make the call, there'd probably be no one left around to answer it.

Napoleon Quote : understand the world of man's youth, understand the man

Napoleon said that, to understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty

nod to the past, look to the future...

Like this article on Hogmany, always find it a pity they don't sing Auld Lang Syne here in Austria, more moving and fitting than the traditional Blue Danube. Whereas that is a nice, dainy celebratory marking of the new year, there's something about the scottish tradition that captures the birth and death of the years together; replacing a slightly mounrful but steadfast lament with a stately waltz is wine where there should be whisky.

So, raise a cup of kindness yet, for the sake of those auld lang syne, and then raise another to the fine art of getting on with tomorrow!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/29/hogmanay-new-year

to quote:
"I have decided that this is a metaphor for Christmas and the oppressively affectionate layers of traditions and obligations that restrict your movements during the festive season. I love Christmas, but I generally collapse, like a slightly worn bouncy festive castle, when it is over. The past stacks up on top of you, distant years materialise with clarity, chains clanking like Marley's, as each ornament is unwrapped, as each card is opened. My life is made up of nothing but Christmases past, and achievements and maturity disappear under tinselly demands to "do it the way we always do it".

"Thank goodness for Hogmanay. Where Christmas is about family, New Year is about friends; where Christmas locks you into the past, New Year frees you to look forward. It is not a cosy holiday,"

"New Year is a time to get rid of layers. Shrug off the last 12 months, raise a glass to loves lost, then get yourself a refill, count the chimes, and raise another to the fine art of getting on with tomorrow."

In public, you lose your right to be an idiot

I never could stand Jeremy Clarkson, with his puerile humour and bravado and the smug conservative views that only a man with more cars than cares could have. So I would normally never waste my time or digital ink on him, but the recent controversy over his comments is with commenting on.
Two of his comments have caused "controversy" this week, one that striking public sector workers should be lined up and shot (in front of their families for good measure) and another that people who throw themselves under trains are selfish because of the inconvenience this causes others.
Is it right that he be condemned for these statements, or is it an example of what is claimed to be faux-indignation coupled with infamous "political correctness gone bad"?
There are two different issues here I think. With the first one, to be fair to the unfair, it's the sort of hyperbolic comment plenty of people might make in casual conversation, and while imbecilic in its ignorance of how such language, like racist jokes, has real negative effects, we can't really condemn him for being an idiot,in private that is. But, and this is a very big but, it wasn't in private, nor in a private role coincidentally on tv, but on a public tv channel, by someone paid for and made famous by that same channel, which is funded by the public, which makes it about as un-private as one can get. And saying such things, which will cause offence directly (and not indirectly as in "sachsgate" where people were more offended on behalf of Sachs than he himself was), and to people who pay his wage through their licence fees, is despicable.
While can't complain about him being an idiot in private, acting one in public is unacceptable.
However far more offensive, and corrosive, was his comment on suicides. The best way to characterise It is I think to ask how offensive it would be if he had said disabled people are selfish, with their slow wheelchairs, or cancer sufferers are selfish, with their slower deaths. The point is anyone driven to suicide is also sick, and it is just as disgusting to blame them for their condition as to blame someone with cancer. Of  course this is a modern understanding and unfortunately having advanced cars doesn't prevent someone having primitive attitudes.  Again, Clarkson has every right to act the idiot in private, but this can't be tolerated on the national stage, and he should lose the job paid for by the national purse.
Now I'll try and forget him again!

What the phone didn't do

It seems the Blackberry outage is held to be responsible for a recent 40% drop in traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi, which would suggest four out of ten accidents there are being caused by people reading email at the wheel!


While a nice piece of trivia, it's also an interesting example of how events in one area (email outage) can result in significant changes in crowd behaviour in another, and, assuming some of these accidents might have been fatal, quite literally how these influences can be a matter of life and death.

What comes to my mind is the potential this shows for manipulating individual behaviour, for large scale effects, and the ethical questions that then arise.

Consider for example if a national government enforced a mobile phone data outage on a particularly dangerous stretch of road, or at particularly dangerous times. If this could be shown (as in Abu Dhabi) to save lives, would it be justifiable? Our instinctive personal reaction would probably be indignation at such restrictions, but could anyone honestly claim their email access tops the benefit of one less widow, or one less orphaned child? We already (largely) accept speed limits as a necessary curb on our personal freedom, so what would be the real difference? And of course, we're not legally allowed use a mobile phone when driving anyway, so technically only passengers could complain (any gut rejection we have I think is just another example of how immune we are to the tangible benefits to a society that can come from reducing what are to the individual, intangible risks; small changes in a massive driving population can save some lives, but we very rarely view it that way; but this is a topic for another dicussion!).

