Brownian thought space

Downgrade Lion to Snow Leopard on new iMacs

2011-10-04T17:16:00.002+02:00

Got a new iMac? Came pre-installed with Lion? Want to go back to Snow Leopard for whatever reason? (Unlike the Fanboy, I realize we have different needs). I've been trying to migrate everything off of my work laptop (MacBook Pro) running SL to my new iMac.

First I tried just sticking in a SL install disk. It causes a pernel kanic (it just calls it a "panic") and the gray screen if death. Complains of incompatible hardware. Then, I attached my SL Time Machine backup, restarted the Lion-iMac, holding down the ALT key to give me a choice of starting up from different sources (fyi - you CAN see the SL install DVD this way, but when you select it, you get the panic again). Then, I selected the "Recovery HD" option, and tried to install from Time Machine Backup. But again, Lion told me I could not do nada.

Here's what worked for me. Remember, you take full responsibility for trying these tricks. Keep good backups and backups of your backups in case things get screwy.

It requires you to have :

1) Fully upgraded SL to the latest 10.6.8, with all updates in place on your old SL Mac. At some point, in anticipation of Lion, SL had got a Migration Assistant upgrade..

2) A Time Machine backup from your fully upgraded SL Mac. I have mine on a WD external HD. All the cables to attach the external HD to your old SL Mac.

3) A firewire 800 cable (the rectangular ones that cost $45[wtf?!]) - of course, make sure both the computers have the firewire ports. Also, if your TM HD also uses firewire, make sure you have multiple firewire ports on your old SL Mac

Then follow these simple steps:

(NB: 1&2 are probably not necessary, but better safe than sorry)

1) Run Disk Utilities on your old SL Mac, repair disk permissions.

2) Do a Time Machine backup. Turn off Time Machine backups, so it doesn't do freaky stuff during your transfer

3) Mount the external HD with the TM backup

4) Restart the old SL Mac, holding down the ALT key. You should see a gray screen with your HD(s) and "Recovery HD". Double click the "Restore HD"

5) On the Lion-iMac, go to System Preferences, click on Startup Disk, and click Target Disk Mode... to restart the computer in TDM. Attach a firewire cable to the Lion-iMac

6) When the Lion-iMac restarts, you should see the thunderbolt+firewire symbols floating around the screen.

7) Attach the other end of the firewire to the old SL Mac.

8) On the old SL Mac, go to (Disk?) Utilities and click on Restore from Time Machine Backup.

9) Select the TM backup disk as your source, and the Lion-iMac HD mounted onto your SL Mac as the target.

10) You'll get a warning that the target will be erased. Sure. Get it running.

11) At this point, it looked like my old SL-Mac restarted. I unmounted the TM backup disk; couldn't see the unmount button for the (ex)Lion-iMac, so turned it off, got the device removal warning. Unplugged all firewire etc cables. Restarted both computers...

Everything seems good so far. Mail on the new (now SL) iMac rebuilt databases when it first started, but seems just like the older one. Programs run. No crashes yet.

hth

Why do some language universals have exceptions?

2011-01-26T13:26:00.008+01:00

In a recent article, Evans & Levinson argue that there are no language universals, because for almost any universal, one can find exceptions. Of course, if you're a Chomskyan-like linguist, the obvious simple response is something like this being another case of failing to draw a competence/performance distinction. But still, one needs an explanation of why we find some rare forms; and here is (another) general possibility.

(Sidenote on Evans & Levinson: Imagine we went around observing living species. We would see a bewildering diversity, and I'm quite confident that for any "rule" relating to the phenotypes, there would always be some exceptions. E.g., swimming mammals, flying snakes, flightless birds, carnivorous plants etc. But from this, should we conclude that there is no underlying "universal" organizing principles? No - we know that there is an underlying organizing principle, but that the variation can sometimes make it hard to see. But it's a better explanation of the facts than to assume that each species somehow arises independently of the other, in response to the local environmental niche. [Of course, this analogy might not be perfect; living systems do evolve; while it's not clear if languages do/have done in quite the same way.])

The possible explanation for rare forms arises from work on language typology and language change. In the former, one finds broad generalizations, sometimes with exceptions. For example, Jenny C. recently told us all about Greenberg's Universal 18, by which Adjective-Noun and Noun-Numeral combinations are forbidden (so you can't say something like "red balls three"). It turns out that, in a large survey of languages, about 4% actually do show this pattern (on the surface).

Now we also know that languages change; and in some cases languages change along gradients. Note that this sense of 'gradient' is different from some others, which equate 'gradient' effectively with non-discrete (and hence non-symbolic?) views of language. In the sense used in this post, a gradient is a hierarchy of constituents to which a certain rule can be applied at different levels of the hierarchy. To give an example (thanks to Jenny.C.), consider the hierarchy of DP definitiveness:

Pronoun > Definite DP > Indefinite DP/Quantifier > Wh-phrase

where X > Y implies that Y is higher up in the hierarchy than X. So, for example, if a certain grammatical rule (like agreement) applies to Y, it must also apply to X, but not vice-versa. (In the above example, one can think of the left-to-right progression as getting successively more unspecific about the intended referent.)

Why should a language change from left to right? A general answer (e.g. in this paper) is that it is due to a tendency for generalizations. I.e., if in generation 1 agreement is only on pronouns, and there is even a little evidence for generalizations for definite DPs, over time the regularization bias will quickly move the generalization to the right in the hierarchy. Presumably, there might not even need to be any evidence - if the input is sparse and the learner is trigger-happy, s/he might hypothesize that a generalization holds at a level higher than the one observed in the data.

But there are two possible scenarios for such gradients like X > Y > Z. One is that this sequence is self-closing, such that X > Y > Z > X ..., much like Rock-Paper-Scissors. In such a scenario, one would expect that, starting from different positions in the hierarchy, and changing at different rates, at any given time one might expect to find all three kinds of systems.

However, if X > Y > Z, and that's the end of the story, then, over time, the elements higher up in the hierarchy will tend to dominate, and Xs will tend to be infrequent or disappear.

(A third possibility is that, for different reasons, learners might be able to move to both the right and the left of a hierarchy. In this case too, languages would be expected to be of all three kinds.)

In essence, the reason why certain grammatical features might be rare is that they represent what a complex system theorist might call repellers - regions that a dynamically evolving system avoids. That is, gradients of change might mostly lead away from some linguistic forms, making them universally rare.

A rule by another name...

2010-11-18T14:38:00.012+01:00

Is this a rule or is this a little portion of an HMM?

Imagine some rule-based system, that has the following:

x -> {x | y}

It's in a made-up notation, but the meaning should be clear enough: 'x' can go to either of 'x' or 'y'. The first part (x->x) is just what this colorful picture represents (minus some probabilities of how likely is it that x->x). In fact, the above figure requires some kind of an identity function (x goes to itself).

Here are some more rules:

However, for some strange reason, people who think human language doesn't require rules, only mean rules like (4) - rules 1-3 (and, arguably, infinitely many more) are not just ok, they're often required.

Of course, there is a bigger question: can (4) be re-stated in a different system of rules? Probably. But, to take an example from physics, the Newtonian

F = m.a

does a fantastic job for most of our daily purposes; although we now "know" that the correct (relativistic) form is:

F = m. (d(γ.v)/dt)

So, till those computationalists who deny rules like (4) can give us a better rule system with the kind of intra- and inter-language advances made by assuming variants of (4), it just remains a promissory note with limited substance.

Matlab boxplot notch "error" resolved

2010-10-06T00:06:00.009+02:00

Use Matlab? Try this:

>> load carsmall

>> boxplot(MPG,Origin,'notch','on')

See something weird? Something that looks like this image with the boxes folded over? It's been driving me crazy for a while; I thought I'd broken Matlab somehow; till I discovered this little documentation. Essentially, before R2008b, the notches were truncated to the edges of the box. Since that's wrong, in the sense that the notches (robust estimates of the median) could extend beyond the box edges, Matlabbers fixed this, so now the notches go to wherever they please; but sometimes it makes the figures look weird.

From the Mathworks website:

For small groups, the 'notch' parameter sometimes produces notches that extend outside of the box. In previous releases, the notch was truncated to the extent of the box, which could produce a misleading display. A new value of 'markers' for this parameter avoids the display issue.

As a consequence, the anova1 function, which displays notched box plots for grouped data, may show notches that extend outside the boxes.

For comparison, the second figure is how boxplot used to work.

The question of dumb rats (and smart babies)

2010-09-26T21:04:00.016+02:00

Some scientists seem to believe that rats predicting when the next foot shock happens is all we need to know to understand how babies learn language. Should you?

I came across an interesting blog post that is essentially more anti-Chomsky/Pinker rhetoric. It seems that some baby research likes to throw its little subjects out with their clichés, to describe «new and revolutionary ways» in thinking about language. So here is some attempt to restore balance to the universe.

The general line from that blog is something like this:

(1) Lack of negative evidence is critical to ChomskyPinkerian's position that there must be innate constraints on language acquisition.

(2) In a tone-shock associative task, rats are sensitive to the statistical pattern of presence and absence of the tone, and learn to predict the shock based on (what she calls) positive and negative evidence.

(3) Since rats can learn arbitrary relationships from such negative evidence, why do ChomskyPinkerians believe babies cannot, and instead invoke innate constraints? (followed by some wrist-slapping).

First of all, notice that the example is rotten - this is not the sense of negative evidence that's relevant at all. This is just saying that rats are sensitive to the probability of a shock given a tone. In the "negative example" case, it's just that the conditional probability p(shock|tone) is less than 1.0

The lack of negative evidence is a logical argument that's quite ridiculously simple: given finite data, you cannot deduce the true underlying generative system. Therefore, if all you're exposed to is a finite set of sentences, you cannot infer the true underlying (generative grammatical) system, unless you have something that guides you to the right solution space.

But you don't have to believe me when I say it's hard - look at the simple evidence: even with several bazillion sentences at our disposition, and all the fancy computational tools, no one has yet come up with an adequate description of a generative system that will produce all and only grammatical English sentences.

But a 5-year-old does end up knowing the generative system, and will produce sentences you sometimes wish she wouldn't, and will write little stories, making original sentences that she couldn't possibly have just overheard anywhere.

