think or thwim

This is an excerpt from John Kennedy’s 1963 commencement address at American University. Instead of showing Kennedy, his words are accompanied by a variety of still photos, past and present.

Gary, the video maker, says:

The great thing about video is that you can show others the mental images you have when you hear an inspiring speech, such as this one.

Very well done.

I can’t imagine anyone in the current administration making a speech like this.

I was sure (94%) the stock market was ripe for a correction - until I saw this graph. The AAII investor sentiment poll shows that 54% of investors agree that the market should drop, and that means it probably won’t. When the crowd finally stops holding back and everybody buys what they want, we run out of buyers. Then the market falls. It seems perverse, but the market always frustrates the majority.

This is the first time in the 12 years of data I looked at that the AAII sentiment reading has fallen down into the 0.3-0.35 range while the indexes are making new highs. Since 1995, those readings have always occurred at pullbacks. I think everything but sentiment seems to suggest we’re at a top. In summary, I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Longer term charts are here and here (PDF pg 5).

Peter Callesen does some amazing things with a sheet of paper and a knife.

See a lot more at petercallesen.com.

You might also like Paper Forest, a blog devoted to cool paper creations.

When I write something, don’t assume that I fully believe it myself. Our memories are very unreliable, and I am ignorant about an incredible number of things. Therefore, I have a percent certainty associated with everything I think. Here are some of my current percentages:

84.4% - Global warming is real and caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
97.4% - Our government won’t do anything about it until it is too late.
99.2% - Guys with the middle name “Wayne” should be avoided.
98.0% - Time Magazine’s readers picked Rain as the most influential person of the year.
99.4% - They were wrong.
87.4% - I don’t know who Rain is.
52.6% - I won’t go out of my way to find out.
98.3% - I’ll find out whether I want to or not.
67.7% - It’s Prince.
79.9% - The Digg revolt was one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.
89.0% - Nothing will happen to websites that publish the HD-DVD key on their site.
99.6% - It is 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0.
77.8% - It won’t work on new releases anyway.
93.7% - More people have published the key than own an HD-DVD player.
62.3% - Digg could have handled it better.
92.5% - Our cat is very selfish. He only cares about what he wants.
85.5% - The Kennedy assassinations were a coop carried out by the CIA and the Mafia.
76.6% - That will be common knowledge in twenty years.
96.8% - I had pizza for lunch.
98.9% - The world would be a better place if everybody used percentages.
99.9% - Karl Rove should be in prison.
99.7% - Patton Oswalt is awesome.
72.9% - You’ve had enough of this list.
96.7% - I’ve had enough of this list.
60.4% - I’ll write about this again at some point in the future.

BBC Horizon subjects seven people with very different gifts to various intelligence tests to try to understand what intelligence is and if it can be measured.

Battle of the Brains

:: deputydog

Bill Maher explains his views on religion to Joe Scarborough, who doesn’t seem to have given it as much thought.

In this TED presentation, Dan Dennett argues that we don’t really understand our consciousness. We consist of about 100 trillion stupid cells who individually have no way to comprehend what they are a part of. Our perceptions of consciousness amount to a bunch of parlor tricks performed by those 100 trillion cellular robots. I think he needed about two more hours to make his point, but it’s a very interesting set of examples.

I think Jeff Hawkins’ model of sensory processing fits pretty well with Dennett’s demonstrations and the ant colonies and slime molds I’ve been writing about. However, there is a difference. Hawkins argues that neurons in the neocortex do have a hierarchy.

Signals from our sensors, like eyes and ears, are transmitted to the lowest level of neurons in the neocortex. Those neurons fire when they see a familiar pattern. For instance, one set of neurons may fire whenever it recognizes a horizontal line. Another set might be programmed to recognize the color blue. The pattern of firing lower level neurons is output to the next higher level, and the higher level neurons process those input patterns into more complex patterns and pass those up. This continues up the six levels of the hierarchy until the top level has the big picture.

Hawkins also theorizes that our brains use a feedback loop to control what the lower levels do and avoid unnecessary calculations. The upper level neurons send signals back down to the lower levels predicting the inputs they should see next. The lower level neurons ignore data that matches the predictions and concentrate on novel inputs. If the inputs don’t differ enough from the predictions to trigger a closer examination, we’ll be oblivious to the changes.

If you think of ant colonies as a higher level in the hierarchy of ants and slime molds as a higher level in the hierarchy of simple cellular organisms, they seem analogous to simple brains.

Ants are fascinating because they are stupid. They seem to totally lack free will and a sense of self. They are simple robots programmed to do a job, and they work like machines. The documentary Ants! Nature’s Secret Power shows grass cutter ants continuing to harvest grass in the middle of a grass fire right up until the instant they die from the heat. The individual ants aren’t programmed to protect themselves by running from the fire. They are programmed to take care of the colony by gathering food. There is no selfishness among the ants.

Bert Hölldobler and E.O. Wilson argue that we should think of the ant colony as an animal rather than the individual ants. The ants are like cells making up the body of the animal. Slime molds are the same way. In fact, at first we thought slime molds were the organism until we discovered that they are actually swarms of smaller individuals.

In an ant colony, the queen is not a ruler. She’s just an egg producer. Complex behaviors like mealy bug herding and fungus farming emerge from interactions between individual ants following simple instruction sets. But even without a designated leader the colony does affect the actions of the individual ants.

In the early 1990s Deborah Gordon at Stanford University conducted some experiments in which she painted foraging ants green and housekeeping ants blue. Then she introduced additional food to the nest. The next day some of the housekeeping ants had switched to help deal with the extra food. Likewise, when she messed up the nest, some of the foraging ants switched to housekeeping duties.

Gordon’s experiments revealed that individual ants get some kind of signal from the colony. At the time the mechanism was still a mystery. Someone’s probably proven it’s pheromone controlled since then, but I haven’t run across that yet. The important point is that there’s a feedback loop between the colony as a whole and the simple rules governing each ant.

Like ant colonies and slime molds, humans consist of a collection of stupid cells. The big difference, and the reason we are so reluctant to classify ant colonies as beings, is that our cells can’t live on their own. However, neither can an ant. An ant separated from it’s colony has a very short life expectancy. The only exception is a queen that has enough fat stored to start a new colony, but if she can’t get some workers raised before her fat store runs out, she’ll die too. With our cells, the demise is just more immediate.

This is how fire ants first arrived in my area. During a flood in the 1980s rafts of fire ants floated to the shore on the flood waters. The rafts are made entirely of fire ants. The individual ants on the bottom die, but the colony survives.

Ants evolved from wasps, and the fire ant still has the sting. If you accidentally step on a fire ant mound, they rush to the surface and attack in mass. First they bite into your flesh to make themselves hard to remove. Then they sting you, injecting a venom that gives a very painful burning sensation. I’m not sure how this fellow managed to get so many stings. Most people totally freak out and manage to limit the damage to less than 10 stings. However, a fire ant attack will occasionally kill small animals like birds, and some people have fatal allergic reactions to the venom. People that live in fire ant country watch where they step.

Fire ants are native to South America where they are kept in check by natural predators. However, they were accidentally introduced to the US around the 1920s when they hitched a ride an a cargo ship. There are no natural predators in the US, and the fire ants push out the native ant species as they spread north and west. RIFA stands for Red Imported Fire Ant.

This figure was from 10 years ago. They have now covered the entire southern portion of the United States. They invaded Australia in 2001 and Taiwan in 2004. They have also spread to China and the Philippines lately.