kip/bot/blog

Great review in The New York Review of Books of V.S. Ramachandran’s Tell Tale Mind. Ramachandran’s books are depressingly, cripplingly, neurally reductive of everything we love about ourselves (appreciation of art, response to music, loyalty). But he writes so elegantly and cheerfully and with such engagement that I completely forget that elegance, cheerfulness and engagement are nothing more than Savanna-evolved modules of our brain and I just enjoy the reading, believing somehow that I am more than a strange loop or gadget.

This is a great review of what looks to be a fascinating book, but the passage that I loved was about the synaesthesia chapter. Synaesthesia is the tendency of an individual brain to connect sensory inputs from one sense in the physical world to another sense inside the brain: colors have smells, numbers have color associations, shapes and sounds have connections in the brain. Apparently (I didn’t know this), it has been a matter of debate whether this an actual condition or the product of conditioning (ie, someone’s wired that way, or has learned the association), so the first thing Ramachandran does is demonstrate that synaesthesia is a real neurological phenomenon (which is kinda cool).

Then, he argues through a series of experiments that it’s the result of “anatomical propinquity” – the physical proximity of certain sense functions to each other in the brain:

When a person with synesthesia perceives numerals there is an abnormal crossing over of nerve activity into the adjacent color area of the brain; the two areas are not insulated from each other, as they are in most people. One brain area excites the other, despite the lack of objective link between numbers and colors. In fact, it is surprising that this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often in the brain, because electrical potentials could easily spread from one area to another without something to damp things down.

And then the payoff from Ramachandran himself:

Thus synesthesia is best thought of as an example of subpathological cross-modal interactions that could be a signature or marker for creativity.

This is a neurological basis, I think, of one of my favorite words: apophenia, the tendency in the mind to connect unlike things to each other, the source of creativity or paranoia, depending on the result and the viewpoint of the observer. Most of us digerati learned the word from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, and now it has a rich, quirky basis in neurology! The anatomical propinquity of various functions in our brain, and the failure of certain parts of certain brains to “damp down” electrical potentials (or keep wires from getting crossed, almost literally) could be the (sadly reductive) basis of apophenia.

Depressed, but exhilarated.

Kevin Kelly has an invigorating post about our the inevitable increase in our ignorance. When I saw the title “The Expansion of Ignorance”, I had a curmudgeonly joy at reading about how stupid we’re allowing ourselves to become. Yesterday, I listened to a series of Open Source interviews with Harold Bloom (while playing my Rogue alt on WoW, no less). He railed against the ‘school of resentment’, lamented the celebration of crap books, condemned the loss of memorization, etc. Cocktail Party Physics had a post about how Sarah Palin represents a celebration of dumb and connecting it to bigger, scarier trends:

Despite the Palin-centric focus, this is not meant to be a political post; rather, her candidacy epitomizes one of our most fundamental failings as a nation. I’m talking about the triumph of mediocrity, of settling for “good enough,” in America. No wonder our country is in a shambles, teetering on the edge of economic ruin and losing our historical edge in technological innovation. No wonder we’re lagging so far behind other developed countries in educational testing scores, when we demand so little of even the highest offices of our land.

In a recent post here about how fivethirtyeight.com was uncovering basic 101 weaknesses in long-standing polls, I was surprised to find out how pissy I was about the media’s and larger public’s inability to figure out this problem for themselves.

So I was looking forward to a bilious post from Kevin Kelly, which, now that I think of it, is silly. He’s not the bilious type. What the post is about is how, despite all of the knowledge we’ve acquired, we’re not really getting close to knowing it all or being done with science. He points out that, if every answer raises to more questions, our pursuit of truth is creating more ignorance than knowledge. Chart:

As one who was depressed that Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov was turning things I once saw as art and as having mystery into simple riddles, this was a big pick me up. There’s something very Jean-Luc Picard’s love of discovery and surprise in all this.

As part of my poll-obsessing, I finally checked out fivethirtyeight, recommended to me by Alex. Short version is that Nate Silver, the author of the site, is also a leader of Baseball Prospectus. He is credited with creating the very powerful PECOTA system, which rethinks baseball statistics — mostly through pure intelligence, but there is some math that exceeds the AD&D level — and in the process creates a much better explanatory and predictive tool. (It also played no small part in helping to create fantasy baseball’s popularity and even help baseball make a comeback when people thought the fast-paced, pre-felonious NBA was going to surpass America’s pastime.)

fivethirtyeight is, and I don’t think this is oversimplifying, doing for political polling what it did for baseball stats: finding truths by refining, critiquing, and improving simplistic polling data. Today’s post on the site was one of those aha moments:

I have gotten an increasing number of questions about the GWU/Battleground Poll, which presently gives John McCain a 2-point national lead, even as essentially every other current national poll shows Barack Obama with a lead of at least 5 points.

Just because a poll is an outlier doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s doing something wrong. Pollsters may have legitimate reasons for having a different perspective on the election, and they may also occasionally produce odd results due to chance alone.

In this case, however, the poll seems to be making a relatively fundamental mistake: it is not weighting by age.

For months, I’ve been wondering why the hell some polls have been reporting a neck and neck race, while others show Obama steadily gaining ground. (Even stranger, why on earth is the always admirable John McCain pulling such silly stunts, throwing hail Marys, if it’s a dead heat?) Finally, someone explains it, and oh how bizarrely simple it turns out to be.