That is roughly the argument for why there must be something inside the baby that makes it such a genius at figuring out how the language system works. And this something (let's call it Flynn) is (part of) the reason why human babies, but not rat babies or komodo dragon babies or little guppies, end up learning language.

Does this mean there cannot be any general cognitive principles? Of course not, and no one claims there cannot be or that they don't affect language learning (that would be the Flab). What they are and how they do their job is an empirical question. Saying something is innate is merely a description - it doesn't tell you how the system works; that's what keeps researchers in business.

And coming to negative evidence, here's a fantastic quote from Roger Brown et al (quoted in Dan Slobin's Psychlinguistics):

What circumstances did govern approval and disapproval directed at child utterances by parents? Gross errors of word choice were sometimes corrected, as when Eve said What the guy idea. Once in a while an error of pronunciation was noticed and corrected. Most commonly, however, the grounds on which an utterance was approved or disapproved ... were not strictly linguistic at all. When Eve expressed the opinion that her mother was a girl by saying He a girl mother answered That's right. The child's utterance was ungrammatical but mother did not respond to the fact; instead she responded to the truth value of the proposition the child intended to express. In general the parents fit propositions to the child's utterances, however incomplete or distorted the utterances, and then approved or not, according to the correspondence between the proposition and reality. Thus Her curl my hair was approved because mother was, in fact, curling Eve's hair. However, Sarah's grammatically impeccable There's the animal farmhouse was disapproved because the building was a lighthouse and Adam's Walt Disney comes on, on Tuesday was disapproved because Walt Disney comes on, on some other day. It seems then, to be truth value rather than syntactic well-formedness that chiefly governs explicit verbal reinforcement by parents. Which render mildly paradoxical the fact that the usual product of such a training schedule is an adult whose speech is highly grammatical but not notably truthful (Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi, 1967, pp. 57-58).

PRAAT script to extract sound tokens

2010-07-30T21:07:00.009+02:00

The problem:

You have recorded a single long sound file with many tokens (words, syllables), separated by silence for your fantastic upcoming experiment. You want to now segment the long recording and extract each of the tokens into separate sound files.

The solution:

My GetNonSilenceBitsinDir script in PRAAT!

How to use:

Place this with all your other favorite scripts. Save all your recordings in a single directory. To be safe, put copies of all your recordings in a single directory. Load up PRAAT and run the script.

Notes

The script also ensures that each of the sound files extracted have zero crossings at the beginning and end, so things sound good.
You might have to play around with the parameters for what constitutes silence. Search for the "#" line in the script and modify the parameters in the following line. Look up help on Sound: To TextGrid (silences)... in the PRAAT help.

Primates and walking

2009-12-23T17:02:00.011+01:00

In a previous issue of the lovely journal Mindfields, I wrote an article about baby robots. In this, happily ignoring various dynamical systems approaches to the issue, I wrote:

Do we think that the ability to walk comes out of experience? Clearly not. It’s not like the human newborn, upon encountering flattish surfaces, gravity, friction, two (semi-)controllable limbs extending below the waist and other similar-looking beings walking around, figures out from scratch that putting this limb so, and then the other one so (controlling for any number of external factors), it can walk. Instead, walking seems to follow its own developmental program, just like facial hair, zits, breasts and those curious feelings for members of a certain gender. So, typically, you cannot walk when you are two months of age, and people around you would be very worried if you were not walking by the age of three.

Just to be clear, this contrasts with dynamical systems in a deep way, as this quote from a random article* shows:

Dynamical systems theory, as we prefer, views walking as an emergent behavior that arises from the collective dynamics of all contributing subsystems, including the central nervous system and musculoskeletal system. Other constraints, such as those found in the environment (e.g., gravitational forces, slippery walking surfaces) and the task itself (e.g., walking fast or slow), also contribute to shaping the behavior.

Note that these authors contrast this with versions of "maturational and neurophysiological approaches." In the most radical version of this stance, something like walking is not pre-destined, but arises through an interaction between various sub-systems. That is, walking is not something that the organism "knows" in any sense of the word, but is a novel generation by each individual (see e.g., Lewkowicz & Lickliter's review of the Thelen & Smith book**).

Now there are other reasons to suspect that walking and the like are indeed things that (certain) animals can look forward to. For example, pigeons who are restrained from birth can still fly.

(There's also an interesting salamander story for another day)

But the new issue of the PNAS has yet another interesting story to tell.

*Jane E. Clark and Sally J. Phillips (1993) A Longitudinal Study of Intralimb Coordination in the First Year of Independent Walking: A Dynamical Systems Analysis. Child Development, Vol. 64(4), pp. 1143-1157

**Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith (1994) A dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Why a watched pot never boils

2009-12-12T16:52:00.008+01:00

Simple answer: phase transitions are relatively rapid.

Let the time when you set the pot/kettle on the fire to be t_0.

Let the time when the contents are at a rolling boil be t_b.

Imagine you're watching TV, and going to the kitchen every once in a while to watch if the contents are actually boiling...

The essence of the observation is that, given the rapidness of a phase transition, in this case between the non-boiling and the boiling phases, the most likely observation is either one or the other, as shown in this mockchart: only in the pink-magenta region will you actually see the transition from one state to the next.

So, in all the 'n' trips where t_n is less than the lower bound of the pink-magenta region, the pot won't be boiling. And if you miss the narrow transition window, then on the (n+1)th trip, where t_(n+1) is beyond the pink-magenta region, you'll see the water boiling. And conclude, "a watched pot never boils."

That or the Quantum Zeno effect...

Teh

2009-11-13T14:27:00.011+01:00

I'm sorely vexed with 'teh'.

For those who think that frequency is teh everything, here is a conundrum inside an enigma: what explains the frequency of 'teh'?

The graph shows the log frequency for all the possible 2-letter mixups possible starting from 'the'. Ok, ignore the last one.

Note that 'teh' is not only the most common, it's the only one where the entire first page of results is about 'teh' as it relates to 'the'. For the last two, the first page hits had nothing to do with 'the'.

Now consider 'and'. The comparable graph shows decreasing frequency like for 'the', but in this case, none of the 2-letter mistakes have anything to do with 'and' - all the hits on page 1 are various abbreviations.

So why is 'teh', as a misspelling (deliberate or otherwise) of 'the' so common?

One possibility is that the bigram frequencies - TE or EH are way higher than TH or HE (well, probably not the latter).

The other possibility is motor planning and the layout of the qwerty keyboard - do people using other layouts like Dvorak or Colemak show the same pattern? Other language layouts (maybe with bilinguals)?

At the very least, it seems that frequency ALONE can never be an answer for stuff you see around you ;)

Probability of finding a four-leaf clover

2009-08-01T19:25:00.004+02:00

Short answer: around 1 in 2,000.

(Clarification: this is the probability that, if you pick up a single leaf at random, it will have four leaflets.)

Here is my collection of four four-leaf clovers (out of five, the fifth has shredded leaves), collected over a period of two weeks.

If you look at the wikipedia page (& refs therein), the most commonly cited figure is 1 in 10,000. Unfortunately there are no actual observations reported anywhere.

But now I can report that, according to my very empirical research, the probability of finding a four-leaf clover is probably more like 1 in 2,000.

How do I know?

I find that I can scan around 100 plants per minute.
Most recently, I found two four-leafs in about 30min worth of scanning.
This gives a rate of 1 in 1,500

The previous attempts have however been slightly longer, although I didn't time them as accurately. Also, the actual number of plants scanned per minute can vary due to wandering attention. So, I would think a more conservative estimate is ~1 in 2,000.

Of course, these are all in upstate NY, although not at a single location. Perhaps these rates vary with a whole bunch of other factors.

Still, these are fairly low odds - finding 5 four-leaf clovers, even with these better estimates, is still less than one in 10 quadrillion! (Clarification again: this is the probability that, if you pick five leafs blindly, all five will have four leaflets each.)

Innovations: Segway to language

2009-07-25T14:17:00.006+02:00

A signboard on my way home: "High-tech gadgets repaired."

What really is a high-tech gadget anyhow? Take the Segway. Nothing like it existed before it did. It would be hard to argue that this was not a genuine innovation - and a reasonably high-tech one.

But what makes it high-tech and an innovation at all? Certainly, as this gentleman shows, it isn't stuff like the "brushless servo motors with neodymium magnets" or wheels of "sophisticated engineering-grade thermoplastic."

That is, all the parts pre-existed, and can be replaced by equivalent, crappier parts that in themselves are old hat, and aren't necessary for the innovation itself.

What about the software? Well, it's using some version of C or Python or some such. So that's not new. Neither is the general problem, which as Wikipedia tells me, is that of the inverted pendulum.

So why is the Segway an innovation? And really, is it even an innovation at all? I think you might agree that, in a sense it is. Oh sure, maybe someone else thought of the idea before and never got around to implementing it, but as far we know, Dean Kamen invented the Segway.

Now here's the point - I think it's the same deal with language and cognition. Sure, language might rely on a whole bunch of stuff - the cognitive equivalent of neodymium magnets and thermoplastics, but in the end, I believe that it is a genuine innovation like the Segway is.

Look at what the Segway relies on (/is made up of), and you find that all the pieces pre-exist, and can be found in several other, crappier devices that don't do half as much. Look at the code, and you'll find data structures and operators from the simplest "Hello World" program. Similarly, look at what language relies on (/is made up of), and you'll find the same old cognitive systems like memory and attention and, I wouldn't be surprised, sex, drugs & rock'n'roll; cos those are the bits the mind is made up of anyway.

But nevertheless, like the Segway is an invention of Dean Kamen, language is an innovation of our species. So the next time you read a paper that pretends that language is nothing more than memory or attention, think of the Segway.

Or, who has seen the wind?

2009-07-22T22:25:00.006+02:00

Finally the special issue is out, and it looks like balance, intelligence, a broad biological perspective and just plain good reading habits lose to rhetoric, misrepresentation and... and I really do not know what.

The culprit, which I think is possibly one of the worst articles is by Spencer et al, and is the first in a special section: Is It Time to Look Beyond the Nativist–Empiricist Debate? in the August issue (Vol. 3,No. 2) of Child Development Perspectives.

