Amira

Q: Is there a line between art and science, and where does it start to blur? Cormac McCarthy: “There’s certainly an aesthetic to mathematics and science. It was one of the ways Paul Dirac got in trouble. He was one of the great physicists of the 20th century. But he really believed, as other physicists did, that given the choice between something which was logical and something which was beautiful, they would opt for the aesthetic as being more likely to be true. When [Richard] Feynman put together his updated version of quantum electrodynamics, Dirac didn’t think it was true because it was ugly. It was messy. It didn’t have the clarity, the elegance, that he associated with great mathematical or physical theory. But he was wrong. There’s no one formula for it.” - Amira

Q: What kind of things make you worry? Cormac McCarthy: “If you think about some of the things that are being talked about by thoughtful, intelligent scientists, you realize that in 100 years the human race won’t even be recognizable. We may indeed be part machine and we may have computers implanted. It’s more than theoretically possible to implant a chip in the brain that would contain all the information in all the libraries in the world. As people who have talked about this say, it’s just a matter of figuring out the wiring. Now there’s a problem you can take to bed with you at night. (…) Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.” - Amira

“The internet is not going to save the world, whatever Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires believe. (…) But eradicating disease just might. (...) “I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.” (...) It isn’t just governments that may be unequal to the task. On this analysis, the democratic process in most countries is also straining to cope with the problems thrown up by the modern world, placing responsibilities on voters that they can hardly be expected to fulfil. “The idea that all these people are going to vote and have an opinion about subjects that are increasingly complex – where what seems, you might think … the easy answer [is] not the real answer. It’s a very interesting problem. Do democracies faced with these current problems do these things well?.” - Amira

"In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself. Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.” (…) “Cognition is recognition,” (...) That’s what it means to understand. (...) “Look at your conversations,” he says. “You’ll see over and over again, to your surprise, that this is the process of analogy-making.” Someone says something, which reminds you of something else; you say something, which reminds the other person of something else—that’s a conversation. It couldn’t be more straightforward. But at each step, Hofstadter argues, there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences, the story or remark that best relates. “Beware,” he writes, “of innocent phrases like ‘Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me!’ … behind whose nonchalance is hidden the entire mystery of the human mind.” (…)" - Amira

"Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms.” Correct speech isn’t very interesting; it’s like a well-executed magic trick—effective because it obscures how it works. What Hofstadter is looking for is “a tip of the rabbit’s ear … a hint of a trap door.” (...) “I have always felt that the only hope of humans ever coming to fully understand the complexity of their minds,” Hofstadter has written, “is by modeling mental processes on computers and learning from the models’ inevitable failures.” - Amira

That's what On Intelligence, written by Jeff Hawkins is about. How brain decomposes analogies to their bare meaning by employing "invariant representations". Unfortunately, they don't disclose exactly "how" that happens. - голос в темноте

"[H]ow much more beautiful and authentic and sophisticated and accurate" our world would become if we could appreciate the key terminologies of all cultures. (...) We need to continue to translate, of course, in order to communicate. But when it comes to the key terminologies of a culture, "we should not translate them but rather we should adopt them," Pattberg says. "The only way, as I see it, to create the global language is really to find a scientific way to adopt as many key terminologies as possible and to unite all the languages’ vocabularies into one."" - Amira

"The Sagrada Família, a world-famous Catholic church in Barcelona designed by the late renowned architect Antoni Gaudí, is set to finally complete construction in the year 2026 after over a century of work. Having first embarked on the ambitious architectural project in 1882, Gaudí took his time perfecting the piece, insisting "My client is not in a hurry." Thus far, 131 years since the Spanish visionary began working on the basilica and 87 years since his death, there have been nine architects continuing where the original designer left off. Of course, these men have each struggled with their own challenges ranging from the Spanish Civil War and several fires destroying Gaudí's models and workshop to the large sum of money required to fulfill the ambitious designs. The project is entirely funded by private donations and ticket sales by visiting tourists. Feeling confident that the church will be unveiled in its entirety in only twelve more years, a video has been released with a projection of its construction." - Amira

