DoctorMo's Blog

I was sent a link to these awesome stickers, they dissect through satire the motivations of school boards in some US states.

The whole idea that you can control people through what they learn is a fascinating social weapon. As if the truth wasn’t difficult enough to approach. We have to create stories, often mostly fictional ones, about almost every aspect of science in order to fit the core ideas into our heads. Little lies that can lead to bigger truths.

What is worse than the lies is the erosion of the scientific principles. The enlightenment was our civilisations way of digging our way out of the primitive creation myths and dogmas and now we seem to be sliding back. I see less people able to cope with philosophy, fewer people who are able to wield rational skilfully and worse, people who no longer believe in their own ability to test any theory.

I was surprised this week by the release of a video detailing the plan to move forward with investments into Hgih Speed Rail. This is an important issue which looked like it had dropped off the presidents rhetoric about improving the USA’s infrastructure.

But now it’s back! And I’m happy to see that there are people in the government who are as concerned as I with this counties failing rail ways. Forget getting on expensive, slow and substandard trains, I’m looking forward to getting on modern, cheap more European rail connections.

Trains aren’t some bridge to no where, they perform a very efficient function in allowing people to live in one place and work in another. Take London as an example, without it’s extensive rail and subway system you’d never be able to get from Brighton to the West End in time for that play,  going by car would be impossible if everyone else was also going by car and there is simple not enough physical space for everyone of London’s workers to drive into the city.

Now to get things cheap. Back home, I could take a train from Liverpool to London Euston (240 miles) in two and a half hours and so long as I booked 2 weeks in advanced it only cost me £23 return (~$30 PPP). What we use in England is a chartered agreement system where even though the train operators are private (much against my personal belief) they at least have to agree to some rules which provide the poor with access to the train network at a price they can afford.

Compare that to taking the National Express coach which takes six to seven hours and would cost £36 return in the same kind of cramp style that Americans would be familiar to in the Greyhound bus services.

No, it’d about time America brought it’s train technology out of the 19th century and into the 21st. I just hope that consideration will be given to allowing the poorest of citizens to access this most important infrastructure.

I’m relaxing this weekend re-watching all three Back to the Future films, classics of their time and very fun. I’m quite fond of sci-fi stories with time travel, the whole idea of what-if is fascinating to think about.

What is most interesting about stories about time travel is how they deal with paradoxes. There are a number of ways you can deal with them:

1. You can have the future effecting the past directly (disappearing people!)
2. You can have a new universe created every time you take the leap, meaning your never effecting your true home universe.
3. Or you can have the future effected, but the people who travel cut off from those effects, creating a localised alternative, instead of a whole universe.

Thinking about time can really warp your thoughts, if you try and think about events you end up getting into cycles. Some things are worth considering in whole though. Think about the chicken and egg in the none literal sense.

I’m sure there is something about time travel that we’re not even getting. It may be as impossible as picking something up out of the universe in one place and dropping it into another (teleport) but I’d like to think it was possible with wormholes or some physics we don’t yet know about.

Think about this though, in the first Back to the Future when Marty gets back to 1985 and tries to save Doc from the Libyan terrorists. He watches himself run from the Libyans, get into the time machine as last time and drive away. The Marty that he watches is used to a life where he owns that 4×4 truck, where his father isn’t a failure and where Biff was always known as a clown. So how can you square his travel back into the past too?

When Marty is in the past and disappearing, how come it’s his older brother that disappears first? could it be that the time changes radiate out through time? And if they do, how come the changes to fix the problem are quicker then those that broke the time-line.

It’s possible that time fluctuations travel, gravitational ones do according to popular theory. If it’s true, then time is more flexible than pure logical consequence suggests.

Anyway, I always laughed at the idea that in the far future there is a time machine with several Arnold robots and a liquid metal man all waiting in queue to kill John Conner. Another set of films with a whole host of time traveling issues.

I wanted to post an entry about a very good and useful collaboration.

The OpenStreetMap project aims to record geographical information in an open and accessible format, so anyone can find their way and create interesting devices and applications.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

In the UK our governmental operated mapping data is owned and controlled, unlike the USA where data is made available in the Public Domain. So the service in the OSM for the UK is very important. I myself updated much of the mapping information for the town I grew up in, little parts that others hadn’t yet touched on.

So now, I’d like to see an Ubuntu application that is able to use OSM data, plug into GPS hardware and fuse the two into an offline mapping and route finding system. That would make netbooks very useful indeed! I’m betting someone somewhere has already taken a stab at such a program; but I’ve yet to be able to find it.

Let me know if you know.

Update: And boy did you guys not let me down… I’m compiling a list of things that people have suggested to me.