The point of the paper is hard to understand, given that, I think, most nativists would have no problems with most or any of the examples they give. Why the fact that development "emerges via cascades of interactions across multiple levels of causation, from genes to environments" should pose a problem for the innateness thesis I cannot fathom. Of course, the adult biological entity is a product of genes and environments. How one can possibly have any kind of theory involving, e.g., nouns and verbs that is derived from such an understanding of development is presumably left as an exercise for the reader.

Everything, language, cognition - must be grounded in theories of development, in their view. It reminds me of the poem by Christina Rossetti:

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.

The point is, and this is probably not the best way to make the point, that "wind" is not really something you can see, just as "language" is not something you can see. You call the (generative) force that hurries leaves along "wind", just as you call the mechanism that drives words from your lips "language". Grounded, whether in the sense of Spencer et al, or grounded in the sense of embodied cognition, I find it these conflations of various interlocking questions: what is a good theory of the generative systems (the langue) that propel the various specific instances, heard and unheard (the parole)? How does this come to be? In ontogeny? In phylogeny?

It seems to me that there is one main reason for writing this paper- the various 'critics' seem to think that, if something is identified as "innate", then research stops. Perhaps so, but that depends entirely on the level at which one is researching. If I am studying comparative behavior, then I might be content to report that:

(1) Chickadees can be tamed in adulthood, while almost no other passerine can.

Does this come out of a "complex interaction of genes and environment?" Undoubtedly?! But does it make a statement like (1) something no researcher should abide by? Well, not for me.

Will the elaborate and "inconvenient" (in their case meaning [1] complex or [2] amenable to much broader range of phenotypes than those the typical environments allow) developmental research shed any immediate light on, e.g., why we can understand and explain to someone the rules of chess? Personally, I'd put that question on par with a quantum theory of tectonic plate movements.

Maybe it's a lack of exposure to Fry & Laurie at some critical stage ;)

Backup systems on spaceships

2009-05-25T05:01:00.002+02:00

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!

2009-05-08T15:56:00.002+02:00

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!!

2009-02-15T15:17:00.000+01:00

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

Mobile Blogging from here.

The plan

2008-12-18T03:14:00.003+01:00

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

2008-09-13T18:23:00.000+02:00

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

2008-08-01T03:25:00.005+02:00

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

2008-07-11T19:20:00.003+02:00

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)

Astrocyte Computing

2008-07-10T16:24:00.004+02:00

The term is supposed to parallel 'Neural Computing', and is intended to work out how astrocytes in the brain are capable of doing computations.

In the past, I've wondered about astrocytes in relation to hemodynamics in the brain. The standard (T2*) BOLD response in fMRI is primarily caused by local changes in the OxyHb:DeoxyHb ratio. The assumption has been that this ratio reflects local neural activity, through a coupling between neural activity and blood flow. Other studies have shown that the coupling is largely mediated through astrocytes.

But do astrocytes actually perform any computations beyond just recruiting blood flow? Not entirely clear; but a new paper from the Mriganka Sur group shows that astrocytes in the ferret visual cortex have properties similar to neurons.

Here are stimulus-dependent fluorescence changes in neurons and astrocytes: Notice that the time scale is comparable- astrocytes are off by just a couple of seconds. Turns out that the astrocytes are also more sharply tuned (e.g., to orientation, in these studies).

And another really cool result: the authors add a glutamate transporter antagonist (TBOA). This has the effect of not clearing glutamate from the synaptic cleft. This causes (a) a reduction in the activity of the astrocytes and (b) an increase and prolongation in the activity of neurons due to extra glutamate in the cleft. But, look at what happens to the blood volume change (measured as an intrinsic optical signal at 546-nm): it decreases!

I.e., although neuronal firing increases, blood volume change decreases. Of course, this is in the presence of TBOA, but it makes you wonder if there are physiological conditions under which the glu-transporters are downregulated (perhaps at a different timescale), leading to a decrease in blood-flow changes.

Of course, blood-flow and BOLD are themselves not super-directly related. But what these studies show is that hemodynamic measures might be actually capturing astrocyte activity, rather than neural activity.

It remains to be seen how much of the computation in the brain is attributable to the astrocytes. And also what 'neural network' models might really mean ;)

Geek tee

2008-06-14T18:08:00.004+02:00

Intended for a very specific clientele, the Matlab Hero T-Shirt.

I use features

2008-05-08T15:56:00.003+02:00

What I tried to say:

"Greek place"

What I ended up saying:

"Breek ... errr..."

What this means:

The initial consonant of word 2 lent it's [place] feature to the initial consonant of word 1; BUT, word 1 kept it's [voicing] feature intact. Thus, /g/ -> /b/

Looks like I do use something like a feature after all :)

Moral: pay close attention to your slips of the tongue and other speech errors...

-----------

UPDATE

-----------

Chris K swaps features between the onset and the coda of a single syllable -

"wis.dom" -> "wis.bon"

by swapping the onset [+alveolar] with the coda [+bilabial]; leaving the rest intact...

Medal and honors to her.

The Mystery of Sixteen

2008-05-04T22:33:00.012+02:00

What's with Sixteen and Facebook?

Background 1: Facebook recently released an app called Lexicon, that counts the occurrence of upto five words on Facebook wall posts and shows their relative usage over a period of several days.

Background 2: I happened to have done my Ph.D. with the awesome Jacques Mehler, who, along with one of his (other ;) star students Stan Dehaene, wrote a paper way back in 1992, entitled 'Cross-linguistic regularities in the frequency of number words' (Cognition, 43, 1-29). In this paper, they found that in cross-linguistic comparison of written corpora, (a) the frequency of usage of a number was inversely proportional to its magnitude, and (b) there were some local increases in frequency, e.g. for 'hundred' or the multiples of 10 and some numbers between 10 and 20.

Materials and methods: Naturally, it behove me to look at how Facebook users went with this trend. You who know my method, would immediately guess that Matlab was made use of. It was, images were captured, axes drawn and relative frequencies (Lexicon does not give absolute frequencies... in fact, there is no y-scale) estimated.

Here is one image output from Facebook. The estimated relative frequencies are plotted in a log-log scale in the inset graph.

As had been observed, there is a nice decrease in frequency going from 'one' to 'four'.

So far so good. But could lexicon actually also pick up the subtle local increases that Stan & Jacques found?

So, I looked at the numbers between 11 and 18. Figure 2 (Numbers 10 to 19) shows the relation between the previous findings and the current ones. In the graph from the paper, each line is a different language (corpus). Ignoring the dotted lines, if you see the trends for the languages (usefully highlighted by me) and compare it with the inset from Facebook (in blue at the top), you see two things: (a) overall, the shapes are remarkably similar, BUT (b) 'sixteen' is vastly over-represented. Hmm.

Bit of a puzzle, that. Has American English changed? Is it the difference in corpora? Theirs was the famous Francis and Kucera (1982), this was Facebook. Or is it because of the online, web nature of the Facebook 'corpus'?

Well, that could be checked quickly enough. A bunch of google searches for 'eleven' through 'eighteen' produced (approximate) counts for these words on the web at large. I normalized the Facebook and the Google values by subtracting the minimum, adding 1 and dividing the whole by the maximum. The results are shown in the last figure. For the most part, there's a pretty amazing concordance between Facebook and Google. Except for 'sixteen'!

Well, I must admit, I am rather puzzled. What's with sixteen? Ok, so it's the age for getting a driver's license in most states, but so what? And why is Facebook different from the rest of the web? Is there something sinister?

UPDATE:

So, I did some more poking around. One hypothesis (suggested by Celeste) was that this had to do with the American cultural association of 16 with 'coming of age' plus the fact that Facebook is primarily a teenage phenomenon. I thought, instead, that this might have to do with the fact that Facebook is a social networking site. To test this, I looked at some stats off of myspace, using Google's handy site-specific searching, e.g. 'sixteen site:myspace.com'. The results are shown in the next figure:

These data show that myspace, like Facebook, has a spike in the count of 'sixteen'; something not found in the original study or in the stats from the whole web (google in the graph).

So, this supports the idea that social networking sites have an unexplained spike in 'sixteen'.

To look a little more into this, I looked at the phrase 'sweet sixteen'. Now Lexicon allows you to specify phrases as well as individual words. So I did that. As controls, I had 'thirteen', which we know is pretty low (and not just in American, although the exact reasons for the cross-culturally low values are not clear but are discussed in the original paper). And, I added in 'turned sixteen' and 'sixteen years' as other relevant phrases. The results from Lexicon in the next picture are clear: 'Sweet sixteen' shows up VERY frequently, while the other phrases don't even show up!

Once again, I used Matlab to estimate the frequency of the phrase 'sweet sixteen'- it accounts for nearly a THIRD of all occurrences. In the final graph, I plot the occurrences of 'sixteen' on Facebook either with (blue) or without the phrase 'sweet sixteen' (red, dotted).

Now suddenly the picture looks much more like the original and like Google!

So, the REAL question is, what's with social networking sites (ok, I haven't done this with Myspace yet) and 'sweet sixteen'???

Statistical inference

2008-04-06T19:02:00.009+02:00

Imagine that a statistical reasoner was trying to build an appropriate model of when I go to the gym. What would such a model entail? In a very general sense, it would be some kind of prediction about the (say hourly) probability that I go to the gym. So, given some data, for each of the 24 hours in a day the model would make some prediction about how likely I am to go to the gym. Observing the data (so far), it might make certain generalizations. (1) The probability of going to the gym is zero at 00(hrs), is some value >0 between 0800 and 1900, and then drops down to zero after 1900. Further, if the model had access to my (woefully inadequate) Google calendar, it would know that the probability that I went to the gym during the hours that my Google cal said I was supposed to be at a meeting was close to zero. Add more observable, contextual variables. The probability that I go to the gym rises in the hours following my eating a protein bar. It is also higher when my car is parked at the campus. The availability of a fresh change of clothes increases the probability , while my drinking a coke drives it lower. Eventually, I'm quite certain that these factors taken together would come up with a model of my gym-going behavior with a pretty good level of accuracy. You could consult this model and know, at any given hour, how likely it is that I am actually at the gym, and you won't be terribly wrong. However! if you thought that the model was a causal model, you would have got the whole causal structure inverted: as far as I'm concerned, I go to the gym when it darn well pleases me. Of course I cannot go when I'm fast asleep, and I do tend to sleep mostly between 1900 and 0800 the next day. Of course I'd rather sit in meetings than go gymming. But these are not the reasons I go to the gym; these are the restrictions that permit or disallow my going to the gym. This is just like the Buddhist idea of substantial causes and cooperative conditions. The first is the actual cause; the second are factors that make the effect possible. In my reading, the failure of Behaviorism is in identifying the cooperative conditions as substantial causes. I think that this also the pitfall that's right next to every statistical learning view of acquisition in cognition. As Chomsky, Pinker and others have belabored, the point is that you need to posit mental causes for observed behaviors. Observed behaviors in themselves don't constitute a causal theory. However, what the causal theory itself should look like is a tough problem. The reason is that we can postulate as many or as few mental variables, but we won't necessarily know which is the right set. It seems that some sort of Occam's razor over introspectively (intuitively) hypothesized causal models would be the best bet. It's in this light that I'm viewing the research of Josh Tenenbaum, for example. And here's where the Bayesian approach might be most useful- I think of it as the best implementation (so far) of Occam's razor.

