Brains and magnets

Seed magazine has a video (and text transcript) of a conversation between novelist Tom Wolff and neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga (who is now at UCSB, go gauchos). They talk about free will, among other things.

But you probably remember Ganzaniga's research from freshman psych class, his work with split brain subjects in particular. Amazing stuff, "a window into the non-conscious", and evidence that we have a bunch of agents in our heads.

You don't have to actually slice brains to do some interesting experiments. One of the strangest examples I saw was using a powerful magnetic field to temporarily turn off a part of a healthy subjects brain, making them aphasic or messing up motor control. In college we used to volunteer for psych experiments to make extra money, but I don't think I'd volunteer for TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation).

Here's an article (complete with a reference to The man who mistook his wife for a hat) from the NY Times where TMS transforms the author into a cat-drawing savant. It's scarier when TMS is used to induce five-minute "strokes".

Changing subjects, this O'Reilly interview about the software on the Mars Phoenix Lander (all in C, no Java on board, and no more Ada on JPL spacecraft) reminded me about what I liked about JPL (cool projects) and didn't like (how many times this guys says "that's right" or some variation) instead of just yes or no :)

More old stuff about Huntington Lake

To go along with some of the other old stuff I posted yesterday, here's the June 1925 calendar from the Big Creek theater (Tom Mix on Saturday the 13th must have been big).

A couple other things from the hydroelectric project engineers. The initial report from 1 January 1913 has an embossed paper cover and is bound with string.
Much of the engineering publications are to showcase their big projects, such as this one from Thebo and Starr Engineers and Constructors.

Another old map

I also like this one: "Route sketch of the march made by Troop "I" and "M", 9th Cavalry" to Sequoia national park and Grant Grove in 1903. You can read about it here.

I also have two versions (dated 1896 abd 1907) of the map "Sequoia and General Grant National Parks and the Sierra Forest Reserve" that look like the came out of a report, and a "Map showing wagon roads and trails in Territory embraced by Sequoia and General Grant Parks, etc." that looks like it came out of a department of the interior publication 53 2, whatever that means :)

Road rage, maps, Huntington Lake

In case you're not keeping up with your Bob Sutton, a recent post is about an experiment to determine when drivers honk their horns. The variable being manipulated was whether the slow vehicle (a pickup truck) had a gun rack or not, and the kind of bumper sticker. Very interesting.

That reminded me that recently my sister and I have scanned some of my old maps. Previously I talked about strip maps, and I was reminded of some that I have, such as Fresno to Huntington Lake (note the road stops at the Huntington Lake Lodge), and Visalia to Huntington Lake.

Speaking of Huntington, we also scanned some photos of the Fresno State summer school being held at the site of the current Camp Keola (before summer school moved across the lake): a physical education class from 1924, a drawing class from 1922, an American Indian class from 1924, and faculty cottages, among others.

There's getting to be more and more old information posted on the web about the south side of Huntington Lake. For example, Google has digitized the 1916 book Winter sports at Huntington Lake Lodge for your perusal, a picture of the Lodge and train, an interesting story about hiking up and down the penstocks, and the Huntington Lake Big Creek Historical Conservancy.

While you are in the area, you should also check out Lakeview Cottages, adjacent to Camp Keola :)

I also have a bunch of strip maps showing routes to Sequoia National Park and Grant Grove, like this one.

Smoky

I don't remember it being this smoky from forest fires since about ... 1991? The news said there are 1000 fires burning, and besides here, the smoke is in the San Francisco bay area, Las Vegas, and Reno, and an advisory was issued.

NASA's released some great pictures with brief explanation, but the 250 meter resolution picture is really impressive.

A funny thing, and a strange thing

The funny thing is I was reminded of this cartoon that's been going around software engineering organizations for years (this version is from David Male's site). The caption is always something like the manager saying "You start coding, and I'll go see what they want."

The strange thing is a surgeon in Honolulu is experimenting using music in the operating room to calm patients. That's understandable. The weird this is the surgeon is actually playing a piano in the room.

A total of 203 patients underwent ophthalmologic procedures when the piano was in the operating room, but 88 had no music played. The result was "a statistically significant increase of their mean arterial blood pressure, heart rate and respiratory rate," the study found.
...
No complications were associated with the music, and patients "were very happy their doctor was playing the piano for them," Camara said in an interview.

