gringo Agave -don-E's thoughts

Why I Believe in Santa: The Untold Story

2011-12-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes we take a short sighted view on what is really true. We become obsessed with illusion that we can really "know" the universe. And this leads to conclusions that certain items aren't real when the evidence of their power lurk all around us. I am of the opinion if something changes the world it is real. And Santa is one of those things.

I know there isn't any land at the North Pole, let alone a fat man in a red suit with turbo charged reindeer and pool of free elf labor. But it doesn't matter, Santa magic works anyway. He is alive and well inside everyone who plays the game. And the game teaches a powerful lesson in an unique way.

Once you had been sent gifts by Santa you are part of the tradition. In the TV show Third Watch there was a powerful episode where a homeless girl calls out the police officer Sulley for his dislike of Christmas. "You forgot what it was like. You forgot what it was like to have a person who was going to fly around the world and deliver a present just to you." In the end of course, Sulley hadn't forgot. He had only been distracted by the naysayers. He did remember and by remembering he felt the touch of Grace and its transformative nature.

Santa gifts are sent to kids, who have no means to get them any other way. They are gifts they can't be repaid to the giver. They are gifts of Grace in shining wrapping paper. And gifts of Grace transform us in ways that nothing else can.

The kids don't get it while they believe, they just feel the joy. And that joy is a seed that grows in them into a need to pay it forward and make sure everyone gets that feeling. It sprouts up in buses filled with toys for those we fear won't get that feeling because their parents, or their lack of parents, can't afford it.
Santa leads people to endless bell ringing in the cold windy dark winter. Santa leads people to do things that they don't do for 11 months a year. Santa is empathy that lies asleep in our everyday lives. A place most of us usually give a meer trickle of a thought sprouts bright with light in the dark days of the Winter Solstice.

So you might say there is no such thing as Santa but I do remember that feeling. And so I believe.

The Arizona Purple Frog and Why We Should Take Up Ayn Rand On Her Offer

2011-11-13T17:30:00.001-08:00

I am not sure if I am a Occupy Wall Street guy or not, mainly I can’t quite figure out what they believe. But I understand the frustration of people who are tired of having rich guys pay their way out of trouble. As Al Lewis says in this weekend Wall Street Journal Supplement :“Either the SEC is a thuggish extortion racket, shaking down private corporations for hundreds of millions of dollars with baseless allegations, or some of America’s biggest companies have evolved into the world’s most sophisticated crime syndicate. “ I am would probably go with the later, as does Lewis when he say’s “They pay millions for the privilege of stealing billions, while the regulators take bows, arguing that civil fines represent an efficient form of justice.” Luckily one judge, Jed Rackoff, has at least stopped and given a pause to this practice, possibly from all of the noise caused by the Occupy movement.

Some of the movement seems to be total free market and parts seems to be anti-bank and anti-capitalist. You can’t really both, banks are who make money in a capitalist economy, the rest of us are just exchanging services. Banks take money that they “buy” from the Federal Government and invest in a ratio that is governed by the assets they hold. This new money is what creates new businesses. Financial Services have done a really bad job of this lately and brought most of the free world down with their folly. Their problem was thinking that they give credit, they don’t --credit is earned. Playing loose with the rules is no different than going to Vegas and betting it all on red. But the problem is we have gotten what is or isn’t capitalism mixed up.

Prices –you have one

Price is what drives a free market economy. Prices are information that tell us how you feel about things. Capitalism is driven by prices. The fact that you don’t own the safest car tells us you have a basic price for the amount of safety you desire. Even if you do own the safest car on the road, you are still OK with other people paying a low price of safety. One of the problems in a capitalist society (and why a pure one won’t work-but I will get to that) is that public goods are free of price but not free of a cost. The article “The City As A Distorted Price System” blew me away when I was an undergraduate studying the economics of Baltimore at Towson State. The traffic problem is a problem of a free goods, no one stops and considers it’s cost. So you have crowded streets in city that cost time and frustration and in turn money. People back in D.C. know that people will pay money for less traffic because in Virginia because there is a toll road that runs along side a free road and it does fairly well. Public goods cost are a tough pickle in every society but one of the trickiest in a capitalist society. So what should we do? I think Ayn Rand had the answer, though it was not the answer she came up with!

Ayn ain’t so bad but…

Before I rip Ayn Rand, let me note that she is an easy person to dislike but she does have some good points. Ayn Rand tried to prove humans have undeniable rights and did a fairly decent job. She also pointed out that people have two basic choices in life to deal with each other, Money or Guns, and that is the conclusion the scientist Steven Pinker came up with his book The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. She also noted that the 60s movements would lead to the force answer and once again Pinker has the stats in his book to back up that the 60s were a time when violence took an odd upswing. She also noted that Big Business are a persecuted minority which is true, though not like they imagine. But she feel short on a couple points and this leads to an error in her conclusions.

First off she has the belief that a person who becomes an industrialist would be good at everything. I hear people spout this nonsense at graduations all the time, “You have learned that you can anything.” If you learned that you need to go back to school, what you should have learned is that you are better are certain things and get more value by doing the things you are good at doing. Rand had a romantic notion that a smart person would be good at anything and that is what she created her characters to be, people who can do anything. But Capitalism requires people to do the thing they are best at and trade with other people who something else good.

Her second error is similar to her hero Aristotle who fell for the same mistake. This example is usually used with bears and people miss the point so I have come up with a new spin on a classic:

How valid is the following conclusion?

Frogs in Arizona are purple.

Billy found a frog in Arizona.

Billy’s frog is purple.

The conclusion of course is not valid because the first statement is undeniably wrong. Logic only works if the premises it relies on are true. As we geeks say,”Garbage in, garbage out.”

So Ayn’s second problem is that a few of her assumptions are just flat out wrong. Humans are not logical, they can make mistakes with perfect information. So you can’t conclude that when a person does something that it is their best option. And this here is the most damning assumption because if people can be incorrect in their beliefs of what is best for them, you can’t say that them “taking a deal” is proof that they are better off with the transaction. But oddly enough, Ayn’s hero John Galt has the answer to our problems.

John Galt has a huge tax bill

In Atlas Shrugged, the premise is the hero, John Galt, escapes away to a utopia where people pay for their exchanges. If a person wants something they should be willing to pay someone a price for the good. So let’s look at how John Galt got his money. An industrialist requires a lot of goods they didn’t pay for or expect to pay for. First, off you need an educated public. Since the majority didn’t pay for their education but you are willing to pay a price for this, let’s start off the tally with a payment to a public fund for education. Since a successful industry has lots of people, this will be pretty large. Second, you need a legal system to enforce the laws. Military, police, court and especially copyright law will be a pretty big cost. If you don’t think you need it, then go on over to Chad or some other system without a stable military and police force and try making your product. Third, an industrialist needs an infrastructure of roads, highways, ships and cars to sell the amount of product to make a commodity profitable. You also need an infrastructure for employees to allow them to live in proximity to work for you. You can follow this logic further as Robert Frank does in his book The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition and the Common Good (who shreds Rand’s arguments with her premises with sound economic logic) but I will leave it here. My point here is simple, if a person claims to want to pay a fair amount, they must conclude that should pay for public goods.

Tea For Two

The Tea party claims they shouldn’t have to pay taxes. They say we need to cut spending. However there are times, especially now, when not spending money raise the deficit. Sometimes paying for stuff on credit saves money in the long run. The most obvious example, which I pull from Frank’s book, is paying for roads in Nevada. If you wait until you have more money to fix the roads, they cost 18% more than they would now. Therefore, if you borrow money now at 5%, you are saving in the long term. So if you believe that public infrastructure is something that should be a good, you have to conclude deficit spending would be good in this case. The problem is when we cut taxes, we actually end up making the waste percentage go up.

People are elected with large donations from people with large wallets that expect payback. This is a fixed cost in our system, so less money total means less money for legitimate items. If people pay for something, they expect something for their money. The only way around this scenario is to not let people pay a lot of money to people who are running for office but I don’t see that happening any time soon. It is not politically feasible but I do have an interesting political item that maybe the Occupy people could push enough to make it feasible.

Incorporate and Ditch

I was appalled on a recent 60 minutes to see the head of Cisco claim that the taxes are too high and so he has hide his cost in Switzerland taxes. Of course, he says that from his office in the United States. He, and his company, is a free loader, flat and simply. He wants to dine and they sneak off without the bill because another restaurant has a smaller check. He claimed that the U.S. should lower its corporate tax laws. I got a better idea, how about we stick these cowards with the check. The solution is simply, any corporation that first incorporated in the U.S. and then moved out of the U.S. would face stiff barriers for entry of all of their products. If Cisco wants the educated public of the United States and bask in our prosperity but not pay for it, well, you can pay for each item that you “import” into the country. You don’t’ want to be part of this country, it is time to put your money where your mouth is. There will be plenty of people who have a new competitive advantage from your tariffs and they will pay their share. Plus, we could make a very public spectacle of this and have people on the list of “tax” dodgers. And let the boycotts fall where they may.

So if Occupy Wall Street wants to do something like this, I guess I am down with them. However, you have to remember that if you want a free economy, you need to pay for what you get. Because in the long run, somebody does.

The upside of hypocrisy

2011-11-06T22:00:00.001-08:00

Hypocrisy has gotten a bad rap. And I admit I am one who has played the hypocrisy card before to note the lack of consistency of people’s arguments. But not anymore, hypocrisy is a godsend and I fully condone the lack of inconsistency of people’s values, especially the religious ones. If people really believe the crap that they say they believe in, the world would be a pretty sad place. But luckily, people have stopped going to the logical conclusion of their confounding views. This is one of the amazing insights I learned from Steven Pinker’s latest book The Better Angels of Ourselves: Why Violence Has Declined.

Getting better, really???

The premise of the book is that we are living in a time with an unprecedented low level of violence. I just lost of few of you right there with mental retorts such as what about WWII? Vietnam? Insert violent tragedy here. He knows you won’t believe him, so he goes through the history of humans from prehistory to present and dissects his points one by one. He is a good scholar and is very detail oriented. I would normally say go ahead and read about the evidence, and you can. However, let me warn you that a non rose colored view of our past is very disturbing. I will never hear the term “drawn and quartered” in the same way again. As he noted and I agree I wouldn’t do some of the stuff that was a public spectacle for everyone to enjoy to the worst person I can imagine. As L.P. Hartley notes and Pinker reiterates “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. “

The sad fact is that the people of the middle ages were more consistent with their beliefs. As Pinker notes:

Institutionalized torture in Christendom was not just an unthinking habit; it had a moral rationale. If you really believe that failing to accept Jesus as one’s savior is a ticket to fiery damnation, then torturing a person until he acknowledges this truth is doing him the biggest favor of his life: better a few hours now than an eternity later. And silencing a person before he can corrupt others, or making an example of him to deter the rest, is a responsible public health measure. Saint Augustine brought the point home with a pair of analogies: a good father prevents his son from picking up a venomous snake, and a good gardener cuts off a rotten branch to save the rest of the tree.35

Pinker, Steven (2011-10-04). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Kindle Locations 656-661). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Luckily, people aren’t that consistent in their actions and beliefs. Again Pinker notes:

[The] people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful.

Pinker, Steven (2011-10-04). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Kindle Locations 666-668). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

So when people like Bill Maher complain that perfectly rational people somehow believe these illogical things, as he does in his movie about religion, you need to say that is ok. Let them spout their ideas but lets just make sure they don’t make these points some action items to be done by Thursday. Because if history is teacher (Ok, it really isn’t, just a figure of speech), the antics of the hypocrites are pretty mild.

The downside of utopia

But Maher goes too far and states that religion is dangerous. It is really a idea of a perfect world that is the danger. The big 3 killers in the 20th century were not religious but secular but they peddled a very tempting caret. If you want to kill someone, you need a good idea. The idea has to be about a perfect place because that makes the economics of the idea work. If someone complains, their needs versus the perfect place makes an easy decision. Kill them for the good of all.

Note that any utopia would do. And we can see now that throwing in some extra virgins is a nice touch for utopia conscious radicals today. Of course, this shows one of the problems with the old ways. In short, guys are assholes who believe in honor and will kill you if you don’t believe it. But before I get too sarcastic, let me break down Pinker’s argument in USA Today form.

The dance to peace

Pinker’s argument is complex and full of maybes, so if you are looking for easy answers from someone who is sure of things, don’t bother. In other words, this book won’t be on FOX news any time soon. But here is basically the argument in a nutshell.

Humans were very violent in prehistory just likes our bros the Pan family. Slowly Leviathan states emerged and started a slow reduction of violence by being the better bullies. Ideas like manners started to give us the idea that we could control ourselves. Reading comes along and allows us to actually be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. This leads to the ideas of the Enlightenment and rights. Nationalism comes along to mess things up for awhile but the liberal ideas of person hood prevail. In fact, the ideas expand and bring about the removal of slavery, women suffrage, race equality, animal rights, children’s rights and gay rights. We also pick the ability to reason more abstractly and unites some of the Leviathans and start to limit the power the Leviathans.

Pinker is no Pollyanna and knows that there are huge problems to our current world and it is no utopia. But he sheds insight on the facts of how we have it pretty good compared to the ancestors and that we should be grateful. But along the way he also shows us when it is not to be ok with hypocrisy.

A line in the sand with Elton John

Pinker shows that there is a line that can’t be passed by or it could lead us back to the bad old days. The line is a very American idea that we picked up in the Enlightenment and have slowly start to realize with radical leaders like ML King.

A person is a sovereign being and as long they don’t hurt anyone else, they should be left to be. That is why I can’t ever let the Christian gay bashing stand because they have tried to remove or limit the rights of people. Ok, you don’t have to believe in Evolution. The people who matter believe in it and save your stupid self. But you can’t reverse the rights of people or try to spin your tribal crap to limit their rights. Christian nation is a bad word. Heck, American nation is a bad word. We are not a nation, people of a tribe, we are a people. A flag or a commitment to God is not our claim to fame. We thought long and hard and put our best thoughts to paper in a Constitution. Because we did that we were able to eventually see the errors of our ways and are closer to people being equal in the eyes of the law than anyone could probably imagine. IN GOD WE TRUST. I don’t think so. In reason we trust. And you know what, we have gotten pretty good results from it.

A tale of two technocrats: Steve and Bill

2011-10-24T22:19:00.001-07:00

When I had graduated from college, I took up the task to make a list of people whom I admired due to a suggestion from a book by Dale Carnegie. Steve Jobs was on the top of the list. I didn’t own a Macintosh but I yearned for one. And in reality everything that Steve was selling I was buying. Steve Jobs sold dreams and it was a dream I wanted to own, to change the world.

Bill Gates never claimed he wanted to change the world. He wanted to build and sell software. Bill was an engineer. He was a nerd. I never really wanted to be Bill Gates. He was Darth Vader and Steve was Luke Skywalker.

It is so odd that now that Steve is dead and we take note of the changes that have happened due to these two visionaries, I have come to a surprising conclusion.

1984

The Best of Steve and the worst of Steve

Steve Jobs did change the world. Steve had a vision of the relationship between humans and technology that is unparalleled. Steve could take a complex idea and make it simple. Because of that, the list of items that he helped to create is truly mind blowing. Apple II, the Mouse, Object Oriented Programming, Graphical Interfaces, Desktop Publishing, Macintosh, Newton, Computer Animated Cartoons (Pixar), iPod, iPhone, and iPad is list unequaled by anyone. In fact, the computer company that he created after being kicked out of Apple, NeXT, was the type of computer that created the world wide web. This places him on every considerable important technological breakthrough of my life.

Everyone agrees that his methods pretty much made him an asshole. He was hard to work with and disrespectful of people. He had a problem with authority. However, the problem he always had was when he wasn’t the authority. When he was the authority, he was

OK with the idea. He marched to his own drumbeat but sometimes that meant he danced alone. But when we he worked his magic we all couldn’t help but watch and smile.

The worst of Bill and the best of Bill

Bill Gates was a programmer. He wrote code and had the vision to know that he should drop out of Harvard to start a company that could only be a success at that moment. He did the dirty work and created something that didn’t exist. He was a man of details. He sometimes did things that caused people to despise him. He was known to not play fair. Many thought he was trying to take over the software industry to rule with an iron fist from his Redmond office.

Bill Gates is now a philanthropist. He is a billionaire. He gives away large sums of money to help change real tangible problems. Bill is changing the world. However, his approach is not as sexy as Steve. He uses money to solve problems like health issues in the 3rd world. He puts his money where we never knew his mouth would be.

Change for whom?

So the conclusion is obvious that both of these men have changed the world. But the worlds they changed are quite different. Steve has changed the world for the middle class and Bill has changed the world for the voiceless. As Johnny Test says in every cartoon, “I didn’t see that coming…”

Steve changed the world for people who could pay his price. All of his products are overpriced, even today. I have an iPad and MacBook because my work gave them to me. I would never ever pay the price for this devices because they are not worth it. We want Steve’s products because he is cool and if we have them we are cool too. But coolness has its price…

Bill changed the world for the people who could pay no price. His charities are changing the world for people that none of us know about. Bill is once again about the details and keeping the vision to himself, though is slowly letting that be known.