Elephant portrait

2008-04-03T16:48:00.004+02:00

This is the preview slide of a painting made by an elehant (YouTube video below). I'm guessing this is going to change a whole lot of ideas in cognition and consciousness.

It's not clear of course how much of this is learnt through rote and how much is 'creative' (a bunch of painters helped the elephants get started).

Still, even if it's memory, it's pretty darn amazing! The video shows pretty clearly that the elephant has broken down the picture into subcomponents, and has at least learnt some sort of higher-level organization across the elements. Is this like the Matsuzawa chimp story with numbers? Or is it something more? Hard to tell. But impressive nevertheless!

Skim

2008-03-20T13:40:00.004+01:00

It's time to stop previewing and start SKIMming :)
This is one hell of a cool application, specially for reading all those darn papers and working almost exclusively online.

You can quickly annotate and highlight and add stickies and whatnot and saves it in the extended file attributes (which some might find cause to quibble over). Here's a screenshot from a really nice paper(pdf) ;)

Revision time

2008-03-17T01:14:00.009+01:00

In a previous post, I proposed buddhism:0, science:1 because, I felt, science offered a better understanding of the world around us. In that and a second post, I thought that what justified this was technology: unless you can truly understand, you cannot truly manipulate. It's revision time! So, let's ask the harder question: Does technology really justify the scientific way of understanding the world? Well, yes and no. Yes in the sense of the previous post. But why "no"? For the moment, let's make the generalization that mathematics is the core of the structures through which we understand the world and create technology. (I would love to hear counter-arguments; remember, the claim is not just understanding the world, it's understanding the world and technology). As Thuan points out (still stuck in the Quantum & the Lotus ;), just the mathematical part of structures that support understanding-and-technology can predate the entire structure. That is, the maths (e.g. tensors and Riemannian geometry) can come before the physics (in this case, general relativity and gravity bending space). Matthieu responds:

...There's nothing odd about the fact that what we conceive corresponds to what we perceive. The way we explore the world, then sort out our perceptions of it, necessarily agrees with our mathematical concepts, because both perception and conception are products of the mind [italics his].

In short, the basic structure of the mind generates concepts either in 'mathematical space' or in 'physical space'. So, it's hardly a coincidence that the two mesh. Remember, here the 'mind' does not refer to the fundamental, luminous quality of pure consciousness, but rather refers to the relative-truth notion of consciousness (see previous post). So, technology does not justify an ultimate truth of the world, even if it does justify the current (relative-truth) model of how things work. In a sense, we conceive of the world around us. This can either be a conception originating in our sensory receptors or a conception arising purely from consciousness. In all cases, these are abstractions at some level or another, and the idea is that they all share a common source. Therefore, inasfar as some subset of these conceptions share common grounds with how we conceive of the world, technology will happen. But then, here's the other question again: Why is there no technology coming out of Buddhist thought? In a previous post, I hypothesized that "...technology might not be expected to advance when it is not felt that having a thin-screen tv trumps the handpainted wall hanging of Tara." In the chapter The Grammar of the Universe, Thuan says something similar. The monk responds:

M(atthieu):This lack of development of the methods of modern science may have less to do with an inability to analyze phenomena than with a different scale of priorities as regards the various fields of knowledge. Which is more important - to know the mass and charge of an electron and to study the details of the world around us, or to concentrate on developing the art of living, to deepen our knowledge of vital questions such as ethics, happiness, death ... and to analyze the ultimate nature of reality?[pg. 208]

And yet, as Matthieu says shortly later, this does not mean that Buddhist thought cannot and does not include all the stuff from what they call our 'illusory' world, with the current 'scientific' style of rationalization. That is, Buddhism is interested in the conventional truth, since this is where most of the suffering happens, and, as the Dalai Lama tells it, is the place that seems best suited to get up to seeing the absolute nature of things. But to them, the conventional truth has no independent justification. This revision is scratching off Technology as a justification :)

Concepts

2008-03-16T22:21:00.003+01:00

Heard a really nice talk by Wendy Haylett on the Diamond Cutter Sutra (among other things) at the Tibetan Buddhist centre. One of the things from the talk impressed upon me yet again one of the first reason that I'd found Buddhism so interesting: it seemed to coincide with some observations in cognitive science. Wendy went through an exercise of trying to ask, what is it in/of a pen that is its 'pen-ness'? Is it the function? (that depends on who is holding it) is it the shape? the materials? the color? And of course, there isn't any one thing or set of things that you can point to as being a pen. Just as, as Chomsky pointed out (and I simply cannot find the reference right now), if the human race were to disappear, there suddenly would be nothing like a garbage can. Both pens and garbage cans as distinct entities are just in the mind. A similar point is raised by the Amazing Gleitmans, Lila & Henry; e.g. in this paper (with Sharon Armstrong). As they point out, if one looks at a dictionary,

...(m)ost of the words in the language are defined there in terms of one another, with most words - unfamiliar ones excepted - acting as defined on some occasions and definers on others. It is as if all the words made their living by taking in each others' washing.

The idea here is that concepts are not the sum of their features. How remarkably similar is this to the endnote in the Quantum & the Lotus, which explains the argument of Chandrakirti that a "chariot" has no inherent existence:

A chariot is not intrinsically the same as its part (wheels, axles, etc.), for they are multiple, and the entity of a chariot would then become multiple. If one insists that the chariot is really "one" entity., then all of its parts must be a single entity. Thus, absurdly, the agent (the moving chariot) and that which draws it along (its parts) would be one.
A chariot is not intrinsically different from its parts, for if it were, then it would be an entity totally distinct from its parts. But ontologically, independent and simultaneous phenomena cannot act on one another, and so cannot be connected by a causal chain[1]. The chariot should then be perceived as being separate from its parts, which is not the case.
The parts of a chariot do not depend intrinsically on the entire chariot, for if they did, then the parts and the whole of the chariot would have to be intrinsically "different", which returns us to the previous point.
For the same reasons, a chariot does not intrinsically depend on its parts.
A chariot does not possess its parts, as a farmer owns a cow or a man his body. For that to be true, the chariot would have to be either intrinsically distinct, or indistinguishable from its parts. Both of these possibilities have already been refuted.
The chariot entity is not a simple composite of its parts: (a) the form of its parts cannot be a chariot; and (b) the form of the composites made up by the parts cannot be a chariot, because the forms of these parts remain unchanged, i.e., they are a chariot neither before nor after coming together.
The form of the composite is not a chariot, because the composite formed from the parts is not an entity with a distinct existence. There is no composite of the parts different from the parts themselves, otherwise we could perceive the composites without perceiving the parts. As we have seen, the composite cannot be identical to its parts, for if it were, either the "composite" entity would be multiple, or the parts would be a single object, To sum up, the form of the composite exists only through a conceptual imputation.

Not bad for someone from the seventh century A.D. :)

Dualistic Consciousness?

2008-03-11T14:01:00.008+01:00

I have been getting puzzled and confused about an apparent contradiction in Matthieu Ricard's treatment of consciousness in The Quantum and the Lotus. On the one hand is the idea of shunyata, or none-ness (=one-ness), by which there is, in one sense, no notion of a true separation between things out there. Since there is just interdependence, all phenomena can be seen as just one, and "... ultimately, phenomena have no intrinsic existence"[pg. 28]. But, when it comes to consciousness, it suddenly seems to go dualistic:

"... cause and effect must have a common nature, when the cause is substantially [as opposed to cooperatively] responsible for the effect. ...A moment of consciousness can only be caused by a preceding moment of consciousness. If something can be born from something utterly different, then anything could be born from anything else. Thus the fundamental level of consciousness cannot have arisen from inanimate matter, and it doesn't necessarily and in all contexts, depend on being embodied in a physical form."

So is this dualism? Thuan asks Matthieu precisely this question:

Matthieu: "Buddhism's conception is radically different from Cartesian dualism. We believe that there's merely a conventional difference between matter and consciousness because, in the end, neither of them has an inherent existence. Because Buddhism refutes the ultimate reality of phenomena, it also refutes the idea that consciousness is independent and exists inherently."