"The sight of a virtual-reality hand pulsing in time with your heart beat is enough to convince your brain that it’s part of your body, according to new research carried out at the University of Sussex. (...) Neuroscientists and psychologists have long been fascinated by the ‘rubber hand illusion’, a clever trick whereby a fake hand is perceived as part of one’s body if it is stroked simultaneously with one’s real hand. This illusion shows that the brain constructs the experience of ‘having a body’ and that this experience depends on integration of visual and tactile (touch) sensory signals." - Amira

"Until now, little has been known about how the experience of ‘body ownership’ depends on perception of the body’s internal processes, like the heartbeat. Yet perception of the body “from within” is thought to be crucial for emotion and consciousness. (...) The researchers found that the virtual hand was more likely to be experienced as part of a person’s body when the ‘cardio-visual’ feedback was aligned with the actual heartbeat, than when it was misaligned. This shows that the brain integrates its perception of the body from the outside with its perception from the inside in determining what is experienced as its body." - Amira

This could have great implications for raves. - Andrew C (see frenf.it)

See also research paper "Multisensory integration across exteroceptive and interoceptive domains modulates self-experience in the rubber-hand illusion" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science... (thx Adriano) - Amira

"Luca Agnani, an Italian designer and animator, has taken the classic works of Vincent Van Gogh, and brought them to life. He’s created a short film called Van Gogh’s Shadow which shows over a dozen of Van Gogh’s paintings suddenly filled with life and movement, perhaps giving us an insight into how the artist may have seen the world he lived in. (...) "To calculate the exact shadows, I tried to understand the position of the sun relative to Arles at different times of the day and, according to my calculations, even the river [in The Langlois Bridge at Arles] should flow in that direction," Agnani told The Creators Project over email. "If the video was projected over his paintings, my interpretations would superimpose perfectly, like a mapping of a framework.” - Amira

tres bon - Todd Hoff

"Last month, a team led at the University of Washington announced they had devised and successfully tested a programming language that can guide the assembly of synthetic DNA molecules into a circuit that can perform a task, just as a software developer would write code to send commands to a computer. Chemists have always used mathematical models to study how molecules behave in mixtures. “Instead of thinking of this as a descriptive language that allows you to understand the chemistry, we said, we’re going to create a prescriptive language that allows you to program something.” (...) [P]ossible future uses for being able to design and assemble DNA to perform a specified function are wide-ranging. Seelig imagines programming molecules to act as embedded sensors inside cells that could respond to changing conditions, just as internal electronics guide the operation of automobiles or home appliances. For example, he says DNA systems could be instructed to release a drug every certain number of hours or in response to an abnormality detected in a cell. “Cells do things like that all the time. They sense their environment, they respond to it.” See also research paper published in Nature http://www.nature.com/nnano... - Amira

That's neat! :-) - Maitani

:-) - Amira

Here's the definitive alphabet which now runs the world, underlying all natural languages and even encoding UTF-8 and the most secret of messages: Base64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano

"According to this research, people who spend many hours in the practice room not only process information unusually efficiently, but they also do a superior job of not letting occasional errors derail them. These findings "suggest that playing a musical instrument might improve the ability to monitor our behavior and adjust our responses effectively when needed," (...) In addition, “higher levels of musical practice were also associated with a better engagement of cognitive control processes, as indicated by more efficient error and conflict detection,” the researchers report. Participants who had spent more quality time with their instruments had "a better ability to detect errors and conflicts, and a reduced reactiveness to these detected problems.” (...) In other words, if you hit a wrong note, it’s important to be immediately aware of what you did wrong, but it’s just as important to not hesitate or second-guess yourself. You quickly take stock what happened and move on—a skill the musicians in the study applied to these two tests, and one players can presumably apply to an assortment of everyday challenges." - Amira

See also: Effects of Music Training on Brain and Cognitive Development in Under-Privileged 3- to 5-Year-Olds - Preliminary Results http://www.dana.org/news... - Amira

could someone make a chart of years of music education v. jail time spent :-) it's seems rare that a Julliard graduate posts bail. - Adriano

"These days I think the composers of music influence me more than any photographers or visual creators. I see something exciting or lovely and think to myself: 'If Papa Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus or the red-headed Vivaldi were here with a camera, they'd snap a picture of what's in front of me.' So I take the picture for them." - Amira