Two non-bestselling books

I recently finished two books about high altitude (over 100,000 feet) ballooning (and jumping). Some really crazy stuff.

The pre-astronauts: Manned ballooning on the threshold of space includes Joe Kittinger's amazing jump from over 102,000 feet. The second book, Magnificent failure (also by Craig Ryan) is about Nicholas Piantanida who died during a high altitude balloon mission (summarized below in an excerpt from a Wired article):

Skydiver Nicholas Piantanida tried to break Kittinger's unofficial record three times, beginning in 1965. On the first attempt, a 6-knot wind decapitated his balloon at 22,700 feet. On his second attempt, Piantanida couldn't disconnect from his onboard oxygen.

The circumstances of Piantanida's third and fatal attempt remain baffling. He was still on his way up at 57,600 feet when ground control staff heard a scream and then a monstrous gush of air come through their monitors. Piantanida had lost pressure at 11 miles high. One theory is that he may not have prebreathed sufficiently before taking off, later causing him to struggle for breath, panic, and open his visor. If so, "it was basically suicide," speculates his daughter, Diane Shearin, "like crossing a desert with one canteen."

One of the high altitude pioneers profiled in The pre-astronauts is Jean Piccard. Wikipedia reinforced my suspicion that Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard is his namesake.

Tuftesque

Something in the State of California's report on EMF (electric and magnetic fields) executive summary reminded me of Tufte's work, particularly sparklines.

Here's the context of the EMF study:

On behalf of the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), three scientists who work for the California Department of Health Services (DHS) were asked to review the studies about possible health problems from electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) from power lines, wiring in buildings, some jobs, and appliances. The CPUC request for review did not include radio frequency EMFs from cell phones and radio towers. ... All three have published original research in the EMF area and have followed the field for many years.

Here's the part that interested me from the executive summary. You can see that in general, Reviewer 1 thinks there is more risk than the other reviewers.


If you like that, you might want to "cook like an engineer". Alas, not everyone loves Tufte, in fact this person thinks he sounds like Gene Simmons from KISS :)

Perverse incentives

In his discussion of "perverse incentives" (reward systems that lead to the wrong behavior), Bob Sutton uses a Dilbert cartoon that I've been showing software engineering classes for over 10 years :)

The comments to his post seem to be fixated on rewarding developers for finding software defects, which is the point of the Dilbert cartoon, but Sutton is making a larger point :)

I also like the Dilbertian take on user interfaces (here, and here).

A Singular Intellect

If you're interested in Artificial Intelligence, the June 2008 issue of IEEE Spectrum is about "the singularity". The "Who's who" grid refers to Jaron Lanier's "You can't argue with a zombie", and says

[Lanier] wrote an entertaining 1995 essay in the Journal of Consciousness Studies titled "You Can't Argue With a Zombie." It zinged Daniel Dennett, Daniel Dennett's critics, Dartmouth students, and philosopher David Chalmers, among others. Sample line: "Arrogance is always a bad strategy in science. In philosophy I suppose it's fine."

You can also watch a talk given at Google in May 2006 by Doug Lenat about "Computers versus common sense".

Speaking of the IEEE Computer Society, my nomination for "strangest article title" is from the Summer 2008 issue (Fresno State people can click here) of IEEE Technology and Society magazine: "The engineer, the dancer, and the severed head". Here's a quote:

Are we, as engineers, content to dance for the king’s entertainment, producing whatever we are paid to produce? Or are we willing to be prophets, speaking technological truth to power? If we aspire to prophesy, we should expect to occasionally get our metaphorical
heads handed to us on a platter. Personally, I think it is worth the risk.

Changing subjects, The July 2008 issue (Fresno State people here)of the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies issue emphasizes "Collaborative and social aspects of software development". If you're interested in agile/extreme programming,take a look at the table of contents.

Finally, some fortune cookie trivia: what is the relationship between the WWII internment camps, and fortune cookies? See the LA Times article. Here's a quote:

... Lee, a Chinese American, was not surprised that such a popular dessert originated in a country other than China: "Traditional Chinese desserts, any Chinese American child will tell you, are pretty bad. There is a reason Chinese cuisine has a worldwide reputation for won tons, and not for pastries."