So, the key to the puzzle (which, had I read the texts more carefully, is there right from the start), is the difference between relative or conventional truth and absolute truth. In the absolute sense, there is no difference between matter and consciousness. But in the relative or conventional sense, there is. But why should consciousness be separated from the material in the relative sense? Buddhists see causation as arising from two things - substantial causes and cooperative conditions. E.g., for a flame, the burning fuel is the substantial cause of the flame, and the atmosphere etc. that make it possible are the cooperative conditions that allow the combustion of the fuel. However, the causes and effects must have 'similar natures', for otherwise anything could be the (substantial) cause of anything else {Note: I think I might prefer to refer to it as a substantial, immediate cause}. And, in the Buddhist theory, material things, because of their qualities like having a location in space and being measurable, do not accord with them being the causes of consciousness. In this view, then, the brain is a cooperative condition for consciousness, rather than a substantial cause. And how does one know this? Well, that's part of the come-and-see bit. You have to do their "math", which is meditation and all that. It's a bit like needing to learn about tensors in order to work through a mathematical understanding of general relativity. Or, you could just believe that Einstein and his crowd (or Siddhartha and his crowd) did the math right... ;)

The day before Genesis

2008-03-07T22:45:00.004+01:00

That's the title of a scientific article in Discover of April 2008. And, given the current extra-curricular readings in Buddhism, it comes almost as a pleasant shock. Several times I've heard or read, how Buddhism views the Big Bang. Their argument is pretty simple: nothing can be causeless. This is one(?) way of deriving the first of the Noble Truths, that of Suffering. So, for example, Matthieu Ricard, in The Quantum and the Lotus, explains that from the Buddhist view point, there cannot be A beginning, out of nothing. What this article does, is to examine the view of some main-stream physicists who would like to know, what came before the Big Bang? The article describes three main ideas:

The idea, originating in string theory, that this world is a 3D brane embedded in a higher dimensional "bulk". This theory makes testable predictions about how gravitational waves should look like, if we could measure them.
The question of time: why does it always move 'forward'? Turns out, you can have models where it does actually move backwards. For this, you need multiple Universes embedded in a multiverse, and so the Big Bang comes out of a background "foam", which holds its cause.
The end of Time. This is an idea from 'rebel' physicist Julian Babour, which is just too similar to Buddhist notions. The basic idea is that 'time' is an illusion, all there are are endless successions of Nows. Strikingly, each Now is a state of the entire universe. Pretty much the same idea as in Buddhst thought.

Taken together, it seems clear that at least some parts of modern physics are remarkably congruent with the kind of things that the Dalai Lama or monks like Matthieu Ricard talk about. It's almost time to re-visit the misgivings about the relation between science and buddhism again.. ;)

Justifying the faith

2008-02-15T14:03:00.011+01:00

[continued from a previous post] Buddhism is certainly pretty. It is non-sectarian (in a deep sense), has tolerance built right into it, doesn't rely on a God, requires rational inquiry, and proponents and practitioners have used the findings of the Buddha and the Bodhisattvas to develops techniques to calm and focus the unstable mind and energize the body. However, (my favorite word, ever!) there is one aspect that I must claim that I have not quite grasped. If, as the Buddhists claim (strong disclaimer:: my experience with this whole business is not more than a few months and a couple of books worth) that Buddhism is like Science, then where is the Technology? Why is this important? Well, because of the Strong Programme. Briefly, this is the notion some social theorists came up with, according to which science is just a social construct. And by this they do not mean that there are gender disparities in science or that the funding of scientific projects is often driven by what is the 'current fashion'. Instead, since human knowledge is born out of human cognition that operates inside a human society, all scientific theories are just social constructs. In response (the funniest being the Sokal Affair), what I thought was the clearest answer to such an attack was technology. Because, if theories about light, materials, semiconductors, electrons, drag coefficients, wind resistance and so on are false, there is no way to get something as complex as an aircraft off the ground (so to say ;). So, if Buddhism is to be like science, it should manifest some technology. It should be able to apply a theory of the world to create something material. I heard it said that the most enlightened ones are able to essentially transform matter at will. But this is far too close to an idea of 'miracles' for it to sit easy with me. What are the alternatives? One possibility is that Buddhism is solely a science of the mind; and for the rest it is purely 'theoretical'. This could be because of the heavy emphasis in Buddhism on improving the human condition. One of the things that I read early on (and heard several times over) was that in this tradition, unlike (unfortunately!) in science, ethics and morality necessarily go hand in hand with understanding the world. If this is the case, then understanding the human condition, and thus the human mind, becomes paramount. Looked at in another way, technology might not be expected to advance when it is not felt that having a thin-screen tv trumps the handpainted wall hanging of Tara. So, I was immensely pleased when I recently read an article by the Dalai Lama, "Science at the Crossroads", based on his talk at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2005. I think the article is best left to be read and experienced by the individual :) All I can say is, it justifies a faith in Buddhism as a possible better model for science than the current one. Nothing is left behind; all of the science done in the past is taken along, minus unclear thinking, bandwagonning, and the other negative effects of the human psyche being added into the science equation. I like to think that this has always been the ideal model of science, at least for me. What is added is a more ethical treatment of human understanding. In a previous post I ended with science:1, buddhism:0. I think it is still true for the material world alone. But, in a more holistic sense, it is the combination of the western-style empiricism and the Buddhist style of dealing with the world that promises the most satisfying condition of human understanding.

Memory as a developmental change

2008-02-08T13:57:00.000+01:00

What's memory? (Here's the Wikipedia take). Last December, I had the chance to hear and interact with Eva Jablonka, famous for her work on epigenetics*. And from that, and reading about other stuff, it occurred that memory, in a sense, might be pretty much the same thing as a developmental change. Why? Because both are changes in cellular properties in response to the environment, and that code the environment in a meaningful way. For example, the training of immune T cells is encoded in the expression of surface markers (like the CDn family). This is a developmental change, and is involved in (immune) memory. One way to think about this is that developmental programs might occur over different timescales, and with respect to different developmental stages. So, some programs might turn on and be relevant at the blastula stage, and others at the adult stage. At each stage, the 'environment', in the inclusive sense (both biological and non), interacts with the various genes and gene products and all the related chemicals to get to the next stage. Why is this relevant? Well, while talking to Eva J, I wondered if longterm memory in the brain was actually a page out of an older and extremely important 'memory' system- the germline. Why 'memory'? You can think of an organism as reflecting in some way its natural history. The 'memory' of this natural history is simply the product of the NeoDarwinistic selection process: the current organism. One might think of the gamete Mother Cells as being the memory stores, which keep both long-term (genetic) and short-term (epigenetic?) memory marks. So here's the idea: perhaps, the epigenetic mechanisms for storing 'memory', which had been perfected in the germline cells, were recruited for storing memory of a different kind- that between sensory inputs and their optimal outputs (i.e., optimal given the environment & the rest of the geno/phenotype of the organism). Actually recent evidence from a unicellular slime mold suggests something slighty different. Japanese scientists showed that Physarum polyephalum amoebae show learning. The learning consists of altered movement patterns in response to external stimuli- these patterns are retained through a period when the stimulus is absent, and re-deployed when the stimulus comes back on. So, the single cell has both the capacity to deply a motor pattern in response to an external stimulus and to keep the memory trace for that. This suggests that germline cells (for the single-celled amoeba, the one cell is both the germline and the soma ;) and memory cells might just be two separate cellular programs generated from a single cell with both capacities. In either case, this implies that, perhaps, during development, (a) germline and neural tissue share some common origins and/or (b) germline and neural tissue share some interesting patterns of gene/protein network states. In fact, there are a bunch of proteins of the testis-brain protein family that seem to be present in both the germline and neural tissue. These proteins seem to be involved in chromatin remodeling and in RNA localizations. Still, why developmental? Possibly, neural tissue and germline tissue, relies heavily on epigenetic markers for retaining environmental memory from recent times. So, during development, precursors to these are put aside early so that the remaining cells can do all the chromatin remodeling they please. Neural and germline cells are put through only very few division cycles to maintain their status as faithfully as possible. Now, wouldn't it be cool if neural changes were able to be transmitted directly down to the germline in adults? :) *A recent article explores the concept in greater depth

Relative interests

2007-12-15T18:02:00.001+01:00

Grandfather from previous post- proudly displaying his pride and joy.
ps: NOT the cupboard, the drawer or the b&w mini-poster of the Bollywood film star.

Family Notes

2007-12-15T12:43:00.000+01:00

Even before I've landed in India, my mom gets a call from her aunt in Houston, TX. "Do you remember my friend Mrs. Somethin-or-the-other? She has this daughter...". See where it's headed? Some aunts here do that. Like my mom's other aunt in Pune who invited her over and pressed her with some ginger biscuits. The next day she called

Aunt: Did you like the ginger biscuits? Mom: I guess... Aunt: So, my neighbors have this daughter; she's a whiz at making ginger biscuits. Say, why don't we go meet her?

See where it's headed? My grandfather, here in Bombay, sometimes doesn't quite get it. He used to be an opthalmologist, and is one of the proudest men who ever took the hippocratic oath. Yet somehow he can't quite seem to link a heaving and coughing (with such wrenching ferocity that I sometimes feel he will turn inside-out) with his "occasional" cigarette. As I was comfortably seated in the bathroom for a well-deserved quiet moment with my book and an easing of the bowels, I hear the following conversation that has left me puzzled:

Gramps: Where's M? Mom: He's in the toilet. G: What's he doing there? M: Umm.. he's in the toilet. G: Is he shaving? M: No; he's in the toilet.

At this point, thankfully, he went off for a smoke. But not much later, he quizzes me about American life.

Gramps: You know, I see that in all these American films, people are always going out and eating and drinking wine. So I suppose that's what everyone always does? Me: Yes. And they all carry guns, and New York is regularly invaded by aliens. G: So are you part of the American culture? Me: Yes.. but I haven't seen any aliens yet. G: Oh.

Sometimes I think he doesn't get it. As the bathroom incident might have suggested, Indians tend to be rather uptight about most bodily functions. We do it a lot, as the last census and the Mahim creek indicates. Still, when my dad was telling me about someone I knew when I was little (I'd broken his leg (this boy's, not my dad's) by mistake. He now lives near my parents' place in Pune and is a big tough guy. I need to go make my peace), he mentioned that his (said boy's, not my dad's) older brother was married and "blessed with a son". Really, I only associate "blessed with a son" with this incident about 2007 years ago, somewhere in Judea, but as far as we are concerned, it's a commonplace incident. Lucky thing Judea wasn't in India, eh? Everyone is "blessed with a son" here...

