Misc

Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.

Even our brain is a small world network

 Posted by (Visited 5270 times)  Misc  Tagged with: , ,
Jul 132009
 

I still follow stuff about small world networks and power laws… and look, here they pop up again. Your neurons have 13 degrees of separation!

That isn’t really what the article is about, of course; it’s more about the way in which this sort of organizational structure allows the brain to live at the very edge of chaos, tipping between stability and chaos as we think — and that in fact, the chaos maybe what drives the classic definition of intelligence.

The balance between phase-locking and instability within the brain has also been linked to intelligence – at least, to IQ. Last year, Robert Thatcher from the University of South Florida in Tampa made EEG measurements of 17 children, aged between 5 and 17 years, who also performed an IQ test.

He found that the length of time the children’s brains spent in both the stable phase-locked states and the unstable phase-shifting states correlated with their IQ scores. For example, phase shifts typically last 55 milliseconds, but an additional 1 millisecond seemed to add as many as 20 points to the child’s IQ. A shorter time in the stable phase-locked state also corresponded with greater intelligence – with a difference of 1 millisecond adding 4.6 IQ points to a child’s score.

— Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain – life – 29 June 2009 – New Scientist.

Now, of course we know this isn’t the only sort of intelligence. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating result, and the article also ties it to research on autism and schizophrenia.

CompuServe Classic is shutting down

 Posted by (Visited 6035 times)  Misc  Tagged with:
Jul 022009
 

The whimper at the end of an era.

CompuServe, the corporate entity, dates to 1969 but the CompuServe Classic online service for consumers debuted in 1979. In 1987 it was the flagship of online services with 380,000 users. A 1991 TV commercial trumpets CompuServe as the only online service with more than a half-million members.
Unfortunately time, and its acquisition by AOL, has not been kind to CompuServe. In recent years it has barely been marketed. Its Web site looks like a throwback to the (gasp!) 20th century. The “build” date on version 4.0.2 of CompuServe for Windows NT, the latest version of the access software for CompuServe Classic, is January 11, 1999.

— The Paper PC: CompuServe Classic: So Long, Old Friend.

I was never one of the hordes of truly hardcore gamers who hovered around the CompuServe and GEnie games — no money, you see. I was in high school at the time. Every once in a while I could sneak on for ten minute snatches — my dad was always horrified at the bill. He used TheSource too, because it was “more useful and had less games and distractions” I seem to recall.

CompuServe 2000 will still be around, but I am not sure anyone cares. 🙂

Lockhart’s Lament

 Posted by (Visited 9667 times)  Misc
Jun 252009
 

Mathematics is the music of reason. To do mathematics is to engage in an act of disvovery and conjecture, intuition and inspiration; to be in a state of confusion — not because it makes no sense to you, but because you gave it sense and you still don’t understand what your creation is up to; to have a breakthrough idea; to be frustrated as an artist; to be awed and overwhelmed by an almost painful beauty; to be alive, damn it. Remove this from mathematics and you can have all the conferences you like; it won’t matter. Operate all you want, doctors; your patient is already dead.

— A Mathematician’s Lament, by Paul Lockhart (PDF).

One is a Wise Crowd

 Posted by (Visited 6492 times)  Misc, Reading  Tagged with:
Jun 062009
 

I have written about The Wisdom of Crowds before many times (see here, and here, and here…). In short, given a problem with a fully objective, quantifiable answer, taking the average of many, diverse people’s estimates will give a more accurate answer than the estimate of an expert.

Now there’s a new study that shows that you can provide multiple estimates yourself, by putting yourself in a different frame of mind — then average them. And that average is likely to be more accurate than either of your two guesses, though not as accurate as involving another person. Neat mind hack!

…participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?… Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.

The perfect geek age?

 Posted by (Visited 57065 times)  Misc
May 142009
 

Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?

  • It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
  • I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
  • It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.
  • And yet I got to play real pinball machines.
  • In real arcades.
  • New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.
  • I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.
  • And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T., which the other folks in the theater didn’t get.
  • I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
  • I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
  • I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
  • And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
  • And I was too young to feel cynical about Dead Poets Society.
  • I got onto the Internet after it was tiny, but before it was mass market. So I got to see and use most of the tools and software that were key to its evolution, as they were used, then replaced, then discarded. Pine, gopher, Usenet, Mozilla…
  • I read Sandman when the issues first came out.
  • I got into the games business before it was mass media, but got to ride the wave.
  • …and also got to see the Web unfold…
  • …and got Wikipedia and Google just in time for when I didn’t need to use libraries anymore…
  • …and see some of the science fiction coming true.

Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?

 Older Entries  Newer Entries