Traces of thought

A computer simulation of the upper layer of a rat brain neocortical column. Dr. Pablo de Heras Ciechomski/Visualbiotech

These images, and their captions, come from an article introducing a project to simulate part of a rat's brain, to be scaled up to a whole brain and later put into a robot with legs. Excerpts below, full link at the bottom.

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows.
...
This is Blue Brain. The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events unfolding inside a mind.
...
The first phase of the project—“the feasibility phase”—is coming to a close. The skeptics, for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them.
...
In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. “We have already shown that the model can scale up,” Markram says. “What is holding us back now are the computers.” The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you’d need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That’s about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google’s servers.
...
“There’s no reason why you can’t get inside Blue Brain,” Markram says. “Once we can model a brain, we should be able to model what every brain makes. We should be able to experience the experiences of another mind.”
...
“There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes,” Markram says. “Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to generate a conscious mind.”

Full article at seedmagazine.com

An entire neocortical column lights up with electrical activity. Modeled on a two-week-old rodent brain, this 0.5 mm by 2 mm slice is the basic computational unit of the brain and contains about 10,000 neurons. Visualbiotech.

Related post: Other substrates

You could have been quite another

mogi by joi, on flickr

Ken Mogi is a brain scientist and writer whose stated aim is to solve the mind-body problem. He's not that famous outside of Japan, but very famous inside, with many popular books and TV appearances. My wife loves him.

This year he began to blog regularly in English, and his English has improved a lot. I like his blog because the entries are short and often there are small mistakes or strange uses, but they don't obscure the meaning. The real talent lies in saying a difficult thing in a simple way.

I usually take a morning stroll to a convenience store nearby, and pick up some morning goods. For the last couple of days, I have walked on to the park, and dashed up the hill that flanks the woods.

It is just a little deviation, which makes all the difference. In life, you turn 90 degrees and run from your path of everyday, and then you discover a new scenery.

It is not that difficult. All you have to do is to identify an unsearched domain. And then you delve into it. Even for a very brief time.

Within a moment the storm of contingency would rage. The conviction that you are here for no reason. You taste the throbbing sensation of knowing you could have been quite another, while loving and embracing the here and now.

Ken Mogi, Deviation

This is also the thrill of being a dilettante – no real deep knowledge of anything, but a vast field of shallowness that’s able to warp at many points and achieve connection and communion – an interesting kind of ignorance, the best that I can hope for.

Out of my head on percodan and hate

Reading Nick Tosches' Dean Martin biography. I can't believe that Jerry Lewis is still alive. I'd love to ask him some questions.

A popular idea about Buddy Love [see clip above] is that he was Lewis' take on Martin - but far more credible to me (who knows almost nothing about it) is an idea I've read in a few places that Buddy = Jerry 'in real life', off stage, turned off and taken off the monkey suit.

Devil on a leash

david hockney, rainy night on bridlington promenade
David Hockney's iPhone Passion

Alcohol sedates the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain which decides if something is a good idea or not. This effect seems to be particularly pronounced in me, not aided by the fact that even when sober I have some of the worst ideas out there.

But this is good: a free eight-song preview download of Tom Waits' upcoming live album, Glitter & Doom.

Good trip

air - sing sang sung [HD video won't embed, but much better, here]

Team DNA

Image of a fractal globule by Leonid A. Mirny and Maxim Imakaev

"We've long known that on a small scale, DNA is a double helix," says co-first author Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology and a researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the laboratory of Eric Lander at the Broad Institute. "But if the double helix didn't fold further, the genome in each cell would be two meters long. Scientists have not really understood how the double helix folds to fit into the nucleus of a human cell, which is only about a hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. This new approach enabled us to probe exactly that question."

3-D Structure Of Human Genome: Fractal Globule Architecture Packs Two Meters Of DNA Into Each Cell, ScienceDaily

Life is awesome.

Other substrates

Order-3 heptakis heptagonal tiling by Claudio Rocchini

When and only when such a loop arises in the brain or in any other substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. To put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, P-6,

Other approaches to being alive

Reading Damned to Fame, on and off, a biography of Samuel Beckett, and BS Johnson is mentioned nowhere, although Beckett is a significant character is his story.

Writing and writers hold such a precious place in the imaginations of people who like to read fiction, so the idea that there's little actual spiritual comfort / joy in the process and the outcome, and that success, even in the limited terms of being published / recognized may not be enough is hard to swallow. In short, a fulfilling life can exist outside the production and consumption of fiction.

I've got too many books on the go, at least one in every space where I might want to read in the house. Beckett is in the little used dining room, while Dino, Nick Tosches' biography of Dean Martin, gets far more attention in the downstairs bathroom. Two men whose lives had little in common, except a fondness for drinking and bars. There are many approaches to being alive.

