Evidence that takes some sorting

tokyo undressed

A typical assignment for Srivastava goes like this: A mining company has multiple samples from a potential gold mine. Each sample gives a different estimate of the amount of mineral underground. “My job is to make sense of those results,” he says. “The numbers might seem random, as if the gold has just been scattered, but they’re actually not random at all. There are fundamental geologic forces that created those numbers. If I know the forces, I can decipher the samples. I can figure out how much gold is underground.”

Cracking the Scratch Lottery Code

We are living in a world that has an even lower level of reality than the unreal world

Perhaps the solution begins from softly accepting chaos not as something that “should not be there,” to be rejected fundamentally in principle, but as something that “is there in actual fact.”

Haruki Murakami, Reality A and Reality B

Fluctuation and noise

TechnicalGanXta

Dr. Todorov has studied how we use our muscles, and here, too, he finds evidence of optimization at play. He points out that our body movements are “nonrepeatable”: we may make the same motion over and over, but we do it slightly differently every time.

“You might say, well, the human body is sloppy,” he said, “but no, we’re better designed than any robot.”

In making a given motion, the brain focuses on the essential elements of the task, and ignores noise and fluctuations en route to success. If you’re trying to turn on a light switch, who cares if the elbow is down or to the side, or your wrist wobbles — so long as your finger reaches the targeted switch?

Dr. Todorov and his coworkers have modeled different motions and determined that the best approach is the wobbly, ever-varying one. If you try to correct every minor fluctuation, he explained, not only do you expend more energy unnecessarily, and not only do you end up fatiguing your muscles more quickly, you also introduce more noise into the system, amplifying the fluctuations until the entire effort is compromised.

“So we reach the counterintuitive conclusion,” he said, “that the optimal way to control movement allows a certain amount of fluctuation and noise” — a certain lack of control.

Seeing the natural world with a physicist’s lens. NYTimes

Patterns emerging from granular matter

Patterns emerge from a rotating tube filled with colored balls of different sizes. Very cool that there are still mysterious things happening with simple objects at the macroscopic scale.

It's just a coincidence, because they used white and orange balls in the video, but it reminded me of the Turing patterns [below] in this post [which is mostly Rudy Rucker].


I've been sick a few days and even slower / more stupid than usual, sweating heavily and dragging myself through dull files. But today the recovery is taking hold, and with the gathering strength other patterns are also emerging in my life, but that's all stuff for another time.

More from Wired on the above

Things that didn't happen

My tendency is to oversimplify, which seems to work out fine, as even the most complex systems move at different levels through states of complexity and simplicity, apparent chaos and underlying / overarching order. Also, I live a very limited life [no authority, no kids] in which the consequences of making mistakes rarely spill out of this room.

However, that doesn't mean my life is not, from some perspectives, one long string of mistakes, simplicity falling into chaos, even though I can never see it like that.

I rarely think about the past, but sometimes I list episodes when things almost took a turn for the definite worse, inre. unplanned parenthood, imprisonment, serious injury or death. If I was the praying type, and I'm not, I would've begged some god to get me out of those situations with the promise to lead a better life from then on. Perhaps the fact no prayers were made doesn't matter, and I still ought to have done things differently and better, and perhaps I did.

Related post: The utility of slack

Occupational hazards of the self-employed, #1

Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you'll be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every day since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age.

John Cage, via Milton Glaser

For a while I've been letting the work fall into a random plan- but my life in its current iteration seems to lack the property of self-order. Or maybe I'm expecting too much. Every deadline is met and yet I appear to be doing nothing, hanging out in cafes and bars.

To misquote Flaubert, I need to be orderly and disciplined in my working life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wilder the rest of the time.

Interesting properties tend to arise just on the border of order and chaos, while one of my weaknesses is to blindly rush far over either side and hunker down, like an exile.

The utility of slack

tanaka lab

I have a mania for systems, never having given up the childish hope that there's a right way to live and it can be codified and broadly applied. This is not how things appear to be, but appearances can be deceptive, and these things come in waves. On some scales there's chaos, and then you pull back or draw closer and order resolves itself. Further back, closer in, chaos returns, alternating in and out.

My own system broke down either a few weeks or months ago, depending on how the story (fiction) is told, although I didn't really have one to begin with. It was a set of external routines that made little sense on their own, and thus were ready to collapse the moment the external influences (my job) were removed. Left to my own devices I've never stopped being a wayward child, full of hope.

This next stage of the experiment is one that teases out the utility of slack, the need for inefficiency at all points of the system so that the inevitable unexpected stresses can be met without any loss of function. Which means what? More time, energy, money and so on than you 'need'. Just enough is a state of permanent near crisis.

The seemingly irrelevant, mediocre player

Various recent lifestyle choices have left me unable to do what I might want to inre. this blog, with far more freedom granted inre. meat life, and so the next few posts might be hurries to catch up and somewhat less thought out or polished than I'd like.

If you've read Moneyball by Michael Lewis then you need no encouragement to seek out this article he wrote on basketball. I know nothing about baseball [Moneyball] or basketball [that article], but who isn't ready to fall for the revealed truth of the seemingly irrelevant, mediocre player who makes all the difference in a game?

What we're talking about is ideas from emergence, complexity, and so on [what I think of as the psychedelic mindset] filtering down [up?] into real life, with pro sports being the bleeding edge of such things now that high finance's applications of extreme math have been shown to be little more than window dressing in a world that is far more complex than a few men on a court, playing by clear rules for an allotted time.

A continuous network of critical states

Kerplunk! by Leigh Mulley

In a self-organized critical state, the fall of a single grain of sand on to the network may trigger a large-scale rearrangement of the [pile of] sand; but after this rearrangement has occurred there will still be a complex network of critical states, it will just be arranged in a different pattern.

John Gribbin, Deep Simplicity, p163

I think I'll quit my job in December and go full-time freelance and see if I can't ride without a boss until the end of my days [currently aiming for 90+, without a Singularity] .

My only problem with relying on proofreading is the same as its basic appeal - that I can set my own hours. At the moment I keep evening classes as training wheels to ensure that I a) get dressed, leave the house and talk to people I'm not married to / buying things from at least once a day, and b) don't start drinking before 10pm. I took the wheels off in 1997 for one year in China and the results were fun, but somewhat alarming.

Still, I was someone else then.