Carbon footprints and talismans

A recent Wired has an article about things you might think are true about reducing your carbon footprint, but probably aren't. Hint: air conditioning a house is better than heating it.

Related to that, the Brookings Institution published "Shrinking the carbon footprint of metropolitan America" Surprisingly, if you look at "Per captia carbon emissions from residential energy use, 2005". Bakersfield is best (!), and 10 of top 12 are in California (Fresno is 6).

Also unbelievable are some of the superstitions involved with spaceflight. "The losing hand: tradition and superstition in spaceflight" talks about pre-flight rituals. Maybe it's because it's really risky:

But perhaps it isn’t as incredible as it first appears. Consider the risk: of the 483 people who have been launched into space as of March 2008, 18 have died during the mission. This mortality rate of 3.74% makes it one of the most dangerous professions one could follow: compare with a 0.39% mortality rate among the US military in Iraq 2003–2006 and 2.18% in Vietnam in 1966–1972, and you see that the risks are much greater for astronauts than they are even for combat troops.

Given this danger, it is quite undertstandable that astronauts should reassure themselves with ritual actions and talismans. It is a natural human impulse to control fears of death and injury by recourse to superstition—we might think of the bullfighter praying to his madonna before the corrida, going through a series of rites and responses built up over the history of this deadly sport.

Two more things: Something that any professor can relate to: "In the basement of the ivory tower", and a picture I really didn't need to see. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant and Dennis Rodman? Please tell me it's photoshopped :)

Legos and Jimson weed

Someone really likes legos and Spinal Tap. Here is the famous "but this one goes to 11" scene, recreated in Legos in stop motion animation. Also recreated is a concert scene in Legos.

Just as weird, this afternoon we were talking about a chapter in Berton Roueche's The Medical Detectives about a family who grafted tomato plants to Jimson weed rootstock. Hint: this is not a good idea. You can read a little about it here.

If your are a House fan you probably will recognize some of the plots from Roueche's book:

The creator of the television show House, M.D. hasn't made it a secret that he was inspired in part by Mr Roueché's writing, but I wasn't aware of the degree to which the show's writers mined the articles in this book for inspiration. In the first season of House, episode 5 ("Damned if You Do") is related to what happens in the article "Antipathies"; episode 6 ("The Socratic Method") is related to what happens in the article "Live and Let Live"; episode 8 ("Poison") is related to the article "The Dead Mosquitos"; and episode 13 ("Cursed") is related to "A Man Named Hoffman".

Besides the Tomato/Jimson weed chapter, there is one about why hospitals don't have aerators on their water faucets ("Three sick babies") and about surplus denim jeans making people sick in Fresno ("The dead mosquitoes"). Pretty interesting book :)

A Titanic cover up

There is a good TED video of Robert Ballard, the guy who found the wreckage of the Titanic. Interesting guy and certainly has done great stuff, but it annoys me that he's a bit disingenuous since he knows that a lot of money has been spent by rival superpowers (the same ones that funded space programs) mapping, exploring, sampling and recording the oceans. In fact, he is most famous for directly benefiting from the national coffers -- "finding the Titanic" was actually the cover story for a secret military mission to find two famous submarine wrecks: the Thresher and the Scorpion. Speaking of submarines, I thought this was an interesting book.

But back to Titanic. Ballard's released the latitude and longitude of the wreck (details are here including the percentages of survivors by fare class). Ninety-four percent of the first class women and children survived, but only ten percent of the second class men. The website also says "Ironically, most of those who drowned were Americans."

At least Ballard isn't as annoying as James Cameron's obsession with robotic subs. But I have to admit, this is amusing :)


Another famous submarine cover-up, Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer, is left as an exercise for the reader. Here is a teaser:

... the wealthy eccentric Howard Hughes constructed the Glomar Explorer, an enormous barge built for the ostensible purpose of mining manganese nodules from the ocean floor. Although manganese nodules are real, the mining venture was actually an elaborate hoax.

You can even watch the declassified burial at sea of soviet submariners recovered by the Explorer.

A Malc and Russ update

Malcolm Gladwell talked about "How to hire the right person" at the 2008 New Yorker conference. He talks what the NBA and NFL scouting "combines" tell us about hiring good teachers and lawyers.