Return of the demon dog

Blood's a Rover has just been published, but I'll wait and order it for Xmas. I'm excited, as the first two parts blew things apart and created a world to inhabit.

I also like James Ellroy the man a lot, because he seems committed and delivers. Below is a great interview with him from earlier this year with a very game Sarah Weinman. It's available in one part at her site [link in name], bit she's suggested that it's up for a limited time only, so I'll host it here until cease and desist. Ellroy's sharing the stage with Colin Harrison, who I don't know, but they make a good study in contrasts. The audio is a little poor

I think I sometimes get like Ellroy when I go out and meet people and get drunk, a kind of lunatic intensity applied to broadly indefensible positions. I can't complain about this, as there's no arguing with their experience - How I appear to be is the reality of how I am to others.

This is how James Ellroy appears to be:













Finally, here's the demon dog himself doing a straight to camera promo for the book in hi-def.

Singularity summit '09

Good summary / impressions of the 2009 Singularity Summit by Razib Khan at Gene Expression.

Summit site here.

Confessions of a mask

The theory of self-deception was foreshadowed by the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, which disputed the romantic notion that behind the masks we show other people is the one true self. No, said Goffman; it's masks all the way down. Many discoveries in the ensuing decades have borne him out.

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, p264

Human universals

rikki kasso at tokyo undressed

A list of human universals, originally compiled by Donald E. Brown, and which is also the Appendix of Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, which I'll be ripping off for the next few weeks.

Here's the first 20 items:

• abstraction in speech & thought
• actions under self-control distinguished from those not under control
• aesthetics
• affection expressed and felt
• age grades
• age statuses
• age terms
• ambivalence
• anthropomorphization
• anticipation
• antonyms
• attachment
• baby talk
• belief in supernatural/religion
• beliefs, false
• beliefs about death
• beliefs about disease
• beliefs about fortune and misfortune
• binary cognitive distinctions
• biological mother and social mother normally the same person

Children, foreigners and retarded adults

Speech addressed to different categories of listeners was examined in a study in which undergraduate women taught a block design task to either a 6-year-old child, a retarded adult, a peer who spoke English as a second language (foreigner), or a peer who was an unimpaired native speaker of English. The speech addressed to children differed from the speech addressed to native adults along every major dimension that emerged in this study: It was clearer, simpler, and more attention maintaining, and it included longer pauses. Speech addressed to retarded adults was similar in numerous ways to the speech addressed to 6-year-olds; in some ways (e.g., repetitiveness), it was even more babyish. However, speech to the retarded adults did differ in timing from the other styles of speaking in that it included fewer and somewhat shorter pauses. Speech addressed to foreigners was more repetitive than speech addressed to native speakers, but in all other ways it was very similar. There was some evidence that speakers fine-tuned their communications to the level of cognitive and linguistic sophistication of their particular listener; for example, speakers addressing the more sophisticated foreigners (relative to those addressing the less sophisticated foreigners) used speech that included fewer devices for clarifying, simplifying, and maintaining the listeners' attention. We discuss the hypothesis that baby talk (the speech addressed to children) is a prototypical special speech register from which other special registers are derived.

DePaulo. B., Coleman. L. (1986). Talking to Children, Foreigners, and Retarded Adults. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51 (5), 945-959.

Local optimum

All plans are contingent, and there's little point in striving for the global optimum and then brooding on failure when a local one will do.

I used to tell my (mostly female) students, Don't worry about Mr Right, look for Mr Right Now.

I no longer teach in any real capacity.

Rare post on Taiwan

my beautiful home [click for huge]

Have no idea how I take the passage below, but living in Taiwan, and with the shadow of China growing bigger by the day, these issues are starting to become more pressing. I start from the position that the China problem is intractable, which means there's no clear first or second step, other than a hope for federalism rather than outright conquest.

To affirm that humans thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are universal human values. Nor is it to reject the claim that there should be universal human rights. It is to deny that universal values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Human rights can be respected in a variety of regimes, liberal and otherwise. Universal human rights are not an ideal constitution for a single regime throughout the world, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.

John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism

This can be rewritten as follows:

To affirm that Chinese people thrive in many different ways is not to deny that there are Chinese values or one Chinese nation. It is to deny that these values can only be fully realized in a universal regime. Chinese values are not an ideal constitution for a single regime, but a set of minimum standards for peaceful coexistence among regimes that will always remain different.

But that probably doesn't have much use in this context.