His own worst enemy

Steve for all of his vision is really his own worst enemy. His characteristics that make him an amazing visionary make him an amazing jerk. Steve is the perfect mix of the hippy culture and Silicon Valley and has all the virtues and vices of both. He is a millionaire that doesn’t care about money. He let his own opinions override the doctor’s recommendations for surgery and it more than likely cost him his life.

He actually never did the detail work on any of his products, he was actually a rotten engineer, yet was always accusing other of stealing his ideas. He is even doing it now from his grave claiming Google stole his ideas from the iPhone.

It’s just Steve being Steve.

Steve would speak so eloquently that he would always lift my spirit and make me remember what is so great about being alive. For example:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works.

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

I'm an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Technology is nothing. What's important is that you have a faith in people, that they're basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they'll do wonderful things with them.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

But there is one quote that I find terribly disturbing that I heard him say on 60 minutes.

You are born alone and you die alone.

This is both empirically and spiritually wrong. You are never born alone, there is always at least one person helping you come into this world and has helped grow to a point of departure. And if you are lucky, as Steve was, there will people with you when you die. And as the cliché goes no one ever thinks on their death bed that I should have spent more time at work. It bothers me that Steve didn’t seem to think that. He was at Apple trying to change things for strangers until the very end. The latest iPad is not that important in the long run.

How can someone be so visionary and so blinded to his own journey?

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve always had trust in his vision and in the end, he went down with the ship. When I connect the dots, I am a little disappointed in my hero. His arrogance has robbed us of what he would do next and in the end I am not sure he understood the beautiful poetry that fell from his lips like manna from heaven. But in the end the love he gave to the world is more than he took and I am thankful for his vision. So I guess I just want to thank him for inspiration and the lessons he taught me, good and bad. He gave us great times and we are the worst for his departure. R.I.P. Steve Jobs.

Haboob has nothing to do with anatomy

2011-07-06T22:47:00.001-07:00

It is very interesting to see the terms Dust Storm and Haboob merge today on Wikipedia. If you have never looked at the history tab on Wikipedia check out this one as it interesting. The change from Haboob being localized from Sudan to Northern Africa/Middle East to everywhere is documented in the history. Also fun to note the first stub reads “boobies boobies boobies.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Haboob&action=history

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dust_storm&action=history

A few weeks ago I was looking up the causes of a dust storm and saw this word and thought it was odd. I asked a bunch of people and no one heard it before. Today everyone and their grandmother is using it.

I think it will be interesting to follow this google ad words query in the next couple of weeks.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=haboob%2Cduststorm%2C+dust+storm&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=1

Plus, interesting how the word has evolved recently in the book world.

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=haboob%2Cduststorm%2C+dust+storm&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=1

Now, when people want to talk about a dust storm they Google it and what Wikipedia says becomes gospel. They use the “unique term” to sound smart and it spreads. The AMC claims the term means “A dust or sandstorm caused by the downdraft of a desert thunderstorm.” Does anyone know if that latest Phoenix sand storm was caused by a downdraft of a desert storm?

Could the new high battle ground be he who controls Wikipedia or the Google algorithm? He who edit last controls the truth…

The Skittles-PP Equilibrium or Why Economics is hard to predict

2011-07-05T20:51:00.001-07:00

Steven Leavitt had a problem. His young daughter was refusing to become potty trained and his wife was at his wit’s end. Leavitt intervened with an economic solution because he is an economist. Economics is about incentives, he just needed to find the proper motivation and he found Skittles to be his daughter’s favorite. So he made the bribe, every time you go to the potty in the proper fashion, you get Skittles. Quickly, his daughter towed the line and Leavitt gloated of his brilliance. Then something went astray. His daughter who did not have the bladder control a week ago could now squirt out what was once one session into multiple sessions to get more Skittles. Leavitt, the author of the Freakonomics books and an economist at the University of Chicago, tells of this story as an example of why economics is a tricky science.

There’s Easy and There’s Easy

The truth is always hard to discern and part of it is just the mere dynamics of systems. For example, the weather cycle is a simple system but because of the relationships of the variables to each other a minor change can cause a qualitative change,.i.e. the Butterfly effect. The science of complexity was born from a model simulation of the weather when the scientist took a shortcut and left a minor digit off a fraction

. (See http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0140092501/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1309919214&sr=1-2 for more details on this concept.)

So simple systems usually don’t stay simple in their results. And due this fact an odd truth emerges. The truth of simple systems is they give complex results and thus the truth is complicated. And that’s a good general rule of thumb, if the hypothesis is simple and clean, it has a high probability of being incorrect or incomplete. If it has a tons of conditions, the probability of truth is higher.

(For a detailed explanation of this concept, please see http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us---Scientists-relationship-consultants/dp/0316023787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309919046&sr=8-1 or http://www.amazon.com/Being-Wrong-Adventures-Margin-Error/dp/0061176052/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1309919046&sr=8-3 )

Economics is one of these simple systems with complex end results. The problem is people want easy answers. Similar to Bart Simpson who claimed his opponent “thinks there are no easy answers. I think he isn’t looking hard enough!”, all types of politicians and pundits claim an easy fix. The economic system is an easy to understand system:

People who create items of worth for people who have something to exchange for items of worth creates wealth.

Of course, you can see this quickly recurses upon itself and becomes a infinite loop of possibilities. Because this is a very hard to predict and more importantly control, and so this has been simplified to a couple of often used shortcuts.

John Maynard Keynes is dead

John Maynard Keynes proposed a simple solution. When inflation heats up, raise the cost of money, and when employment becomes a problem. lower the cost of money. His critics pointed out that in the long run, inflation would be a problem. His response was in the long run we are all dead. Now it is true, that JMK is dead, we aren’t and live with the consequences. As Nixon claimed “We are all Keynesians now.” And the fact that inflation has distorted the world economy and created “lumpy” money is just what his critiques predicted. Oddly enough the idea of “Stagflation (inflation and unemployment)” quickly emerged due to the OPEC crisis in the 70s yet no one seemed to notice this obvious sign that Keynes was using a simplification that was in fact false.

Ayn Rand is dead too

Ayn Rand is famous for a simple idea “Pure Capitalism is the key to a just society.” In her defense she said that that capitalism couldn’t exist without a rational populace, but she wasn’t a real stickler for details either. When I hear people campaign that (Pick either Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, or any other word ending with ism) is the answer or the problem to (insert problem), I have one reaction. The person is a ideologue who isn’t interested in any empirical science. The first obvious retort to any of these is that not one of these ‘isms” have ever existed in a pure form. So sentences like “when America was Capitalist we were better off” or “Since (insert Scandinavian country) is Socialist they are better off”, I can only roll my eyes. Once again the true answer is easy and complicated. Every economy on Earth is a mixed economy, the differences are only in degree. To say any different is to take a strong stand against the empirical evidence. And saying X country is better/worse off is an aggregate that you pick your facts to prove your point. So this is crap thinking pure and true. So what is the proper thinking? Well, let’s go dancing with the stars.

Samba Economics

Brazil wasn’t touched by the financial crisis of 2008 which is an odd fact that illustrates the dynamics of an economic system. As Silva stated on 60 minutes, it took a socialist to bring capitalism to Brazil. Brazil figured out a great answer to the question that had great political and economic consequences. There were lots of poor people in the country, they gave them a stipend. This poor didn’t have basic durable goods, think washers, dryers and other capital consumer items, and Brazil had people who could create these needed items from the resources that existed. People who have something to sell meet people who have money and voila you have economic happiness. Note without the government pushing money to the poor, this doesn’t happen. And note that if they didn’t have the knowhow to build these goods, this doesn’t happen either. The answer isn’t pushing money to people if they don’t really have a need to buy what people are selling. So though I appreciated the money earlier in the decade I wasn’t surprised it didn’t do much for the economy.

So what is the answer to our problems

In reality, I don’t have the answer. But I do have suggestions and warnings against some obvious things that won’t work. Let’s start at home.

A regressive tax (retail tax) is never an answer in a bad economy. The fact that AZ gives back retail tax at the end of the year via the long AZ140 form makes it even more stupid and more regressive. Taken more money from those with less money won’t fix anyone’s problem. The proof in the pudding of course, the schools still need money-we need to look somewhere else.

Pushing more money into the economy without making anything else just causes inflation. Got to have a plan to push that money into an industry that capitalize some resources we aren’t using (like those who are still unemployed or those who are overeducated for their current employment). I like some of the Prez’s idea but I don’t think there is a glut of individuals with green technology skills to save us so that won’t do the trick. Time for some crazy ideas like a census of talents of those who are unemployed and some targeted industrial incentives, not just mo’ money. But then again there are too sides to the equation, the question to answer is what do people want that we have the ability to create but aren’t and how do we get them making it. I admit, I don’t know what that is. But let’s start to ask the right question and stop doing stuff that hasn’t worked before.

The Story Amplification Consequence or Why A Good Story Leads Us Astray

2011-05-28T15:26:00.001-07:00

Chris Mullin sat in the ESPN studio after hearing Nick Fridell’s arguments on why Derrick Rose was not the MVP of the NBA. The fact that he didn’t have the most statistically dominate year and that his team actually had a better plus-minus ratio (net points) when he was NOT playing. Mullin, an all time great, listened and then summed it up in a very common way.

“I don’t know about all of that but I know what my eyes see and Rose is the best.”

Mullin’s statements were in the majority and Rose was awarded the MVP. Fridell claimed that the reason Rose was considered the MVP was that he had the best story line. The reasons for Mullin’s eyeball estimates are very common and a natural consequence of normal human thinking that we all engage in. They are highly irrational but as Dan Ariely notes they are predictably irrational. Mullin’s thinking could summed up in this way. Chicago was mediocre last year, this year they had the best record in the NBA, Derrick Rose has improved this year and is the best player on the team. Derrick Rose is the cause of the Chicago Bulls having the best record in the NBA and thus the most valuable player this year. There a few things wrong with this argument but first let’s start an experiment to demonstrate the issue.

Let’s start an experiment

Ok, this experiment is easy. I will give you some sets of three numbers and you need to figure out the pattern. After I give you a set of numbers write down what you think the pattern is and a couple of other examples that might be in future sets and how confident you are of your hypothesis. I am warning you ahead of time, the pattern is the easiest answer.

{2,4,6}{4,6,8},{6,8,10}

Ok, write down your thoughts. Remember don’t overthink it. Pattern, future examples and confidence level.

Back to our story

One of our biggest weakness in understanding phenomenon is that we are always looking for a cause of the phenomenon. We are very blind to the products of randomness. Sports is really a beautiful illusion and we see causes where randomness would better explain things. The illusion of a “hot” shooter is one of the best. The idea of a hot shooter is an illusion and was proven experimentally to not exist (Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky). But anyone who has played and watched basketball knows that it really seems like a person is just hot. I can recently remember thinking that Kevin Durant just can’t miss in a recent playoff game. The reason is partly a bias in the way that we look at things, we are skewed to look for a pattern.

We always look for examples to prove our point and ignore examples that don’t support our point. Show me a baseball player that has a hit in 5 of his last 6 at bats in August and I will show you a batter who has hit in 5 of his last 7 at bats. Show me a hitter in August that is 1 in his last 10 at bats and I will probably show you a hitter that is 2 of his last 11 at bats. You see 5 of 6 is a better story than 5 of 7 and 1 of 10 is better than 2 of 11. That natural instinct to make meaning in sets of data is a natural instinct and is ground into us from evolution’s mortal consequences.

Let’s look at some more numbers

Back to the experiment… add the following sets to your data;three,five,seven and five,seven,nine. Ok once again, write down what you see as the pattern, some future examples and your confidence in your answer. And back to the story…

It is just a lion, don’t run

Making rash judgments of casual effect has an evolutionary advantage but is not as helpful in our modern world. Seeing a lion and quickly running away because you saw a person get eaten by a lion once is not a logical conclusion. However, it is a good bet and more than likely the best choice. The expected value is easy to calculate and it has a certain appeal. So logically if you have only seen one lion in your life and it maimed the person who didn’t run, you can’t conclude that all lions will maim you if given the chance. However, the probability that the lion will maim you times the consequences (your health) versus the probability that the lion will not maim you and the benefits(you see a lion up close) make this an easy decision. The expected value tells you that you should run and that is what your ancestors would have done given the hypothetical. But here is the funny part of the story, if you (person who lives in the United States) see a lion up close it is very unlikely that the lion will NOT kill you. And this odd fact is an example of how our modern world differs from the ones our ancestors lived through.

First, lions are not indigenous to North America and thus it is very unlikely that you will meet one walking down the street. Most likely you will see lions in a zoo or an animal park. In a zoo you will not need to run because the lion will be secured away such that they are not any threat. In an animal park like the wildlife park we visited last summer, the lions are actually tame and used to human contact. The lions would actually play games with their human wardens. If you were given access to go in the cage with the other trainers, the probability of your safety is actually rather high (mainly because the company would have to be awful sure because if got killed it will kill their business). So in the possible reality space of your life, if you see a lion up close you shouldn’t run. And in reality you have probably have seen a lion fairly close and didn’t run. But that first story about your distant ancestor seems reasonable. It’s a good story for sure and easy to imagine and there lies the problem. Our love of story and inability to imagine patterns of randomness is in fact why sports is so popular.

The beautiful illusion

I know that my position on the couch during Maryland’s national championship had nothing to do with their victory. But I also know I wouldn’t change my position once MD was in the lead. I know that most of the drama of sports that I perceive is nothing but a playing out of random processes. I also know I have nothing to do with the game as a fan watching it live or semi-live via TiVo but my human side feels that is true. I know my mother-in-law has nothing to do with Maryland losing a 10 point lead in the last minute against Duke. However, the story is pretty good and makes have a certain odd “truth.” Here is the story: We went up to Show Low to watch my mother in law get baptized. Later that night we watched the MD and Duke game and Maryland dominates the game for the first 39 minutes. The announcer says “It will take a miracle for Duke to pull this out!” My newly baptized kin then said “Ask and ye shall receive.” Jay Williams steals the ball and leads Duke to an overtime victory. Did my mother-in-law cause MD to blow the game? Obviously the two have no relation in real life but they are hard to separate in my mind. The story is so much better if God intervened on my mother-in-laws behalf to lead the Blue Devils to victory. And story is hard to beat.’

The random occurrences in time during a game become a drama that I want to see how it turns out. Every fan knows that a blowout of 20 points is not as enjoyable as a last minute victory. As TNT notes, it is the drama. I like it for the same reason I like Law and Order, it unfolds in a way that keeps me guessing. And that guessing leads to another fun and irrational activity, prediction.

It’s the end of the world and I feel fine

Humans love to predict the future. A character in a play that I wrote noted why he liked gambling, “I am the prophet for the profit.” We love to predict things and feel great when they come true. Whether it is the rapture or the next election or which grocery line to stand in, we get an odd pleasure in predicting the future. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that someone (again) predicted the end of the world but I don’t think enough about WHY we are so in love with prediction. Take for example the Monty Hall problem.

You are on Let's Make A Deal and you have your pick of 3 curtains with a big prize behind only 1 of the curtains.
Let's say you pick Curtain A (you can pick anyone but I will use A to help with the demonstration). Monty opens up Curtain C and the grand prize is not behind the curtain. Do you stay with your pick or change it?

This created a big controversy when Marilyn from the Parade magazine told people that the odds were better to change their pick. Curtain A still has 33% chance and therefore Curtain B must be the 66% to even it to one. If you don't believe this, try this Monte Carlo simulation that I created to prove the point right here. There are a few odd things about this problem. One, people who were professional math people couldn’t figure it out. Two, when people get the wrong answer, 50%, they feel that they want to stay and don’t want to change. This is odd because given this 50% scenario it shouldn’t matter if you change. But we like to stay with the horse that we rode in. I think our love of story, especially the one where we defied the odds and picked the correct answer, is part of this bias.

Now back to the experiment

So let’s get back to the experiment. I have told you that it is the easiest solution and I willing to bet you think you have the pattern figured out. So let’s end the experiment with you applying your pattern to determine if you are correct. Which of the following sets are incorrect: {six,four,two } or {one,seventy, seventy three}

I am willing to bet that most of you saw the pattern in the first set and feel that I am tricking you. And your prediction is probably right, I am tricking you. The answer is (drumroll) the pattern is three ascending numbers. Therefore the second set of numbers is the correct one. I told you it was the easiest answer and you can’t get more simpler than three ascending numbers. The problem is our minds want to find patterns and once they have found a pattern they stop looking for things that will prove them wrong. We want to find a cause but the world is full of randomness that masquerades as a pattern. Part of it is how we ask the question, so let’s do one more experiment with facebook account.

Today’s your birthday

What do you think the chance is that one of your facebook friends has the same birthday as you? Actually not great. What are the chances that some of your facebook friends have the same birthday? Almost a sure bet. These questions look the same to the untrained eye but are very different and turn on “How” you ask the question. Check it out for yourself now in your facebook accounts, if you have more than 100 friends there is high probability that 3 of your friends have the same birthday.

As you look through your facebook friends birthdays be aware that your pattern seeking brain will try to find hidden meaning but you shouldn’t give in to this fantasy. Looking at a dataset to find patterns and then claiming to see a cause for certain items is one of the most common mistakes in the scientific community. The proper way to look at any pattern in any large dataset is what is the chance that (insert number of occurrences) would happen randomly to any characteristic of the group. Let me demonstrate this from an example in my last job.