For those who are curious, here’s the weighting of the battleground poll in question:

18-34 17%
35-44 12%
45-64 40%
65+ 31%

Compared to the US Census/2004 election data:

18-34 26%
35-44 17%
45-64 38%
65+ 19%

Pretty clear. This poll massively overrepresents older voters who, at a local polling level, have been averse to Obama for a variety of reasons, and massively underrepresent the younger voters who Obama has targeted in campaign activities and who are likely to respond to the post Baby-boomer voice he’s cultivated.

So simple, no math. Can’t tell if I’m impressed at the baseball-stats freaks or disgusted at the innumeracy of the media, or even literate newspaper reading people.

I woke up with no sense of disorientation, nagging feelings of deja vu or reverse deja vu, and I feel like nothing has changed due to the launch of the collider. (I still haven’t looked out the window yet, and the only creature I’ve had contact with is my dog, so I may yet be in for a surprise. In the meantime, there is a cool comic describing the LHC.

On display at the Whitney, and my favorite moment there, is a telegram sent by Fuller to Noguchi explaining relativity. I got to the exhibit close to closing time, so I couldn’t stay and memorize it, but this has to be the best telegram ever:

Listed in lots of other places, but preserved here for my easy access: Google filed a patent for wave-powered data centers, specifically, pelamis wave-powered centers. Cool patent diagram, and cool video showing how much power the ocean contains.

Sociology visits the science “lab” and discovers: 1) science is often social; 2) expertise is a tricky balance.

An interview in American Scientist about the nature of expertise by way of a sociologist (Harry Collins) who spends serious time with physicists. Some of it is very old ground, like what we read in the 19086Laboratory Life

The idea of analyzing expertise grew out of my long study of the sociology of gravitational wave detection. I’ve slowly become a quasi-member of the gravitational wave community. This means I chat with my new colleagues in restaurants, cafeterias and coffee bars. I began to find I was talking physics—just the normal to-and-fro of science chat. Sometimes I would recommend that they try something different in the experiments and my remarks weren’t just shrugged off; for instance, I might be putting a case that had been considered and rejected for physics reasons that I could follow, or, rarely, I might even get something right.

This began to strike me as interesting: Here was someone, all of whose university degrees were in sociology, talking physics with physicists. I could not do the math, design the circuits or solder wires, and I would never contribute to a physics paper. Yet I could still talk gravitational wave physics.

Then it struck me that the managers of the big gravitational wave experiments … were also not doing much in the way of maths, or designing and building experiments, or co-authoring research papers in the field. Most of what they did was mediated by the same kind of talk that I was doing. And I also realized that talk of this kind was what I heard when I sat in on review committees—it was talk that happened in these places, not calculating or experimenting. I could follow most of this talk, and, every now and again, I felt that I could even have offered something. This made me think about the nature of expertise: how my expertise differed from that of the scientists and the managers.

But then there is a counterbalance:

Nowadays any parent of a young child, or anyone who can access the Internet, thinks their opinions on technical matters are sound. Many of my colleagues in the social sciences seem to think the same thing … I found I wanted to work out how to value expertise without going back to the bad old days where anyone in a white coat was treated as an authority on anything scientific or technological. We have to solve the very hard problem of reconstructing the value of science when we know it can’t deliver the certainty that people want. Studying expertise may do the trick.

One of the services of this discussion is to unpack different moments and types of expertise. The book, Rethinking Expertise contains a periodic table of expertise types, which includes “interactional expertise” (being able to interact with experts in the field) and “referred expertise” (leveraging expertise in other fields in a field which is not your own). It also discusses types of knowledge, such as “tacit knowledge” (“things you can do but can’t describe how”, might be a better phrase than ‘thin slice’).

The interview doesn’t go into much detail, sadly. I’m hoping the book catches on and others review and dissect so I can talk about it without having to read it. In the meantime, it does contain some interesting ideas for management or areas of expertise by non-experts, collaboration, and the eternally fascinating topic of T-shaped people.

Demonstrating the continued importance of visual communication in all fields, we have UC Berkeley helping educators explain “the most misunderstood concept in science”, evolution.  The tool is the evogram, a series of tightly focused evolutionary paths demonstrating the emergence of species and/or features:

While the visual execution might be lacking, the structure and mode of the visual narrative is worthy of Tufte.  The evogram’s tightness and potency is worth of a sparkline.
Found in the NY Times.

There’s a small park just east of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I’ve played chess at the tables near the entrance literally dozens of times over the thirteen years I’ve lived in Brooklyn. But it was only today, while I was riding my bike along Eastern Parkway, that I looked at the memorial.

The park is named after Dr. Ronald Ervin McNair. I assumed that this was an inter-war physician who had done some service like setting up a clinic or been a benefactor of the community’s arts efforts. It turns out that McNair was, among other things, an astronaut on the ill-fated Challenger mission of 1986. The memorial, sadly neglected (like the park it is in), is pretty cool:

It’s a nice mix of air & space design, interesting sides to a modern personality (the karate kick next to the professorial holding forth confused me and a person standing nearby), and traditional monumental bronze imagery.

Other interesting things about McNair:

• Nichelle Nichols, Lt Uhura of Star Trek, was helping NASA recruit more diverse candidates to the space program in the 70s and McNair was one of those recruits
• He had a black belt in a form of karate and was regional champion several years
• He was an accomplished saxophonist and composed a piece of music with Jean-Michel Jarre before the 1986 mission. (McNair was supposed to record the saxophone part on the mission.)

Things learned from the trip:

• go that extra step — I’ve been in that park many times but never took the extra steps to find out who it was named after
• ride a bike — having a bike meant that I didn’t have to take extra steps to see this
• the internet needs a memorial project to remember people who inspired the dedication of parks, but not quite enough to maintain those parks.

But will it be my FB friend?