39.5 = 51%

tokyo undressed

In six months I'll be 40, which is exciting because it's a) better than the alternative, and b) I should be getting there in better condition - by all metrics - than I ever would have thought possible from the ages of 0 - 35, possibly even later. Life expectancy for a 40-yr old British male is 77.

Not having kids, and not hanging out with folk who do, it's easy to forget about aging. There are few external things of consequence that I see changing in anything other than a cyclical way. The seasons come and go, the years pass, but having dropped out of fashion and popular music, everything pretty much stays the same aside from the constant parade of techno-novelty that's now so ingrained as to just be how things are. The point is, I don't have a kid who not long ago was a mewling infant and is now autonomous and who'll soon be a little adult. In this way I've fallen slightly out of time.

So I was a little shocked the other night when I went for a bowl of ramen and sat across from a mother and her son, about 10 yrs old. Now I plan to live a long time. In all my accounting I aim for 90+, although looking at my family I'm only likely to get 80 or so. Still, I exercise and try and eat right, because good health is always good, and hard-living loses much of it's romance well before middle age, crisis binges notwithstanding. So, if I make it to 90 this kid will be 60, and he'll still have me beat, and I'll die first, while everyone else goes on living.

I looked at the kid and took it as a challenge.

Vistas of reality

The galaxy I Zwicky 18, originally thought to be a young galaxy, actually seems to have formed around the same time as most other galaxies. The bluish-white knots in the heart of the galaxy are two major star-forming regions.

Nasa / Hubble - image here, more here

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu [full text]

Casey's Island

Strong Coloring Sample by Claudio Rocchini

The goal of Island2012.com is to get people to pay to join a community and advertise on that community under the promise of being allowed to live on an island that Serin intends to purchase with proceeds from advertising. [Wikipedia]

It can't last, but Casey Serin resurfaced about a month ago with a plan to buy an island, and the last few days he's been doing podcasts / call-ins. The archive of the shows [three so far] can be found here, until he breaks down and tries to erase everything again. Streaming video here. The new blog, which is nothing much to look at yet, is here.

Steve Serin, Casey's brother, has his own blog on the saga.

Another law of nature

Poincare Halfplane by Claudio Rocchini

Rudy Rucker has a post on finishing his memoir.

...thanks to the chapter I wrote about society as a kind of computation in The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I’ve finally came to accept that writers’ sales obey a scaling law that’s technically known as an inverse power law distribution. You’re not getting lackluster book advances because someone is actively screwing you. It’s the scaling law.

The scaling law applies across the board—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books. There’s no getting around it. Thus, if you’re the hundredth-most popular writer, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand bucks. That’s how nature is. It’s not anyone’s fault. [more]

About the same time I read that I saw John Gray's review of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton [which I haven't read], and this passage jumped out:

One episode covers the time the author spent with a career counsellor, “a professional dedicated to finding ways of ensuring that work will be synonymous with fulfilment”. Describing a session with Carol, a private client, “37 years old, a tax lawyer, in charge of a department of 45 in an office near the Bank of England”, de Botton recounts how Carol suddenly stared to sob as the counsellor “watched her with his kindly eyes, and outside, the neighbour’s cat took a stroll round the carp pond”. The counsellor has dedicated his life to the belief that work is a quest for self-enactment, a way of becoming who we really are. The trouble is that, like many of his clients, Carol seems perplexingly diffuse in her interests, and it is not clear whether there is a self concealed somewhere within her that is waiting to be enacted. Worse, it is unclear whether, if such a self does emerge, anyone will have any interest in it. These uncertainties extend to the counsellor himself who, in return for allowing de Botton to sit in on the sessions, asks to be referred to a literary agent who could promote a book on which he has been working. Twelve agents are contacted, and each replies with polite enthusiasm. The book remains unpublished.

Commenting on this episode, de Botton writes: “For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary projects or organisations. It will remain no more than a hope carried over from childhood.” [more]

I don't have these anxieties anymore, but that might be due to a lack of imagination or effort. This week is the first for a long time [four weeks, more?] when too many deadlines to reasonably handle have not been trailing me. I spent today [Monday] sleeping in, worked a little, scootered around town, collected cash from some clients, came home, cooked, read, took out the trash, bought some coffee and settled down for an hour or two's work ahead of a swim, and then came home to this. I don't have a boss, and work in my study or anywhere else I set up my notebook. I know how lucky I am, but I also know my story, although I almost never think about it.

Power laws and the failures necessary for success were also explored in this earlier post: The myth of 1,000 true fans

My life as a test subject

Eigenfaces from Wikipedia

I volunteered to take part in an MRI-based study on face recognition / memory out of interest and for the $, which I immediately went to a cafe to spend on espresso and alcohol. I also hoped they'd let me know if they found a tumor or some other abnormality, like a massively enlarged pituitary gland, lit up like Las Vegas.