Delhi to Bombay

2007-12-15T04:33:00.000+01:00

JFK-Delhi is not too bad considering you get to stop in London and stretch your legs and patiences by going round Heathrow once, through security, and straight back into the plane. The queue here is longer, grumpier, and more rowdy. Owing in part due to the different security rules that are prompting some to argue, some to stare in disbelief and some to throw away t-shirts so they can 'consolidate' all their hand baggage into exactly One. Back on the flight, dinner is served. Now, everyone who knows me knows I'm a rather slow eater. And what with watching classic Bollywood, I'm exceptionally slow. But the airhostess is really nice about this. She tells me,"Oh don't worry, take your time. We aren't going anywhere". I pause in mid-fork and look out of the window, scrolling back to the captain's numbers- so what are we doing at 980 kmph? I go back to my Bollywood film. Delhi airport. I know enough about India to put aside my socialized European male tendencies (which I don't really have, as it turns out) and ask the first official looking man about my connecting flight to Delhi. There's something funny going on. Some guy (Official 1) is taking aside the people bound for Bombay and there's some talk about the triple-1-2. We are to be transferred via the triple-1-2. I don't have a boarding pass, and neither do a few more of the passengers, and all of us are to be subject to this mysterious triple-1-2. Now, some of us have our bags checked all the way through to Bombay and some don't. Triple-1-2 does not like this fact; but Official 2 winks mysteriously and nods sagely and tells me not to worry. Officials 3 and 4 come around, and there's and triple-1-2 is mixed up with some more codes. A typical conversation goes something like this:

O1: "But their PNC3s don't match the ones on the computer" O2: "That's easy. Transfer their PNC3s to the OLC. Pull up the triple-1-2 sheet and set the bytes to zeros and convert the RST code to their first name" O1: "Oh right" [pause] "So why don't you do it?"

And you thought getting off one flight and onto another was easy. Finally, we are down to 14 of us passengers for this mysterious triple-1-2 business, all marked in pencil onto a dot-matrix, accordion-style folding sheet, and taken through a special security gate. The security guard is suspicious, until Official 1 shows assures him that there will be only 12-14 people coming through this special gate. "Twelve or fourteen?" asks the suspicious guard, forcing Official 1 to recount. Suspicious guard counts us carefully through into a hall, where we follow Official 1 to what I understand in retrospect to have been the transfer desk. There are about a hundred people milling around the transfer desk. Most are there because they were tired of hanging around the security lines and the various shops, and the transfer desk is, after all, right next to the tea stall. Official 2 throws away the dot-matrix list, and looks us over brightly. Life starts now. So one by one we give him our tickets and are issued boarding passes. By now we are a group of 4-5 people inside the group of a 100-odd people at the transfer desk, who are realizing that all of us are part of the triple-1-2 scheme. Which turns out to be a flight leaving for Bombay not at 6.15am, as we had booked, but at 00:45 am. Now, in fact. Triple-1-2. Turns out that one of the jumbos had to be sent to Bombay for inspection; and the kindly officials decided that it would be a good idea to pack us poor travelers off to Bombay asap instead of having us sit around all night in the airport! Isn't that touching? Can this happen anywhere else? Of course I'm not sure I was 100% happy traveling on a humongous plane that some feel requires inspection, but still, that was far better than hanging around at the Delhi airport all night.

JFK to Bombay: Note 2

2007-12-14T16:07:00.000+01:00

JFK to Bombay. Note 2: Safety Got the seat by the emergency exit. The neighboring seat was a pretty girl, who chose the seat behind, next to a good (ok, better) looking Indian boy, and sent the balding, middle-aged IT engineer up next to me. All this before I even got to my seat. The airhostess (there's some other term nowdays- Aircraft Supervisory Crew or some other such American euphemism which I've now forgotten) came up and explained what me and the IT engineer should do in the case of an emergency. She ended with "any questions?" And that's where I realized; we Indians MUST ask questions, even if none are needed. So IT engineer dutifully raised his hand and asked if.. no, I've quite forgotten. It was some clever, technical point like whether or not we, the Guardians of the Emergency Gate should put on our life jackets before or after the other passengers. We're really big on safety. But we take refreshments seriously as well. So, during the safety demo, one of the airhostesses was busy serving orange juice instead. This annoyed somebody in a white shirt and a tie, who engaged in a particularly interesting shouting match in the galleys. The airhostess was clearly adamant in her right to serve juice when she pleased, so the white-shirt+tie-man stormed off, swearing he would never speak to that particular airhostess again. We care for the safety of children. But, we don't believe in reining them in. So during most of the flight, random children appear and disappear like elves on the lam from the North Pole peak gift-wrapping season; unaccompanied by Mr. Claus or any other adult being. Some kids are lying on the ground, wrapped up in blankets. During takeoff. I'm watching an old Bollywood film on the excellent onboard entertainment system (seriously, the BEST onboard entertainment system! Individual screens and a fantastic selection of films, videos, TV shows, both English and Hindi, and games and what not) and there's this scene where the hero is driving in an open jeep with his 7-year-old daughter sitting on the back of the seat next to him, bouncing along on the bumpy roads. The captain spoke to us. For an interminably long time. He told us how high, how fast, how far we would be flying. They all do that, and I don't know why. I did see someone nodding when our altitude was announced, so clearly some people need that kind of info. The captain then told us about the entertainment system. How we had a great collection of Bollywood songs and music videos. Then he invited the passengers to dance to the provided music, but to take care that they did not block the aisles. Clearly there was a dance floor somewhere that I'd missed. They probably don't have seatbelts.

JFK to Bombay. Note 1.

2007-12-14T15:45:00.000+01:00

India trip 2007-2008 After all this time abroad, I see how weird every culture is. At least I'm better suited to comment on India, so here are Notes from India. JFK to Bombay. Note 1: Get started at JFK for the Air India trip. See this foreign guy sniggering and surreptitiously taking pictures with a fancypants digital SLR. Turn and see the longest line in any of the JFK Terminals. Indians have this thing of queueing up, and the almost 100% Indian passengers have already spontaneously formed a line. It's a critical mass effect. Put a sufficient number of Indians near a means of transportation and a line spontaneously forms. The airline official is trying to explain the boarding process- how rows 34 to 51 (do they choose these numbers at random? Or is there a theory?) will board first while the others can please avail of the splendid seating arrayed around the boarding desk. The Indians stubbornly keep the queue intact. Some foreigners worriedly join the queue- it looks so orderly! It must be the right thing to do. Mustn't it? Finally everyone's through the gate. But then, they're queued up somewhere between the gate and the plane while (Indian) officials are shouting stuff back and forth. There's some luggage that's not going through. Or maybe not. No one really knows. We stand there queued up for a couple of days. Then we board.

What is Science all about?

2007-10-27T03:57:00.000+02:00

Current readings include (see left) The Quantum and the Lotus - a dialogue between a scientist and a buddhist. As a clearly identified member of the previous, I'm curiously watching over the shoulder of Trinh Xuan Thuan, the scientist, as he discusses with the molecular biologist -turned-buddhist, Matthieu Ricard. Two chapters down, I'm already not totally happy. Here's an example. Thuan explains that, extrapolating backwards from the present, we find a 'beginning' to the universe as we know it at something like 10^-43 seconds (Planck time) after the big bang. Ricard takes this to mean that science claims that there was 'nothing' before that time. Instead, (as is not evident from the comments recorded) the laws of physics cannot be applied at an earlier time. In fact, the very notion of 'time' as it is understood in physics is not the same thing before Planck time, given our current model. If buddhist thinking has an answer to what happens before this time, well and good; I think it's unfair to say that science does not. It does not because it sets up a rigorous demand- to predict and mold the observable universe, to understand it through empirical means*. That is why science, and not buddhism, can give us CD drives and iPhones. It may be that the noumenal can provide a better explanation of reality. But this can be seen in two ways: (a) The noumenon tells us about the noumenon - it provides the moral and spiritual dimension along which to evaluate science. (b) The noumenon can tell us about the noumenon and the phenomenon - it provides both the description of our causal, sensory reality AND a way of integrating this into the fullness of the human condition of having both a body and a mind. Again, this is not a call for dualism. My current hypothesis is that the mind is rooted in the material, and is the result of a certain organization of matter. Consider the following from Ricard:

In Buddhism, the matter/consciousness duality, the so-called mind-body problem, is a false problem, given that neither of them has an intrinsic, independent existence.... Our ordinary way of thinking emerged from that same process and thus it can't place itself "outside" the chain of causes and so determine its own origin.

Why do we think the way we do? This is one of the questions cognitive scientists are fascinated with as well (some of them at least). And one possible answer is that, through evolutionary time, those 'minds' that encoded the causal, physical structure of the nature of the phenomenological won out, since these could correctly model and forecast, and so control the phenomenon surrounding it. Therefore, it follows, such a mind should have a jolly hard time trying to figure out alternate possibilities. The very rational structures that we feel need no convincing (like 2+2 being 4) might reflect the basic truths embodied in this version of the universe. Much as, as Thuan points out, Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. science:1, buddhism:0 *This is NOT the same as being an empiricist!

Upstate colours

2007-10-26T16:15:00.000+02:00

Near Naples, NY

Stitched image- Lake Canandaigua

Highway Indian Restaurant

2007-10-13T16:45:00.000+02:00

Off Route 80 somewhere between Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York is this curious Indian restaurant.. :)

Photosynth

2007-10-03T22:35:00.000+02:00

Blaise Aguera y Arcas is one amazing person, and some ideas he'd been talking about many years ago (Trieste, 200x) he's actually gone and put into something related - Photosynth. Here's a video of a talk from Ted.com

Dyslexia for musical score. And a Godly beer

2007-10-02T22:28:00.000+02:00

I know I have a hard time reading Marathi or Hindi, and always put that down to a shortage of practise with the Devanagari script. But then, I find it very hard to Italian, which is in Roman, so I've been assuming I'm mildly dyslexic (or plain lazy to do the grapheme-phoneme translation). But recently I realized that I am also bad at reading musical scores. Of course they're diferent, but lumper* that I am, I couldn'thelp wondering if there were people who were dyslexic in reading musical scores the way some people have dyslexia for reading text.

If the question interests you, look at this review article from last year by Sylvie Hébert and Lola Cuddy - which reviews some findings about music and text reading. Also, do consider looking at fMRI experiments with score reading vs text reading, looking at ROIs around the inferior parietal gyrus and in the visual word form area...

