Strange Loops

How would you feel if law enforcement started scanning all of your email, your file transfers, and your web search history that Google and other companies keep (often going back years)? The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, is proposing just that. It’s for our security, he says.

Security, after all, is a trade-off. We know that staying home all day would generally increase our safety, but is it worth it? Banning cars would decrease traffic deaths immensely, but is it worth it? We face a multitude of situations like this that involving weighing increased security against its costs. (This is to set aside the many cases where security tactics are mere security theater, and may be counter-productive).

Security weighed against costs — unfortunately this common-sense notion has been used to promote a false dichotomy in United States discourse recently: “security versus privacy”. It’s assumed that the more we allow privacy, the more our security is undermined because Bad Guys^tm can take advantage of it, hide behind it. Making ourselves safe requires giving up some of the privacy we’ve expected up until now.

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Normally our bodies receive sensory input through eyes, ears, skin and other systems, and those inputs synch up in consistent ways, such that our brain can put it together into a coherent picture of the 3D world around and including us. My visual input is basically just a sterooscopic movie, but because it matches so well with tactile and other input (you feel the toe-pain of a rock right when you see that familiar foot object hit it), we interpret those images as us being inside a 3D world. Really we construct the world around us — and we presume our construction is veridical because it consistently predicts the matching up of sensory events (occasional illusions notwithstanding).

This makes perfect sense if, as we assume, we are bodies inhabiting a 3D world — bodies including brain systems that integrate sensory input from different feedback devices (including inner feedback from proprioception and the like). But if this is the case, then we should theoretically be able to disrupt or alter the brain processes that synch up our various sensory experiences, such that our consistent, 3D view of the world from our own body’s perspective is thrown out of whack. But what would happen, in that case?

We’re all familiar with claims of out-of-body experience such as, say, looking down on your own body from above. That is to say, some people report visual input that seems to locate itself in a spatial location within the 3D world that is not the same as usual. In fact, they may see an image of their own body, much like what we see in a mirror; except in the case of a mirror the various sensory modalities still match up. When seeing yourself in a mirror, the proprioceptive and muscular feedback of lifting your arms corresponds to visual feedback of the arms moving up in the mirror image, as well as peripherally seeing the arms come up as normal. In an out-of-body experience, however, the body could move (or not) in a way that doesn’t correspond to the changes in sensory (usually visual) input to the experiencer.
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Researchers in the U.S. and Japan successfully synched up a monkey’s brain with a robot across the world, and after about an hour of practice the monkey could control the robot’s legs while it walked on a treadmill.

First the scientists trained the monkey to walk on a treadmill, and electrodes monitored her brain signals during the activity. The brain signals predicted her leg movement in such a way that they could translate the signals into instructions for a bipedal robot in Japan on a similar treadmill.

The monkey was shown a live video of the robot’s legs while both walked on their own treadmill, and the monkey’s brain soon ‘tuned in’ to the robot’s leg movements. In fact, when they turned off her treadmill and she stopped walking, she continued to concentrate on the video screen, and sure enough, her neurons kept firing, controlling the robot’s movement. The robot kept walking, controlled from across the seas by a stationary monkey’s brain.
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Over enough time, molecules released into the air disperse pretty evenly (this is why polluting smoke-stacks are so tall, avoiding local pollution by dispersing the output more widely). It’s reasonable to assume, then, that whenever you breathe out, eventually those molecules from your breath end up spaced fairly uniformly around the Earth’s atmosphere.

That’s also the case for historical figures (for whom enough time has passed to really disperse their breaths well). So if, for example, Caesar’s last breath is spread around the atmosphere pretty uniformly, then what are the chances you are breathing part of that in right now, in this very breath?

According to common calculations, the chances are really good. Each breath you take, in fact, has a high chance of having some of Caesar’s last breath in it! (And the exhalations of Shakespeare and Hitler and Plato and the first human beings and…). How do we make such a calculation?
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“So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week’s potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago — a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of my brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out — there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.”
–Richard Feynman (The Value of Science)

Back in 1953, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution concluded from radio isotope tracings of chemicals entering and leaving the body that we replace around 98% of our bodies’ atoms every year or so.

