Between this and their executive-elect being named President Chinchilla, it all sounds like a promisingly animalcentric vacation.

But it went surprisingly well! Everyone’s kit worked immediately; in fact, they even seemed to work with the iPhone 3GSes that were on hand — something that the MintyBoost can’t necessarily be relied upon to do.

You can find more photos here.

I think that my favorite part was watching everyone mess around with the Dremel. That’s some advanced nerdery for you.

I think that folks had fun; we might do this again, perhaps with more of an Arduino bent. If you want in, let me know.

The look is just as bespoke, concentrated and confusing as his description had implied, and the noise it makes every bit as terrible as Tara had promised.  I think it’s great.

Charles and I have been watching the Olympics avidly, as it’s provided a welcome and unexpected outlet for the violent anti-Canadian sentiment that we hadn’t even realized was building up inside us, poisoning our hearts and minds. They think they’re so great. Or at least, they think they’re okay, but will resolve to try harder. Those bastards.

The Olympics come with various apocryphal stories, most having to do with athletes overcoming personal adversity.  But Charles also heard a good one about the South Korean speed skating team’s training regimen.  Supposedly they’re in the habit of doing interval training where they sprint for 40 seconds, then walk for 20, then repeat the cycle seven more times.  Charles said he’d tried it and it was a surprisingly exhausting way to spend 8 minutes.

I can back that up.  When I was done with my first attempt, I could swear I tasted blood.  I kept walking around the track for what seemed like forever, afraid to let my heart rate drop to the level it desperately wanted to.  Eventually I was fine, though I felt like I had completely exfoliated the inside of my lungs.  Man, was it exhausting.  And I was cheating, using 30 second rests!

Perhaps your cardiovascular system is not as pathetic as my own (I hope not; these lungs have proven to be serious underperformers).  Either way, this is worth a try.  And as a bonus, it produces an unusually bumpy and cool-looking heart rate graph, captured courtesy of the neat Garmin monitoring doohickey that Emily bought for me a year ago (that first peak is from me climbing up the six floors to the YMCA’s indoor track).

If you own a pair of these earphones, and have owned them for a while, go buy some replacement filters.  I didn’t believe the manual when I read it, either, but this actually does make a huge difference.  Wow.

If you’re interested in getting the source file, head over to the post on Sunlight Labs.  And if you do, please be gentle.  Advice on what I’ve gotten wrong would be welcome, though.

ALSO: Thanks to the diligent outreach efforts of Sunlight’s own Nicko Margolies, the original post has now been picked up by Hack-a-Day and MAKE. Neat! And better still, educational: I’ve already had a number of revisions suggested to me by the Hack-a-Day commenters.

ALSO ALSO: Engadget, too! Though I’ve gotta say: man are the commenters there morons.

The wages of internet success, I suppose.

AAAAAND: Gizmodo. That’ll just about do it, I think. Their commenters are mean. Which I like. I want the apparent EE to offer some more information, though.  I think he’s at least partly wrong.

But what I find interesting about the holographic hypothesis is what Chalmers dismisses at the end of this passage:

The Computational Hypothesis says that physics as we know it not the fundamental level of reality. Just as chemical processes underlie biological processes, and microphysical processes underlie chemical processes, something underlies microphysical processes. Underneath the level of quarks and electrons and photons is a further level: the level of bits. These bits are governed by a computational algorithm, which at a higher-level produces the processes that we think of as fundamental particles, forces, and so on.

The Computational Hypothesis is not as widely believed as the Creation Hypothesis, but some people take it seriously. Most famously, Ed Fredkin has postulated that the universe is at bottom some sort of computer. More recently, Stephen Wolfram has taken up the idea in his book A New Kind of Science, suggesting that at the fundamental level, physical reality may be a sort of cellular automata, with interacting bits governed by simple rules. And some physicists have looked into the possibility that the laws of physics might be formulated computationally, or could be seen as the consequence of certain computational principles.

One might worry that pure bits could not be the fundamental level of reality: a bit is just a 0 or a 1, and reality can’t really be zeroes and ones. Or perhaps a bit is just a “pure difference” between two basic states, and there can’t be a reality made up of pure differences. Rather, bits always have to be implemented by more basic states, such as voltages in a normal computer.

I don’t know whether this objection is right. I don’t think it’s completely out of the question that there could be a universe of “pure bits”. But this doesn’t matter for present purposes. We can suppose that the computational level is itself constituted by an even more fundamental level, at which the computational processes are implemented. It doesn’t matter for present purposes what that more fundamental level is. All that matters is that microphysical processes are constituted by computational processes, which are themselves constituted by more basic processes. From now on I will regard the Computational Hypothesis as saying this.

I don’t know whether the Computational Hypothesis is correct. But again, I don’t know that it is false. The hypothesis is coherent, if speculative, and I cannot conclusively rule it out.

The Computational Hypothesis is not a skeptical hypothesis. If it is true, there are still electrons and protons. On this picture, electrons and protons will be analogous to molecules: they are made up of something more basic, but they still exist. Similarly, if the Computational Hypothesis is true, there are still tables and chairs, and macroscopic reality still exists. It just turns out that their fundamental reality is a little different from what we thought.

The situation here is analogous to that with quantum mechanics or relativity. These may lead us to revise a few “metaphysical” beliefs about the external world: that the world is made of classical particles, or that there is absolute time. But most of our ordinary beliefs are left intact. Likewise, accepting the Computational Hypothesis may lead us to revise a few metaphysical beliefs: that electrons and protons are fundamental, for example. But most of our ordinary beliefs are unaffected.

Those “few metaphysical beliefs” are important, though! Contrary to what Chalmers implies, similar fundamental discoveries in other domains have, in fact, greatly informed our concept of how consciousness operates.  The understanding that the brain is the seat of the mind; and that neuronal firing is essential to its function; and that that function can be mediated by drugs or damage which can alter reported phenomenal experience and, we have strong reason to suspect, the mind itself — these may all be philosophically irrelevant from Chalmers’ perspective, as none of these have seriously shaken our faith in personal agency or qualia or the integrity of the conceptual world we inhabit or anything like that.  Chalmers would probably not go this far, but I think personal experience has an irresistible, biologically-determined immediacy, and the practical, personal psychological upshot of our discoveries about consciousness seems almost certain to be minimal.  Being alive is going to keep seeming the way it currently does.

But the aforementioned discoveries did give us some good clues about the limits of consciousness (its time resolution, for instance), and avenues for thinking about how to create it artificially, and how morally concerned we should be about canned tuna’s dolphin-safe status. Certainly they blew dualism right out of the water (as far as most people are concerned).  It seems like the truth of the holographic hypothesis — and that we experience ourselves as part of the holographic projection and not of the underlying lower-dimensional brane — could also have some implications for how we think about, say, the possibility of panpsychism.

Or maybe not!  My aim is not to imply that the HH could be cause for a “nothing is real!”-style freakout, but I do think there might be more meat here than Matt’s first impression implies.

On the other hand, the most likely explanation is that I’m fundamentally misunderstanding (or New Scientist misconstruing) the HH.

If our world really is a hologram*, what does is mean for the philosophy of mind that phenomenal experience* seems to occur at the holographic level rather than at the level of the lower-dimensional surface* (or brane, more technically, I guess)?  Does it bolster the case for consciousness-as-epiphenomenon (I think maybe, if the hologram can be created in multiple ways with varying underlying conditions, it nudges us toward an explicitly supervenient relationship)?

* I realize that all of these sound like the sort of nonsense that freshmen would ponder while stoned.  But that’s only half right: it’s not actually nonsense.