And of course, then there's Google. Given the location information it already has available, it surely is possible for Google to also detect if someone is in a speeding car, or, from knowledge of other users in the area, if they are in a group of speeding cars. Indeed, if they are using google maps navigation, then Google probably even knows which cars are going the same place. In principle, the company could delay (at least Gmail) emails being delivered, if even for a few minutes, if it detected the person was in an at risk situation. Not that there is much likelihood of them ever wanting (and hence) trying to do this, since while there might be long term commercial benefit in keeping customers alive, unfortunately no one thanks you for saving their life if they don't know it. But maybe they could use this traffic analysis in other areas - though we might get suspicious if after an accident (and our car is detected to stop suddenly in the middle of an intersection) we get a pop-up ad for the nearest breakdown service/taxi company. But the potential is there, and the likes of Google have a habit of following potential.

The point is, mobile phones represent a somewhat unique phenomenon : a system which majorly influences individual behaviour, but yet can be centrally controlled. There has been a lot of talk about 'nudge' policies, whereby society is gently prodded in a favourable direction; what the Abu Dhabi traffic incident shows is how easy this sometimes can be done directly, and to everybody. Though in this case it's more a question of what the phone didn't do.

Aristotle, marriage, and the balanced life

Have always found it hard to nail the philosophers down on marriage (not a lot to say, or wise enough to keep their mouths shut!) but a friend getting married reminded me of the topic, and I really must look into it again. Especially I must revisit Aristotle, since , whether by cultural default or reasoned choice,  I have a lot of time for him, and especially like (what I understand to be) his conception of the balanced life, involving family and children.

After Plato's excessive abstraction and airiness, Aristotle I think provided a wonderfully pragmatic foundation for Western civilization, as beautifully depicted in Raphael's "School Of Athens" which shows Plato gesticulating to the sky, while Aristotle points firmly back down to earth. While we must examine and question life, there is no point in wandering about with our head in the clouds. Life is about real things, real commitments and enterprises, not abstract wondering, and marriage, family, settling down, is somehow part of that reality for the social animal that is man.

 
                                        

What I also intuit from him (but need to confirm this) is the idea that via these things there is one of the roads to happiness, whereby one gains happiness not by striving for it itself, but by seeking it for others. As he says in the Nichnomachean Ethics, the essence of love "seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved".  Given our willful and whimsical nature, how we habituate and how desire begets satisfaction, begets desire, then there is something in this. This I think is complemented by the Aristotelian idea of such things a happiness etc. as actitivites rather than states : to be happy is to act in such a way, not to achieve a state, and to experience love, is to love, not to be loved.  And that is what a family offers - the opportunity to love by choice, not through duty or default, others, one's wife/husband, and children; to work for their benefit at the (at least partial) cost of one's own. And of course, it's nice the way evolution provides the innate drive to gain satisfaction from that as well, but one that doesn't habituate.

"In being loved, on the other hand, people delight for its own sake; whence it would seem to be better than being honoured, and friendship to be desirable in itself. But it seems to lie in loving rather than in being loved, as is indicated by the delight mothers take in loving; for some mothers hand over their children to be brought up, and so long as they know their fate they love them and do not seek to be loved in return (if they cannot have both), but seem to be satisfied if they see them prospering; and they themselves love their children even if these owing to their ignorance give them nothing of a mother's due. Now since friendship depends more on loving, and it is those who love their friends that are praised, loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends, so that it is only those in whom this is found in due measure that are lasting friends, and only their friendship that endures."
Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics, Book VIII

Quote of the day : Vanishing lives...

“Most lives vanish. A person dies, and little by little all traces of that life disappear. An inventor survives in his inventions, an architect survives in his buildings, but most people leave behind no monuments or lasting achievements: a shelf of photograph albums, a fifth-grade report card, a bowling trophy, an ashtray filched from a Florida hotel room on the final morning of some dimly remembered vacation. A few objects, a few documents, and a smattering of impressions made on other people. Those people invariably tell stories about the dead person, but more often than not dates are scrambled, facts are left out, and the truth becomes increasingly distorted, and when those people die in their turn, most of the stories vanish with them.”
― Paul Auster

Digital Serendipity?

Some fascinating articles and books at the moment about the long term effects of the web's move towards personalization. On the one hand it means the web will deliver more of what you want, the problem is, getting what you want isn't the same as getting what you need. The more our sources of information and inspiration mould themselves around what we already are, the less opportunities we have to grow into something new. The phrase of the moment is 'serendipty' - the chance stumbling on something unsought, but well found.

There is indeed I think a lot to the idea that ever more impressive personalization will limit this, and some have gone so far as to say that a digital world, being definite and algorithm based, just can't provide the distractions and abstractions needed to stumble accidentally on something. But while not saying the current structures won't end up being so restrictive, in my vieww they don't need to. Any truly complex system is open to chaos-style behaviour, where small changes in input result in wild variations in output, and the internet, and even the search and match algorithms of the likes of Google and Facebook, could surely display, or be allowed to display, such behaviour.

Indeed, probably serendipity itself results from accidental pattern matching, where we are thinking of one kind of thing and suddenly spot something similar in a completely unrelated field, achieving a flash of insight which is maybe really a flash of recognition, a realisation of how theold can lead to the new; and pattern matching is what Google etc. are good at. Up to now they have probably been trying to emulate perfect 'directed' pattern matching, focused in one area, but surely there is also the potential (if not probability) for cross-field matching. If for example Google Translate is trained to match words across languages, what would happen if it was fed with a different data set, and tried to extract similar patterns in this new domain. Is this not exactly what the serendipitous brain does?

