“surprises”
103 posts under this tag.
Here’s the beginning and end of Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder, a 1996 talk by Richard DawkinsWP on the wonders of science, transcribed and made available online on Edge (which I’m reading a lot these days). What can I say—breathtaking.
You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.
I’m not saying you’re more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle’s the cleverest person who ever lived. That’s not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.
It’s often said that people ‘need’ something more in their lives than just the material world. There is a gap that must be filled. People need to feel a sense of purpose. Well, not a bad purpose would be to find out what is already here, in the material world, before concluding that you need something more. How much more do you want? Just study what is, and you’ll find that it already is far more uplifting than anything you could imagine needing.
When they arrived in his office and Abir explained the concept for what is now called the decoder, Carbonell was floored by its elegance. “In the few weeks that followed, I kept wondering, ‘Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t the rest of the field think of that?’ Finally I said, Enough of this envy. If I can’t beat them, join them.”
I’m floored too. (And envious!) What Meaningful Machines lyrically calls «flooding» in a recent Wired article, Me Translate Pretty One Day, is a stunningly beautiful translation algorithm, baffling in its simplicity.
Though if it’s simple to state and understand, it’s only because it relies on operations on a terrifying (computational, mathematical) scale. (Like the first time one invokes inside a theorem, say, the set of all possible sets, there’s a mixture of fright and awe—we can barely believe our moxie to write such thoughts.) In a very real way, the algorithm is written in Moore’s law language and if it escaped us all it’s mostly because our words are so shy, so inadvertently constrained by past assumptions.
Ah! How exciting! Machine language translation is on the horizon.
I’m sure I’ve seen the stats before, several times, but still I was disconcerted when I read this paragraph:
As of mid-1981, according to Steve Bloom, author of Video Invaders, more than four billion quarters had been dropped into Space InvadersWP games around the world—that’s roughly “one game per earthling.”
Four billion quarters seemed a wild guess, but four billion people? In 1981? Surely there was something wrong with the reference. But there wasn’t. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, that was the approximate number of people only 25 years ago.
More alarming still, my dad was born in 1957. World population was around 3 billion then. We’re 6.5 billion now and counting. That is, my parents’ lifetime has seen the world population double—3.5 billion new souls.
I had surely seen a similar graph several times before but somehow it never got through my thick skull. I was overjoyed to realize just to what extent the world had changed in less than 50 years. Frankly, I believe I’ve found the proof I’d been looking for that the world is getting better. Isn’t it unambiguously a good thing that 3.5 billion people have been able to be born? Yes, many will live in what are to us abysmal conditions. But there is no worst quality of life than not being able to live in the first place. Death is always an option, life is not. Most of this growth comes from the poorest classes of the poorest countries but that’s also heartening in a way. There was never before reason to counteract the “ignorance” that made them try to have as many children as they physically could—it wasn’t ignorance at the time, it was bet-splitting. Most of them died anyway.
Never have so many children had the luxury of extreme poverty, to put it bluntly.
The other number shock today was from a talk by Google’s Marissa Mayer, platonic love and Google’s VP of search products and user experience:
[Starting around minute 3.25:] Most people are familiar with the concept that computers get faster all the time, they get about twice as fast every two years. It’s a law inside of computer science. But it turns out the same thing is happening with hard drives. So, around every thirteen months you can store as much information in the same amount of space on a hard drive, because the technology has advanced. Which means that every ten years you can store a thousand times as much information. So I thought I would again try and give you a sense of, in everyday form, how much content that is or how much this could change things. What this means is that if you consider a typical iPod, which today can hold tens of thousands of songs, [it] means that something the size of an iPod could actually, in the year 2012, carry an entire year of video on it, playing nonstop without repeats. By 2015 it could have all commercial music ever produced. Imagine buying an iPod where all the music is already loaded on it and you just decide what you want to access. By 2019 it could carry an entire lifetime of video in the palm of your hand, 85 years worth of video will be able to fit in an iPod. And by somewhere in the years 2020 you’ll be able to have every content ever created, sitting in the palm of your hand. Hhmmm…huuumm. Hhmmm…huuumm.
Again, I’ve played with such numbers before. It’s just they had never hit me so hard.
Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.
We’ll talk then.