Beer of the Gods ;)

Found this beer with a remarkable label at Beers of the World - an amazing shop which just too large a collection of beer to be able to choose in any reasonable amount of time. Way to go, California! Here's one beer you shouldn't export to India ;)

The infinite power of language (PG17)

2007-09-12T16:26:00.000+02:00

The Park Bench Back Alley Bar off Park Ave is a great place to hang out for it's nice mix of peoples. And the occasional wacky piece of conversation: Guy 1: So do you speak other languages? Guy 2: Yeah, Hebrew. Guy 1: So say something in Hebrew. Guy 2: Like what? Guy 1: Say "come sit on my lap and do me a dance" Guy 2: ... Guy 1: Can't you translate that? Guy 2: We don't say such things. Guy 1: Weird. In English, I can say pretty much anything that I can think of, even if I've never said it before. Folk psychology, at least of the gentle folk of the Park Bench Back Alley Bar, would appear to support a very algebraic, mentalistic version of the language faculty :)

Food and synesthesia

2007-09-10T14:01:00.001+02:00

The Psychology Press has an interesting (though meagre) podcast, with interviews of interesting people from psychology. The first one, with Jamie Ward, talked about synesthesia (a field in which he is an expert). At one point, he talks about how eating is such a multisensory experience.

And recently, I saw Ratatouille (which for me marked a come-back of better Disney films (ok, backed by Pixar animations animation) with a strong storyline). In this film, Remy, the rat-protagonist and food lover describes at one point how different flavors create different sensations; and how combining flavors makes markedly different sensations. Interestingly, when he is shown experiencing these sensations, one sees music and color patterns swirl around him - the rat is a food synesthete!

Puffballs

2007-09-03T00:32:00.000+02:00

Puffball mushrooms - the spores are inside the ball-shaped sac, and any mechanical disturbance causes a spray of spores to puff out of the top. Shot at the Adirondacks range, upstate NY, (c) me

Arrival of the baingangaadi

2007-08-31T03:07:00.000+02:00

The eggplant car is here :)

ltnblogging

2007-08-19T23:07:00.001+02:00

A whole bunch of new experiments and ideas coming along!
Lets see... finally I've gotten some ideas for experimental evidence to show that statistical computations over the incoming speech must be sensitive to some notion of what natural language looks like. So, forthcoming is an experiment that tests the very distinctly Saussurean idea that in language, what counts is a contrast. So, if you look at a dog and say 'bog', either (a) 'Bog' refers to some feature of the animal other than its kind (in this example), e.g. it might be the name of the particular dog. Or, (b), the [d] and the [b] sounds actually map onto the same underlying lexical item dog, so that these two sounds are not contrastive in the language (are not phonemes of the language). Without providing fodder to the competition, I'll just say - computational models, watch out! :)

Oh,and I finally got around to restarting baking things, starting with strawberry-banana muffins, using a recipe from this nice website. The final product is edible, and quite tasty too ;)

And here is my neighbour's handsome cat. An erstwhile run- away- from- neighbours er, he's now keen on playing and sometimes rather adamant about it...

A common thread

2007-07-20T05:53:00.000+02:00

Have been catching up on years of not-so-easy access to my fav genre, Sci Fi. Funnily, two stories sort of stood out because, at some level, they were so so similar to the Whale Rider film (from this earlier post). The underlying idea is that a tradition becomes just a set of rituals when the original purpose for each of the actions is lost. And once this stage is reached, there is an inertia to change anything, since the purpose of each action of the ritual is lost. So, you don't know what the consequence of every action is; in particular, which ones are essential and which ones are frippery. In the interesting Sci Fi collection - Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois is included Mike Resnick's Kirinyaga, from his Kirinyaga cycle of stories. In this story, the Kikuyu tribe lives in a sort of artificial preserve, Kirinyaga, under observation from an extraplanetary system. The wise man of the Kikuyu tribe, Koriba, acts as the only liason between the Kikuya and technicians from the outside. Koriba is convinced that the fall of the Kikuyu will come from not following the customs and practises of the tribe, and is determined that nothing should change them. When asked about it, he balances a stick on his finger, pointing out that putting a finger at any point along the stick will cause it to fall off. To Koriba, the Kikuyu and their place in Kirinyaga is one single complex whole; far too finely balanced, with way too many variables that any single change can only cause disruption. (Sidetrack - Presumably this is why most mutations that have an observable effect, have deleterious effects). In a completely unrelated short story, Target Generation by Clifford Simak, the inhabitants of the Ship have just encountered something never seen before in several generations of a tranquil life. Saying more would ruin the suspense of an excellent short story, but here's what one of the protagonists has to say:

"I'm trying to tell you that we must follow each law blindly until we know the reason for it. And when we know, if we ever know, the reason and the purpose, we must then be able to judge whether the reason or the purpose is a worthy one. We must have the courage to say that it is bad, if it is bad. For if the reason is bad, then the law itself is bad, for a law is no more than a rule designed for a certain reason or to carry out a purpose."

While in Target Generation the purpose of the laws is eventually revealed, in Whale Rider a variant is discovered through the determination of Paikea. Such is the thrill of discovery - of finding a common pattern that links such diverse things as Whale Rider, Kirinyaga, Target Generation, and, at a slight stretch, the episode of Friends, where the girls do a cleansing ritual to get rid of bad men vibes :)

Ultimate Harry Potter hypothesis

2007-07-12T19:21:00.000+02:00

As is well known, a large part of being a scientist is hypothesizing. So, with practically no ado, here is a theory about Harry Potter, book 7 (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows): The whole story: Harry's parents figure out the whole horcrux story. They already possess one of the horcruxes. Albus Dumbledore, in reality a close friend of Voldemort, concocts up the story of a "prophecy" so that V would have a reason to go get rid of Harry's parent. However, things get botched up and the horcrux gets transferred to Harry, and V's Avada Kedavra goes all wrong, only scarring HP. Voldemort doesn't know what's happened to his horcrux, but suspects that Harry is the key. Dumbledore promises V to keep a close eye and protect HP, and find out what's happened to the horcrux. Snape has been always opposed to Dumbledore, since he knows the truth about Dumbledore's alliance with V, and is suspicious of why Dumbledore is so protective of HP. In order to win into the friendship of V, Snape, pretending no knowledge of Dumbledore and Voldemort's friendship, offers to kill Dumbledore to show his loyalty to Voldemort. Voldemort agrees, since he knows that Dumbledore himself has a horcrux, and is a real badass.

Cog Psych top 25!

2007-06-29T20:21:00.000+02:00

Looks like I have lots of friends ;) Our paper is climbing the download ladder! An interaction between prosody and statistics in the segmentation of fluent speech • Article Cognitive Psychology, Volume 54, Issue 1, 1 February 2007, Pages 1-32 Shukla, M.; Nespor, M.; Mehler, J. Copy for download from here

The Apple, Pear, Banana Theory

2007-06-27T15:07:00.000+02:00

A Short Primer (aka Computational Linguistics) Finding linguistics too hard? Prefer the cosy comfort of cloudy equations? Prefer to let the computer do the work instead of trying to actually understand messy natural languages? Here is what you do -

Take one or several corpora.
Look for apples.
Look for bananas.
Look for pears.
Notice how apples aren't always followed by bananas or pears. Notice how there are many more apples than there are bananas, and how infrequent pears are.
Set this up as some fancy equation - not ANY old equation; it must be Bayesian.
Design some experiment to test the idea that people are sensitive to these statistics*.
Publish papers, give talks.
Move on to pineapples, artichokes and oranges. Relabel these apples, bananas and pears (abiding by the time-tested "what's-in-a-name" principle).

Example equation - p(apples|bananas) = [ p(bananas|apples) * p(apples) ] / p(bananas) Advantages - Easy to do. Both setting up the equations and the experiments can be quite complex and fulfilling. The Extended Version - Natura Morta (aka Fruits on tables) Not happy? Want to go further? Look at the table these fruits lie on. Is it wooden? Is it plastic? Recast your equations to take this 'context' into account. Look for context sensitive p(apples|bananas) equations - is this number larger on wooden as compared to plastic tables? Make the bold claim - given sufficient contexts, and sufficient fruit, everything will be understood.

NB: Remember, the ONLY job of linguists is to discover the fruit. Once that triviality is out of the way, the Apple, Pear, Banana Theory is what is important. *If you find that adult participants don't behave like the equation, either (a) you're missing some statistical property or (b) you're onto something interesting; please post as a comment to this post ;)

Theistic explanandum

2007-06-19T13:59:00.000+02:00

The Discreet Charms of the Neuroscientists

2007-06-08T15:42:00.000+02:00

For everyone who's suffered to look at endless reds and blues on brain pictures as 'evidence', here's a thought-provoking paper by people from Yale, titled The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations. One of the critical (and scary) finding from their study is that

Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation.

"But Mo, aren't you doing imaging as well?" Well, yes. Sorry. Not everyone is seduced by neuroscience! Some do it because behavioral tasks can be so messy - the failure to spot a difference in behavior might or might not reflect a real difference in processing by the brain. Which of course leads to the interesting question as to WHY something which shows up differently in a brain scan doesn't lead to a difference in behavior.

Antecedents

2007-05-29T05:14:00.000+02:00

Was at Skillman, NJ, for a short trip, and found a most interesting photograph, of the Bachelor of Science graduating class from the Fergusson College, Pune, in 1922.

The last part of the caption reads:

Long hair for men is not so unique to the present generation. ...Mr. Lele... courts long hair.

Mr. Lele, is the one on the top row, the second from the left who for some reason has a blue light thingy around him. Here's the funny thing - my mother's side are Leles! Looks like long hair and doing science runs in the family ;)

Butt Te Bathi

2007-05-24T18:43:00.001+02:00

AKA Shanghai Noon. I'm not sure I can get enough of this. Owen Wilson's "accent" is enough to slay a thousand :)

Rush Hour in Punjabi

2007-05-24T16:16:00.001+02:00

Can anything be funnier?

YES! Watching the whole film in Punjabi! Till then, here is one more teaser...

Bowling award

2007-05-23T21:49:00.001+02:00

Hard work. Dedication. Rigorous training. These are the things that make other people winners. Me, I'm content to sit on my ass :)

Slavoj Žižek and cinema

2007-05-20T19:20:00.000+02:00

That excellent Dryden theatre last night screened all three of a 3-part series, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema by Sophie Fiennes (yes, Ralph & Joseph's sister), in which Slavoj Žižek psychoanalyses films. For a 3X50min session, it was most provocative, thoughtful, very funny and should've come with a "Spoiler's Ahead" warning.

Also, it would probably have helped to have seen all the films SŽ refers to during the course of the documentaries.

SŽ starts by asking what it means to desire something, and contends that all desire is something that must be taught to us. Further, that films provide us with a version of reality that reflects, but also drives our own desires (presumably for those who actually watch films).