In fact, what is often portrayed as a bad thing, that even the very people who design and operate these systems are losing true insight into how they work, provides hope, since they may become semi-evolved 'intelligences' in their own right (and i only mean this in so far as excellend pattern matching machines), and provide us with unexpected insight - since what they produce will be unexpected.
So, when it comes to digital serendiptiy, as Google itself suggests, i'm feeling lucky.

better to have believed and lost or not to have believed at all?

One reason for even aetheists not to completely shield their children from Religion, is the idea that like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it provides some harmless yet comforting fantasies to the young mind, support until it can fully grasp and handle the beautiful yet brutal realities of existance; however, the question then is whether the puncturing of that bubble is overall a worse knock, then not having had the bubble at all.

Without beginning to start the analysis that the topic needs, one piece of psychologic research I read about recently struck me as being perhaps relevent. Ironically putting things into perspective, it had to do with parents in a real nightmare scenario, with a seriously ill child. what was examined was, if, against the odds, the child seemed to be improving, but was still at some (but not too much of a) risk of a relapse, which of two attitudes worked better in terms of the parents' mental well being. First was the quietly optimistic but still very cautious approach of thinking yes, things were better, but wasn't worth getting too excited since weren't out of the proverbial woods yet. The other attitude was basically hallelujah, this was wonderful luck (which of course it was), and best to appreciate and enjoy it for what it was, and not worry about what might yet be. As could be expected, the latter strategy resulted in lower stress levels. As might also be expected if a relapse did occur, then the positive effects immediatey dissappeared, but what is important is the parents mood dropped lower than during the original onset of the illness. Dashed hope really does seem to be worse than no hope at all.

It's like a prisoner's dilemma of the heart - hope for the best, and end up worse, or keep hopes possibly needlessly dampened. Don't fly too low Icarus, let the water weigh down your wings, nor soar too high, lest the sun may burn them. Flying a middle course may sound like the best option, but how can we then reach for the stars?

brain simulations

(this is a VERY random thought - more a wondering than a pondering!)

A major goal of technology has always been to emulate human behaviour, especially reasoning, and far from getting closer to a solution, our modern advances seem to simply reveal more and more how hard the problem really is.

One problem is we are looking for a 'design', and this requires first an understanding of what it should really do, and then how it should do that. But this is of course a 'top down' approach, whereas the thing we're trying to copy, the human brain, is the product of a 'bottom up' mechanism - the evolution of our species over millenia.

Ironically our 'higher level' conceptual approaches can't seem to match the mindless simplicity of the natural process. The reason being of course, that we are trying to produce the same 'work', and work is a product of power and time; we have the power, but nature had the time, and for the moment our power pales in comparison.

There are though two ways to achieve something - through planning, and through trial and error. In principle any method could be discovered by just trying out all the possibilities, and (within the limits imposed by 'adjacent possibilities') this is basically what happened during our evolution - over time multitudes of organisms of increasing complexity were thrown into the testing ground of the world, and slowly whittled down until just us were left.

Even for the simplest problems, we don't ever really have time (or inclination) to really apply trial and error, but we have a powerful substitute : computer simulation. It could be that since we don't fully understand what we are really trying to emulate from the off, then maybe a better approach would be to use simulations and then see if anything produced actually matches what we were looking for (our ignorance in understanding the brain then is out of the equation, since we might not know much about intelligence but we know what we like when we see it).

The question then is, is this feasible, and if so what would be involved?

What i'd be interested to know sometime, is if (and that's a big if) we had a model of an earth environment, and could model some basic creatures in it (we could cheat and start of with some primitive lifeforms we DO understand better) - then how many iterations would be needed to match the simulation runs performed by evolution?

There are admittedly many parameters involved - at the very least not just the number of generations (years/lifespan?) but also the number of relevant interactions (reproductions/terminations) per generation.
But surely there is a number which could be worked out,even from what we currently know about the history of the earth and biology?

And if so, then what is the number of computer operations, or the number of years for a computer running at 1GHz (1,000,000,000 operations per second) it would take to run?

And I don't even think it is a problem that nature basically ran one large simulation, but for a very long time : that large simulation (history) consisted of a multitude of smaller simulations in parallel. Of course there needs to be room for cumulative effect, but it is also probably the case that the starting points in nature (the number of relevant creatures) was initially small and it is in the 'cone' of development that the amounts mushroom.

My point is not really that this is a valid approach for modelling human behaviour, but it would be interesting to quantify just what sort of domain space is involved.

And of course, there is still that big IF of how to model the environment, but probably we could again take a leaf out of evolution's book and not model ourselves a complex environment, but allow complexity arise through the interaction of a sufficient number of simple models.

I know in areas like game theory such long running interactive simulations are used, but I must do some research to see what sort of sizes of runs are involved, and how the addition of parameters increases them.

I would just be interested to know what for example would happen if took some of the most powerful computers today and ran a simulation of some simple interacting evolving structure for say a year?

Nature didn't have the guns, but it sure had the numbers. My question is - how many?!