At Sun, an email would be sent out each month to tell everyone who had a birthday that month. In September, 4 of the 6 people in our department were on the list. Someone noted in a meeting that this was interesting and wondered why it was so. Were people with a programming mindset more likely born at a certain time of year, maybe environmental factors in youth or starting school led people to a mindset towards logic. Another employee noted that this showed that there is a slight boost in birthdays in this month due to the holiday seasons. Both of these are wrong because they are not asking the right question. The correct question is what is the likely that a greater than half of a small group in about 20 groups would have the same birthday month. It is actually fairly likely. The second statement is wrong because the person said “the holidays were the cause of the increased birth rate”. The question is what is the likely hood that a certain month will have more births than all of the rest, pretty high. It is true that September is the highest birth month on most years. However, not every culture has the same holidays so it shouldn’t hold for non-Western cultures and it doesn’t. This is the confusion caused by seeing cause when there is correlation.

So the story goes…

Be aware that your brain wants there to be a cause. Your brain wants a story to explain what is happening. A good story is memorable and we are biased to think that the things we can remember easiest are the most common. So we have a story bias and that distorts our understanding of the world around us. Remember, random happens.

Of Rabbits And Men Or My Thoughts On Obama’s Visit

2011-01-12T22:30:00.001-08:00

Rabbits have eyes on the sides of their heads to give them full vision of the everything around them. It is an adaptation for prey to prepare for the approach of predators. Long ago our ancestors eyes moved slowly to the middle of our heads to give us depth perception to navigate their arboreal home. This adaptation came at a price, we no longer were able to view things from behind and individually were at risk. Our ancestors came up with the great adaptation-- to live in groups, let the many protect the weakness of the individual. We are a social animal. We need each other. It is lies in deep and ancient places of our being nurtured for millions of years. It is how we came to be where we are today. It is an ancient echo in each of our souls and today Tucson throbs in tune with this truth.

It is true, like the plowboy poet claims, that the best laid plans of Mice and Men often go awry. Steinbeck used this as a metaphor for his famous novella Of Mice And Men. The story has a cynic, George Milton, and a innocent men passionate about bunnies, Lenny Small. They are desperate people on the edge of a society who were cast out over a misunderstanding. But they still had dreams. They kept trying but were once again taken advantage of by bitter people. In the end, the innocent dies by the hand of the cynic. But George kills Lenny because it hurts him to see George’s innocent dreams destroyed by the harsh realities of life. It pains us all cynics and optimists to see innocence destroyed.

I doubt the shooter had George’s well intentioned motives at hand last Saturday. I also doubt that he saw the people as innocent. But the rest of us see the innocent and it brings the nation together in a hopeful pace of grief. The President recognized that and paid a visit to the U of Arizona campus to share with us his thoughts. I make no bones, I am a fan of Barrack Obama. He did not disappoint me tonight. He kept his thoughts to the positive and reasonable. He didn’t let it become about politics.

Obama reminded us of why we grieve. We recognize our loved ones in the fallen and their heroes. The loved matriarch, the protector of the law, the public servant, the brother, the son, the husband protecting his wife, and yes, probably the hardest hit of all, the optimistic daughter. We grieve because we hate to see innocent destroyed and recognize it in ourselves. As Robert Burns states in the poem:

You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
And weary winter coming fast,
And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel plough passed
Out through your cell.

My cell was crashed by a cruel plough indeed. I never imagined these things would happen in Tucson. I saw the signs of “weary winter coming fast” in the inflamed rhetoric that spewed out in the weeks before this tragedy but I never expected this. Burns continues later in the poem:

But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often askew,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!

Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!

But here Burns is incorrect. I do see pain in the past but I don’t see fear in the future. I still see the dream and recognized the time to celebrate his life slowly approaching on the calendar.

The shooter talked nonsense about people not being able to dream but that is far from the fact. Martin Luther King’s dream is still very much alive and we shall celebrate it this coming weekend. MLK is another example of the fact that you cannot kill hope. Obama is living proof of that fact. We grieve because we love and our love plants seeds of hope that grow on the weariest of fields.

Used to be we would play a song that I wrote about MLK on this weekend but that isn’t going to happen this year and probably never again. Though I won’t sing it again it still rings true to my ears and so I will put it down for the last time right now. This was what I heard Barrack ask us tonight and I can only answer yes.

Can You See The Dream (Dedicated to MLK, Jr.)

I had a dream
Of what could be
But I had to leave
Before I saw it here

So now its time
For you to make
That vision I had
The real world today

Can you see the dream?
Can you see the world to be?
Will you work with me
To make it that way?

The dream survives
Without me here
If you do your part
We’ll bring justice here

Let justice ring
For all to hear
And we will be
Free at last again

Can you see the dream?
Can you see the world to be?
Will you work with me
To make it that way?

Self-Evident
To all with eyes
That all of us
Are created equal here

The dream survives
With your help here
A better place
Because you were here

Can you see the dream?
Can you see the world to be?
Will you work with me
To make it that way?

Surviving The Waves Of Hate

2011-01-08T23:01:00.001-08:00

I don’t usually go to Oracle Road. But today Thomas, my youngest son who is eight, and I were headed out to Lowes on Oracle Road. We were going to make a play box as part of a promotion from the lumber company at 10AM. We quickly assembled the project and headed home going east on I-10. On the way back, I saw the lights go on for a police car and race westward in a big hurry. Within a minute, 2 others sheriff’s vehicles followed suit. I thought “Wonder what the heck is that about?”

The News

If I was permitted any favor by the divine I would use my favor to dissolve the news. When people tell me that they keep up on the news to be a more informed person, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry or smack them across the face. The news is a perfect hack of the humans reasoning mechanism. News is the unusual. It is news that “Human bites dog”, not vice versa. But humans reason that the most common thing in their memories is the most common thing. So listening to the news actually makes you less aware of the true balance of the world. Steven Levitt in his books about Freakanomics shows how the shark attacks of a couple of years back were anything but newsworthy. But today I would grant the news a pass. Today is different.

Arizona has been quite newsworthy of late. One crazy law after another has earned the state the title of “Crack lab of democracy” by John Stewart. But as embarrassing it is to have my friends back east think the crazy news in Arizona was representative of my state, it was always easy to says “that’s those idiots in Phoenix.” Tucson is different. Today Tucson is different.

Today a Tucson man took a gun and shot 18 people at a grocery store off of Oracle Road. Six of those people lie died tonight; one a judge and another a nine year old girl. A congresswomen from Tucson who represents Tucson lays in critical condition with a bullet hole in her head. Today a tsunami of hate erupted and the waves are washing over the people of my beloved city. Today people gathered online, in prayer and in buildings to try to keep each other afloat. We gathered together so we could pull each other out of the weight of vengeance and to not go under and drown in the anger.

The Waves

An explosion in the middle of the ocean doesn’t register as much in the middle of the ocean. I remember a friend of mine who had been stationed in the middle of the Pacific thought it odd that the tidal wave was a mere little wave in the vast open sea. It is when it hits the stable ground of the shore that the monster is revealed. But it doesn’t matter how the wave started once it hits the shore, all that really matters is how are you going to deal with the 40 foot wave of water coming at you.

Was the tea party or Sarah Palin responsible? Is it responsible to talk about how guns are important and then put gun sites on the American map? I feel that anger and agree that we should figure out what was responsible for this and try to prevent it in the future but today is the time to swim and help others stay afloat. Today is about the waves.

I didn’t hear about the news until past noon. Thomas and I were making up games with his favorite toys, Go Gos. I got a call from my wife at Costco who asked if I heard the news. I said I hadn’t and turned on the TV right away. I sat with open jaw disbelief with Thomas perched beside me. I thought how the heck do I explain this to my kids. Dumbfounded I just muttered “Thomas I can’t believe the world today.” Not very profound but the Gods honest truth. This was the first wave that hit me and I was stunned.

Later upon learning a nine year old girl was one of the slain, it hit me how the other waves were playing on the other side of town. Tonight, parents are trying to explain to their kids why Christina is not going to be around anymore. Somewhere a principal is trying to figure out how he is going to react. A teacher is wondering how to deal with the fact that one of the students in their class is not coming in on Monday and everyone is going to notice. Everyone can feel the depth of pain of the parents and tries to not imagine it themselves. But their grave pain is just one of the many waves of despair that will fall onto the valley tonight. And the adults we will try to catch ourselves, stay afloat and pull up the others as best we can.

Watching for the next wave

I learned in the grief counseling after my father’s death that every new tragedy will invoke the feelings from previous similar tragedies. How ironic that the little girl was born on 9/11/2001, probably the most unbelievable tragedy in my lifetime. The paper had done a story about this little girl that was a ray of hope in our darkest hour. Today I again felt the same as that rainy day back in 2001. That day hate revealed itself on an American landmark but today hate found an American servant.

I have many friends who worked with or campaigned for Gabby Giffords. I saw friends exchanging information and trying to give support on the pages as facebook, hoping that she survives this vile crime. I voted for her on every ballot I saw her name. I see her name a lot on emails from her office and from the Psychology List View at the University of Arizona but I don’t know her personally. I really only know of her and what she represents.She represents what every true American believes about America, hope and opportunity.

Giffords was a first in many things in her life. Given the opportunity, she put in the hard work and won a seat to serve. She was holding an open meeting because she was a open person who trusted that openness was the light from above that would lead our country along our way. The attack on her was an attack on that very ideal. Let us not forget those co-workers that gave their lives today and other who were witness to the horror. Let’s not forget the people who trusted in such an open policy for a politician. Let’s help pull them out from the waves of despair that strike down on them on this day. Openness is not dead, the ideals will live to fight another day. 6 Americans lay dead, 18 more physical injured and countless others traumatized by a terrifying moment of life. The waves turned their power against many people today. And the senseless violence effects the witnesses and every one the witnesses knew. It then spreads in horrible pools to each new friend, over and over again, crashing into the same people countless times.

So while it is easy to get sucked into the why of what happened today, I say let’s put that on hold. Today is a day to swim. Today is the day to grab the others who are getting pushed over by the tide of hate. Today is the day to let hope float above and let hate dive down into the depths of which it came. The truth is will we forgive them in time. Not because they deserve it but because we deserve it. Hate bowls you over and keeps you down, to hold onto it is to hold on to an anchor of pain. We will swim on towards the light and we will bring others with us. The wave of hate will bring back a wall of hope and our spirits will be stronger for the swim.

Bless all and swim on.

The Nope Hypothesis Or The Joy Of Being Wrong

2011-01-04T21:20:00.001-08:00

In the movie Doubt, Meryl Steep’s character is trying to get Phillip Seymour Hoffman to admit that he has done something inappropriate with a young boy in the school. She devises a scheme where he will have to admit it; she will ask him whether he has something for which he needs to be forgiven. If he did something inappropriate, he will have to admit it and this will prove her claim. Hoffman explains to her that he like everyone else has done things they need to be forgiven. Streep concludes Hoffman is guilty of the crime she suspects.

Amy Adams also wants to know if Hoffman did something inappropriate also. Her strategy is to ask him to explain the situation. He gives a plausible explanation and that convinces Adams of his innocence.

Many people believe that Streep thinks that Hoffman abused the boy. There is actually nothing in the film mentioning this fact. The fact that is was shown in the theatres while priests were being revealed for abusing boys sexually would seem to be the logic to this conclusion.

I’m a Pisces

Myers and Briggs were students of Carl Jung who devised a test to help determine the personality types of people. It never used any scientific methods in its creation, and actually the binominal nature of the types defy the obvious bell curve phenomenon, yet it is used by people and businesses all over the world. It works it magic in the same way as a horoscope. Brian Dunning explains:

One obvious trait that the MBTI has in common with horoscopes is its tendency to describe each personality type using only positive words. Horoscopes are so popular, in part, because they virtually always tell people just what they want to hear, using phrases that most people generally like to believe are true, like “You have a lot of unused potential.” They’re also popular because they are presented as being personalized based on the person’s sign. This has been called the Forer Effect, after psychologist Bertram Forer who, in 1948, gave a personality test to his students and then gave each one a supposedly personalized analysis. The impressed students gave the analyses an average accuracy rating of 85%, and only then did Forer reveal that each had received an identical, generic report. Belief that a report is customized for us tends to improve our perception of the report’s accuracy.

All of the above people are guilty of a normal human logic problem, the framing problem. People frame questions to be consistent with their beliefs. And then they look for evidence to prove their theory. People like proving themselves right.

The Truth seems to have expired

Jonathan Schooler published a clever experiment to demonstrate a phenomenon called “verbal overshadowing” (a person will remember items better that they don’t have to describe) in 1990 and his work was duplicated by lots of colleagues. His work has over 400 references in academic journals. In the 1990s, he started trying to duplicate his experiments and noticed something odd. His results were not the same. The more he tested them, the less the effect occurred until it is practically not existent. He is very disturbed by this and wonders if the ideas of statistics used to prove his experiment “valid” are actually invalid themselves. But lots of psychologists still quote his work.

What’s so great about being right? Briggs and Myers were both scientists (kinda), so it not reserved to the religious as some skeptics insist. David Freedman notes in his book Wrong that over 90% of studies that are published in medical journals prove the effect the experimenters expected. Of the ones that are retested later over 50% aren’t NOT duplicated. Very few journals publish studies proving “no effect.” Why is Schooler different than the other people in this article? I suspect that he knows that being wrong is usually more informative.

First, let me make sure everyone understands why the above people in Doubt are not correct. The number of things that Hoffman can be ashamed of it greater than the one item that Streep is thinking, his being ashamed is not proof of Streep’s intuition. Hoffman’s assertion explaining the facts doesn’t mean that this fact is true for Adams. The idea of sexual abuse is not even on the table so it can’t be proven in any way. It doesn’t mean they are wrong either. That is the problem at the end of movie, Streep has doubt; she says is not sure of Hoffman’s guilt. Doubt sucks, being wrong is much better.

The Terror of a Perfect Experiment

The Merson clan loves us some Mythbusters and if affords fun conversations. My favorite is “Does the experiment prove what they think?” What we are looking for is a perfect experiment. A perfect experiment is a narrative of tasks that will lead the next experimenter to get the same results. To be perfect you need to document everything you do in detail. You need to try your experiment multiple times if possible. You need to implement measures of statistics and randomness to make sure the experiment is not fooling you. Schooler has some good ideas and suggests we should make researchers state what would be proof or disproof of their experiment before they run the tests. The maxim of science is a willing to doubt is a willingness to know. Take a couple of examples.

If Terrorism is a response to lack of education what would we expect to the data to show?

Well the people who are terrorists would have less education on average than those from the same areas who are not terrorists. Does this hold true? Sadly no, it is not that simple, the data shows the opposite. But the important part is that we ask the question before we look at the data. That way we don’t explain away the data which is a favorite hobby of economists of the left and right. Be bold and try to prove yourself wrong.

So the next question to ask is what other factors could be the cause of terrorism? Is it more than one phenomenon, are there certain types of education that lead to the phenomenon? We could look at the data and see what items stick out. The next important idea, which is rarely done, is after we analyze the data we make a hypothesis and not a conclusion. We need to ask a question again and get new data to try to prove our conclusions wrong. Analyzing data never proves anything and you can prove this for yourself.

Take a group of 23 or so people and start talking to each other about likes and dislikes. Pretty soon you will find something odd, that a certain “unnatural” amount of people do something or have something in common that seems beyond chance. There is actually an over 50% chance that two of those people will have the same birthday. If your group grows to 57, the chance grows to 99%. You might even start to think hey maybe people who are drawn to this group seem to have this in common so maybe that is why they are drawn to this group. I remember at a company I worked out all the managers could juggle which lead the director to wonder if he had found a trick to finding new managers. That is your human logic trying to proof something is true. Put your fingers in your ears and go “La, la,la,la,la”. It is an illusion based on the odd counter intuitive laws of probability.

Let’s make a deal that you will doubt

In 1990 the Ask Marilyn column in the Parade magazine put out this puzzle.

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? (From Wiki)

The answer is switch, you a 2 to 1 dog is you stay. The scary part is that there were professors of statistics who wrote in explaining her supposed error claiming it was a 50% chance. It is the most counter intuitive puzzle I know. If you don’t believe it, I have just the thing for you. Computers allow me to run a simulation of this test and show you the results. Click here to prove it to yourself. I made this page to prove the point when I got annoyed that enough people didn’t believe me. I can’t believe a person who does math for a living wouldn’t have done this first before “correcting” someone in a national newspaper. They didn’t think to try to prove themselves wrong. I had the courage to do that. And that makes all the difference. Now where is my car? What, a goat? That just proves I am so unlucky.