Most of us are familiar with the cells in our body being replaced (the new daughter cells being made up largely of new food we take in). Skin cells slough off constantly and yet we retain skin. Hair is lopped off and new hair comes out. The stomach lining is replaced in a matter of days, the liver in weeks. An 18% yearly calcium replacement in the adult body replaces most of our bones in a few years. Neurons essentially stay for life (though adult neurogenesis sometimes replaces these).

But even those cells that are not replaced through duplication — even those holdout cells like neurons — have shifting make-up on the level of particles. New atoms flow in to replace old ones.

Now, we need not concern ourselves with whether or not every single atom actually gets replaced, or on what timeframe. We can at least be confident that a very large and significant amount of material in our bodies — even in our brains — was not there previously and won’t be there for very long. As Feynman put it, our bodies and brains are last week’s potatoes.

Obviously, this suggests that the individual atoms in our brains aren’t like packets of information holding memories or personality. Rather, the structure is what is important to cognition: whatever materials can instantiate that structure so as to carry out the computations and lead to the proper outputs are sufficient.
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At the Primate Research Institute in Japan, Ai is a chimpanzee in her thirties who has been involved in cognition research for decades. She’s well-known for learning to use our familiar numerals (1, 2, 3…) to appropriately label sets of objects (5 bananas, etc.), and she’s done some other really cool things with numerals and numbers.

What I didn’t know until recently is that she has a son, Ayumu, and he too is becoming quite the research superstar. A recent study demonstrated his talent for remembering an array of randomly mixed numerals on a computer screen, after they were very briefly flashed to him and then masked by white boxes. He had to touch each of the hidden numerals in order without a single mistake in order for a trial to be considered a success. This seems to show a pretty impressive working memory for visuo-spatial layouts, but does that mean Ayumu has something like eidetic memory (”photographic memory”)?

I don’t have the full article. However, previous studies with other chimps (including Biro and Matsuzawa’s 1999 study with his mother Ai) have shown that they “queue up” action sequences in a task like this, such that if the targets change/move in the middle of a trial, their fingers still briefly travel toward where the right answer would have been. Perhaps this is a demonstration of a pre-planned motor sequence, rather than anything like photographic memory.

One way to test this might be to remove one or more of the number locations completely (including the white box masking where it originally was flashed). If the chimp has a photograph-like visual of the layout in memory, then he should be able to continue the sequence by skipping over the missing numeral. But if he has pre-planned his actions in advance (as mother Ai did for a set of 3, 4 or 5 numerals), then his finger should still move to where the missing numeral disappeared.

Either way, if the task sounds easy, try it for yourself. (even with only 5 numerals, it’s pretty tough at first). The study compared college students’ performance to that of Ayumu, and the chimp won. Note that without access to the paper, it’s hard to know if the setup was truly the same. Ayumu almost certainly had a lot more practice than the college students (but then this is necessary to teach him what the task is, whereas humans can have instructions explained to them). Also, Ayumu’s numerals aren’t masked until he touches the first one (usually very quickly), but the college students’ might have been masked immediately after flashing (as the website demo with fewer numerals does).

At any rate, the experiment is a very impressive demonstration of a larger memory span than has been seen before in a setup like this. However that information is stored, it’s cool that he can do it.

[Thanks to Primatology.net for the game link]

The Catholic Church just announced an effort to train hundreds of priests to become exorcists. Apparently, right now “you have to hunt high and low for a proper, trained exorcist,” according to the Vatican’s Exorcist in Chief, Father Gabriele Amorth. You know, a proper, trained exorcist, as opposed to some schmuck merely reciting prayers to an archangel (the poor man’s exorcism, according to the Vatican). It’s just more magically powerful if a proper priest does it.

In case you forgot, Father Amorth is the guy who warned against the Harry Potter books because they try to distinguish between good and bad [fictional] magic, whereas he says any magic is a move toward the devil. Any magic, that is, except his own. Magic power words (prayers), magic water, and hand-waving magic gestures used to banish demons during an exorcism — those are okay, because they are done by trained professional magicians (priests).

By the end of 2005, Catholics numbered over 1.1 billion, about one-sixth of the entire world population. We are not talking about a small religious group, but one of the biggest out there. And their official body, representing their god and religion, is still back in the Dark Ages worrying about boogiemen possessing people. Why?

