IdeaFestival

"The Mind and Brain," part two

The very latest podcast, featuring part two of Jeffrey Schwartz's "The Mind and the Brain," is out at iTunes. As always, you may get IF podcasts on the front page of IdeaFestival web site or by taking take the podcast feed. If you're wondering, a brief description of the difference between the two the mind and the brain is here.

Wayne

Welcome, daydreamers

You are coming right? All-access and individual passes are still available.

Wayne

Shocker! Albert Einstein really Marilyn Monroe

Scientific American has recently run a series on the neuroscience behind illusions, or how reality might not be what it appears to be. No kidding. Albert Einstein as Marilyn Monroe? Who knew?

Scientific American:

One of the most important tools used by neuroscientists to understand how the brain creates its sense of reality is the visual illusion. Historically, visual artists as well as illusionists have used visual illusions to develop deep insights into the inner workings of the visual system.  Long before scientists were studying the properties of neurons, artists had devised a series of techniques to “trick” the brain into thinking that a flat canvas was three-dimensional, or that a series of brushstrokes was actually a still life.

Visual illusions are defined by the dissociation between the physical reality and the subjective perception of an object or event. When we experience a visual illusion, we may see something that is not there, or fail to see something that is there, or even see something different from what is there. Because of this disconnect between perception and reality, visual illusions demonstrate the ways in which the brain can fail to recreate the physical world.

I'm thinking Teller might have something to show for this cognitive disconnect at the IdeaFestival. And as for the most unlikliest of transformations, just load the page and back far away from the computer.

Wayne

Image: Martian polar sunrise

At the polar north on Earth, the sun hangs low in the sky for a good portion of the year, and depending on latitude, may dip below the horizon for a short time. On Mars, the summer at the polar north where Phoenix is currently at work features similar a similar sun trek. In this image, our sun rises on the morning of Sol 90 following a 75 minute "night."

Click the image to enlarge.

Wayne

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University

Tagging social media at IF

If you're planning to attend and produce media on-site during the festival September 25-27, please tag your Web-bound posts, images and video with "IF08" (without quotes, of course) so that they're discoverable. In addition to making it easier for others to find your IdeaFestival-related stuff, I'd also like to reference it from here. And if you're new to all of this and interested in DIY publishing, ask me on site. I'm on the agenda for 10 minutes and will describe some of the nuts and bolts of blogging and how to take web feeds.

Wayne

New digital tribe discovered in the wired, wired west: us

In the wired age, retrospectives come early. Like David Weinberger's seminal 2004 suggestion that thanks to the Internet, "everything is miscellaneous," this Kansas State professor goes deep, deep, deep on mediated culture, providing an anthropological introduction to YouTube.

Weinberger suggested that there was a new order for ordering, that a "folksonomy" (as opposed to a formal, top down taxonomy) was emerging; Michael Wesch describes that new digital tribe.

Wayne

In praise of the news comic

Ethan Zuckerman reflects on recent research from the AP on the patterns of news consumption - or at least the news as consumed by several people who are the subject of an ethnographic study done on behalf of the AP. Ethan:

News consumers in the US get lots of facts, quickly updated and delivered through a variety of media. But they get very little backstory to help contextualize the facts delivered, and rarely get follow-up stories, or speculations about the future. All that seems true to me, but it’s hard for me to extrapolate that from the 18 interviews the researchers performed. The AP report makes it clear that this is the magic of ethnography - the invisible roots below the visible tree of interviews. To me, it sounds like a couple of smart anthropologists cogitating about the state of global journalism and offering a (potentially correct) diagnosis.

The concern is this - if there’s a deep desire for depth going unmet by contemporary journalism, a need to have stories followed through their resolution and explored as to their future implications, that’s a highly solveable problem. There are lots of journalists - most of them, I’d posit - who’d like to explain stories in more depth to readers. I’m having a hard time resolving the study’s evidence of people 'snacking' on news with a profound desire for depth.

I don't know if journalists will ever get paid to deliver the news in the kind of depth they would like.

But as mentioned by the study and by Ethan, if the stated aim of the AP study is to find out how disaggregated news is consumed by young people today, it could do a lot worse than looking to the Onion or - gasp! - cable television. Snacks don't have to be less filling. Perhaps that's why Jon Stewart is regarded, alongside the major news anchors, as one of the most trusted news men in America.

Wayne

Quantum entanglement exceeds speed (of light) limit

3quarksdaily: Scientists in Switzerland recently conducted another in a series of tests related to entanglement, the little understood quantum property whereby two entangled objects - in this case, photons - immediately share the same informational state once one of the objects is measured. In 2007 experiments, this "spooky action" was confirmed at a distance of 89 miles.

The Swiss test wanted to rate the speed at which this communication might take place. It turns out to be quite a bit faster than the speed of light, which raises questions about the nature of quantum communication since ordinary communication cannot exceed the universal speed limit of 186,000 miles per second.

In the everyday world, objects can organize themselves in just a few ways. For example, two people can coordinate their actions by talking directly with each other, or they can both receive instructions from a third source.

In both these cases, the information is communicated at or below the speed of light, in keeping with Einstein’s axiom that nothing in the Universe can go faster. But quantum mechanics allows for a third way to coordinate information (emphasis added)....

Scientific American - "Entanglement clocks in at 10,000 times the speed of light?" - has more on the story:

Theoretical physicist Terence Rudolph of Imperial College London, author of a commentary on the new paper, says that putting bounds on faster-than-light entanglement [which the Swiss experiment seems to have done] is useful for researchers trying to imagine theories that might extend beyond quantum mechanics.
 
What might such a theory look like? Rudolph says we're probably stuck with instantaneous entanglement, which seems impossible to us because we're stuck in everyday space and time. 'We need to understand how quantum mechanics sees space and time,' he says. 'I think there's probably much deeper issues.

In physics history, Einstein used the fact that communication was fast, but not infinitely fast, to question and to ultimately revolutionize Newtonian physics, which implied that gravitational effects were instantaneous over vast distances. Einstein's re-conception led to his spectacularly successful and empirically confirmed theories of special and general relativity, which show how space and time is a thing, bent and twisted.

In the current example, "quantum communication" may hint at limits subtler than those imposed by space and time, and, perhaps, at revolutions to come.

Wayne

Wikipedia: quantum entanglement

"R U Really Reading?"

A new debate is taking place in education circles that revolves around the media literacy debate that started after the introduction of the internet. Instead of "reading" like kids used to, kids are now getting their information in a quicker, more streamlined manner. Instead of sifting through tons of books and magazines for days and days to get sources for a research paper, students are able to look something up on the internet, read several quick summaries and decide which sources to use. It all happens in a split second as opposed to several hours.

The problem, according to some is not that students aren't reading, per se, but that the manner of reading internet text does not allow for a beginning, middle and end. This article in The New York Times, "R U Really Reading?" explains the controversy.

Personally, I hate it when my kids start saying, OMG WE (Oh my god mom whatever!)

Jeffrey Manber on "branding randomness" - IF Conversation

Can randomness be branded? As Yuzoz CEO Jeffrey Manber explains, the company taps events in space - the Northern Lights and solar flairs, for example - and turns that information into certified random numbers that can be used for a wide variety of purposes, from architectural design and music composition to the choice of lucky numbers.

Wayne