Hopefully Interesting

Blindsight, made famous by a book of the same name in science fiction circles by Peter Watts, is a disorder caused by damage to the primary visual cortex.  Sufferers typically lose all ability to consciously perceive any sight from the eye corresponding to part of the cortex damaged.  Which sounds sort of like blindness.  If you cover their normally working eye, but a tomato on a table in front of them, and ask them what's there they'll have no idea and be unable to do so.  But this is called blindsight rather than just blindness.  If you then ask this person to point to the object in front of them they'll point right at the tomato. How does this work?  Well, the brain is composed of different parts that connect to each other in different ways and serve different purposes.  Strange as it may seem the part that corresponds to you knowing that you know there's a tomato there and the part that lets you point to the tomato are different and its possible...

One of the first posts I made on this blog was a  review of The Myth of the Rational Voter  by Bryan Caplan.  That book convinced me that retrospective voting, mostly politicians' fear of it, is the greatest part of what makes democracy work in practice. And we do need to explain why democracy works in practice, because the evidence is that it does.  Democracy causes countries to be more peaceful , richer , and when women were given the vote childhood mortality went down .  So there does seem to be something to this democracy business where we have to explain. In Democracy for Realists Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels set out to "assail the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens." Well, that's not the only thing you could investigate about democracies.  You could look at: How...

Lets say I'm telling a story about some hiker heading up into the mountains.  I mention that when passing under a cliff a pebble came loose and landed on him.  That might sting but it wouldn't occur to you to ask if he died.  Lets say that instead I mention that a boulder had landed on him.  Then you'd expect him to be quite dead. That's the nice thing about these old English words that've been around a while and encode distinctions that make sense in our everyday lives.  The difference between the pebble and the boulder is just a matter of degree but it's one where the quantitative difference is big enough to become qualitative.  If we just had one word whoever I was telling the story to would have to ask questions and because we run into rocks so often I'd know when I'd have to use an adjective. When you're talking about scientific things, though, you don't often have this choice of words.  Energy is energy and you're expected to use a ...

So, MIT has this IM system called Zephyr that I still unaccountably find useful.  Clients generally let you display a signature with your message that might be some static bit of text or might be the result of a script if you’re more into that.  I have a script that selects from a bunch of sayings, jokes, etc that I’ve collected over the years.  And which I now want to inflict on you. Please forgive the puns and don’t take these too seriously. Unfortunately the universe doesn’t agree with me.  We’ll see which one of us is still standing when this is over.  Reality is what you can get away with. The truth is whatever you can’t escape. I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body.  Then I remembered who was telling me this. I feel more like I do now than I did a while ago. I intend to live forever. So far, so good. Don’t ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. You can’t know that this sentence ...

People have been thinking about life on Mars for a long time, ever since the writings on the illusive channels of Mars were mistranslated as being about canals if not even longer back.  The original Viking landers had some experiments to help detect life and people have been looking ever since.  If life had ever existed on Mars it's quite likely that the loss of hydrogen and breakdown of the magnetic field have ended it so I wouldn't bet on there being life now.  But for reasons I'll explain I think it's actually pretty likely that there was life at some time in the past. A while ago I blogged about a timeline of life on Earth  extending from its origin in Earth's path to its end in the future (if we don't do something about it).  Here it is again. Of course that's not how things went or will go on Mars.  Well, Mars formed at the same time as Earth did and I can't find any reason that liquid water would have taken a very different amount of time t...

I'm not going to try to defend the formula of adding a state's senators to its representatives to figure out how much say it should have in who becomes president.   You can make an argument for giving minorities extra influence but why should that only apply to minorities that correspond to a state's border?  Why should Rhode Island get extra influence so politicians pay attention but up state New York be dominated by New York City? But there is a reason to group votes at the state level in that votes are counted at the state level.  It's at the state level that voting is organized and if it were the case that a state was strongly dominated by one party or the other then there would be a temptation for that party to over count their vote to influence the national election.  But if the whole weight of a state is going to one party or the other anyways then there's less incentive to do something like that.  And for more balanced states it's (hopefully) hard...

Now that we're in the era of people wondering if Moore's Law is ending  it's probably worth looking a little bit at what Moore's law really is. Way back in 1965 Gordon Moore of Intel publish a paper showing that as the years went by the number of transistors you could economically cram onto a piece of silicon went up.  The more transistors per chip the cheaper it was to make the chip but at the same time the greater the chance that one of those transistors would have a defect and the whole chip would have to be thrown out.  Between those two forces there was a happy medium number of transistors that would get you the most compute for you buck, and Moore observed in 1965 that that happy medium number of components tended to double every year with improving technology.  He also observed that with decreasing device size the power used per transistor would decrease and that the overall power consumption would remain manageable despite the explosion in the number of ...

Deepmind, a group owned by Google, has been making waves recently with their game playing AIs.  First there was the one that taught itself to play Atari games.  Then, most famously, they created AlphaGo which went on to beat the world champion at Go.  That really generated waves since nobody had been expecting a computer to crack Go any time soon.  They've also done a few other things such as figuring out what shapes proteins fold into just from their chemical composition. Last Thursday they revealed their newest creation, AlphaStar the Starcraft 2 playing bot.  Starcraft 2 is the sequel to a game I played way back in high school.  It's an example of what is called a realtime strategy game or RTS.  The way these work is that you have a bunch of soldiers or other forces which you use to fight your opponent.  But at the same time you have other units under your command that can gather resources which you can use to create more units.  So you ...

I  wrote earlier  about how we need to figure out some way to give drones some equivalent of license plates to let their users be identified.  Anonymity is all fine and dandy online but far less so when someone is interacting with the real world. Well, recently a drone  shut down a major UK airport  for a day.  Police were entirely unable to find out who was responsible.   Hopefully the manhunt will scare people off trying similar things in the future but, well, the person responsible did  get away so maybe not.