I worried slightly about claustraphobia, although I've never suffered from it before, so I took the last Xanax in my pill box and it kicked in just as they were explaining the procedure to me. I was relaaaaxed in the machine and even enjoyed the noise, which sounded like the intro to a Daft Punk show. Like an idiot, as I was led into the room I asked if 'the music' was part of the test.

I was in the machine for 30 minutes, and they stuck in a 6 minute 'rest period' between the practice and actual tests, during which I put myself into a trance and tripped out / fell asleep. I'm really interested in the results, which will be sent to me in a few weeks.

I ought to donate my whole body to science well before death, but I'm sure that I'm now on a university hospital blacklist.

But the summer / early fall mad rush is over, and I've lots of time for things that can't be easily explained.

Huge post from someone else

This is supposed to be part of a post on Henry Miller, but it can come in two or three parts.

Terry Rossio wrote a lot of successful movies, and this is a piece he wrote called Throw in the Towel, at a blog I can no longer access [maybe you can, but in Taiwan, from this machine, no]. It starts like this:

You don’t get to hear the truth much in this town, so listen up. I’m gonna back up the truck and unload. Harsh truths, right here, right now. And we’re gonna start with the most brutal: You people really aren’t much good at writing screenplays.

In fact, your writing pretty much sucks.

I tried to be different. I tried to leave the door cracked open a bit. I politely asked you to send me only good stuff, your best stuff. And for years now I’ve been deluged by a storm of crappy query letters and mind-numbing script submissions. So many I can’t keep up, can’t even respond to them all. And not one of them has been any damn good.
Now I’m about ready to slam the door shut, and lock it down like how they do in cartoons, with a whole series of barricades and bolts and latches and such.

It’s disappointing. Especially after offering all this advice and encouragement. But man, I’m tired. Tired of being informative and helpful and optimistic. Tired of wasting my time answering your pedestrian-at-best e-mails and faxes and message board questions.

Tired of inventing nice ways to avoid telling you all that your writing sucks.
Hollywood, it is said, is the only place where you can die of encouragement.
Well, not here. Not anymore.

Your writing sucks.

You simply cannot write to a professional level. And you probably never will. It’s a safe bet to say that none of you will ever make a sale, anywhere, anytime; to think otherwise is just deluding yourselves. It’s a waste of your time, and that pains me, and it’s a waste of my time, and that pains me more.

Got it?

Oh, of course not. I knew you wouldn’t. I know you people all too well.

It's 5,500 words long, and it doesn't seem to be available elsewhere, so I've uploaded a WORD file to Google Docs, here.

But what goes on

Jane Birkin & Brian Ferry "In every dream home a heartache"

Sometimes I can only listen to one song all day, again and again and again.

In the process of shedding skins, although it may just be another mid-life crisis / breakdown.

Taiwan is forgiving.

EDIT: Wrote /posted the above late last night, a little drunk after a long bike ride, which is all cool, but in the morning it reads slightly alarming. There's nothing wrong with a small crisis and breakdown now and then, as generally they're just milestones on a path of interesting changes that I observe as much as order. And these days my idea of a breakdown is just the collapse of one system or outlook and the emergence of another. Nothing to fear, and much to enjoy.

This is just the result of physical+mental relief+relaxation at the end of a huge piece of work, waking up at the end the summer with my aims achieved and various attractions laid out in front of me. Now I wait and see what happens next.

El hombre invisible

Always the romantic, Lester [Bangs] viewed [Richard] Meltzer, [Nick] Tosches, and himself as heirs to the Beats. He claimed the mantle of Jack Kerouac. Meltzer he named Neal Cassady, and Tosches became William S. Burroughs. Nobody wanted to be Allen Ginsberg.
Let it Blurt (the life and times of Lester Bangs), Jim DeRogatis, p91

Finally done editing the textbooks and now want to spend as long as possible away from this machine. Just work on paper, in cafes and the garden, or sprawled on the daybed with a fan.

Raw power

Primal Scream - Accelerator

Summer's end

Huge backlog of work almost done, and so the 7am starts and night time finishes are over, and I can start enjoying my life and this city again.

In England the end of summer is always sad, because it's so short and a long, dreary season is all that's ahead until next May, at best. Out here the summer is the worst season, so hot and wet, and the rest of the year is just warm. Also, being just in the tropics, there's barely any change in hrs of daylight. In this way time feels more linear than circular, and it's easy to wake up two or three years later with few points of reference for all the times past.

The Beatles - Within You Without You / Tomorrow Never Knows