Here's interesting column on "Gladwell's Brain" from The Washingtonian. Included is the now infamous "perverse and often baffling" contest:

The mischief peaked with what Gladwell refers to as “the contest.” He and another young science reporter, William Booth, chose a phrase and competed to see who could insert it in the newspaper faster. The contest culminated with the phrase “perverse and often baffling.”

Booth wrote a story on mollusks. “The copy desk took out ‘often,’ ” he says in the recording, “arguing, I think correctly, that mollusks were either baffling or they weren’t.”

Finally, with the clock ticking, Gladwell struck gold. He discovered that Washington is home to both the country’s highest number of gastroenterologists per capita as well as the highest fees for gastroenterology, flying in the face of supply-and-demand rules.

Baffling indeed, and possibly perverse—at least by the standard of Post editors. Gladwell won the contest.

But is that story true? Maybe, maybe not :) The article includes links to Malc telling the very entertaining story.


Finally, I recently was in a meeting where I said something about "the tyranny of vision statements" (I'm not a big fan), which reminded me of this take by Russell Ackoff. You might remember his and Quay Hays' visit to Fresno State a year ago.

Over 8g's, but who's counting

The results of the study of the last ballistic Soyuz re-entry are in the news. Richard Garriott, video game guy and future space tourist, rationalizes that everything will be OK for his return in October, but I think he's a little optimistic. But in his shoes, I would be too since thinking about the alternative would be depressing at best :)

Jim Oberg is a space expert and written about Soviet and Russian space missions. He has an awful looking website but if you scroll down past the UFO stuff there are pictures about how the Soyuz is supposed to re-enter. It stays connected as three pieces just before hitting significant air, at least that's the way I understand it.

Oberg's IEEE Spectrum article "Internal NASA Documents Give Clues to Scary Soyuz Return Flight" has some "interesting" comments back and forth between Oberg and a reader accusing him of being overly dramatic.

One of the links from Oberg's comments takes you to this translation of a Russian news account of farmers coming to the aid of the Soyuz.

On the ground there was a black apparatus, which looked like a pot. A moment we approached there was a boom. We jumped back. Immediately, a cover, which looked like a fry pan flew off and an antenna jumped out. The apparatus was so hot that ground started burning. We were waiting what would happen next. Then a man fell out of the pot. He was in the cosmonaut outfit. As we approached we could read "Yuri Malenchenko." "We are cosmonauts," he told us, neither his hands or feet were moving. He was pale and sweaty. We put him on the ground, gave a pillow under his head, while he asked to get others out. There were two women. I carried in my hands Peggy (Whitson) and So-yeon Yi, who appeared from the capsule. The American removed her glove and shook my hand. I said that this is Kazakhstan, Aitekibisky Region, but she did not understand Russian. Neither did So-yeon Yi, so I mostly communicated with Malenchenko. He asked us to take some gadget out of the capsule. The capsule was very small, while all our guys were huge. We picked the skinniest in our brigade -- Kanat Kydyralin -- he pulled the radio and some other electronic device.

You can see how small the pot (to hold three adults!) is here.

I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.

The Fresno Metropolitan Museum has a new director, Dana Thorpe:

The board of trustees' announcement this week follows an eight-month national search. Thorpe will succeed Kathleen Monaghan, who has been the top administrator since October 1999... Dana (pronounced Hannah) Thorpe said in a telephone interview Thursday that The Met presents an opportunity to build on the foundation set by Monaghan.

What? (pronounced "Whaaah?")

Reminds me of an old George Carlin album. I couldn't find it exactly on the Internets, but this is close:

You can call yourself whatever you want. You can spell your name S - M - I - T - H and pronounce it "Jabnowski" if you want to.
"Name?"
"Jabnowski."
"Can you spell that?"
"S M I T H"
"Huh?"
"They're all silent, never mind!"

Software's classic mistakes

Steve McConnell released results of his 2007 survey about software development blunders and compares them to the "classic mistakes" described in his book Rapid Development.

"Noisy, crowded offices" was fourth, reminding me of our previous conversations (about 2/3 of the way down this posting, and this posting too).