(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)
Just started reading Neal StephensonWP’s Diamond AgeWP, AM—trembling with excitement. The 500-page, 1995 cyberpunk novel is baroquely immersive in that hip, queer way that only Stephenson can deliver. It has many, many rarefied words too, some of them beautiful («alamodality», «runcible», «velleity1»), some pedantic («cineritious», «hederated», «callypigious»), and some unfathomable (what the hell is «eutactic»?). Of the latter class was «machine-phase»; at first unconsciously ignored (I tend to do that with common-word alloys), it eventually emerged into consciousness and was diligently googled (since unfound on any dictionary I know of)—it is now most definitely a member of the beautiful words class:
It would be a natural goal [of nanotechnology WP] to be able to put every atom in a selected place (where it would serve as part of some active or structural component) with no extra molecules on the loose to jam the works. Such a system would not be a liquid or gas, as no molecules would move randomly, nor would it be a solid, in which molecules are fixed in place. Instead this new machine-phase matter would exhibit the molecular movement seen today only in liquids and gases as well as the mechanical strength typically associated with solids. Its volume would be filled with active machinery.
Overall I don’t think it’s that good a presentation, but there’s one true (outrageous) gem worth repeating from Seth Godin’s recent talk at Google:
There is a belief among a lot of companies, especially in the valley, especially on this road, Amphiteater RoadWP, that technology wins.. I don’t think it does. I think what technology does is it gives you a shot at marketing.
..I believe that.. what made Google work were some brilliant—maybe not intentional—marketing decisions. And those decisions have allowed you the freedom to do some really cool technology.
Well, ok, here are two more highlights:
[To Googlers:] You guys have built something for the ages.
Hummer and the Mini. The Mini small enough to put in the trunk of the Hummer—but they had a lot in common. For four years they sold at full retail, for four years they made a profit, for four years they had a waiting list, because they were on the edges. General Motors loses money on every mid-sized car they sell, because if you want to buy a mid-sized car, just buy a Toyota or a Honda, the cheapest one. It’s at the edges that people wait in line; it’s at the edges that people will notice you.
(Oh and this is also the first online video with captions I’ve watched. They’re really cool, even if buggy.)
Second LifeWP, a 3d online community, recently hosted a live concert by Suzanne VegaWP and of course someone had to make her and her guitar’s avatars. Robbie Dingo did. And he made a video of the making (of the guitar avatar). Breathtaking. Go straight to the Quickitime video or see it embedded as a flash in Second Life’s website.
This is some fiendishly impressive photoshop.
And I am, because it really, really, really is true: YouTube’s lonelygirl15 is the birth of a new art form.
How Gibsonian (or Laughing-man-esque) the whole video-cult esoterica was, don’t you think? (Though no one would have predicted that we would become obsessed with a (fictional) chirpy teen.) Danah boyd has some interesting things to say and the New York Time’s article on the memebomb is outstanding (but would some link love really kill them?).
That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in MindfulnessAM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?
No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:
Above-average manual dexterity
Since most of the deaf speak sign language WP and since sign language relies heavily on hands as the primary vehicle of expression, it is likely that the deaf develop above-average manual dexterity, which would sure come handy in many cooking tasks (say, chopping or cutting).
Since they have one less sense to distract them, they can focus more on flavors. The blind are known to have very refined senses of hearing and smelling, perhaps something similar happens to the deaf?
No stress in noisy environments
Kitchens can be pretty hectic environments, right?
Clear, quick note-writing (and reading)
It is likely that they have had to rely many times on writing clear, quick notes to strangers so they might have developed systems or experience for making them easily understood. That may come in handy in busy kitchens were a lot of information is passed on written notes (so that, say, orders don’t get all mixed up).
Different food cues
They may have discovered different cues for food quality or meal readiness (say, since they can’t hear milk burbling, they might smell when milk is just about to boil over).
Sign language is a noiseless language
So it might be better at restaurants where absolutely no noise is desired from the kitchen. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s hard for a deaf person to accurately assess just how much noise they inadvertently make with cooking instruments.)
More accurate people-reading
A deaf may have learned to rely more on other people’s body language and thus may be more accurate gauging whether people honestly liked her dishes or not.
Any thoughts?
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