Loneliness kills
Judith Shulevitz:
Harlow subjected newborn rhesus macaques to appalling isolation—months spent in cages in the company only of “surrogate mothers” made of wire with cartoonish monkey heads and bottles attached. Luckier monkeys had that and cloth-covered versions of the same thing to cuddle. (It is remarkable what a soft cloth can do to calm an anxious baby monkey down.) In the most extreme cases, the babies languished alone at the bottom of a V-shaped steel container. Cruel as these experiments were, Harlow proved that the absence of mothering destroyed the monkeys’ ability to mingle with other monkeys, though the “cloth mother” could mitigate the worst effects of isolation. Years of monkey therapy were required to integrate them into the troop.
1Rule 30
This rule is of particular interest because it produces complex, seemingly random patterns from simple, well-defined rules. Because of this, Wolfram believes that Rule 30, and cellular automata in general, are the key to understanding how simple rules produce complex structures and behaviour in nature. For instance, a pattern resembling Rule 30 appears on the shell of the widespread cone snail species Conus textile. Rule 30 has also been used as a random number generator in Wolfram’s program Mathematica, and has also been proposed as a possible stream cipher for use in cryptography.
Wolfram based his classification of Rule 30 as chaotic based primarily on its visual appearance, but it was later shown to meet more rigorous definitions of chaos proposed by Devaney and Knudson.
Hallucinogenic fish
The effects of eating ichthyoallyeinotoxic fishes are reputed to be similar in some aspects to LSD. Experiences may include vivid auditory and visual hallucinations. This has given rise to the collective common name “dream fish” for ichthyoallyeinotoxic fish.
These widely distributed coastal fish became a recreational drug during the Roman Empire, and are called “the fish that make dreams” in Arabic. In 2006, two men who ate fish, apparently the Sarpa salpa caught in the Mediterranean were affected by ichthyoallyeinotoxism and experienced hallucinations lasting for several days.
Brain-to-brain interface between rats
The researchers first trained pairs of rats to solve a simple problem - pressing the correct lever when an indicator light above the lever switched on, to obtain a water sip.
One replication of the experiment successfully linked a rat at Duke with one at the University of Natal in Brazil.
All that’s needed now is a USB port for your brain to plug in to your glasses, and you have telepathy.
[HN]
Epidermal electronics
Our research group used the device…to control a computer strategy game with muscles in the throat by speaking the commands.
In principle, the same function could have been achieved by simply mouthing commands rather than speaking them out loud. As such, this capability could be provided to ALS patients so that they could “speak” through an epidermal electronics system that is un-noticeable to them, and invisible to other observers.
Humans are less adept at comparing areas as they are lengths
Statisticians generally regard pie charts as a poor method of displaying information, and they are uncommon in scientific literature. One reason is that it is more difficult for comparisons to be made between the size of items in a chart when area is used instead of length and when different items are shown as different shapes.
Further, in research performed at AT&T Bell Laboratories, it was shown that comparison by angle was less accurate than comparison by length. This can be illustrated with the diagram to the right, showing three pie charts, and, below each of them, the corresponding bar chart representing the same data. Most subjects have difficulty ordering the slices in the pie chart by size; when the bar chart is used the comparison is much easier.
Who can name the biggest number?
Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?
China brain
The China brain thought experiment considers what would happen if each member of the Chinese nation were asked to simulate the action of one neuron in the brain, using telephones or walkie-talkies to simulate the axons and dendrites that connect neurons. Would this arrangement have a mind or consciousness in the same way that brains do?
This is similar to the Ship of Theseus Paradox.
Also read: Philosophical zombies.
