I watched some of this Flash art. I especially liked Scene3.
Author: Seth Roberts
An Endangered Language
This is the most moving YouTube video I have ever seen.
Background here.
Several years ago I visited Alaska with a friend. We stayed in Juno. One day I visited a nearby glacier. A visitor’s center had a slide show about the glacier, with taped narration from a park ranger. The glacier came out in the winter, he said, and retreated during the summer. He spoke about plants and animals nearby. It was all very factual and flat but you could tell the speaker cared a lot about the glacier. How rare, I thought. Not the emotion — people care about lots of things — but its expression.
Interview with HuntGrunt (part 2)
Joyce Cohen, the New York Times real-estate columnist — her column is The Hunt – blogs at HuntGrunt, one of my favorite blogs. Part 1 of this interview.
SR: Why did you start?
JC: Because HuntGrunt was too good a name not to use. Also, I started at the time we had The Walk-through. [A Times real-estate blog.] The Walk-through was on WordPress and WordPress sucks. It’s all buggy and glitchy. I had to teach myself HTML to even do it. It was while I was doing that that I came up with HuntGrunt.
SR: Did you think of HuntGrunt?
JC: My very first entry tells you that. You can’t make a diminutive from my name. You can’t make a diminutive from “The Hunt” either.
SR: You’d be JCo. Like JLo.
JC: No one’s ever called me that. HuntGrunt came from Property Grunt. Property Grunt would write to me — to me and about me. He’s a Corcoran broker. Property Grunt was his name and all of a sudden HuntGrunt came to me.
SR: You’re the pure artist who has an idea and has to use it. Your blog is a way of drawing attention to the phrase HuntGrunt.
JC: Without the name HuntGrunt, I’m not sure it would exist. I’m not sure there would be much resonance.
Annals of Self-Experimentation: Highway Signs
Meeker initially assumed that the solution to the nation’s highway sign problem lay in the clean utilitarian typefaces of Europe. One afternoon in the late fall of 1992, Meeker was sitting in his Larchmont office with a small team of designers and engineers. He suggested that the group get away from the computer screens and out of the office to see what actually worked in the open air at long distances. They grabbed all the roadsigns Meeker had printed — nearly 40 metal panels set in a dozen different fonts of varying weights — and headed across the street to the Larchmont train station, where they rested the signs along a railing. They then hiked to the top of a nearby hill. When they stopped and turned, they were standing a couple hundred feet from the lineup below. There was the original Highway Gothic; British Transport, the road typeface used in the United Kingdom; Univers, found in the Paris Metro and on Apple computer keyboards; DIN 1451, used on road and train signage in Germany; and also Helvetica, the classic sans-serif seen in modified versions on roadways in a number of European countries. “There was something wrong with each one,” Meeker remembers. “Nothing gave us the legibility we were looking for.” The team immediately realized that it would have to draw something from scratch.
A little bit of self-experimentation went a long way. From a wonderful story in the NY Times Sunday Magazine about highway signage. Like all good stories, there is struggle.
Over several years Meeker and Pietrucha went to meetings at the Federal Highway Administration; they would end each one by setting up a row of sample highway signs in the long hallways of the agency’s headquarters. The government’s own engineers were impressed with Clearview, but any immediate progress was slowed by the inevitable forces of inertia and bureaucracy in Washington. “We’d go in each time excited,” Meeker says of their presentations to federal officials. “And we’d leave each time thinking, ’Why did we even bother?'”
But it ends happily.
Science in Action: Omega-3 (letter-counting test)
At a reading, the novelist Dennis McFarland said that the hardest part of writing The Music Room had been after breaks in writing it. Before he could resume, he had to reread what he’d written so far. This became so painful that he forced himself to never stop.
Because of a break due to wrist problems, I’m going to backtrack a little. When my wrist started to hurt, I had been learning a new way to measure brain function. It’s a reaction-time task that I can do almost anywhere. On each trial I see four letters. For example:
The task is to respond as fast as possible how many of the letters are from the set {A, B, C, D}. In this case the answer is 4, so I would type “4″.