Ralph Steiner (February 8, 1899 – July 13, 1986) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... "[W]hile studying chemical engineering at Dartmouth, discovered photography. Steiner has a scientific bent as well as a lyric visual one, and has used his knowledge of chemistry and physics with great enthusiasm to solve photographic problems. After Dartmouth, Steiner studied at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in l921 and l922, although he was not in agreement with the painting-oriented design instruction that dominated the curriculum. (...) In the 1960's Steiner finally began to be able to devote most of his time to his personal photography and cinematography. He moved to rural Vermont in 1963, spending summers on a Maine island. (...) Many of Steiner's lyrical, sometimes gently satirical photographs can be seen as conveying, along with sophistication and concern, a sense of wonder about the 20th century which he entered at the age of one, and yet has been so much a part of." http://mastersofphotography.blogspot.com/2011... - Amira

"The great libraries of the ancient world served as archives for empires, sanctuaries for sacred writings, and depositories of literature and chronicles." Contents: 1 Anatolia 2 Egypt 3 India 4 Iran 5 Iraq 6 Israel 7 Rome 8 Syria 9 See also 10 Notes - Amira

See also: List of destroyed libraries | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

#yakebikeç - Terra Barselonevî

"What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. // It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.” - Amira

"Forget your perfect offering..." http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Adriano

The “rainbow” effect is achieved through different colored sandstones and minerals being pressed together for over 24 million years and then buckled up by tectonic plates. - Amira

"Developed in the UK, the Seaboard is the brainchild of multi-instrumentalist inventor Roland Lamb. While studying at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, Lamb decided to create a new keyboard that he hoped would be more expressive than the piano. (...) We're trying to figure out how to get beyond the boundaries of technology that was invented 600 years ago or so." (...) Essentially I was jealous of guitar players who could bend notes at will on a single note." The Seaboard takes the basic layout of a piano but allows a player to 'bend' the sound of each note by using a range of different gestures that Lamb says are based very closely on the gestures people learn when they first pick up the piano. Moving a finger left on a key makes a note 'bend' downwards. Moving it right makes it go up a little." - Amira

"Lamb believes that this opens up the expressive potential of the instrument, and serves to counter the "direct and unbending" nature of notes played on a piano. (...) "It behaves much more the way you imagine as a human being you would want to interact with your notes. It doesn't have that stiff 'plunky' thing that a piano has. It automatically has a sort of sensuality to it ... Look, if Debussy or Ravel had had one of these I think their music would have been X-rated." - Amira

wow! - Storvandre FinisceQui

"[The] method which is similar to the page-rank algorithm that Google uses to rank websites. The basic idea is that a thinker is important if he or she is influences the most important sources of discussion. (...) The most influential thinkers are those that are linked back to by other influential blogs. In other words this is a pagerank-type listing in which a thinker is deemed influential if he or she influences other influential thinkers. (...)" - Amira

“The era of the great authorities seems to be over.” (...) Instead, the list is filled with specialist thinkers who focus on niche topics and whose work is generally unknown outside their field. (...) Second, write a book. They point out that every thought leader on their list, bar two, is the author of a book about their ideas. “Writing a book is key,” they conclude." - Amira

Underlying assumption is that somehow the blogosphere is a good indicator of influence. I'm not sure that's so. - Todd Hoff

"We sought to demonstrate that it is possible to send information extracted from one brain directly to another brain, allowing the first subject to cause a desired response in the second subject through direct brain-to-brain communication. A task was designed such that the two subjects could cooperatively solve the task by transmitting a meaningful signal from one brain to the other." -- Read more: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rao... - Amira

"Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, Rajesh Rao sent a brain signal to Andrea Stocco on the other side of the UW campus, causing Stocco’s finger to move on a keyboard. (...) “The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,” Stocco said. “We want to take the knowledge of a brain and transmit it directly from brain to brain.” (...) “It was both exciting and eerie to watch an imagined action from my brain get translated into actual action by another brain,” Rao said. “This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his. The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains.” - Amira

gr8 - giga

"[N]early all participants — including highly trained musicians — were better able to identify the winners of competitions by watching silent video clips than by listening to audio recordings. (...) “It’s a very counterintuitive finding — there have been some interesting reactions from musicians,” Tsay said. “What this suggests is that there may be a way that visual information is prioritized over information from other modalities. In this case, it suggests that the visual trumps the audio, even in a setting where audio information should matter much more.” Tsay herself has performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and said it was her experience in classical music competitions that piqued her interest in visual vs. audio information. (...) People had a lower chance of identifying the eventual winner if they only listened to the sound,” Tsay said. “People who just had the video — even without the sound — had surprisingly high rates of selecting the actual winner. Even with professional musicians, who are trained to use sound, and who have both expertise and experience, it appeared that the visual information was overriding the sound.” Because musical differences between two top performers are often slight, viewers can more easily pick up on visual cues they associate with high-quality performance." - Amira

I love that dress.. Looks so beautiful and elegant.. - Nevanta Media

I'm thinking the problem is more in the idea that there can be single winner, that's there's a one quality that defines a winning performance. It would be more realistic to say there's a family of performers that are defined by their performance being of a winning quality. - Todd Hoff

tl;dr :-P (kidding!) - Eivind

Lovely :) - Eivind

:-) - Amira

"The Singing Ringing Tree is a wind powered sound sculpture resembling a tree set in the landscape of the Pennine mountain range overlooking Burnley, in Lancashire, England. Completed in 2006, it is part of the series of four sculptures within the Panopticons arts and regeneration project created by the East Lancashire Environmental Arts Network (ELEAN). The project was set up to erect a series of 21st-century landmarks, or Panopticons (structures providing a comprehensive view), across East Lancashire as symbols of the renaissance of the area. Designed by architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu of Tonkin Liu, the Singing Ringing Tree is a 3 metre tall construction comprising pipes of galvanised steel which harness the energy of the wind to produce a slightly discordant and penetrating choral sound covering a range of several octaves. Some of the pipes are primarily structural and aesthetic elements, while others have been cut across their width enabling the sound. The harmonic and singing qualities of the tree were produced by tuning the pipes according to their length by adding holes to the underside of each. In 2007, the sculpture won (along with 13 other candidates) the National Award of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for architectural excellence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

I LOVE that quote -- and that guy! :) - LoisMarketing

"The fact is, there’s nothing infallible about “direct experience” (...). Indeed, experience is never direct. It is a sort of virtual reality, created by our brains using sketchy and flawed sensory clues, given substance only by fallible expectations, explanations, and interpretations. Those can easily be more mistaken than the testimony of the passing hobo. (...) [Popper]: [A]ll ‘sources’ are liable to lead us into error at times. And I propose to replace, therefore, the question of the sources of our knowledge by the entirely different question: ‘How can we hope to detect and eliminate error?’ (...) Popper’s answer is: We can hope to detect and eliminate error if we set up traditions of criticism—substantive criticism, directed at the content of ideas, not their sources, and directed at whether they solve the problems that they purport to solve. (...) Democracy, in this conception, is not a system for enforcing obedience to the authority of the majority. In the bigger picture, it is a mechanism for promoting the creation of consent, by creating objectively better ideas, by eliminating errors from existing ones. “Our whole problem,” said the physicist John Wheeler, “is to make the mistakes as fast as possible.” (...) [T]hat only means that whenever possible we should make the mistakes in theory, or in the laboratory; we should “let our theories die in our place,” as Popper put it. (...)" - Amira

"Fallibilism, correctly understood, implies the possibility, not the impossibility, of knowledge, because the very concept of error, if taken seriously, implies that truth exists and can be found. The inherent limitation on human reason, that it can never find solid foundations for ideas, does not constitute any sort of limit on the creation of objective knowledge nor, therefore, on progress. The absence of foundation, whether infallible or probable, is no loss to anyone except tyrants and charlatans, because what the rest of us want from ideas is their content, not their provenance. (...) Indeed, infallibilism and nihilism are twins. Both fail to understand that mistakes are not only inevitable, they are correctable (fallibly). Which is why they both abhor institutions of substantive criticism and error correction, and denigrate rational thought as useless or fraudulent. They both justify the same tyrannies. They both justify each other." - Amira