Back to that paper I mentioned yesterday, "Building an Information System for Collaborative Researchers: A Case Study from the Brain-tumor Research Domain" by Mamrak, Boyd, and Ordonez (Fresno State people can click here for full text). The paper's been a great source of quotes for me to draw on to illustrate problems with requirements (I quoted from it in my response to Rita Vick's article). Here's an excerpt from Mamrak et al.:

A third clinician was genuinely interested in using our information system. However, every time we met with him to determine his data input and query requirements, his needs would shift from our last meeting. This process extended over several years: with every presentation of a fast prototype, and even when the first version of the system was implemented and installed, at every meeting with him we came away with several pages of notes indicating changes that he still required. When we expressed our concerns to him about our inability to converge on a common understanding of his needs, he constantly assured us that we were 'getting very close' and that the next time we would surely have it 'right.'

End of semester stuff

More random things: I previous wrote about launches to "high inclination orbits. A recent Popular Mechanics has a nice diagram and talks about space shuttle aborts.

A Hodg-man posting reminded me of Match Game's Gene Rayburn, and ended up with videos of celebrities smoking on television.

Over seven million people watched a three year old describe Star Wars, but how many of you have seen it with Spanish subtitles?

Bob Sutton has a couple of interesting applications of his "no asshole rule": a theological approach, and a sad tale of bullies in the medical world. It seems like there's another wave of cross disciplinary work going on with the healthcare. This reminds me of the paper by Mamrak, Ordonez, and Boyd about working with medical folks on an information system for their brain tumor research. Great quotes. More on that later.


Dr. Dobb's has two things worth at least a skim: "Has agile peaked?" and "Requirements are required reading". Here's a quote:

Driving up the cost of the 2010 census is the Harris Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA)—essentially a mobile hand-held device on the front end... —which was supposed to save taxpayers $1 billion, but instead may end up costing $3 billion extra. Why? Because, according to people who participated in real-world trials, the mobile FDCA system (which will be used by 600,000 temporary census takers) is just too doggone hard to use.
...
Harris is standing behind its FDCA system, claiming that the computers actually are easy to use. "After you spend about 30 minutes to an hour familiarizing yourself with it, it's as easy to use as a modern cell phone," said a Harris spokesman. Well now, that's comforting. After 30 minutes of fiddling with a new cell phone, I'm lucky I haven't chucked it.

Finally, two short videos: a cockpit video of the downwind and final approach to HNL. This is the usual approach with Waikiki to the right, Pearl Harbor, and then a right turn to land. Second, there's been a clamor for years to get the 1986 CBS Fresno miniseries on DVD. You can torment yourself by watching the intro and a brief clip.

Videos that only a computer science person could love

My characterization of a good Alan Kay keynote is something to make everyone in the audience irritated :)

But in this short (2.5 minute) excerpt from an ACM conference talk, Kay really bashes Dijkstra.

Several years ago SD&M had a Software Pioneers conference. The speakers list was incredible, but I can't get the videos to work anymore. But you can watch Kay's talk, and Dijkstra's talk here and here.

Bonus video: Senator Obama fielding a question about sorting integers at Google.

Mad Money, Yo-Yo, and Eudaemons

I'm not usually a big Charlie Rose fan, but I'm a fan of HBO's From the Earth to the Moon so I watched this episode. Strange combination of three segments: Jim Cramer (the Mad Money guy with the yelling and sound effects on CNBC), followed by (starting at 8:37) Andy Chaikin and Tom Hanks talking about From the Earth to the Moon, then (starting at 35:30) Yo-Yo Ma.

Speaking of moon stuff, an Apollo 11 fecal bag sold for over $200 recently. Unused, thank goodness.

In other news of the weird, the Biography Channel has been showing the "breaking vegas" episode about the UCSC folks who used computers controlled by toe switches to predict the results of sloppily installed roulette wheels. The remarkable thing was this was in the 1980s. When I used to teach the CSci 1 class the book (The Eudaemonic Pie) was on my list of books they might be interested in, along with other books like Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer. They roulette people went on to apply chaos theory to investment.

Instead of counting cards at the blackjack table, or looking for non-uniform routlette wheels, why not buy lotto tickets? If each one dollar ticket gets you a 1-in-X chance of winning, and the jackpot is over $X, isn't your expected return greater than $1? Kind of, but to get jackpots that high a lot of people buy tickets, which means you would probably have to share the winnings, reducing the expected return. But sometimes it works :) Scroll to the bottom to see an example of covering all the numbers in Jai Alai.