Here is another possible display:
The correct answer is 3. The possible answers are 1, 2, 3, and 4; I just leave my fingers resting on those four keyboard keys.
As soon as I respond to one display, the next appears. Each test has 4 blocks of 50 displays (= 200 trials) and takes about 4 minutes.
I slowly got better — faster and more accurate. This graph shows how my reaction times decreased:
When I started the task, I had to hit Enter after typing the answer (e.g., type “3″ then hit “Enter”). After 50 tests, I learned about an R function that got rid of the need to hit Enter after typing the answer. I could just type the answer (e.g., just type “3″).
This shows how my accuracy improved:
The points become more widely spaced around July 24 because at that point I started learning another reaction-time task. After I hurt my wrist I decided I was trying to do too much.
Ideology of the Meritocracy (part 2)
From The American:
Rich Karlgaard, the technology entrepreneur who is publisher of Forbes, tells the story of a trip he took with Microsoft’s Bill Gates in the early 1990s. On the flight, he asked Gates, “Who is your chief competitor?”
“Goldman Sachs” was Gates’s surprising reply.
Gates went on to explain that he was in the “IQ business.” Microsoft needed the best brains available to make top-shelf software. His primary rivals for the smartest kids in America were elite investment banks such as Goldman or Morgan Stanley.
“Microsoft must win the IQ war,” Gates said, “or we won’t have a future.”
Contrast this with open-source-leader Eric Raymond’s beliefs (expressed in this talk) about software development. He repeats the idea that “with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow” — implicitly meaning enough diverse eyeballs. That I am writing this with Firefox gives some sense of who (Gates or Raymond) was more realistic.
Part 1. Charles Murray vs Charles Murray. How important is IQ?
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
My Theory of Human Evolution (Planet Earth edition)
The many-hour BBC documentary Planet Earth, mentioned earlier, takes viewers way off the beaten track — deep into giant caves, for example. But humans — and human evolution — creep in.
Non-human primates are shown a dozen-odd times during the series. Only once do we see them walk erect: When baboons wade into a flooded area of Africa. This adds credence to the Aquatic Ape theory of human evolution, which assumes our ancestors came to walk upright because it helped them walk in water. David Attenborough, Planet Earth‘s narrator, made an excellent radio show about the Aquatic Ape theory.
The Aquatic Ape theory explains all sorts of physical differences between man and our closest primate ancestors — why we walk upright and they don’t, for example. My ideas about human evolution are about what happened next. I try to explain ways we differ mentally from other primates — we speak, for example. The core idea of my theory is that the human brain has changed in many ways to promote occupational specialization. For example, language — single words — began because it facilitated trade; it was the first advertising. (I think of a Guatemalan market where someone shouted “toothpaste” over and over. He was selling toothpaste.)
The magic of occupational specialization also comes up in Planet Earth. The “Planet Earth Diaries” (Making-of) section of “Seasonal Forests” describes filming baobab trees using a unique hot-air balloon designed for photography by Dany Cleyet-Marrel and piloted by him. Twice he flies into trees by mistake. “Many of Planet Earth‘s finest images would have been impossible without devoted and passionate specialists like Dany,” says Attenborough.
A Great Day For Free Speech
Two days ago, Dubner and Levitt, the Freakonomics authors, moved their blog to the Opinion section of the NY Times website. There was a big announcement on the Times home page. Dubner posted a short and modest note about the move (“we are excited and flattered”). It got over 100 comments, mostly about the lack of full RSS feed (“I thought this move would be good news but the truncated RSS feed pisses me off”) along with a few formulaic congratulations.
So I’ll say it: This is a fantastic accomplishment. Two days ago was a great day for freedom of speech. For the first time ever, someone — actually two people — can say whatever they want as often as they want however they want (long, short, funny, serious, video, text) in the most coveted spot in the entire media world. Levitt took the new freedom out for a spin by posting a what might be considered a big help to terrorists. Nothing like that has ever appeared in the Times or any other major newspaper in the whole history of newspapers, I’m quite sure. Nor anywhere else with a big audience.