1. The Nokia Maemo project has a Mapper tool which doesn’t yet work on Ubuntu.
2. TangoGPS looks like it does everything, available in the repositories.
3. Merkaator is a simple GPS Path recorder also available in the repositories.
4. The Nav-IT project can do similar things, but looks a bit config fiddly, they have their own repository.
5. If your ok with Java and with German, you might try CacheWolf.
6. For the python programmers, we have PyRoute.

One missing piece I notice is route finding, it must be a difficult problem to solve. so I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a dedicated lib that could do it.

Looks like we’re in for another wave of 3D films, I’ve so far watched Coraline and Monsters vs Aliens.

I have to say I’ve enjoyed having the film in 3D, this new polarised light steroscopics is much more natural than the old red and green varity.

So do I think 3D films will take off? I think so, we’ve been waiting for the tech to reach a point when multiple people can watch a movie in 3D from their own homes, and I think there may be TVs on the way with just such tech in them.

If you get a chance to try it out, do so and tell me what you think. I’m waiting for Pixar’s Up in May and the film called ‘9′ out in September (which looks AWESOME with a capital Awe).

Today I’m just going to ramble on a bit about music and what I’ve picked up about how it all works:

Neurologically humans are programmed to recognise patterns, when the pattern is successfully predicted the brain releases hormones that make us happy, which also strengthen the connections in that area of the brain. When it gets it wrong it release cortisol a stress hormone and I bet we don’t feel as good.

We also feel happier about being in social groups, socially conforming produces much higher releases of happy chemicals than going against the grain or being alone.

So what would a pleb like me make of these ideas?

I reckon this means that the music we enjoy will be what ever music we’ve listened to while in the company of people we like and it’ll be dependant on the number of times listened and how similar the music is to other music you like. If it’s a new form of music which is completely different, then a socially positive experience can introduce the patterns and allow you to enjoy that music more (say listening to Beethoven or Mendel while at a Concert with friends).

It’s unlikely the the kind of music we enjoy are related to our intellect or genetics. A person who is in the social circles of rap music will tend not to like classical music, but that’s only because of the large social separation between people who like each kind.

Thoughts?

Hey there readers, (both of you) I figured since it’s a Sunday and the first day of the month, I could recap some of the interesting things going on.

Mark Suttleworth released details about the next version of Ubuntu after 9.04, this version (9.10) will be nick named ‘Karmic Koala’. All those people who like ‘Cloud Computing’ should be happy, it’s mentioned a lot. No mention of any exciting projects to my mind though, no breakthroughs. Although new versions of xorg, linux and gnome are always handy.

It looks like Microsoft is starting to sue more in conjunction with software patents. There are concerns this move is an attack against Linux because TomTom uses the Linux kernel and no doubt the FAT patents being used here are provided at the kernel level. All those pundits who argue that this isn’t an attack are mistaken. Every software patent attack is an attack against Free and Open Source Software. How are we expected to have the freedom to modify and distribute if patent holders can sue everyone who comes in contact with our work? We shouldn’t be looking for specific attacks against open source vendors, an attack against one user (no matter how big) is still a threat to everyone else and we must treat it as such.

Obama said he backs going back to the moon, it’s an interesting move. If we can enthuse people with science and make discoveries in the process when weighed against the environmental impact and the cost; then I say let’s do it, it’s about time we went back before the moon moves further away (it moves a few centimeters each year further away from earth).

Darwin’s 200th anniversary of his birth is upon us and artists have been doing some truely wonderful works in celebration. There has also been quite a lot of creationist criticism in every article posted by New Scientist. It seems religious people love to crowd out psudo-scientists on a proto-science magazine websites.

Novell is hitting a rough patch these days, though the business was in trouble before it even acquired SuSE Linux way back when. I know a lot of people who would be happy to see Novell go away and for OpenSuse to be taken fully community based. It’s sad to watch a company, that has produced good work, melt from unfortunate prioritisation.

I’m a bit tired today, been suffering from a cold these last few days. So prior apologies for more mistakes than usual.

I was thinking about how cartoons and drawn symbology works. The first thing that I though was ‘Is a cartoon dog just a symbol of a dog?’ and I thought well no, you can see it’s tongue sticking out and it’s piddling on George W Bush. There is clearly more to the drawing that just symbology.

So I thought about how the eye works, there are multiple components to the eye and a hell of a good pre-processing layer of neurons within the eye. You get out of this a number of layers, a colour layer, a luminosity layer and interestingly a edges layer. The edge detection seems to incorporate stereoscopic vision into a map of where all the various objects you see start and stop. I was looking at some software that mimicked this once and noticed how the outside of a face had huge thick green and red lines between the face and the background, the inside had smaller lines denoting the distances between each of the objects.

