Madness In My Method

Even with the email reminder just a couple weeks ago, I still completely forgot about the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks going on this week. I kept thinking it was going to be in September or October, not August, and I only just now paid attention to the dates for it. I really wanted to look at possibly using a week's vacation from work to go to this. On the bright side, that means I still have 3 weeks to take between now and next March, but still - damn.

My primary degree adviser from college is one of the co-chairs for this event. It would have been nice to see him again and chat about the different lectures going on.

This is exactly how I managed to miss my 10 year class reunion that I couldn't decide if I wanted to attend or not. I woke up on a Monday and checked the dates on the invite, and it was that weekend that ended. Hey, next year is the 20th reunion. Maybe I'll opt to sleep in. I think I need it, considering how much lapse in judgment I'm having recently.

These paragraphs about how the brain supposedly works come from an article about infant fatalities in cars.

The human brain, he says, is a magnificent but jury-rigged device in which newer and more sophisticated structures sit atop a junk heap of prototype brains still used by lower species. At the top of the device are the smartest and most nimble parts: the prefrontal cortex, which thinks and analyzes, and the hippocampus, which makes and holds on to our immediate memories. At the bottom is the basal ganglia, nearly identical to the brains of lizards, controlling voluntary but barely conscious actions.

Diamond says that in situations involving familiar, routine motor skills, the human animal presses the basal ganglia into service as a sort of auxiliary autopilot. When our prefrontal cortex and hippocampus are planning our day on the way to work, the ignorant but efficient basal ganglia is operating the car; that's why you'll sometimes find yourself having driven from point A to point B without a clear recollection of the route you took, the turns you made or the scenery you saw.

Ordinarily, says Diamond, this delegation of duty "works beautifully, like a symphony. But sometimes, it turns into the '1812 Overture.' The cannons take over and overwhelm."

By experimentally exposing rats to the presence of cats, and then recording electrochemical changes in the rodents' brains, Diamond has found that stress -- either sudden or chronic -- can weaken the brain's higher-functioning centers, making them more susceptible to bullying from the basal ganglia. He's seen the same sort of thing play out in cases he's followed involving infant deaths in cars.

( Here's my interpretation regarding what I view are common misconceptions about the brain held by pretty much everyone, including most neuroscientists. )

With things like Facebook and cloud databases, it should be easy enough for a program to map all the relationships between people. Then you could figure out the six or less degrees it would take to get from person A to person B.

I imagine there are plenty of people out there who would happily pay good money to have access to that kind of knowledge.

It only took a couple of hours, but I was finally able to find the USB/ADB driver I needed for my phone (T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide) so that I could upload the default "Hello World" app that I created today. Apparently it's the most difficult of drivers to locate EVER and required combing through about 20 different help files and forums until I finally found one guy who himself had been looking for a couple of hours and eventually found another guy who was able to provide the solution. I now know that HTCSync.exe is required to get my phone and my computer happy with each other. (It's easy to locate the file once you know that's what you need, as it's on the front page of their support website, but trying to find the documentation that connects an ADB driver with HTCSync is nigh impossible. HTCSync is heralded as a sync for video, pictures, contacts, and other files, not as a debug driver for app developers.)

I also had to go sharp shooting for another missing file (Good ol' Java) so that I could get Eclipse, the app builder program, to run on my Win7-64 system. That was frustrating, seeing as how I was able to download and launch the program without any hitches on my WinXP laptop yesterday. Finicky, finicky.

Technically, it's taken me two whole days to get this far, but only because I'm reading the crap out of the ALL of the online Android Developer files.

Oh, boy, it feels nice to get back into my programming head space, despite the random hiccups and ... oh crap, it's already 1am again ... schedule.

PS - This is all because I didn't like any of the grocery shopping list programs I tried out, and I tried out about 20 of them. Tom mentioned that I ought to create my own. Curse you, Tom!

monoideism


Edit:
LOL. While reading about this I came across the following sentence:
"Now the various practices I’ve described above [meditation, chaos magic, Wicca, astral travel, Vipassana] have gotten attached to a certain New Age stigmata."

