Backup systems on spaceships

Watching old Star Trek: Next Generation. In this episode (Disaster) the Enterprise collides with a quantum filament (whatever that might be), and things aren't very spiffy anymore aboard the vessel. Life support systems are compromised and the field holding the ship together is packing up for a little vacation.

Anyhow, that got me thinking - if I were to have any say in the design of a spaceship, I think that besides the various backup systems, fault tolerance, hierarchical, modular structures and self-healing material, to also make sure that for each critical system, there was at least one backup with a totally different technology. So, for e.g., if a quantum filament hits you and quantum systems are jinxed, you can switch over to a classical system. The fundamental idea being that the cause of the damaging element would be unlikely to affect two technologies that were fundamentally differently implemented.

Which nicely brings us back to Marr and his levels :)  To restate: the spaceship would benefit if the systems for each critical function (the computational level) was implemented (implementational level) in two distinct ways, so that if something caused a failure of the implementational bits of one system, it would be unlikely to also affect the implementational bits of the second system. 

 

Featured!

I got featured in the Observer magazine of the Association for Psychological Science!

Also, I realized I haven't really been blogging in a while. Which is not to say there hasn't been anything interesting :)

iPhone!!

Since it's not yet possible to jack into the matrix, at least there's the iPhone :)

Mobile Blogging from here.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

The plan

Me and Katherine are working on an anticipatory looking paradigm, and we've designed a system for creating and analyzing Tobii experiments. Starting from this system-level design, Johnny Wen has written a most marvelous MATLAB project. It's amazing how far this cluttered-looking whiteboard has come :)

I'm a skeptic

Your result for The What's Your Philosophy? Test...

Skeptic

The skeptic constantly lives in a state of denial - everything is false until proven otherwise. Skeptics refuse to follow religion, since it relies on theories that cannot be proven true or false. Likewise, they refuse to believe in most scientific research, since logic is viewed as an inadequate measure of truth (Just because A = B, and B = C, there's no proof that A = C). Although they can sometimes be depressing to talk to, skeptics are vital to scientific advancements, since they constantly look for problems with new theories. Famous skeptics include: David Hume, Rene Descartes. The opposite of Skepticism is Optimism.

Take The What's Your Philosophy? Test

Buddhist monks and post-modernists on a rollercoaster

So, a while ago I go on my first rollercoaster, and as it sends us hurtling to a certain (p < 0.001) death, I spent some time reflecting on physics equations. Followed by that, I paid homage to the sciences of metallurgy, geometry, friction; before moving on to philosophy and theology. I cannot believe I lived through that. Or that I went on a couple others. And somewhere behind the adrenaline and who-knows-what-other chemicals clouding it, I sat in a corner of my mindbrain reflecting on the reality of what we perceive of as the real world. More specifically, the role of science in all that, as describing a true reality.

Thing is, you cannot help wanting the physics to be a true and very very accurate description of reality. It's all that keeps us in the little metal seats while we twirl and twist at speeds we were not exactly supposed to undergo. So naturally, i wondered what would someone who might object to this version of reality think about going on rollercoasters. 

So, I wondered what (a) a Buddhist monk and (b) a Post-modernist would feel about rollercoasters. I don't know the answer for the post-modernist (Derrida springs to mind), but for the monk, the answer is clear, as Frank Howard pointed out - the Madhyamika style is to analyze the perceived reality as being clear and real as the reality where one lives multiple lifetimes and 'sees' an Avalokitesvara as a tangible presence. For the monk, the distinction itself is not entirely meaningful except as one possible method in attaining enlightenment. 

In short, going on a rollercoaster presents no philosophical contradiction to (certain?) Buddhist monks. I'm not sure what the answer is for the post-modernist.

Illusiontime

Here's a nice illusion:

Stare at the central dot in the image. 

Wait for the image to switch over to the color-inverted version. Keep staring at the dot.

Now, when the image switches back, you should see a 'normally' colored picture (the colors might be a bit washed out).

But! Look around the pic now - it is still a grayscale image!

How I think it works:

The reversed-color image causes specific (spatially congruent) bits of the retina to adapt to the color at that point. So, when the inverted-color image goes off, you get a recovery, which is the true color, and that 'paints' the grayscale :)

(Photo (c) me)