The Chuck Lorre Identity Or How TiVo Changed My Mind

2011-01-03T21:58:00.001-08:00

My wife and I play a game most Monday evenings after the kids go to bed. No not that game… I use the TiVo remote to scroll through the list of shows and if I find a new Two And A Half Men I click it once to view the title and description of the show. We then play the game. The game is based on the title of the episode. Every Two And A Half Men episode is named after a line in the show. TiVo when it tapes the show has the title and summary information at hand to determine whether to tape it or not. We look at the title of the show and guess what the name of the character will be who has the line that the show is named after. Kim tends to read the description of the episode before guessing, I tend not to and try to guess it it cold. There are great lines in the titles of most Men episodes such as “Keith Moon is vomiting in his grave” and “Three Girls and a guy named Bud.” We have learned that when in doubt guess Charlie Sheen. It is a fun distraction and adds an extra bit of suspense to the episode. So we have slowly noticed that each show has a title, something I never really knew was public knowledge before Direct TV. The title shtick is part of the fun of shows now as different shows have different methods. In Seinfeld, it is always “The” something, in My Name Is Earl is it the bad deed he is trying to make up for but my favorite is the other Chuck Lorre vehicle The Big Bang Theory. The titles are actually the inspiration for my blogs. For example, the last couple of episodes “The Bus Pants Utilization” and “The Justice League Recombination” are great example. Just take what the item is about and imagine how you would say it scientifically. I add the “Or” part to give a hint to help explain what the blog will cover. It is all good fun for me. It is more than fun though as it is part of my TiVo mind.

This afternoon I was watching 2 games (3 really-Go Colts!), reading on my kindle, talking with son Thomas, writing this blog, explaining an experiment with my son Sam, and checking email in the hours from 2 to 5. TiVo allows me to pause live TV, switch the screen to another game(and keep either game paused), fast forward at a speed I can still watch the game, slow down to check out subtle parts, have both games on pause so I can wait until the commercials are over and can do something else (read my Kindle) at the same time. TiVo is one of the many devices that allow me to control information flow. It is not just that it is a DVR, we have a DVR downstairs because our other TiVo died. It is not the same thing. It does most of the same things but requires me to put thought into it. The DVR is put together like a German Synthesizer manual. Diz button does this, dis button does dat, it has no flow it only has functions. The TiVo remote is like a part of my hand, it has all the features in the most logical place. It even had special combinations that I could accidently discover which I now use all the time.

I have been reading the pros and cons of the internet in the book Shallows:What The Internet Is Doing to our minds along with other various articles about research into how the internet is changing the way we think. The studies tend not to get it, they cite the formats of a book work better and people retain more info, blah, blah,blah. And I have seen this argument before in the 1920s when psychologists noted the poor showing of immigrants on intelligence tests. The reason for the immigrants poor showing was, of course, they didn’t all know English and that tends to lead to doing poorly on a test. It seems so obvious now but this was real research and one of the reasons that psychologists claim that intelligence tests are much better now. (Quick diversion--- Intelligence Tests are B.S but that for another blog) The same flawed methodology is being used in tests of whether it is better to read a book in print or in the web.

The methodology has the users read a work of fiction in either print or web format and then test them on their comprehension. Surprisingly, not, the printed book is better for comprehension. Seems a book is a better learning device from that evidence, right? How about we change the venue. Let’s give one group a manual on how to change the oil in a car and the other group a video of how to change the oil. Anyone want to make any bets on who does better with this? Heck, give one person a car manual and the other just the internet to run the test and I don’t think you need to be Houdini to figure it out who is going to be looking up how to dispose of oil first. Web is not just text, it is images, it is video, it is links. Yes, these are distractions but unless you are doing a book report on Tolstoy, these are not so bad because that is how real life is arranged. Plus, the web lets me manipulate things into mashups of what I want or need in a given situation and my TiVo really started me down the road.

Tonight-Monday now as I am writing this-Kim and I played the Charlie Sheen game (“Skunk, Dog Crap and Ketchup” which was spoke by Alan so she won) and then watched another of our favorites-How I Met Your Mother. The show has the best writers in the business and always have TiVo rewindable material in the show. Sometimes it is a homage to another movie, like a monolog modeled after Salieri’s speech in Amadeus, sometimes it is an interesting detail that would escape first sight. Tonight, it was a very clever sight gag.

Kim, who can’t help but read license plates, noticed it first. Numbers were appearing in descending order placed into the scene. There were numbers throughout the episode to throw you off (or maybe for some other reason) but as the show progressed the numbers 50-1 appeared in descending order naturally in the scenes. The writers even cleverly used the 9 to become the 6 in the show (as I predicted when I saw the 9). Of course, with TiVo, we were able to stop and rewind when we realized we missed a number (hint-if you play 15 is partially hidden behind the CBS logo branding). What it counted down towards was, as the title explained, bad news but not the bad news you expect as the show unfolds. The show also has a clever visual trick as there are two “Barneys” and the producers try to trick you with this fact (Kim saw it before it was revealed). Without TiVo, none of this is possible.

Was the story linear-yep, but in a scatter plot kind of way. It has no analog in book form. You could try fun tricks like not use “e” in a novel and that is kind of like it but not really. See it requires you to pay attention but in a different way. Not pay attention to in the normal way-being lead by the author on a string- but to be able to be open to experience while not doing something else. It requires you to pay attention in the same way you drive. You are following the road relaxed in expectation, listening to the radio but need to notice that car 5 cars up lights just turned red. Your non-conscious mind must be able to take over the cycles and come to the forefront. That is what is needed on the web really, a new way to pay attention. And that is why I am thankful for my TiVo mind.

The New Years Resolution Alternative or What I Expect Will Change In Years To Come

2011-01-02T11:54:00.001-08:00

What happens if Marshall McLuhan had a love child with George Lakoff? You would probably get me and my spin on the world.

So instead of vowing to do something everyone knows I ain’t gunna do, let me take a different approach. I am going to think about how I believe things are going to go down and what I hope to do to so I don’t work on Maggie’s farm no more.

spell check

I can’t spell to save my life. My 10 year son Sam, a multiyear spelling bee champ, has probably been a better speller than me for a year or more. But I am not worried, my world doesn’t need spelling so much. The red lines lead me into possible answers-did you mean x,y or z? If my first attempt at a word is not found in the correction list I quickly alt-tab into one of my open browsers, click new tab and type “spell wordIdunno” in the address bar. Google will usually give a definition or say “Did you mean this? If this doesn’t work I can clear the Google search box and start trying to the word and Google will in real time try to give me suggestions which I can then use to find the conventional spelling of the word.

But the fact that a word is a valid word doesn’t mean that the word is the correct spelling of the word; sometimes that is two much for a spellchecker. But grammar checkers have been created to catch these things also. The information of how a word is spelled is easily queryable but whether it is appropriate in the place you want to use it must be learned. That, to me, this is a metaphor of the modern world to me. Knowledge is no longer facts but understanding.

Sam may be able to spell off of the top of his way better than I ever could but I have an understanding of technology and linguistics which makes it possible for me to get answers he still doesn’t know. I understand that English is a highly evolved language with a checkered history which shows up in its orthography and people’s opinions on correctness. I also have a better idea of whether I know when to say it, how to find out how to pronounce it (though I still stink at this) and a better feel when I don’t know how to spell these things. And I still do have the experience advantage. That is why given a the same amount of time, I can use a larger vocabulary and negate his spelling advantage in any essay form. In this case, the speed and the knowledge can compensate for natural spelling talent differences. But there is something that only a human can do and that is why editors are important in the new world.

The editor with a thousand keyboards

I have friend (names withheld to protect the innocent) who always gets upset that “young people” don’t print out and read through their resumes. People do sometimes do this and submit a resume that an objective reading would find problems (but so do old people and people without computers). That is why she concludes that you will always need editors. I agree that statement but in a different way than she means. She would say “I need an editor to look over my resume.” I would say “I need editors to look over my resume.” The internet’s growing wiki culture has been a bold experiment in collective wisdom and it is beginning to show its muscle.

Wikipedia has changed our ideas on what an expert is and whether you know something. Expert is always a tricky idea because of what I call the expert paradox. You claim a person an expert when they know more about a given subject than you. However, you can’t really validate they know more than you because you don’t know enough about the subject to judge their expertise by definition. But throw a mob into the mix and this starts to erode. Wiki allows anyone to be an expert but their expertise can only live on if the mob agrees. So the first thought is that conventional platitudes will overpower unconventional wisdom. However, wiki has a answer for that also,the view history link. You can see how stable a subject is by looking at the revision history and actually see dissenting opinions. Plus there are editors scanning articles for style concerns noting “this needs a references” and other stylistic concerns. Sentences like “Some experts think it was Clapton’s best album” can’t stand because they are weasel words. (The opposite of the sentence is also true even if the sentence is true-Some experts didn’t think it was Clapton’s best album, hence it doesn’t convey the truer statement- Experts are mixed on whether it was Clapton’s best album)

So I have instant access to information on pretty much any subject in the world. The skills I need for the new world are:

Can I determine if said fact is true and how sure am I?
Do I understand the factors that make said fact true?
Can I expand on factors that exist because of said fact?

The speed at which I can arrive at these statements is improving daily but in multiple ways. So instead of being able to find quick answers, sometimes one can be overloaded with information. So I believe “information retrieval optimization” is the new knowledge that will have the most power in the next decade. What you know is determined by how fast you can get an accurate answer.

The internet massage

Marshall McLuhan concluded that the “Medium is the message” in his now famous book Understanding Media. The statement means that the type of the media influences our minds more than the content of the media. The fact that the West exploded with theories to break ideas into smaller more manageable ideas coincides with the Guttenberg Revolution which broke words into various ink blocks that can be rearranged to create any idea. The idea was later developed into the media is the “massage” meaning that media changed our perceptions and then our perceptions change the media. Simply stated-technology changes our understanding, our understanding changes so we change our technology and so on and so on.

Lots of people dislike the lowered status of content from this idea. Content is not unimportant in McLuhan's mind but is less important than the package it arrives in. The counter argument is that technology is good or bad depending on how you use it. And that is actually a completely false statement and why McLuhan is right in my opinion. Technology is always good AND bad, it is never just advantages or disadvantages, it is both. What technology I have influences how I see the world and how I understand the world.

George is my friend

George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist who developed the idea that humans use metaphor in their language and thought process in many unconscious ways. Do you get that idea? (Metaphor-Ideas are Objects that can be acquired) Lackoff, though now known for his political opinions which are based on his cognitive research, is a revolutionary thinker and a figure still controversial in Linguistics circles.

I doubt that Lakoff would agree with McLuhan but Lakoff’s work lays out the framework in an interesting way. Lackoff would state that objective reality is unknowable because the way we understand the world is limited by our conceptual system. Lakoff, in his work Philosophy In The Flesh, shows why our conceptual system is not reconcilable with an objectivist epistemology. Simply put-there is an objective world but we can’t know that world because of our human senses. He points out that in fact humans reason with physical metaphor, mostly unconscious, due to our physical experiences and that there is never a single metaphor that is true. While I know this is a shocking position that would need more explanation because it goes up against two thousand years of Western Philosophy that is ingrained in everyone’s brain but just suspend belief with me until another blog. We can reconcile Lakoff and McLuhan because they both believe that human thought is molded by the experiences of their life and technology is a large part of that experience. In fact, we do have many people talk about the internet as a type of brain and give it brain like attributes.

Consummating the marriage

So I think that people who “get” technology intuitively understand this argument. But it has odd consequences that I not sure others without my screwy vision will notice just yet. One thing is that there will be cultural misunderstandings due to someone not understanding how the medium works, viewing it as an electronic letter, and will tend to be viewed as rude as time goes on. I have a friend (doesn’t every internet story start this way) who doesn’t realize that emails are not letters. The slowly structured logic of a letter doesn’t work in an email. She gets upset that people don’t read her emails where she “said that.” So my friend has so much experience in the wonderful world of books that she can’t help to use her more familiar metaphors from publishing in understanding the new technology. People in turn get upset that she is so verbose in a non-verbose medium. Most people don’t read email in the same way that they read books. People, as Nobel Peace Prize recipient Herbert Simon notes, satisfice. They look for the first thing that looks like it is what they want and go from there. Good web page design is based on this idea. As more and more websites are designed this way, people’s expectations will skew every more to this reality. So I think the writing is on the wall for books.

The idea of a books is based on having to convey every bit of information and logic in one package because that is what the end user needs to get your argument. You have to write a book with an audience in mind. A web page doesn’t quite have to follow these rules. A web page can state an argument and link to the details or proof and not require every reader to plot the same path to the truth. Of course, there is danger here too. Conventional facts can be unexamined because they will be glossed over. Things that “everyone knows” will have a new weight that didn’t exist in such an extreme state in earlier times.

Also if a picture is worth a thousand words than a video is worth frame rate times a thousand. (I had to include at least one geek joke) Video does not work in the same way on our brains that reading works. In video our minds are easily hacked. The director uses our attention span and type of consciousness to get us to believe certain facts about the meaning of the images. The easy example is we see a person start off towards a cliff and then we see that person is wet in the river next to a cliff. The conclusion is the person jumped off the cliff. I am reading a great book, Sleight of Mind, about how magicians and painters are really hackers of the mind. I find it interesting and scary. The human brain has lots of holes that are easily hacked and it is not the things we don’t know that will kill us, it is the things we know that just aren’t true.

Video is powerful because we expect to be true. We think we see it with our own eyes but really we see it with our brain. Your brain has built a bunch of logic circuits but some of them are like Newtonian Physics; they seem to work but are really not the whole story. Of course video is easily manipulated in digital form so it is the tool of choice for influence makers in the next decade. Though this is a scary phenomenon, I think people can see the basic problem with this and have a healthy distrust of it. The scariest part of the new world is the price of it and the cost it extracts.

Free is not such a good price

Lots of free stuff is not so good. The problem is our mind is not so good remembering that the cost of anything always has a time component. Things with lots of options also have a good “time suck” factor. An item with lots of choices also brings about a need for seeing all its possibility. My Line6 guitar has kept me up multiple times to the wee hours of the morning trying to determine the “best” sound for a particular song. Lesser technology and I would have been in bed dreaming of better technology. The price of doing something is the cost of not doing something else. As the book Predictably Irrational explains free is a whole other experience and one that humans are drawn to like a moth to a flame. So we have to be aware that “free”, whether it be more options for no more cost or no cost whatsoever, is something our brains don’t understand so well. And because we interpret it as zero so our normal formulas don’t really know how to calculate it.

The problem is that the internet brings so much free into our life that we become numb to the free problems. Every technology has good AND bad things. It is great that I have access to any subject but it is also bad because my brain has not evolved yet to understand the consequences. So what I am going to try to do in the next year…beware of how free things change my judgment. I can’t resolve to escape the stranglehold on free that the internet brings. I cannot be free of free. So I am going to keep trying to ask in the next year, how much is this free thing costing me?

The Dog Probability Factor Or Will facebook Keep Your Identity Secure

2011-01-01T18:36:00.001-08:00

With more than 500 million active users counting on them, facebook has a power that might just be unknown in history. Users expect facebook to be there like the morning sun in the sky. And it seems some people’s lives revolve around facebook like the earth revolves around the sun. So when facebook makes a change, a big portion of the world notices.

When facebook made changes to their privacy standards without user’s notice a little while ago, it stirred up a hornets nest of anger among its users. Mark Zuckerberg really shook up the user base when he claimed that “privacy is an evolving standard.” But he is correct it is evolving and facebook is really a major influence on how it evolves.

Let’s call Jack McCoy

They say “on the internet no one knows you are a dog” but lots of people have put many man hours into letting web pages recognize you so you don’t constantly have to identify yourself. So this of course sets up a scale that must be balanced of how much you can get done and how much you must divulge. No web application can do any work without recognizing you on some level and of course this leads to concerns of privacy.

Privacy is one of those invisible cultural artifacts that lives in our brain unnoticed until a situation pricks them to life. It is codified into our English common noun and the court is not allowed to violate the “expectation of privacy.” The problem is what do people expect to be private? And is it uniform within a culture or variable to the individuals.

I would say there isn’t any uniform standard and that technology is morphing it constantly. Take a gander at the couple of examples below to see how you feel about the scenarios if someone had a recording of the following actions. Would you feel violated if someone had a recording and/or if someone would ask for the recording and/or if the recording would be prorogated?

You singing in your car
You picking your nose in your car
You making bodily noises in your car
You talking on your phone
The texts coming to you in the car
The texts you send in the car
The talks with family members in the car
The talks with friends in the car
The talk you had with the sales rep who sold you the car
You asking for direction from your car
You eating in the car
You when you were a hormonal teenage in the car (You know what I mean)

Now think about this… Most of your actions in your car are public and it would be easy to someone to have these recordings accidentally. Imagine the couple from Alabama videoing themselves near the Hoover Dam as you get into the car next to where they are lined up smiling next to the modern marvel. You burp loudly and scratch your nose (no nostril penetration), take a bite of your Carl’s Jr., wipe your face, turn on the radio and sing loudly out of tune to Wham. Have they violated your privacy by recording your public acts?

Evolutions Power Engage!