What a glorious statement in which to use the wrong word in a sentence!


Also: New Age E-Meter.
Eat your heart out, Scientology!

I was thinking about traffic. I would say I was bored, but that wasn't the case. I was just awake.

When a two or three lane road is compressed down into a one lane road due to construction or design, the speed of the traffic flow from the cars slows down and creates increased pressure at the "bottleneck."

Bernoulli's principle, on the other hand, shows that when dealing with the dynamics of fluid motion, the flow will speed up and the pressure will decrease, like when dealing with an airfoil, piping, or a water hose (which is simply another form of piping).

What is it about a system comprised of intelligent entities that causes human flow to slow down at a bottleneck instead of speed up?

I was trying to find a Discovery or NOVA episode I saw years ago about laughter. Yeah, I'm not having much luck finding it, but there's still plenty of info out there.

This article actually caught my attention because of the last paragraph:

"But chimpanzee laughter usually happens in a different social context than it does in humans: chimps laugh almost exclusively during physical contact, or when contact is imminent during chasing and wrestling games, whereas most adult human laughter occurs during conversation without touching being involved, according to Robert Provine, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, who is an authority on laughter.

It has me thinking now about the differences between laughing because I found something funny in my mind versus laughing as a sign of social agreement with peers, as when participating in a group of people conversing. Most people don't pay attention to how much they "ape" the behaviors of others in an unconscious sign of social agreement, and laughter is just one of those aping behaviors.

I find that the biggest issue people have with someone on the autistic spectrum is inherent in what autism actually is. It's a-social interaction. It's not "fitting in" with the rest of the social group. The push for "dealing" with children on the spectrum is all about getting them to behave and act in more socially acceptable ways. "Interact with us the way that we want you to interact with us." Many people on the spectrum laugh at "inappropriate" times. Of course, it's not inappropriate to the person laughing, but inappropriate as deemed by the social rules. This comes back to a video that was shared with me, and that I posted a while back, about a lady that had gone through psychological reprogramming. She wasn't sad at a funeral, and didn't "get" the joke at a party. Her behaviors would have been seen as a-social, and she was keenly aware of how left out she felt. Her reprogramming included deleting all those rules that she learned while growing up, while being properly socialized as a human being.

I'm not really going anywhere here with this thought process. I'm too tied up at work to let my mind really wonder at the moment, but there seems to be some more stuff in there I'd like to dig my teeth into.

I just realized that my statement from this post, about people taking things at some sort of hybrid gist and gestalt value, assigning emotional responses, and then going from there without analyzing it too deeply, mirrors greatly with the primary research subject of one of my predecessors. I am most definitely my teacher's student.

Dr. Valerie Reyna ran the cognitive psychology judgment and decision making lab in which I participated as a researcher for a year and a half. I was exposed quite a lot to her and her husband Dr. Charles Brainerd's Fuzzy-Trace theory. It's a dual-trace theory that seems to explain why people pick intuition above deductive logic, published in 1990.

There are tried and true cognitive tests which show over and over again how often most people will make faulty decisions without the use of corrective probability and logic to guide them. The Monty Hall problem is a perfect example, fooling even some of the most astute minds who not only give the standard answer but will argue the point, even after being told the mathematically correct answer, until they are blue in the face.

The only thing I've really added is perhaps clarifying the semantic component of the Fuzzy-Trace theory.

I was thinking about which variables would be necessary for creating a handwriting recognition program, as in a program that could be trained to determine which handwriting goes with which individual (versus simply recognizing the words that have been written).

Number of joints in the hand and number of degrees of motion for each
360-degree half-sphere representing the potential angles for [pen] to [paper] within a stationary hand
distance from pen tip to finger tips
possible hand grip styles
frequency of hand movement along the paper as hand movements get restricted from movement forward
pressure of pen against paper

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Oh yeah, and this is what my brain does while I'm at work training someone on balancing accounting reports. I start brainstorming this kind of stuff. My brain is weird.