David Brooks earned his Op-Ed column, yes, but he was also given it. His influence went way up when he started that job. Were he to lose his column, his influence would clearly diminish. He can be fired, in other words, and being fired would hurt him. Dubner and Levitt, on the other hand, can upset the people who control the Times as often and as deeply as they wish. They can be removed from the Times but it will make little difference to them — it might even help them. No matter what they say, no matter how many powerful people they offend, they will always be able to find a hosting service for their blog and will always have a big respectful audience. If anyone should be worried about offending anyone else, the people who run the Times should be worried about offending Dubner and Levitt. That’s taking freedom of speech to a whole new level.
To the right of David Brooks’ column — which appears twice a week and has a fairly constant length, format, and tone — on the Times website is a blank area. David Brooks controls none of it. Whereas to the right of the Freakonomics blog is the largest set of links ever to appear on the Times website, completely under the authors’ control. One section (5 links) is titled Organ Transplants. Dubner and Levitt believe that the regulations about organ transplants are too restrictive. Given its visibility and prestige placement, that little section is not just a constant reminder of their position but a powerful force for change. It is a new kind of activism. The rest of the Times’s dozen-odd blogs have tiny blogrolls if any, always narrow-focus and never activist.
Quite apart from the tangible power, there is also the symbolism of it: A blog is being given the utmost respect. Blogs are inherently about diversity of voices and the notion that everyone has something to say. Editorials are not (of course). Newspaper columns are not (they are almost always by journalists). Now that the Times has shown a blog such respect, other important places will do the same. The esteem of blogs will rise in the world and, inextricably, so will the beliefs they embody.
Something is Better Than Nothing (part 2)
In a recent post I said that scientists are often much too dismissive. They are “evidence snobs,” Alex Tabarrok might say. A letter in the current issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition criticizes a important example of just such dismissiveness:
In conclusion, whereas we agree that policy decisions should be evidence-based and not hasty, we do not agree that the evidence base [used to make those decisions] should be constrained to one type of study [long-term randomized controlled trials]—in particular, not to a study design that is inherently limited. Do we really want to wait perhaps decades for results of long-term RCTs, which almost certainly will not provide definitive evidence, while ignoring other relevant evidence involving shorter-term endpoints? An example is provided in the panel’s own summary statement (2). In lauding RCTs as the “gold standard for evidence-based decision making,” the panel proudly points to the fact that, even though folate was well known to decrease the risk of neural tube defects in animal studies, policy recommendations for folate supplementation to prevent neural tube defects were delayed while authorities waited some years for confirmation from RCTs. One can only wonder how many infants were born with neural tube defects while authorities waited.
“Proudly,” huh? Inclusion of that word shows how pissed the authors of the letter are — and rightly so. One author is Bruce Ames, a neighbor of mine, for whom I have great respect; another is Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist. In 1998, Willett wrote a smart article challenging the popular belief that a low-fat diet is a good way to lose weight.
Here is part of the reply from the authors of the report that Ames et al. criticized:
It is important to note that our panel was not charged with asking whether vitamins and minerals play a role in human disease –a topic that occupies much of the letter by Ames et al, and for which observational evidence is indeed central — but, as a State-of-the Science Panel, was charged to reflect on the state of the available evidence for a treatment recommendation on the use of vitamins and minerals in the general population. For treatment decisions, the RCT is the established standard. No better proof of this principle can be found than in the RCTs reviewed in our report, which showed serious harm from vitamin ingestion in certain circumstances.
A less-than-reassuring answer. A commentator on my earlier post thought I should address the strongest arguments on the other side. I had trouble thinking of any. It’s hard to argue that less evidence is better. You can see that those who wrote this paragraph — some of the most prominent nutrition scientists in the country — were equally baffled.
I will revise my “common mistakes” article to mention the Ames et al. letter.
Annals of Self-Experimentation: Magnetic Implants
Quinn Norton, a San Francisco journalist, had a tiny magnet implanted in her finger, which enabled her to detect electrical fields.
Bits of my laptop became familiar as tingles and buzzes. Every so often I would pass near something and get an unexpected vibration. Live phone pairs on the sides of houses sometimes startled me.
You might think of self-experimentation as a modern version of “know thyself” but this is “know the rest of the world”.