Given that we have a brain that likes to mix signals up with synaesthesia. It might be that the black lines used in cartoon images are a replacement for this stereoscopic information and that is why to me at least, some cartoon images look more 3D than a photo of a person on a similar shade background. Although it’s obvious that the cartoon is not a picture of a real thing and the photo is, my brain can’t shake the idea that the cartoon has spacial information beyond what my brain expects.

If this is true then I should expect a number of things of cartoon drawing:

1. Outside lines should be thicker than inside lines and should vary with depth of space behind them.
2. Objects that change depth (like noses) should use tapering lines that thin out as they get closer to the object behind them.
3. Shading/colouring is not required to produce 3D objects in cartoon form.
4. Lines should get thicker as the object moves closer compared to similar objects.
5. Bluring a typical cartoon will not make it look out of focus unless the line widths are changed.

Now I’m going to have to start testing these conjectures, firstly with a cube:

And this image for a face, the first with all the same line widths, the second with lines designed as if the thickness was related to the depth.

If you can see more depth or if you can’t, post a comment.

According to some new research, synaesthesia can be induced by hypnosis.

Synaesthesia is an abnormality in some people that causes them to mix up their senses. Some people hear colours, taste music. Then it turned out people could also link conceptual ideas to the senses, some people would see colours when they see a number. It’s now thought that this kind of rewiring on concepts accounts for savant abilities; one savant who remembered very many digits of pi, later said that he sees numbers like a terrain topology and flying through that terrain allows him to remember all the numbers.

The discovery that you can induce it comes at no great surprise to me. Programatically the brain seems to be in a permanent state of self rewriting (called neural plasticity) and when you turn off certain input validations with hypnosis, you get to make the brain do weird things like link ‘2′ to ‘yellow’.

This doesn’t at first seem like such a useful ability; but linking one concept to another is immensely useful for creating systematic knowledge of how things work. Think about a wheel, we link it to ’round’, ’spin’ and ‘roll’ which tells us all we need to use it as a mechanism by instantly indexing a concept to it’s uses we save vast amounts of thinking time.

This neatly brings us to programming. Programming seems to be an intensified version of this conceptual linking skill. Being able to conceptually pull functionality and mechanics (APIs) together. Being able to create new mechanisms, and so on.

It will be interesting to see if we can use this information about brains to better program our interfaces. When you call your method gwaaztze(), that’s not very useful because you need to create an unconnected reference (unindexable) against it’s mechanics and functionality to remember what the hell it does. But if we follow existing concepts we could rename it to get_content_pointer() and we can instantly place it’s mechanical properties without looking it up. We may still have to look up it’s precise definition, but at least we can get a topology of the API without a manual.

I also think this is why advanced none technical users in ubuntu like to remap ‘apt-get install’ to just ‘install’ on the command line. To them it makes no sense that you would use the noun of the package system, followed by two verbs that almost mean the same thing. It should be obvious or not important what the package system is, and any one verb should be enough, say ’software install [package]‘.

Perhaps what we mean by ‘ease of use’ outside of ’stop trying to use it exactly like windows’ means using existing conceptual links in a way that gives an indication about what the program is trying to do and thus allow our users to index the mechanics and functionality without having to create static memories of commands and interfaces.

If you’ve ever been to a philosophy class, you’ll know that there is one interesting issue about the meaning of existence that is still begging for answers.

This one is about free will, what it means to be in control of yourself, to decide and weather you as a being are deterministic and predictable (in some fashion) or can make choices which can not be determined by any scientific measurement.

Even scientist regularly stray into this area. The more neurology research done; the more we discover how deterministic we really are. Say for instance the amount of the brain dedicated to consciousness (the part most people consider to be the ‘you’). It looks like only small amounts of the brain are under your direct control; while lots of other parts of the brain are seemingly automatic, animalistic.

This puts a lot of people into a terrible problem. We, as animals, like to consider that what we do and how we act is totally under our control. That how we think has some baring on being good, moral, social. That this introspective control separates us from basic self serving animal natures.

Of course this all misses two very important philosophical points:

1. That as a human being we have free will because we embody the deterministic mind. Our bodies are not attachments of the mental process. This embodiment allows us to be both deterministic and have free will.
2. That knowing about how we work creates a self referential paradox. We will adjust our actions and motivations based on how we think we work and thus change how we work. Even to prove we’re not deterministic. Think about how many time traveling stories have protagonists deliberately poking and pulling the threads of time to prove that time can be changed (and by extension, the deterministic nature of who we are)

It may be that future scientists will work out some facet of the brain that is inherently quantum in state. But I think we’ll find instead that the quantum effect is not quantum physics, but the quantum nature of self awareness.