I think the answer is it depends on what they intended to record and/or what they do with the recording. If you are David Hasselhoff and they intent to show you on TMZ, I think the answer is an easy yes. If they are just folks who only use the tape to show their kin when they get home, I think the easy answer is no. In between these two forms, the answer is tricky. If they post this video up on facebook for just their friends is this a violation? If they post it to everyone on facebook has that crossed the line? If they put it up on YouTube have they crossed the line? What happens if burping, no singing, sloppy eating tourist becomes the next viral video? What if it becomes a feature clip on NBC nightly news? Or becomes one of the clips of the year? What if these sequences happen because of actions that the original poster never intended? These crazy possibilities are why privacy is an evolving standard and will continue to be mutated as technology gets ever more powerful. I am willing to bet if I ask 10 people I would get at least 5 different perceptions on where the line was crossed in the above scenario. And I am willing to bet that no one would be certain of their answers. Technology changes the ideas of privacy like in the example of cell phones.

Cell-U-Itis

Prophet of the future

It really annoys me that people talk on their phones in public, even more so when they are using a blue tooth device. I hate the scenario of being in the mall walking towards someone and all of sudden they start talking. Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? Cause I don’t see anyone else here.

Even more annoying is the teen who is talking on the phone in the middle of a pack of their friends. I even wrote a song about this once. “She’s a phone ear, always talking to all her friends, unless they’re with her”

So does she have an expectation of privacy talking in a pack of friends? So if she is planning the text cyber bullying campaign that leads to a murder can the Orange Julius manager who overhead her master plan testify against her? Can the posting of a embarrassing photo that leads to a suicide be blamed as they put the suicide into motion? Does the privacy settings she used on her facebook post matter? Does it not matter if she is or isn’t aware of the privacy options in facebook?

What Jay Leno Doesn’t Understand

Jay Leno likes to tease people who text and email from their phones. “If only there was a way I could talk to them right now.” Leno doesn’t get that text messages, phone calls, IMs, email, facebook posts, tweets, etc. all have different innate privacy abilities and different amounts of attention that are required by the other user. Teens were quick to get the stealth nature of texting because it allows them to communicate to their friends without the annoying hungry ears of their parents to intercept the message.

A text is a private item that requires the user to view it only when they feel it is convenient. A phone call requires the user to answer in real time, go through formalities (Hey whatsup dude?) and not being able to communicate with the people around them while talking on the phone. The phone call also puts a burden on people in room with the person. It is hard to tune out sound and someone talking on the phone will naturally draw your attention. When there were only phones and phones were tied to a place, the rudeness and privacy expectation were different. And people evolve an understanding of what they believe is private and/or rude as technology changes.

So it comes back to facebook again, the visibilities of the privacy features will determine the future of privacy and the social norms around a good portion of technology. If your mom posted a picture of you as a baby in your nature suit with butt shining from powder and makes it available to everyone, what do you do and/or think? Do you phone her, email her, IM her, drive to her house or report her as putting up inappropriate material? Do you blame her or facebook for your young butt exposure? What do you when she tells that she “took facebook off of her computer?” (This scenario comes a real life relative) These wacky seemingly trivial actions are why facebook will continue to help evolve our global ideas of privacy. Woof woof woof woof. Sorry, dog collar fell off.

The Mark Twain Experience Differential or How Experience Changes Our Experience

2011-01-01T13:00:00.001-08:00

In Two Ways To See A River, Mark Twain talks about how he used to cherish the beauty of the Mississippi but as he became more experienced as steamboat pilot he started to fail to see the beauty. Twain states:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

I know of this phenomenon in my personal life especially in the realm of music. I no longer just hear a song; I hear the progression and the instrumentation and the form, etc. I no longer hear just the song in that magical way that I did before I studied music. Thursday night while listening to Roger Clyne and The Peacemakers play a show at the Rialto downtown, I realized that this was more true than I had previously imagined.

Monkey See Monkey Feel

Humans have an odd condition that is sometimes called “Theory of Mind” in the psychology research circles. We come to understand that other people don’t see things the same way we do. This is actually something quite remarkable. The classic experiment is having an two adults and child in room with a toy. Then one adult leaves and the other adult helps hide the toy in a concealed location. If you ask the child if she expects the other adult to know where the toy, the child expects the absent adult to know where the toy is because the child knows where it is. Eventually, we catch on to the fact that our experiences are not other’s experiences. Our brains take this even further.

fMRIs required subjects to be still in a magnetic chamber and any movement will bankrupt the experiment. So how can we study behavior when a subject can’t move? Because when the subject sees an action, their brain imagines what is it like to do that thing. When you see someone pick up a book your brain fires the circuits that your previous book picking up experience activated. This is an unconscious action just part of the many wacky things our brains afford us. We have actual neurons that mirror the action.

Feeling the music

So since I have been playing guitar for about 30 years now, my brain has lots of data about playing music. So as

I see the lead guitarists bend the note on the second string on the 15th fret, my brain is activating the neurons that have done this in the past. As I hear the volume swells, my brain activates the feeling of letting up on the volume pedal. I am literally feeling the music.

In fact, one of the oddest sensations I experienced in my life was when I started playing acoustic patches on my line 6 Variax guitar. My experience of playing acoustic guitar for years had taught my body that the difference between playing electric vs. acoustic guitar was you could feel the vibrations on your chest. The line 6 emulation didn’t do this. It is a perfect emulation; in fact I remember posting a song with an acoustic patch online once and someone commenting that is was “some good acoustic work.” It took a while to realize why my brain was feeling out of sorts while I played but I eventually figured it out. Now after 5 years of playing my Variax, I don’t notice it. My experience of playing the Variax has changed my experience of playing the Variax.

Hey Soul Sister

As I was holding my wife’s hand listening to the music Thursday night, my fingers start to curl. My wife thinks of this as “jamming” on her hand. Just one of the many annoying things I do when primed with music. In my mind I think I am trying to communicate my inner experience though I logically know that can’t. But as I was talking with Kim about this phenomenon in the car yesterday, I realized it went the other way also, there are internal experiences for songs that her experience brings to the table.

We were listening to the Gloria Estefan hit Conga on the radio. I feel the feeling of pressing on the keys of the keyboard in that Latin clave rhythm or banging on the bongos. So I asked Kim what she felt. It reminded her of a Jazzercise routine and she could feel the dance steps in her mind.

Dance Dance Revolution

Probably my favorite dance routine on the show

I wonder if that is part of the wonder of the show So You Think You Dance. Our brains are trying to imagine the experience of leaping through the air with supreme grace as the dancers sway for our pleasure. The freedom of their movements help free us in some way.

But the theory of mind changes us in ways untold also. We can imagine what it is like to be other people. I have a video burned in my brain of the dancer Brain Gaynor who has scoliosis and his dance routine to the song Fireflies. (see the video here if it doesn’t appear in this post) The beautiful opening lilting melodies of the tune Fireflies can’t be processed in my mind in the way that guitar music can. So the music itself just dances weightless in the air for me like a butterfly while the dancer thin, limber and frail moves robotically in place. As the drums and rest of the band erupt into focus, the frail dancer moves in perfect harmony to the sounds in perfect syncopation and this creates an emotion I don’t know how to place in words. The song moves along with beautiful precision and as the words “the planet earth turns slowly” ring out, his hands move and twist an imaginary planet earth in a gentle turning motion. The judges are crying and are moved by living song in front of them and I can no longer hold back the tears either. The dancer dwindles his motion down to the floor in loving reverence as the final words “I fall asleep” drop from the air.

Is it that I can’t imagine the fear to wake up everyday not knowing whether I could do something I could treasure that moves me so deeply? Is it that I can’t imagine the mechanical motions necessary to create the shifting sounds falling in the air?

I think that I can try to imagine what these experiences are like and they are novel and tickle my soul in ways I have yet to experience. This is the beautiful caress that is what all of Art is about. So while Twain is right, experience does change the experience. The more subtle truth is that imagined experience can mold us even more.

The Baggy Pants Evolution Or Its Literally The End Of The World

2010-12-31T22:15:00.001-08:00

I had the pleasure of taking a class from Andy Wedel this year and it was always entertaining. Andy is a dual PhD, Biology and Linguistics and one of the brightest people I have met. With over 250 college credits under my belt and 18 years in the software biz, I have met a lot of bright people but Andy rates pretty high. Andy’s class on Phonology was like having a human web page. He had a carefully devised topic but the class could press links to more details on a topic with a thoughtful question. He told us up front that he liked “uppity students who asked a lot of questions” and we did.

However, I also created an experiment for him last semester so I had a special pipeline and got lots of time of him talking about what he was passionate about. He actually even invited me to listen to him lecture in a graduate class on evolution put together by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini who co-wrote the book What Darwin Got Wrong. Though my ideas on evolution are different than the mainstream but I do disagree with the basic premise of the book-that natural selection is overrated. And Andy also disagrees with the premise of the book. (I personally believe that natural selection might be the greatest idea anyone has ever realized, I only disagree with minor details of how it works.)

The class was filled with bright minds and Andy mesmerized them all with his presentation. My favorite Andy hyperlink was one of how the baggy pants style came about. It started because prisoners were not allowed to wear belts while incarcerated and thus their pants fell off their butt. Upon leaving prison, they kept the style to prove their street cred as a homage to having done time. Kids, yet to see inside prison walls, seeing the style and relating it to being tough started to take up the style. More people, who had no idea the reason for the style but admiring the people who wore it, started emulating it, not knowing it’s roots in prison culture. The link had disappeared and looked like the style had evolved out of nowhere. But it actually had a logical but not obvious origin.

Lots of press still seems to come about from people who still somehow don’t want to come to the reality wagon of evolution always try to bring up the concept of missing links. The missing links are not so missing now as Neil Shubin details in his book Your Inner Fish. But the idea I want to emphasis is that lots of odd things pop into existence seemingly out of nowhere where there was a logical unnoticed evolution. Language is one of those items that people think is a static thing when it is actually a constantly moving target.

The End Of The Language As We Know It

I always find it funny that Bookman’s puts authors that talk about “proper English” in the Linguistics section. Linguists hate these guys. People who believe in a prescriptive version of English are not going to have the same opinions as people who take a descriptive view of English. They are really like the Jets and the Sharks.

This reminds me of another Andy story. To quickly demonstrate that people didn’t learn English from their 4th Grade teacher he brings up the wonderful world of English infixes. It is an un-freackin’-believable topic to some people but it is un-freakin’-forgettable lesson. I am a Linguistics student so I was already one of the converted but if you ever doubt that you learned English grammar in school just think about the inner curse word trick, we all know- even Ned Flanders has got it down.

So when I finished reading Txtng:The Gr8 Db8 today I was amused to see the various talking heads exposed doing the same thing they always do-tell us it is the end of the beloved language. People are really upset about abbreviations, e.g., gr8, lol, etc., i.e., abbreviations created before they were born. David Crystal tells the tale and lifts the cover on the ways that words have and always will evolve. The difference with txtng is really the people who are causing the evolution, teenage girls.

Words evolve whether we want them to or not. People remove middles of 3 syllable words and drop endings. Kids grow up hearing these items and create mental models that the parents didn’t intend. Kids grow into adults and a little by little things change. Ya know itz proly going keep hapnin’. It is “literally” a steamroller of evolution.

Not so literate

Literally is a great example of the process. People have evolved the meaning into “I am being serious.” The conventional meaning is that the physical process is actually happening; the phrase is not a metaphor. However, think about how people actually learn the word. They hear the word in a context, not read it from a dictionary. So imagine being a naïve user and hearing the following story.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. People were literally jumping out of the World Trade Center.

The point here for the speaker is that the unbelievable was happening, the speaker wants the hearer to know it is not a metaphor. But it is easy to see in the concept that “literally” could be interpreted just as a modifier meaning “This is true.” Hear this a few times in similar contexts and the meaning gets stuck. Unless the person who knows the “literal” meaning, it gets cementing into minds as the definition; though it is not the conventional one. Evolution is literally a moving target of change.

Every generation has those own language snobs who crown themselves official English ambassadors of proper language from Jonathan Swift to William Safire. They are always missing the missing links and don’t see the pea in the peas.

Don’t Peas Me Off

Pea is a non-word that eventually was granted word status. It is a backformation and was created by user’s viewing peas as being a plural word. I doubt any monarch of the English language would deny “pea” real word status. People view pea as something that just happened, like baggy pants stylishness, and are unaware of the missing link of peas. But the concept of a word as a static thing is a illusion. Pea may be stuck and not subject to further evolution at this point, a species of a word. But “literally”(the word) is a species in the midst of change evolving before our eyes.

So peaz dnt peaz me off and tell me you think language is a static thng. u c idz tru. da times day r changin.

So let’s have a little cell phone to take us out…

The I Am A Dork Confirmation or Why I Jumped Into A Pool of 44 Degree Water

2010-12-31T11:19:00.001-08:00

In case you haven’t seen it from my wife’s posting, I did in fact-as the video shows- jump into a pool of 44 degree water for a 50 bucks of Amazon credit. However, I would like to show that while I am a dork for doing this, it actually wasn’t that bad, and want to show what I actually got for my troubles. To see the evidence go to http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1658840524844

First, my kindle has ruined me on newspaper and books. I don’t like reading books, they don’t allow to adjust to a font for maximum reading speed and they are bulky and unyielding in your hands. I thought that maybe I was mistaken and checked out a few books from the library two days ago. But the experiment proved to me, I don’t like the paper versions of books anymore.

I actually bought a book with my winnings to explore this idea called The Shallows:What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brain. Kindle Cost: $9:43. I know the internet effects my brain and makes my view of the world and I would love to see this guys spin. I read the sample (advantage to Kindle Books) and thought, hey, I need more.

The Kindle is also probably responsible for lack of satisfaction with newspapers. I try to read parts of the paper everyday but I always leave with a feeling of it should be better than this. Mainly because I have already found something better. Instapaper is an awesome service and the correct price: Cost : Free. Articles like “The Moral Life of Babies”, “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains”, “Does Language Influences Culture.” now these are interesting to me. And I can use the Instapaper bookmark to send any article on the web to my kindle. And with my wireless kindle, they just appear on my machine.

Being someone who is interesting in Linguistics and Internet Culture of course I had to buy Txting: TheGr8 Db8. Cost : 7:16.

I am a person who is on the net everyday for large portions of my day but I also have a luddite streak in me like one of my favorite authors, former Wired Editor and technologist and luddite, Kevin Kelly. After reading his sample of What Technology Wants where he talks about the evolution of technology (you have me at evolution) reaching back to the language revolution of 50 000 years ago. I had to buy this too. Cost: $14:98.

I also found a cheap book that talked about a Calculus for three bucks!

So I have 15 bucks of amazon credit left and I am pondering what to finish off with. The logical choice would be a book on Speed Reading because it would make my life so much better. It kills me that there is so many things I don’t know that are just a book away. There is also books on Music Psychology, an always fun topic for me. There is a book on an Amazonian language that doesn’t have recursion (for Linguists this is a really big deal). There are also the obligatory cutting edge books on evolution such as Life Ascending: The Ten Great Innovations of Evolution. And of course the obligatory books on cognition and vision such as The Vision Revolution and Fixing My Gaze.

But I went with Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. Cost:12:99. This book talks about human perception from a cognitive science spin and how Magicians “hack” your mind. Hacking people minds has now become my favorite phrase and favorite idle mental rambling. Here a video from my favorite site TED which talks about the concept.

So I figure I have a few bucks left and I have 50 bucks of Barnes And Noble gift cards which I figure I can trade for a discount to someone for cash (My kindle doesn’t read B&N books only Amazon version). I will glad to take any offers ;>,

But really the best part of this story is that Kim said she would have given me 50 bucks for Amazon anyway.

Jumping into a pool of 44 degree water for no use other than your wife’s amusement. Priceless.

The Mike Ditka Coaching Theorem or Seeing Beyond The Invisible Aggregate

2010-12-30T13:18:00.001-08:00

The guys at ESPN’s NFL pregame show were talking about whether the New York Giants’ coach Tom Coughlin had a personality that was compatible for his job. Was he too abrupt with his players? Did that type of communicative make it impossible to be a successful coach? Ditka responded by saying different styles work and it didn’t matter. “Lombardi and Landry were both great coaches.” The point being Lombardi was a in your face coach and Landry a distant mentor. I thought wow this is quite an interesting observation. How could this be true because communication in pretty much a large proportion of what a coach does. No amount of brains matters if you can’t communicate the message to your players. So how could this empirical fact stand? Is communication not that important in coaching?

My buddy Boomer then went around the table to former NFL greats and asked what they thought about coaching style and which they preferred. The formers players did not have a consensus; some preferred a coach who “told them like it is” and said they preferred someone who didn’t yell at them.

I SEE DEAD LOGIC

Do you see the answer? This is kind of like that scene in The Sixth Sense when the boy whispers to Bruce Willis that he “sees dead people.” I was blown away at that point in the movie and had to whisper to my wife that Bruce Willis is dead. Other people didn’t realize that the reason the boy is telling Bruce this fact because Bruce is dead and doesn’t know it.

If a coach needs to communicate to his players to be successful then how can two totally different polar opposites work. If A –>B and C—>B where A <> C are mutually polar opposites would be the best symbolic formulation I think. If you are perplexed by this then you creating an invisible aggregate. Players is(are) not a uniform thing.

The results of a coaching style are determined by the fit of the players. Some players work better with different methods. A perfect coach would be hard on the players that needed it and be supportive of those who needed it. Though this might not work so great because the players might not be aware of the why of the treatment and only see the how. Thus players being treating harshly would believe the coach was playing favorites. So what’s the best answer?