"In one of his most ambitious suspended installations to date, artist Tomás Saraceno (previously) launches visitors at the K21 Staendehaus museum in Düsseldorf more than 65 feet (20 meters) above the main piazza with a taut, multi-level web of netting. Titled In Orbit the giant interactive piece is constructed from three separate levels of safety nets accessible from various points in the museum separated by enormous PVC balls measuring almost 30 feet (8.5 meters) in diameter. The resulting aerial landscape is an interesting hybrid between science fiction, spider webs, neural pathways and cloud formations. Known for breaking the boundaries between art and science, Saraceno often refers to his interactive pieces as living organisms." - Amira

"This floating spatial configuration becomes an oscillating network of relationships, resonances, and synchronous communication. When several people enter the audacious construction simultaneously, their presence sets it into motion, altering the tension of the steel wires and the intervals between the three meshwork levels. Visitors can coordinate their activities within the space, and are able – not unlike spiders in a web – to perceive space through the medium of vibration. Saraceno himself speaks of a new hybrid form of communication." - Amira

"Plants have a built-in capacity to do maths, which helps them regulate food reserves at night, research suggests. UK scientists say they were "amazed" to find an example of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation in biology. Mathematical models show that the amount of starch consumed overnight is calculated by division in a process involving leaf chemicals. (...) "They're actually doing maths in a simple, chemical way - that's amazing, it astonished us as scientists to see that." (...) During the night, mechanisms inside the leaf measure the size of the starch store. Information about time comes from an internal clock, similar to the human body clock. (...) The researchers proposed that the process is mediated by the concentrations of two kinds of molecules called "S" for starch and "T" for time. If the S molecules stimulate starch breakdown, while the T molecules prevent this from happening, then the rate of starch consumption is set by the ratio of S molecules to T molecules. In other words, S divided by T." - Amira

Abstract: "The Voynich manuscript has remained so far as a mystery for linguists and cryptologists. While the text written on medieval parchment -using an unknown script system- shows basic statistical patterns that bear resemblance to those from real languages, there are features that suggested to some researches that the manuscript was a forgery intended as a hoax. Here we analyse the long-range structure of the manuscript using methods from information theory. We show that the Voynich manuscript presents a complex organization in the distribution of words that is compatible with those found in real language sequences. We are also able to extract some of the most significant semantic word-networks in the text. These results together with some previously known statistical features of the Voynich manuscript, give support to the presence of a genuine message inside the book." - Amira

Voynich Manuscript available online http://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind... - Amira

"[R]ecently, Caleb Everett, a linguist at the University of Miami, made a surprising discovery that suggests the assortment of sounds in human languages is not so random after all. When Everett analyzed hundreds of different languages from around the world, as part of a study published today in PLOS ONE, he found that those that originally developed at higher elevations are significantly more likely to include ejective consonants. Moreover, he suggests an explanation that, at least intuitively, makes a lot of sense: The lower air pressure present at higher elevations enables speakers to make these ejective sounds with much less effort. (...)" - Amira

"[H]e found that 87 percent of the languages with ejectives were located in or near high altitude regions (defined as places with elevations 1500 meters or greater), compared to just 43 precent of the languages without the sound. Of all languages located far from regions with high elevation, just 4 percent contained ejectives. And when he sliced the elevation criteria more finely—rather than just high altitude versus. low altitude—he found that the odds of a given language containing ejectives kept increasing as the elevation of its origin point also increased. (...) As a result, over the thousands of years and countless random events that shape the evolution of a language, those that developed at high altitudes became gradually more and more likely to incorporate and retain ejectives. Noticeably absent, however, are ejectives in languages that originate close to the Tibetean and Iranian plateaus, a region known colloquially as the roof of the world." - Amira

"[Brent] Tully, a cosmologist at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy (...) has mapped the universe in detail out to a distance of about 100 million light years. To put that in more human terms: Columbus’s maps of the New World described a land 3,000 miles from home, but Tully’s map extends 6,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles out. No wonder he is often referred to as a cosmic cartographer. By filling in the details, Tully has made it possible to discern the true structure of the universe: clusters of galaxies arranged into enormous filaments, bound together by invisible strands of dark matter, and tremendous lonely voids where galaxies are sparse." - Amira