Is it because fear keeps people in the flock, and takes their mind off scandals like wide-spread child rape by church leaders?

If so, it’s a double-edged sword, because such fear makes people irrational, and when you feed into their irrational impulses with talk of magic and demons and other superstitions, you fuel a fire of stupidity that leads to deaths (note some exorcism-related deaths thanks to Wikipedia) and more scandals.

Of course, this sort of thing is not confined to Catholics. Many Muslims believe in possession by jinn (genies, invisible spirits made of smokeless fire). Scientologists work to exorcise possession by Body Thetans. But it’s especially popular among Evangelical Christians (a “big business”, estimated at around 500 such ministries in 2006).

A couple years back, I had a friend in the army. He told me stories about how himself and his Evangelical comrades in the barracks were involved not just in a war against another country, but in a real war against evil demons. This was apparently common belief among a large proportion of the barracks personnel, who claimed to experience the literal presence of demons involved in such shenanigans as opening and closing doors at night and moving objects around. No doubt more nefarious things would have occured were it not for the “strength in Christ” shared by these army guys. The same friend also told me once of an exorcism “successfully performed” on a member of his church, right down the street from where I lived at the time. The practice is not just for the rare group of nutcases; it’s surprisingly common (often hidden under the less conspicuous label “deliverance ministries” by Evangelicals).

The sad thing is that many of the victims of exorcism (note: victims of the practice itself, not victims of possession) have historically been people with some sort of real disorder (schizophrenia, epilepsy, Tourette’s, depression). Unfortunately, this faux treatment can keep them from getting real help (when it doesn’t directly threaten their lives, that is).

Maybe some people just need magic. The world is big and complex and scary, and believing in magic is an easy way to simplify everything. But it’s too bad that such a belief in magic can hurt innocent victims too.

Fear not, I have done my best to banish the bandwidth-eating demon of hotlinking, so that you, my dear reader, may safely once again peruse my collection of odd signs at the Introduction to Semiotics.

I’ve taken down the Funny Signs (Intro to Semiotics) page from the website. I logged in to find that in a single day, many gigs of bandwidth had been burned by someone hotlinking to my images there.

Initially, I tried to simply prevent hotlinking to images by altering my .htaccess file, but it turns out that also blocks RSS programs and breaks images on my own blog syndication. So I’m back to allowing hotlinking, and have just removed the files that tended to be linked to.

If someone finds a more elegant solution (say, allowing hotlinking to blog images but not main site images), please let me know.

or: You Didn’t Pay For What You Bought

When we buy an item at the store, there’s a price tag attached and we usually assume that price on the tag is made up of two things: the cost of making the item, and some amount added on for overhead, profit, etc. If we see a remarkably cheap item, like a complicated piece of electronics for mere pennies, we assume that efficient creation, cheap parts and mass selling make up for the small profit margin. And to some extent that is a valid picture.

However, more often than not, the price tag on the shelf does not actually reflect the real cost of the item we buy. The cost is, in fact, higher than what we pay. Sounds like a great deal, right?

It’s not. The reason companies get away with selling items at lower than the cost to produce them is because the companies externalize their costs. Now, externalization is a simple enough idea in general: let some third party do part of your business in a way cheaper than doing it yourself. For example, having the pros like FedEx do shipping for your business instead of doing it in-house can save lots of money. But that is only the surface of cost externalization, and what we are interested in is much more insidious.
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Someone in Maryland has been secretly replacing ipods inside their boxes with culture-jamming ransom-style notes.

Quote: “Reclaim your mind from the media’s shackles. Read a book and resurect[sic] yourself. To claim your capitalistic garbage go to your nearest Apple store.”

Personally, I think this little act of poetic terrorism is well-intentioned and pretty harmless, so I say more power to whoever is doing it, and may you continue your spree without getting caught. Yeah, it may have been an annoyance to the end consumers, but maybe it caught their (or someone else’s) attention. Getting someone to stop and think (or giggle) for a moment is worth slowing them down a day or two on their latest quest for expensive consumer goods.

[story via BoingBoing]