Bill Parcels came to the conclusion that if you want me to cook the soup you need to let him pick the ingredients. It is an obvious solution, you need players who thrive with the coaches playing style. Bill needed people who could take direction and criticism.

I turned out ok

People model their parenting style based on how “they turned out.” The reasoning being if I turned out ok then what my parents did must of worked. If their parents toughness was a primary factor and they consider themselves successful, then they conclude that the parenting must have been the reasoning. Or if they feel that they are a failure, they adopt a different more nurturing philosophy. People fail to see that events can transpire because of conditions or in spite of conditions. And some conditions actually don’t matter at all. And more importantly as Amos Tversky pointed out people will gravitate to view facts that prove their initial mental theory. Our minds create abstractions and begin to believe their abstractions are real. That is why there are things like the Gambler’s fallacy.

I will put all my money on black

People often confuse probabilities with distributions. Probabilities are what the chances are that it could happen to you, distributions are the aggregate sum of happenings. They are related but not the same thing and most definitely not interchangeable. So given n spins of the roulette wheel, 1/2 of them will be on black. That doesn’t mean if there are three blacks in a row that the next one is more likely to be red. It is still 50% chance of red and black. Casinos make millions of dollars because people don’t get this concept. My favorite joke is from a comedian who I can’t remember his name but still chuckle at the joke. “1/3 of people of are stupid (distribution). So look to your left and then look to your right, if they aren’t stupid then it is you.(probability)” I sometimes wonder if people are laughing because it defies their logic or that the logic is false. It is part of normal reasoning though.

Humans reason by taking in data and making abstractions. They then apply these abstractions to reason about the world. Sometimes we don’t realize that these abstractions are not real things but distributions. This is what I call the invisible aggregate. People sometimes can only see the forest and can’t see that it is made of trees. The trees become invisible in the forest (aggregate). Thus when we expect trees to exhibit “forest behavior.”

What does this all mean? Don’t forget to listen to Ditka, he’s da man. Ok, if God was playing Dit-ka, who would win?

The Omar Little Alternative or How Evolution Really Works

2010-12-29T23:53:00.001-08:00

I have grown to love the HBO series The Wire and probably count it as one of the five best TV Dramas ever. I love it because it is gritty, real, subtle, intelligent and enlightening. I think the thing I like best about the show is the character of Omar Little.

David Simon, the show’s main writer and a former Baltimore crime reporter, tells us that Omar is based on a compilation of various real characters. Omar is a openly gay black man who robs drug dealers for a living. He is smart and cunning. He is earnest and moral (in a real odd kind of way). He is a niche predator in the bizarre world of street crime in Baltimore, MD. He is a part of the ecology of modern day Ballmere. Below he is testifying (falsely) on Bird, the man who he knows killed and mutilated his gay lover/partner. He understands the “game.”

Omar in Court

I got the Shotgun, you got the briefcase. S'all in the game tho right?

What a great line, might be the best of all time. Drug dealers create a market for drug dealer robbers and lawyers to get the drug dealers out of trouble. Watching the show you will note that Simon (seems) to be implying the lack of industrial economy creates the market for drug dealers in an odd trickle down economics.

This to me shows a great ecological evolution of the inner city culture. To not confuse my opinions with those of conventional versions of evolution, I am going to label my version of evolution donEvolution. donEvolution is based on a few premises. The first of which is, quoting the book What Darwin Got Wrong (p152):

History (natural history included) is about what actually happened;it’s not what had to happen;or even about what would happen if Mother Nature were to try again.

To quote another great Philosopher Homer Simpson “There is no moral, it is just stuff that happened.” So basically just because something is, doesn’t mean it had to be that way. There are multiple ways of life possible in any ecology. This rules out a lot of speculation in Evolutionary Biology about why something is. That is the wrong question, the real question is why are certain things, given an ecology, not present anymore.

South America had a ton of large creatures 10 000 years ago. How come they aren’t there any more. Well, humans came to the continent. Humans are good are killing big slow creatures for food, probably a little too good for the likes of giant penguins and giant sloth.

This rids us of stupid question like why did species X develop trait Y in environment Z. The reason is trait Y is not a lethal trait in environment Z. This also rids of the really dumb ideas of a spandrel, which is a trait that developed in spite of having no evolutionary advantage. So Steven Pinker’s claim of music as “auditory cheesecake” goes out the window as not a real good question. Spandrel assume an intelligent designer which is bad theology and bad science put together in one shiny crappy idea.

The next important concept in donEvolution is that every living organism is equally evolved. There is no more evolved creatures;each living creature comes from a certain base creature which could or could not still exist, though it is doubtful. If anything, E Coli and other single cell organisms could be considered more evolved as they have been through many more generations to get to their current design. Animals like humans with single births and long initial periods before fertility haven’t had the number of rounds that our single cell cousins have weathered.

So this rids of us of goofy ideas like we are evolving towards more complex beings which is in vogue now with the digerati. Lots more single cell creatures than multicellular ones, lots more beetles than mammals. And due to fecundity differences this is probably become a wider gap every day.

Point four is there are different species because of genetic and epigenetic change. The corollary of that is that there isn’t any essence to a creature, any given creature is the result of past genetic calculus. All mammals have a same ancestor that had 4 limbs and each limb is designed with one big bone, 2 smaller bones and lots of little bones at the end. Bats and humans both have this configuration but also have a difference in size and other odd features. So suppose you are this ancestor (probably Tiktaalik) who will have children that through genetic change turn into bats and humans, are your distant grand children still kinds of lungfish? Hopefully, you will agree that bats and humans are not lungfish. Now do the same mind trick a million years into the future, will your future grand children be human? Probably not—odd thought, no?

Point five is that there are genetic change dead ends and those are called species but these dead ends have unforeseen outs. A species by definition is two biological units that can reproduce a new creature that can procreate. If two things can create new biological units they will have a tendency to create more of the same. But through odd circumstances there are mutations and after time these mutations are so different that they can’t mate with the base species only with the mutated species. That is how you get new species, you can actually do this in a lab with creatures with short generations and high fecundity.

Point six is that certain aggregates of creatures create an ecological base and certain creatures will thrive in this environment while others won’t. Sometimes your random genetic mutations like for instance the color of your fur matches the color of the sandy beach on which you live will allow you to thrive. Sometimes your random genetic mutations like the color of your fur being different than the beach you live on is not so good and you don’t survive to make new little ones of you.

There are certain laws that appear over and over again. Being too good of a predator can have bad future consequences. Only eating one type of food also not a good strategy. But the point of donEvolution is that it depends on the circumstances of the environment whether it happens, there is no predictable paths of evolution—just tendencies. Panda Bears are built for extinction in so many ways, one food source that needs to be constantly be eaten. However, they live near humans who love their beautiful symmetry.

So to come full circle back to Omar, he has a great survival strategy. But it doesn’t follow that every drug gang situation will breed an Omar. Omar is moral but this isn’t a must be trait for a drug dealer robber. Omar is smart and that is definitely a trait that ensures his survival. You could argue that Omar couldn’t survive in this situation without being more cunning than those he robs. We see that pattern in nature, predators tend to be more intelligent. Why? Well the unintelligent ones probably don’t get dinner because they are being outfoxed by rabbits and other dinner dates. Omar needs lots of targets just like predators need lots of prey. This is another pattern we see in nature. In computer speak, predators don’t scale. Prey that survive also tend to have a high fecundity. Lots of street level corner drug troops are being created more quickly to not allow the drug dealers to predict Omar’s next move.

So Omar is the shining example of a predator in an environment but is oh so unique. He is a great example of donEvolution.

The Bowling/ Calculus Intersection Hypothesis or What I Didn’t Learn In Statistics

2010-12-29T09:30:00.001-08:00

Zeno had a fun paradox when he argued that you can’t leave a room. For every point in the room, there is a point that is in between you and the door. Wherever you move this holds true, so how can you move through an infinite series of points in a finite amount of time? There are multiple reasons this paradox isn’t true, plus the error proves a point for cognitive linguistics, but let me talk about the most famous answer to the paradox.

(left-Koch circle which is an infinite line in a finite space)

Reaching the limits

Newton had a better idea. The idea of the limit. (See an example created by http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=limit+of+1/x)

The concept is real easy and well explained in this article from the cool math site. (Check out the link-it takes about 3 minutes to learn this concept) Eventually this evolves into something more complex looking. But while this is hard to calculate, the concept is easier to understand. As you learn calculus you learn tricks that are mentally easy to do: If (number1)x(cubed) + (number2)x is the current form then you can convert it to number1 times the cube (3 x 3 in example) x(squared) plus number2 (2 in example).

Isaac Newton came up with a different idea and that is why Sheldon puts him on the top of his Christmas tree.

So which of the following of the previous two ideas help you better understand calculus, the polygon or cubed trick? The trick helps you calculate better but the polygon example helps you better understand what calculus is doing. To me, this is kind of like modern bowling.

Bowling me over

Yesterday the family went bowling (full disclosure my wife won the second game) and it occurred to me that modern bowling is using computing in the correct way. Neither of my sons knows how to keep score in bowling, which was in the past what knowing how to bowl entailed. It is easy enough to understand and we explained the concept to both of them. However, given a blank piece of paper and having them bowl, I don’t think they would calculate the correct scores with 100% accuracy off of the top of their head. They would probably need a reminder of the concepts or have to look up what you do in the last frame if you got 2 strikes. But keeping score is not bowling.

Bowling is the physical act of knocking down the pins with a ball. Understanding how to knock the pins down consistently and in novel situations is bowling. Keeping score is something you need to understand the concept but a machine does a much better job than a human can (it can even sense “hidden” pins that the first glance of the naked eye might miss). This is the way that math should be taught.

My kingdom for a calculating machine

I am frustrated that I can’t take many math courses at the University of Arizona. Every one knows that remembering how to calculate a math problem fades with age and it has been many moons since I took an official math class. I already program many higher level concepts and read lots of popular math books on things like statistics and game theory. But solving polynomials by hand to pass a test of my knowledge, heck, I am scared to even to take the test because I will embarrass myself. The only math class I was able to take in the last two years, Statistics, I had to spend tons of time having us calculating by hand linear fits and God help me chi-square distribution. Plus tons of time looking up by hand on a piece of paper the various proper answers for p or r after the hand calculation was done. The teacher admitted that no one calculated this stuff by hand anymore.

So instead of learning about how to recognize various trends in data and what they mean, we learned various ways to keep score. We talked briefly about when to use what but never got any practice on when to apply these things (until the final exam of course-grrr). What I would love to find is someone that has a math course of study where you spend time learning how to better understand the concepts in a logical cumulative manner from the ground up. I know that Conrad Wolfram is doing some stuff with this. I don’t know if he is looking for guinea pigs but I would love to be the first to test such a curriculum. Maybe I should make a shout out to the Carol Cronin robot. Oh great computer robot gods please hook a brother up with a way to learn more (and remember what I forgot) about math. Please do your AllState™ commercial magic and make an exciting courseware appear in my mailbox. Or I guess I could just email him. But what is the fun in that? Shape of Benoit Mandelbrot!

The Carol Cronin Robot Hypothesis or Do Robots Dream of Electric Tweets?

2010-12-28T12:23:00.001-08:00

The oddest thing happened the other day. I got an email from Carol Cronin who read my last blog and wanted to know if she could tweet it. I responded of course that I thought that was fine. Then I got to thinking…how did she get the blog and was she just a robot? And if I wrote about her again, would she (or he or it) find it?

CSI TUCSON

I quickly made a quick web search on Carol Cronin to find out if there was such a person. There is such a person who works at Mathematica which is what a large part of my blog post is about. Does that mean she is real? Not necessarily, people who are smart enough to create spambots would probably have thought of this possibility. My next thought would be is there a picture for her? Once again there was and it was not what I expected which was good in my mind. If I would create a Carol Cronin I would make a picture that reflects a common Carol—> Carol O’Connor or Carol Burnett maybe? She doesn’t resemble either of these people. So while this is not a foolproof methodology, the effort required to get a greater degree of truth is now greater than the probability of the possibility that someone faked such a fact. So the next question is how or why did she find my blog?

You are your robot

My best hypothesis is that she used a computer robot of some sort to search blogs for hits on the name of her company or maybe their url. So if she did bidding with her electronic spider does that mean she found me or that it found me? Aren’t they really the same? If she manually did a search of blogger to find “Wolfram” is that different than any pre built code doing the same thing? My conclusion would be that “she” found me, not “it” found me. She is her robot in this modality. I think it is really interesting because it is the type of symbolic gymnastics that Mathematica™ does in many domains.

What is “=”

I love to teach my kids that all math is related. Geometry and Algebra are just the same thing in different clothes. The more math that you know the more you learn that they are multiple modes of the same problem. My kids first learned about multiplication and division from counting stacks of dog food in PetSmart™. There are 4 stacks of 3 dog food sacks, how many dog food stacks are they? If we make 6 rows of dog food sacks, how many would be in each row? These show the physical modality of multiplication and division. They also communicate how they are closely tied concepts and why you can’t divide by zero! There is even a deeper truth that gets displayed. When the stacks are in a square shape, the rows and columns are equal, hence you get the idea of a number being “squared” or a “square root” of a number. Of course, there is an even deeper algebraic meaning (z=x*y) which relates many geometrical truths. And this type of thinking is why I love Mathematica™.

Seeing is believing

Check out the following: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=x*y%3D12

This is the equation from the pet store and this is all the other things that “equal” to it. These are the different modalities visualized for you. There is even a way to see “imaginary” things that can’t be visualized in the pet store (In the negative quadrants).

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=SquareRoot[-81]+

If you haven’t seen imaginary numbers before, well if you clicked on that linked you have now.

I’d like to teach the world to teach

I have included a link to my favorite website with a person from Mathematica explaining how math education could be better. It is about 20 minutes but well worth it. As a matter of fact, if you think you don’t like math I advise you to see what math really is. You might be surprised to find out you are more mathematically inclined than you knew.

I will summarize the podcast as I see it. Math is not calculating; it is more than that.

Math is create a model of a real world process, calculating the model in a new situation and verifying the model reflects realty. In the past, the calculating is what people think of as math. However, now computers can do this, so we need to get people to understand how to ask questions and verify their answers.

Combined with the easy access to information, new methods need to be used to teach people. People have access to anything in the world (to a certain limit) and now need to understand how to abstract deeper forms. With instant access to all bits of information, teaching becomes what is the proper path to maximize the information retained and ability to use information in new novel ways. There is nothing that annoyed me this last semester than my Computation Linguistics teacher saying “There are lots of resources out if you Google it.” It makes me want to scream, I know there are lots of resources. What I need to know if the best resources that can put concepts in a fashion that I can retain the most things and be able to use the most things in the future.

Mathematica would seem to the best technology for the job as I see it now. The calculable notebooks and slides shows bring a whole new learning tool to the table. They are actually even better than a project that I am currently working for a dynamic notebook called dScribe. My idea is based on being able to take good notes for Linguistic classes with the phonetic alphabet, grammar trees and pictures of the human head and I don’t know if Mathmatica™ does these things yet. But hey maybe I can help build them. Maybe even Carol Cronin’s robot will give me a free extended trial while I talk my bosses into buying me a full version for my job (and schoolwork) at the University of Arizona. Robot, are you there? It is me don-E.

The Play Doh Origin Conjecture or How Many People Live In Tucson

2010-12-25T21:37:00.001-08:00

Last week Kim and I had a date night and went to see a movie. Our late arrival had us pick the best possible candidate which ended up being a loser of a movie despite having a cast of top actors like Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson and Jack Nicolson. However, there was a truly interesting part of the movie that gave us something to talk about on the drive home because it deals with what I consider the real big question.

In the film, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson are vying for the affections of Reese Witherspoon. Paul Rudd corners Witherspoon and has here open up a present. Witherspoon unravels the present and it is a can of Play Doh. Rudd goes on to explain his present with a short narrative on how Play Doh came to be.

Rudd explained that Play Doh was the brain child of someone from Ohio. Witherspoon felt the story to be fiction and asked Rudd the name of the people. Rudd obliged by given the names of the main characters. Rudd goes on to explain that Plah Doh was first used by people to clean off the coal in their chimneys. However, his sister, a kindergarten teacher, noticed that Kids liked to play with the elastic plaster. When the need for a coal removal product stopped becoming a necessary, the makers of Play Doh were left to figure out what to do with material. The sister-in-law suggested they put dye in the mix and sell it to kids and the rest is toy history. Rudd’s point was with a little adjustment sometimes great things could happen.

Now this is a nice story perfectly in tune with the story (what little there was to it). The question is do you believe the story is true?

The Question

The question of the 21st century is how do you know when something is actually true. The rules of fiction allow the above story to be totally false, partly false or the god’s honest truth. Which do you believe it is and what are your reasons to believe it?

One of the ways that we try to spot a lie is that we ask about a detail that might not seem to be obvious to fool the person telling us the story. This is a technique that Witherspoon uses in the film. The writer of the script of course knows of this technique. So is he using it to tell us something about the character of Witherspoon or as a subtle way to tell us “Yea, it really is true?”

