IdeaFestival

Alternate reality: Mile deep rubbish, mile wide fun

Why can't fun be practical? This video from the same group that brought you the "musical stairs" has three cognitive payoffs. When we think outside the (thumbtack) box, new and better outcomes are possible. Maybe a rubbish bin can be something much more. And maybe a big game set in the real world, Kentucky even, can have beneficial outcomes, as well as be a complete blast.

I'll be tweeting tomorrow's Alternate Reality Games workshop in Lexington. Follow @ideafestival for the latest.

Wayne

Bonus entry from Wikipedia: Functional fixedness

"Satisficed"

Via Johnnie Moore, this suggestion: do satisfied people make better decisions?

Wayne

Cymatics, the sight of sound

Working its way from idea to lab to nascent technology, Cymatics is the study of how sound lends shape.

While an unfamiliar idea to most, a very human analog might found in "Born on a Blue Day" author Daniel Tammet, who has written at length on his ability to see numbers as color and shape. He provides a rare first person narrative into how mixed media can lead to creative possibilities and life enhancing technologies alike.

Perhaps people will even be able to see with their tongue.

Think about this. Knowing what something might have sounded like based on its physical properties might provide physicists with a 13 billion year old vantage on an event like the Big Bang, as Evan Grant suggests in this TED video. Check out the video below and others linked recently by Emerging Tech blogger Chris Jablonski.

Wayne

Study: the IdeaFestival will extend your life

Clinically defined as "same thing, different day," or "again?," boredom has been identified as a serious health risk. The IdeaFestival is here to help.

Wayne

Am I Machine enough for Deep Blue?

[This blog entry was originally posted in 2007, but expresses my continuing fascination with what makes us human. Other favorites may be found on the left side of the blog, "Inside."]

Cognitive Daily: does beating humans in chess qualify machines as creative? While noting that we have a habit of moving the goalposts on these human v. machine challenges, Dave Munger says he's unwilling to bet against it. He also links to a post from Jonah Lehrer of Seed Magazine, who argues that efficiency ought to be considered when thinking about the "humanity" of Deep Blue.

I'm a little more skeptical of Deep Blue's psychological realism. The set of linked mainframes was capable of analyzing over 200 million possible chess moves per second. Kasparov's brain, on the other hand, only evaluated about five moves per second. This difference in processing power leads to profound differences in computational efficiency. Deep Blue is a fire hazard, and requires specialized heat-dissipating equipment to keep it cool during chess matches. Meanwhile, Kasparov barely breaks a sweat. His biological computer is a model of efficiency. So that's one thing evolution gets you.

Knowing what we know about the indispensability of emotion to thought, sentient or reflective action may not depend at all on crunching the numbers. In his book, Reconstructing the Cognitive World, Michael Wheeler argues that biology rather than sheer brainpower endows us with creativity and that a philosophy of mind focused on reason applied to brain representation is somewhere north of the point. Our bodies make meaning.

Once I can sum up some of Wheeler's thinking, I'll pass it along here.

Frankly, I am not sure that I'd recognize a truly creative machine If I encountered one, but intelligence - not to speak of humanity - is surely found in carbon, not silica. And as Lehrer suggests, functional accounts of intelligence might ascribe thoughtfulness to machines but it also, sadly, lowers the standard for intelligent behavior in one significant way.

The fact is, I'm not machine enough to avoid dumb mistakes. Will Deep Blue have pity on me?

Wayne

Link miscellany: Barbie, Elon and the historic algorithm

Big ideas culled from the IdeaFestival feed reader.

• Paleomathematics: Manuscript from 1940's lays out Google's page rank algorithm.
• Swivel charts the Olympic medal count.
• For her 126th career, Barbie will be a computer engineer.
• 3-D printing is making its way from big idea to big lab to the garage lab. Tinkerers experimenting today clay 3-D prints, for example, could create whole new markets.
• While used in the context of game design, this quote is widely applicable: "The opposite of play is not work, it's depression."
• With a mission to see cold objects near and far with its infrared vision, the space observatory WISE is returning unprecedented sights, and in the case of the furtherest images, going way back in time. The one above that can be credited to NASA.
• While addictive behaviors have been widely studied, is there a science of recovery?
• Is gravity an emergent principle that can be compared to elasticity?
• Elon Musk may well play a big role in whether the newly announced policy of using private enterprise to ferry humans to and from low Earth orbit is successful.
• "If you find that most of what you do is a struggle, this is a sure sign that you are not at your most creative and productive." Here's some sound advice on productivity.
• Ethan Zuckerman asks whether Sumo will ever globalize. Cultural openness has value.
• How might the in-flight brain recordings from the fruit fly be useful? And what about animal consciousness? Finally, in a completely unrelated video
• John Cleese explains the brain.

Wayne

Lemon-scented ethics

Can that nice smell make you more ethical?

That’s the provocative suggestion of a recent study in the journal Psychological Science. A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game. In another experiment, the smell of cleanser made subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity.

While Proctor and Gamble is unlikely to hire one to market its brands, philosophers have long discussed the phenomenal character of experience, largely focusing on sight and its non-reductive character. The famous thought experiment featuring "blind Mary," or our inability to correlate the thrill of seeing our significant other with a molecule-for-molecule brain state point to the special nature of experience and its unique contribution to knowing. As it turns out, scent, too, has a place in that literature.

"What it is to be like" under the influence of recently spritzed citrus-scented cleanser? Only you really know. And armed with a lemon zester, someone, somewhere has a plan.

Wayne

Four billion miles distant, Earth is a pale blue dot

Click this image to see Earth as it appeared nearly twenty years ago from Voyager's vantage as it sped away from our planet on its way out of the solar system. According to a story at NPR,

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab used to have... a display with the full mosaic of photos posted up in an auditorium, says [Candice] Hansen-Koharcheck [who discovered the iconic image as she sat looking at data being returned by the craft]. 'And to show the whole thing it covered, oh, I don't know, 12 or 14 feet,' she says — of mostly empty black space, with just a few pinpricks of light showing the planets. One of them was labeled Earth.

'One of the guys that took care of that display told me one time that he was forever having to replace that picture,' says Hansen-Koharcheck, 'because people would come up to look at it and they would always touch the Earth.'

And Voyager? The doughty metal ship is entering the interstellar medium, further from Earth than any other made object, ever, and still phoning home over the vanishing distance.

Wayne

Garden and self

Renowned for embodying a sense of calm, Japanese gardens can provide relief for sufferers of Alzheimer's, according to anecdotal data collected by the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers, and linked by Futurity.org.

Wayne

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27398485@N08/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

There's an app for that? Trust

The infamous example of HAL aside, how far should we trust our artificial assistants? A NewScientist column on innovation asks that question and a few others about a new phone app that can take spoken commands and reserve, for example, a table at that fabulous new restaurant with very little further input from you. One issue raised by the min-review of the artificial intelligence in "Siri" is trust. It depends on context and, in the example here, an ability to pick out meaning rather than just keywords.

For some industrial strength reasoning about trust, check out this Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry. Or simply read All's Well that Ends Well.

Wayne