Another way a lot of people, and especially me, determine the truth of a story is whether there are different media outlets that have reported the same story. I looked up the fact when I got home and found the broad outline of facts to be reported in Wikipedia and other places such as published books. Does that make it true? I think about the time of an episode of 30 Rock when the writers created a fake profile for Janis Joplin on Wikipedia to fool an actor in the show to “live” the part in a foolish manner. Of course, this is a fictional account of a situation, a scripted teleplay. Note the interesting interplay of allowing a fiction story help me decide on the truth of a real world item. The characters in the show had a motivation to tell falsehoods and that is another sign we use to determine truth, does the teller have something to gain by relating the facts of the story.

This is one that is constantly being played out in traditional media and internet websites and emails. Questions such as Was Barrack Obama born in the U.S.? I love getting these emails from relatives and take great pride in quickly showing the “spin” on most of these right wing and left wing items. There are even publications that are dedicated to determining the truth of such items. Which of course have spun off sites that shows how the sites that expose these urban myths are false. The way of course they determine this truth is who said what and what they have to gain by saying it. There is also the matter of scale or balance that we use to determine the truth.

One of my favorite all time films Pulp Fiction demonstrates this in a scene with John Travolta and Uma Thurman. Travolta asks Thurman whether he husband threw out another man from a tall building because he had massaged her feet. Thurman responds to him whether that seems like a logical response. Travolta claims that it seemed extreme but within the bounds of possible. Some people don’t have this in their bags of tricks however and don’t look at this in subtle way like Travolta in the story. I was amazed one time to hear a person talk about how a certain church had been hacked and it told that the church was all about “having sex all the time.” I laughed saying only naïve people who believe such an extreme view, a better lie would be to say a certain person had sex with an illegal person. The person was insulted because I guess they believed the hacker sight to be true. I felt bad because I guess I had insulted her unwittingly.

Only the facts

One might believe that such “facts” are the exception and not the rule, not important to true learning. In fact, there are two current projects that are determined to give users true facts. The first is a site that I highly recommend, Wolfgram Alpha( http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/) . Unlike search engines which try to figure out what you are asking and showing you sites to answer your questions, the site actually will answer your questions or least try to answer your questions. Try a couple of the examples and you will see that it is quit good at “Natural Language Processing.”

The other project is the Watson project at IBM where they are developing a computer to compete on Jeopardy. The computer looks to answer questions by taking the answer (remember Jeopardy gives you the answer and you give back the question) and uses multiple ways to determine the question. It uses multiple paths and if the paths come back with the same thing in a statistically significant amount then Watson knows the proper question.

Both of these projects will be used to create the technology of coming software. Watson will be sold to be used as a decision engine. The Wolfram engine is actually only a small part of the Mathmatica programming language. These 2 projects will decide the truth of the future very soon and it is actually somewhat scary because sometimes things that seem true are actually just best guesses. Let me show you why by giving you two different seemingly objective queries.

Color my world

Color is the most interesting phenomenon because everyone (who has not studied anthropology or cognitive science) believes that color is a good objective attribute of an object. This is far from the truth in many ways.

First, the color of an object is a cultural decision. Lots of different cultures don’t have color names for different obvious colors such as green or blue. And before you throw the primitive card out, unless you are a speaker of Russian also, you don’t see some obvious colors either. Russian has two different colors for light blue and dark blue. If you want to play the primitive card, non-Russian speakers will have to throw themselves in the primitive pile as we see these as shades of color, not separate colors. By that definition speakers of English are more primitive.

The second fact is that color is not just a reflection of light. A reflection from a surface at given wavelength will been viewed as a given color but given a color doesn’t mean that is a reflection of light at that frequency. Your brain corrects for different lighting and which colors are next to the surface you are viewing. Plus, there is the whole sky is blue thing. The sky is not reflecting blue to you, it is letting certain wavelengths through to your visible eye.

How many people live in Tucson?

Try the following query from Wolfram Alpha: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=population+of+Tucson%2C+AZ

You will see the first glance on the fuzziness of the question. Do you mean Tucson proper or metro area? Do you include Catalina or Marana in you estimates? So does Tucson have a million people in it? You could objectively say from the data that it does, in a way.

Now try Google. http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=population+of+tucson

Google tries to give you an answer and states the population is 486,499. Wolfram Alpha gives you a number of 720,425. Google has the population of Tucson being 2/3rds the size that Wolfram does. Who is correct? Check the sources at the bottom of the query from Wolfram and you can see the sources for this information and there are many. The Google fact doesn’t have a source but looking at the results from the query we see that Google got the fact from the 2000 census and thus is very out of date.

So checking out one of the links you get the obvious issue, the source is the 2000 census, but something even more interesting.

http://www.trueknowledge.com/q/2010_population,_tucson,_az

It claims that the 2009 census came back with 548,555 residents. Since there is no such official 2009 US Census, it is puzzling in many ways but still is way less than the Wolfram figure.

So you might think how can such a seemingly objective measure be so contested. There are multiple ways to get the answer; a census, number of dwellings, school, work and social security statistics. Who would ever think such an objective fact could have such diverse answers. I mean really who has anything to gain by a population census.

But in reality, there are many people whose actually job is get the people who matter to count in the best possible way. As a senior at Towson, I took a class on Baltimore Economic Development where we explored the current issues on the development of the Baltimore area. One of the places we visited was an actual foundation whose job was to get the federal government to count Baltimore and Washington, D.C. as one big city. If the two cities and suburbs were merged it gave the illusion of the market being the 4th largest in the country (at the time). If you didn’t count it that way, they really were two mid sized venues. They wanted the illusion of a bigger market when people thought of their city.

So how many people live in Tucson? I am not sure and I doubt that any amount of facts would convince me of any number. The real answer is less than Phoenix and more than there used to be. But really what does it matter? Well, it matters to people with sport teams who have left Tucson in the past year leaving the city dry on professional level baseball teams in the spring and summer.

So try two more last queries and see how really screwed up this population count really is.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%3Dlargest+cities+in+world

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%3Dtokoyo+mexico+city+shanghai+

As you see, it depends on how you count. The question needs further clarification but clarification I doubt that most people really know exists.

Garbage In Garbage Out

The problem is a lot of people, myself included, will end up building applications on top of the information in these application. That is IBM’s actual goal for going on Jeopardy, to sell decision systems. But the information is only as good as the question that is asked, so we will be developing inferences based on answers that might not be so true. And how will people know to check their answers?

This of course reminds me of an old joke. Three men were discussing what the greatest invention was in the world today. The first guy says I think it is the car because with a car I can go anywhere. The next guy claims that a plane is even greater and can take you even more places and faster. The third man says a toaster. “A thermos???” the other men gawk. “Why a thermos?” The third man explains it keeps the hot stuff hot and the cold stuff cold. The first man says “So what is so great about that?” The third man says “How do it know?”

Since we don’t have the laws of physics to determine our facts, how will we know? That is the big question.

The White Album Equivalency or Why iTunes Sucks

2010-12-25T10:17:00.001-08:00

You say you want a revolution-Beatles

Steve Jobs likes to wear the mask of a revolutionary but in reality he just sells the same ideologies in shiny new packages. He is the cubic zirconium revolutionary. One of the latest revolutionary items spawned by his company Apple is the amazing fact that the Beatles are now available on iTunes. It is has garnered press and was even a lead item on the apple.com site. You can buy the White Album yet again in another format. This is big news for record companies because they can sell you something that you already own yet again. I am puzzled why supposedly intelligent people haven’t noticed this but it really shows the terrible state of the music industry.

There is a base assumption that the record companies and media companies have used to dupe people for a long time. That you can and should own music. Once you buy into this idea, their job is done, because owning leads to buying. And buying is caused by marketing and that is what they are good at. How many of you have bought the same album in various different formats? LP, 45, 8-Track, Cassette, CD, mp3, wma?

You might be asking what is alternative to owning music? The best answer for artists is actually not having you own music but getting credit for using their music. It is the worst answer for the record companies and that is why the record companies keep silent on this issue.

How can that work?

The best system would be a system that a person pays for the right to listen to a music by pool of musicians. The musicians would get paid by taking a percentage of time listening to their music/ total fees from all users. There are various tweaks you can make on this system but the basic idea is performers/writers of music get paid by the amount of time their music is played, not how often it is bought. This is the revolutionary idea because it creates incentives for musicians to create music that is not initially attractive or faddish but it creates an incentive to create music that will be played for a long time. It also lowers barriers to young, unsigned and local bands. They don’t need a large company to front the massive distribution chain that is needed to sell music nowadays. There are a few objections that I see most people would have to such a system with the most frequent being it is technical feasible. And that is the funny thing, the infrastructure for such a system is already in place.

The future looks like now

Record companies have already got this deal in place with business. Since buying a piece of music would be a cheap capital good, the record companies make businesses pay for play. This is a slightly different model than I am suggesting but the important point is the music industry is already set up for the idea. Musicians are broke down into 3 main groups (ASCAP, BMI and Sound Scan) to get royalties of music that is being played in business settings. There are also already services such as Napster and Yahoo that allow users to listen to music for an all you can eat price. All that is needed for a revolutionary shift that musicians should be rewarded for creating music we want to listen to and not for selling us the format de jour.

Won’t musicians not Get as much money in this system?

Some musicians will get less money. They are the ones that have a song that is “burning up the charts” and you buy the album only to realize the album is unlistenable. However, musicians who create music that you listen to over and over, for example- the Beatles, have been ripped off by you for a long time. You bought their music once and they never got any more money from you. Well, they might have when you converted your collection to the latest fad format.

All this machinery making modern music

Can still be open hearted

Not so coldly charted, its really just a question of your honesty

-Neil Peart from Spirit of The Radio (RUSH)

So you say you want a revolution? DON”T BUY MUSIC! Join a subscription service or use services such as Pandora, it is easy and rewarding. Go out and see musicians when your favorite band comes to town or better yet go see and support the local music scene. It is the institution that is corrupt but it has sown the seeds of their own destruction. We only need to plant them and watch them grow.

Dr. Beatbox or How I Learned to Stop Hatin' and Love the Rap Music

2010-12-18T22:21:00.000-08:00

As a person who made his living playing music during the 80s, I saw some odd changes happen first hand that didn’t make sense at the time. At the time, I hated them and thought they were an affront to “real” music. However, with the gift of 20/20 hindsight, I now realize that the changes were inevitable and that Rap music is the most important musical innovation of the 20th century.
To get the full appreciation of this depth of innovation, start off with a little mind experiment; Think to yourself what are the base elements of music. Most people will come up with pitch, rhythm, duration and timbre. I will call these the classical elements because these are the elements that most people who were trained in what we call classical music use to determine what a song is. People view these as the base elements because the base mental representation for classical music separates these elements out in musical notation. A musical score has these elements separated. Pitch is represented by the height of the musical note, there are various types of notes that represent the duration of the pitch, the rhythm is represented by the left to right representation and different instruments (timbre) are determined by having different staffs for them. With these elements you can determine the essence of the piece of music. This essence is an emergent property called melody.
Melody is a property that emerges from the base classical musical elements sans timbre and what most people designate as the song. The rhythm, pitch and pitch durations of Mary Had A Little Lamb is the same song no matter what instrument plays them. The timbre is a variable but the other stuff is the essence of the song. Melody also has another mysterious property in humans in that is not relegated to exact pitch, the Hertz(Hz) or number of vibrations per second, but is emergent in the relative pitches. The exact pitch sequence of 220Hz to 440Hz (the first two notes of Somewhere Over The Rainbow) has the same melody as 110Hz to 220Hz. Classical theory has merged this fact in the theory of notes. The above sequence has named above the above items as “A”. 440Hz is middle A (the pitch of a dial tone in old touch tone phones). The other As are different octaves but the same note. Since the relative sequences of notes is the same we view them as having the same melody. So notes seem to be another emergent property of pitch. Later I will explain how pitch itself is an emergent property but let’s not get ahead of the story.
Around the 17th century, music theorist noticed that when certain notes were played together gave a certain essence to the song which evolves into an emergent property called harmony. These essences became cataloged and abstracted into various theories of harmony. The most popular of the time still are with us today when we talk about music theory in most college level classes in Western universities. The theory states very roughly that there are 2 parts of a song, the melody and the harmony. These two parts also have a distinct hierarchy, melody is the essence of the song and harmony can be changed in the same way that timbre is a variable. The harmony is the background part of the song, the ground to the melody’s figure. The melody is still the song.
Harmony will eventually become visible in the music notation in the 19th and 20th centuries. It will eventually take over certain fields of music like folk music as being an integral part of the song. Songs with chord charts are a staple of music now but once again, let’s not get ahead of the story.
With the innovation of the piano-forte (now just called a piano) as a stable of the musician’s basic toolkit and the increase of the modern orchestra, dynamics became an important topic and show up in the musical scores. These are seen as an important element to the music piece but also lower in importance. There are other ideas such as tempo added to the score, I.e how fast a piece of music is played.
So at the time of the golden era of Classical Music the elements of a piece of music and their importance are as follows:
1. Melody (Pitch, Duration, Rhythm)
2. Harmony (The relationships of the pitch)
3. Timbre/Tempo
4. Dynamics
Level One items are the songs essence, level 2 is of secondary importance, level 3 is a variable and level four is important for the execution of the song. I am going to switch from the use of the philosophic term of essence at this point and bring in a term from Cognitive Science, prototype. From Wikipedia:
Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization in cognitive science, where some members of a category are more central than others. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool. Prototype theory also plays a central role in linguistics, as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics.
Prototypes are essences on a sliding scale. Most people think that a Robin is a better example of a bird than a penguin. Though this concept has not been applied to music before that I know of, it actual is quite useful. In the same manner as the bird example, most people believe that Mary Had A Little Lamb played with a major chord harmony is a better example than one played with minor or extended harmony. I can play Mary Had A Little Lamb with a piano or a mouth harp because these items are not important to the prototype. How loud of soft I play the notes doesn’t matter, this is just a fact of how well I play the song. The prototype of what a song “is” and it is an evolved idea. It is the product of small changes of culture over time and thus has a certain amount of arbitrariness. And this is where the story gets interesting.
The elements of music evolved in such a way because of the history of how music was performed, the technology involved and how people listened to it. And since these elements have changed greatly since the middle of the 18th century the elements that we actually use in Western popular music have changed and Rap is the evolution of these elements. But before I can explain that I need to explain how the classical elements are evolved out of the historical record.
Music before recorded music was always performed in a place, at a given time and with an analog instrument. Listeners were bound by the acoustic environments. The distance was an element that added a dimension to the music that was to be ignored, reverberation. It was uncontrolled in this environment therefore the listener learned to ignore it. Reverberation is actually a very important element to how people experience sound. Many man hours have gone into the perfection of acoustic environments for recorded music. Many of these solutions are engineered into computer equipment that denies the actual physical reality of the recorded space. That is why Daniel Levitin in his book, This Is Your Brain On Music, claims reverberation to be a basic musical element. This also makes sense in an evolutionary biology frame of reference.
Our hominid ancestors before they left their arboreal environment were small creatures. Because their eyes had shifted to the front of their heads to create depth perception they were vulnerable from various unseen directions. The ability to place an object’s location through sound was an important trait in their continued existence. Modern humans still have this sense and enjoy it with their surround sound systems in their homes and movie theatres. A recording engineer knows that the acoustic aural space that is created on a recording is important to convey cultural meaning. The engineer can make the singer sound like he is in a stadium or a room with the flick of a button. While this parameter probably does not ascend to level one importance, the changing of this parameter makes a difference in the execution of the piece as much as dynamics.
One innovation that had already been understood at the height of the classical period was pitch. Pitch was now well-tempered, i.e. equally out of tune. Bach’s masterpiece The Well-Tempered Clavier had already explored this change to the pitch of various sounds to create the ability to modulate to various different keys. This was a great innovation to the concept of pitch but the technology didn’t yet exist to mangle the concept in the way that modern technology can.
Analog instruments can only create sounds in a certain way. There is a physical force which creates a vibration and this vibration lasts a set period of time due to the intensity of the force and whether any other force acted upon it. Thus every sound has an attack, duration and decay. Certain instruments can change the vibrations without going into the decay first and these are called slurs. String and air instruments players through the ages have learned to create vibrato which is also a method to vary the vibration slightly to sound more like the human voice. These changes are subtle and not perceived as being a different pitch or “out of tune” by the listeners. This shows that the idea of pitch, like color, is a cultural phenomenon and is not an element of the empirical evidence of the observation. These subtle changes can take various forms.
On a stringed instrument, you can bend a string, “hammer on” or pull off of the string with another finger or mechanical bend the string to create a change in vibration without changing the attack. These changes all are written in a similar mode in musical notation with textual or special symbols to note which of the ways that the note has changed. However, Modern digital instruments are not limited to such forms of execution.
A modern synthesizer can create a sound that can change attack and decay in ways one cannot with an analog instrument. A modern synthesizer can create a sound that starts as a piano and ends up as a saxophone. These sounds cannot be correctly written in standard musical notation. But there are also other musical sequences in the modern landscape that can kind of be duplicated in musical notation but not without a lot of text notation. For example, a guitar can produce the same pitch E (the highest open string) in multiple places on the instrument and at the same time. For example, the opening of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Pride and Joy starts with two Es being played at the same time (one open and the other on the adjacent string with a finger on the 5th fret). There isn’t a way to produce this in standard music notation and that is why most guitarists use a method called tablature. The subtle point here is that in this case the timbre of the pitch is essential to essence of the song.
The prototype of the song Pride and Joy is not the melody of the song in total. People who know the song will recognize that you are playing the song when you play the 2 Es at the same time followed by the G-B diad. Part of the prototype of the song is the timbre of the notes being played! This is quite an interesting turn of events but I actually had seen this play out before in my guitar teaching days back in the 80s in an even more extreme case.
My teaching philosophy is to teach a student that big picture, macro level music theory and then teach them songs that the student enjoys to “prove” the theory. Different students have different tastes, some being easier to teach than others and the easiest of which is punk rock. Punk rock is mostly 3 or so power chords played real fast. That is the prototype punk song. I had a student of which I had taught 3 or 4 songs at this point in his development and he kept saying that they didn’t sound right. One evening he said that he wanted to sound like the guy downstairs in the music store. The guy downstairs was playing a song he knew but he was playing it with a distortion pedal. I went out to my car, brought out my Rockman distortion pedal, plugged it in and saw the big “aha” moment as his face lite up. I never saw him again but he stays with me to this day. The prototype of his song to him was the distorted timbre as an essential part of the song. The song wasn’t the same when you were playing it with a guitar without distortion. This isn’t a fluke but goes to the essential nature of how people understand their environment.
I am going to define the base prototype of a song as the minimal amounts of elements needed for a listener to recognize the song. With this definition coupled with the story above you should note that the prototype of a song is not the same for everyone but depends of cultural experience and in particular musical training. The previous mentioned student was an extreme case but goes to show how the idea of what a song “is” is hopelessly linked to life experience. Also note that this has multiple representations. Take for example, the first four notes of Mary Had A Little Lamb. Most people will get quickly figure out what song you are playing with those first 4 notes in rhythm. Just the last 4 notes and most people will not get the tune you are playing outside of a priming influence. Also, in my experiments, if you change the rhythm of the first note to a half note or dotted half note, the listener will still be able to figure out what song you are playing.
There is an asymmetric relationship of items in songs to their prototype which is similar to a phenomenon in phonology. Words tend to evolve or change at the middle or ends of words. Words like “yes” can be evolved to “yea” easily while retaining the same lexical identity. Words like probably become proly over time. Like the evolution of word sounds (phonemes), most of this understanding of what a song “is” happens in the unconscious so until someone points it out to it goes unnoticed even though it challenges stuff we “know”.
People have different listening habits since the golden era of classical music. The most important is recorded music. A listener in the 18th century might hear the same piece of music multiple times but never with the same exact way. The timbre, reverberation and other factors would have changed and thus become unimportant to what the song really “is”. However, when you can hear the same exact song with the same exact timbre, timbre and reverberation multiple times a strange phenomenon starts to evolve. The timbre and the reverberation became part of a new emergent atomic feature- the sample.
Rap is prototypically noted for its lack of “singing” and the rhythmic talking of the lyrics, however, that is not the greatest innovation of the genre. The sample is the great innovation. Tone-Loc didn’t want an E power chord with a certain tempo, he wanted the E chord in the Van Halen song “Jamies Crying” to create “Funky Cool Medina”. His base element wasn’t a thing that would be written in musical tablature. He wanted the exact timbre he heard as a base element and once again thinking about evolutionary biology this makes sense.
Early hominids needed to be able to distinguish between the swooping sounds of a hawk versus a fellow kin moving down from the higher branches. It is really an underappreciated talent of humanity that we can distinguish timbre and the exact person who created a sound. After multiple hearings of Snoop Dog, it is very easy for anyone to quickly recognize his voice in a new recording. The difference between the late 20th century and 18th century is the number of times that one heard the exact same timbre and reverberation. That is why the importance of timbre didn’t become an essential element until recorded music invaded every phase of culture in the late 20th century.
Rap and hip hop music were created in NYC in the early 70s. This timing is not accidental, the turntable had become an instrument, not just a device to play music. Turntableist now created music out of records by manipulating the order of various records using “two turntables and a microphone.” This timing is similar to the timing of another interesting form of 20th century art.
20th century painters were treading new ground because a new technology, the camera, was stealing some of their thunder. The camera could create an exact replica of a thing. Artists needed a new perspective to create something new. Abstract Art flourished in the 20th century and had the same initial distaste for the masses who expected a different idea, a prototype, of what art really “is”. People’s taste evolved to learn that art was trying to recreate what something “is”, not what something looks like. Until the invention of the camera this was a subtle distinction but once the camera showed us what something could mimic reality better than any person could with oil and pencil, the difference was obvious.
Recorded music created a similar issue for artists. People now were used to songs that sounded exactly the same time after time. The abstract items of timbre and reverberation were now conquered and people without musical training still had access to music but not necessary the abstract theory of the classical world. Thus people with access to music all the time extracted their own elements because recording technology permitted this to happen.
Melody was not always the prototype of a song, some people found the “beat” of a song to be prototypical of the song. What consists of a song’s essence became much diversified in the late 20th century.
The early 20th century had seen various new ideas on the essence of a song was. Jazz musicians abstracted out a “head” with harmonic changes as the base of the song. The player could then manipulate a new made up melody over the harmonic changes. This evolved into songs where the harmony was also “jazzed” up with harmonic substitution and harmonic embellishment. Classical theory was doing even odder things.
There was the theory by the Second Viennese School that thought music was evolving to be more chromatic and they saw it through with twelve tone music. Most laymen don’t consider this “music” either but there are starch members who only enjoy this type of music.
The other artsy school was typified by John Cage and his piece 4’33” which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. Modern theories of music have a problem removing this as a piece of music. Note however with the prototype theory, this is quickly put out of the realm of the music and shown to only be an interesting intellectual exercise. There is no prototype for this piece. No one hears nothing and has their brain deduce “Hey that is that John Cage piece!” You might deduce this piece after sitting for 2 minutes with no song but it is not an automatic cognitive response which is necessary for a prototype of a song.
And this is the important part; a piece of music is a combination of sounds that evokes a recognition response as a piece of music. One learns what the song is when one has formed a prototype of the song. After the 20th century, the essential prototype of what a song could be has been broadened and has evolved. It is not a monolithic response and an understanding of music genre prototypes can easily show why this is so.
Depending on your musical experience the prototype of what “Jazz” is can greatly differ. To a person, like myself,who has been taught about the subject formally I would say that “real” jazz deals with harmonic prototypes and improvisation. My definition of Jazz doesn’t view lyrics as being important to defining jazz which would differ from other now “indoctrinated” people. To most people, Jazz is best understood as “instrumental music” as is “Classical” music, the difference being mostly which instruments are playing them. Songs show the same prototypical evolutionary features.
This is why the idea of “rapping” was considered not music by the educated musicians (read indoctrinated musicians) when it first appeared. People who had grown up with melody being the primary prototypical item had a different idea of what the essence of the song really “is” than people who grew up with the idea of lyrics or beats being the primary prototypical items. The two cultures saw things in a different way. As the number of people increasing played this type of music, people began to notice items that actually resembled rap, such as Aerosmith’s Walk This Way, and were able to incorporate a mental model of how this was music. More and more people are born with this being “real” music and in one generation it becomes real music to an ever growing number and can be included in mainstream media such as commercials and movies.
So what is the point in all of this? Basically that Rap music is the largest leap of prototype in musical history. It basically ignored the main elements of music that existed and create a new form unlike any other before it. And it is not stopping, the use of auto tuners, vocoders and other voice processing equipment are keeping Rap ahead of the curve in the area of music technology. This technology is expanding the idea of pitch in new ways that music theorist haven’t really been able to describe how this innovations effect the theory behind the music. Lots of people don’t really know that there are technologies behind the Kanye West sound or the Cher “Believe” effect but these techniques are slowly expanded the idea of pitch in new and exciting ways. And for these reasons, that is why I find myself listening to more and more rap music these days because I feel the artists are pushing the edge of musical understanding.

Praying for my enemies (or not)

2010-12-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

I am going to warn you ahead of time, if you hate iconoclastic statements, you shouldn’t read any further.
If you don’t like anyone questioning the words of the Bible and Jesus in particular, I am warning you to go no further.
However, if you are one those people who gets annoyed by people “who pray for our enemies in (insert war enemy here)”, you will probably like the following.
The following verses from Matthew are probably the most famous of the Beatitudes:
“But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (most of the time translated as your enemies), so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? “If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? “
It is actually a troubling passage in my ways but I want to break it down and see if it actually makes any sense. The main portion of this that is troubling is to “pray for those who persecute you.” The main gist of this is what do we mean by “praying for” and who are “Those who persecute you.”
Let me first take the second part and the more conventional term, what are your “enemies.” One easy way to define this is people who persecute you; but let me take that further. If you are being persecuted by someone I think it would be safe to say that they are doing or intending to do harmful actions to you or innocents for real or imagined reasons. We could also broaden that item by saying people who have done harmful actions to you in the past. We could also say people who pursue actions that go against your moral code. I will go ahead and add the more superficial disliking of people because of a character trait that you find distasteful. So let’s call the people in this list our enemies.
Now the next question is what we are doing when we pray “for” someone. There are once again a few possibilities.
1. We are wishing them to get their wishes or desires
2. We are wishing them to get divine insight
3. We are wishing them strength towards their wishes or desires
Those are the possibilities as I see them, I doubt this is a complete list but it covers multiple scenarios. We pray for someone who is sick or troubled by events of their life. All three items would apply here. Now if someone is intending to do you or your kin harm, do you want them to have 1 and 3? Or do we wish them only number 2. Let’s take an easy mind experiment because in reality it is more than likely happening right now. There is a gang somewhere that is having an initiation right of getting a new member to put a “cap” in some random person. Let’s say they are cruising your block right now. Are you wishing them 1 or 3? More than likely if you are honest you are wishing every such person number 2. So if you wishing for number 2 are you any different than the Gentiles or tax collectors (who Jesus is using as the model of bad people in this scenario, I understand that most of you are Gentiles and some might work for the IRS)? I will go out on a limb and say I am most certainly not. I am not really shamed into agreeing with the statement, any statement, because certain lesser people do such an action.
However, if we take the enemies to be people who have harmed you in the past, it seems that wishing for 1 and 3 would be good. Holding onto grievances is a good way to waste your life on unproductive things. C.S. Lewis once entered a debate about what were the differences between the major religions and came up with the big stunner for Christianity. Grace, the giving of something unearned, is the difference. Every other religion or moral code preaches that you get what you sow, or so Lewis believed and his friends at Oxford stipulated. Now I realize that most modern religions recognize Grace as an important subject and this is where I think the above passage can lend some insight. Basically, there is value on wishing people who have done us wrong in the past both 1,2 and 3. It is liberating and transforming. As Phillip Yancy noted it is what is so amazing about Grace. To forgive without merit someone who has done you wrong is an oddly fulfilling practice. It doesn’t mean that you wish the people who pursue you 1,2 and 3 but if they don’t seek to cause you or innocents harm, it is a good practice.
Once might argue that actually Jesus actual did mean that you should take one for the team, as it were. Gandhi actually believed such a statement and was able to make great changes in the world. However, this overlooks one important point. Do you wish the people who wish to harm innocents (not you) to get their wishes or desires? It is easier to be a martyr than wish others martyred. Most people will see the distaste of the sentiment when they are not doing the hurting themselves. To desire the failure of those who pursue the innocent is to be in tune with justice.
That is why I find the “I pray for the Iraqi soldiers” type statements so offensive. Hopefully, you are wishing them 2 or can muster 1 and 3 after they have found 2. But I don’t wish them their desires if their desire is, as our enemies in Afghanistan desire, to put in place a Medieval theocracy that blatantly violates the rights of the people of their country. I pray that they don’t get their way. I believe that a large portion of the people in most war torn countries probably don’t really care about political matters, they are just doing what needs to be done to survive and would like the whole stupid thing to go away. I pray that they get their desires. But the sad fact of life is sometimes you got to fight. You can choose not to fight but to choose to let the evil dominant the innocent is to choose injustice.
And so that is why I sometimes choose not to pray, in certain ways, for my enemies. It is also why I am annoyed at people who try to make some odd political statement by praying for the enemies soldiers. But hey, that is just the way I see it.

What, not who, is what we should do (Why I support Obama)

2010-12-11T09:30:00.000-08:00

Frank Boas is considered by many to be the father of American Anthropology. Many people give him credit for the idea of “cultural relativism” even though he did not coin the term per se. “Cultural Relativism” (roughly stated) is the principle that one cannot judge the actions of a cultural outside of said culture. All cultures are basically equal and none has a privileged position.

Because of this ideal Boas stood up for some controversial topics in his day. He was the first Anthropologist that publically stated that the “White and Negro” were fundamentally equal. While other colleagues would talk about “Savage” cultures, he was showing this notion to be rubbish. He was critical of certain American sentiments to ban anything dealing with the Kaiser during the First World War He found it foolish that banning “Bach” because he was German.

However, Boas was also a person who escaped from Germany because of oppression and helped many scientists escape repression from Germany. If Boas believed that all cultures were equal then how can he be taken serious when his actions show he doesn’t view the rules of cultures to be equal? His actions showed that he didn’t believe that Germany had the right to oppress these minorities. Was he in fact not acting according to his ideals? Actually, no, his stances were still consistent with the idea of cultural relativism.

I believe Boas was distinguishing between a culture's ability to punish behaviors vs. its right to punish due to individual identity. Every culture has to establish norms of behavior for the continuation of the culture; however punishing an individual because of “whom” they are oversteps the bounds that can be afforded to any culture. This is a useful distinction. Germany was oppressing people (Jews, Gypsies, etc.) for who they were not what they did. They tried to turn the phrase around by saying “those people” are the cause of our problems. Radical Muslim cultures like the Taliban have rules aimed at women. These types of oppression are beyond the pale (interesting phrase that actually goes back to English oppression of the Irish).

As a believer of American democracy I actually believe our system of government is set up to make this distinction. We have democratic vote to determine our customs however we also have the bill of rights to protect us from laws aimed at people, not actions. We allow our votes speak the will of the people but we are setup to not allow people to overstep their bounds.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

This is the greatest of all the amendments in the Constitution. James Madison fought long and hard on this. He didn’t want people to say “It doesn’t say so in the Constitution that we can’t make this law, so we can make this law.” It is the most understated work of genius in the American story.

What does all this academic talk and flag waving have to do with our current house bill on taxes and current debates of American law in general? Actually, if you follow this method strictly it will change how you look at people’s arguments. You must ask the question are we regulating behavior for the common good or targeting people so we can get our way. So let me take a couple of examples to show you how this spins current debates before I show how this methodology works.

Gays in the military, marriage of same sex partners: This is obvious once you accept the empirical evidence. A person’s sexual orientation is something that can empirically determined via a PET scan. It is who they are, not what they choose.

The case for war: Violence is justified against a group of people who are oppressing people due to who they are (genocide being the obvious one), not what they do. WW II is the very obvious example here. I believe Afghanistan is here also and after seeing the 60 minutes special about the war I am only more convinced that the war is just. I believe leaving the war is basically throwing every woman under the country under a bus of Taliban ignorance. Iraq in the case of the Kurds would also qualify but not the blanket craziness under the Bush administration.

Immigration: This one is tricky if you don’t think it through. The U.S. has the right to determine the rules for citizenship, i.e. the required actions for citizenship. It doesn’t have the right to turn down the citizenship of someone due to their identity, things they are due to birth not choice, but it can for their behavior including the disregard of their rules. Hence, I believe measures that target people because they “look like immigrants” are invalid but I definitely believe that the U.S. can set up rules that people must adhere to for Citizenship.

And finally the current bill and how this method would highlight the debate. They are two things that people are debating which boils down to two statements: Is unemployment benefits worth a tax cut for the rich? So let’s apply this idea to these two groups. First of all are we regulating behavior or targeting people.

People who have used up their unemployment benefits: This is a group of people who have acted by trying to find a job (a requirement of unemployment benefits) but couldn’t find them in a given period. This is not a case of identity but a case of behavior. Should we reward people who have been trying to find employment extra time and money? I think this falls under the ability of being democratically determined and I personal believe the answer is yes.

Giving a tax break to people who are rich. This is where my beliefs differ from normal liberals. People who are rich is not a behavior. The behavior is people who do things that earn them money that exceeds 250K in this case. Is it democratically determinable to allow us to target behavior? The question using my methodology is “Is allowable to treat people differently who do behaviors that end up having their income exceed a certain threshold?” It is something that is allowed but when we see the question in this light it seems an odd thing to do. We are currently enforcing behavior, reduction of money, due to the results of a success of a behavior and now are thinking of not applying this behavior. I think it is a fair political trade.

I think that people who are arguing about this political trade are doing so because they believe there is a group of people called “the Rich” and that is what is worrisome to me. Their language is talking about “whom” and not “what.” Nothing good can come about due to debate of this nature.

There is no such group as the "Rich" so in this case there is a "no blood, no foul" nature to the debate. But I hear the echoes of ugly mustached man in the timbre of their argument and it worries me. Americans discuss behavior, not identity. That is the American identity.