This is followed by loads of psychoanalysis of a bunch of films. While very entertaining and funny - he frequently appears to be in the same room as some shot, to some very comic effect.

SŽ himself enters into the reality of films (rather like in the film Last Action Hero). According to him, the identification with films is impossible to avoid. That, despite the blatant fakeness, it nevertheless evokes in us pretty real emotions. But is not the whole world like that? According to SŽ, you need a symbolic structure to interpret the world, but I guess the distance from someone like me is that according to him, these symbolic structures are acquired from the environment and are merely frames in which to understand (what passes for) reality. Instead, the current view from the kind of cognitive perspective of mine, a large part of these structures come out of the gene-envronment interaction, and are as deterministic (stochastic) as this interaction itself.

On sexuality, SŽ makes a strong dichotomy between men and women. On the male side, in the sexual act there is a (mentally construed) third person, who is the true object of sex. While, for women, sex is the thing that they will talk about afterwards. Of course, not as simple as this, but without any hint of justification, the split and the analysis seems far too tied to Wester norms; making them a cultural artefact, which ofcourse, is what according to him everything is, including desire.

At one point, SŽ talks about video game personas. He analyses the difference between a diffident, geeky/nerdy and his superhuman game alter-ego not as the making up of a lack in the former through the latter, but rather as the latter being the true self (the id and its libido), and the former the (super-ego controlled) 'external' self that obeys the constraints of the society.
Surely this is abundantly clear to every game player? Some research on this point would be SO useful! As a gameplayer, it certainly works the second way for me :)
But! If this is true, then where is all the social-based acquisition of structures coming from?

In the end, SŽ seems to be saying something that is probably true of all art anywhere and is not limited to the cinemas that, as caricatures of reality, they are in a sense more real than reality itself, and help us to understand and grasp reality. This is precisely the point that I think art meets science- a scientific model of the brain is not the brain, it's a caricature. It's a caricature that, like the paintings of the impressionists, captures the essence and shows us the deeper reality of something that can be quite mundane.

Mithun and Maggi Memsaab

2007-05-16T14:56:00.000+02:00

This smashing young couple made a great early-week bbq, and we were lucky that it only rained before and after the bbq. Yay!
If you knew Maggi, you'd see she was born a Memsaab... :)

Interpreter of Maladies
Currently catching up with Jhumpa Lahiri after liking the film "The Namesake". One line particularly stood out (from the book so far) for its cheek:

By the next morning, three separate palmists had examined Bibi's hand and confirmed that there was, no doubt, evidence of an imminent union etched into her skin. Unsavory sorts murmured indelicacies at cutlet stands; ...

Maths has no structure

2007-05-15T04:22:00.000+02:00

Imagine a Martian; perhaps the same Martian that Chomsky & colleagues saw as looking down (up?) onto Earth and noticing the funny thing about language. Imagine that the Martian is a Bayesian dude, much like computational linguists (and others) today are, and he gets his hands on a bunch of mathematical derivations by, to pick random examples, Einstein and Bohr. If said Martian is anything like the computational people today, he would look at all the symbols, and try to extract the statistical probability that, say, the ')' symbol was followed by the '=' symbol, and so on. Then, being an empiricist, the Martian would involve him(her)self in a textbook alien abduction scenario and test how good this Bayesian statistical model of the Einstein/Bohr symbols was against a carefully chosen subject (it wouldn't make sense to pick a Tibetian monk to test a theory of maths symbols, just as it wouldn't make sense to pick a Navajo tribesman to test a Bayesian model derived from an English corpus). Let's assume that the fit is good. the Martian would claim that he(she) had now a good theory of (a) what the end state of a mathematically minded person is and (b) by adding a few more parameters, how acquisition would proceed, by updating a flat distribution against the data - p('='|')') would go from a small, (null) prior to a high value, given the data. Q.E.D.!

(Einstein himself might have objected)

Red Wings Rochester

2007-05-06T02:49:00.000+02:00

My first baseball game! Thanks to Anne Pier (and others), went to see the Rochester Red Wings vs. some Canadian Lynx team. It's F.U.N.!!

(with my Red Wings baseball cap ;)

Growing pains ;)

2007-05-03T01:25:00.000+02:00

Sunday

2007-04-29T21:56:00.000+02:00

You get the weirdest stuff in the supermarkets: for example, the 'Pride of Szeged': :)

Sunday cooking tryout:

Uttapam (readymade batter I'm afraid), and a shot at cookies...

Thursday bbq

2007-04-20T17:33:00.000+02:00

Housewarming!

2007-04-09T18:58:00.000+02:00

Birds and Boston

2007-04-05T22:37:00.000+02:00

Rochester is looking up (even more!). Saw this super-vivid bird, the Northern Cardinal, hopping around the bishes, looking like a spray-painted fake puppet more than a real bird.

Next weekend I will also be online from home, so that should make life super-easy!

BOSTON:
Had a superb Boston trip with these excellent folks

Of these, one of them collects toothbrushes.

New House!

2007-03-22T21:57:00.000+01:00

The middle one.. mine is the uppermost floor, the apartment to the left.

The kitchen needs work.

..as does the bedroom! The living room is just a blank. So far.

El Laberinto del Fauno

2007-03-22T00:34:00.000+01:00

Another film with an incredible young female lead role. El Laberinto... deceived me. Not the film itself, but the tagline "Innocence Has a Power Evil Cannot Imagine".

The film is quite raw and beautiful in a way that borders on grotesque. There is a starkness and a richness, both in the cinematography and the characters.

America Update

2007-03-14T15:16:00.000+01:00

All the scare about North American winters! Looks like I'm travelling with sunshine in my pockets: in New Jersey, NY, and Rochester, people swore that just till the day before you arrived it was close to 0 Kelvin, with enough snow to make the arctic circle blush.
Anywhoo..
The good thing was that with the temperatures climbing, nice 90$ Gore-Tex shoes were being thrown at you for 30-40$. Useful.

New Jersey
The place is marvelous. Although the first few hours were just roads, and more roads. Nothing there is really walkable. Some counties in that area apparently has the largest % of Indians in any US county.
I met more family, and a second cousin who's brilliant!

Rochester
The main problem is the transportation! Luckily, there are scores of friendly people who don't mind taking passengers :)

Sooo.. have been bowling, to a bbq place, a film-watching session (Why We Fight). With pizza! American, not Italian pizza, but good American pizza.. the stuff we are used to in India.

Much more to look forward to:

Maple Sugar Tour & Pancake Brunch
Rochester International Council Wine Tasting.

I really Need More Hours...

The secret is out!

2007-03-03T18:20:00.000+01:00

Whale Rider

2007-03-01T10:47:00.000+01:00

This is one great kiwi film. Basically, it's the story of Maoris in the modern world, and one old dude waiting for his grandson to carry forward the traditions. Only, he ends up with a girl instead, and isn't terribly happy. The most amazing thing of the film is the girl herself; both the actress and the character Paikea.

The attitide of Paikea's granddad towards her is nothing new... sexual discrimination is everywhere around us. But, what's perplexing is the contradiction: why would a clearly nice person (granddad) be so tied to the discriminatory traditions?

Here's a possible explanation. Suppose you wanted to change the memory on your powerbook. You might have seen the guy at the Apple centre change one earlier. Him, knowing what to do, removed his shoes before working, all the better to ground himself because he happened not to be wearing anti-static shoes that day. Then, he placed the powerbook on a dark grey mat, disconnected the power supply, removed the battery, used the back side of a bakelite-handled screwdriver to remove certain screws, and then flipped out the old memory.. and so on.

Now, as a naive user, how are you ever to know which of these steps are the important ones, and which can be substituted? Is taking off your shoes important? Was there something special about that dark grey mat?

Now scale this up to something like a Maori (or any other) tradition, which they believe is a way in which the world works. Would you be willing to take the chance and change any of the traditions and risk breaking the world itself?

This is also part of the story behind Sylvia's Recipe^[pdf] by Gergely & Csibra (2006).

New Location!

2007-02-28T10:48:00.000+01:00

Finally, it's time to transfer out to the green arrow on this page... :)

Kid Stuff!

2007-02-20T17:38:00.000+01:00

One brilliant site..

The Mystery of the BOLD Signal

2007-02-19T12:39:00.000+01:00

I've been pretty much bugged about trying to understand the physiological basis of the BOLD signal in fMRI. In a previous post, I sketched an initial attempt to undertsand the vascular changes, mainly in relation to Optical Topography. But then, I realise I don't understand the BOLD response very well, after all...
So here's an update.

MR Basics¹

Inside the magnet, anything with a magnetic moment will align itself with the big stationary magnetic field (B₀), along the z-axis, and all spins will be in phase.
A radio-frequency pulse makes a second magnetic axis (e.g.) perpendicular to the main magnet axis, and several molecules/atoms use this as an excuse to spin away from the main axis and into the transverse (x-y) axis.
When the RF pulse is turned off, {a} the spins start coming back to their equilibrum position along B₀ with a time constant T1, and {b} in the absence of an external driving force, the spins in the x-y plane lose coherence (and so lose a net magnetic moment) with a time constant T2*. (There's also another decay time constant in this transverse field, the T2, which is the decay constant during repeatedly refocusing the phase of the transverse spins).
The presence of a paramagnetic substance like deoxy-Hemoglobin (HbR) creates magnetic inhomogeneities, such that the going-out-of-phase in the x-y plane happens much quicker. So, a much smaller signal is produced. Thus, the more the HbR, the smaller the signal. In contrast (heh!) HbO is diamagnetic, and for all magnetic purposes behaves like water, so doesn't contribute much to the (T2*-dependent) BOLD signal.

So far so good.

The basic reason why one would use the BOLD signal is because of certain findings that indicated to Messrs. Roy and Sherrington (1980):

...the existence of an automatic mechanism by which the blood supply of any part of the cerebral tissue is varied in accordance with the activity of the chemical changes which underlie the functional action of that part. Bearing in mind that strong evidence exists of localisation of function in the brain, we are of opinion that an automatic mechanism, of the kind just referred to, is well fitted to provide for a local variation of the blood supply in accordance with local variations of the functional activity.

In short, a neurovascular coupling.
Naively, one would expect the following sequence of events²: a stimulus comes in, the relevant neurons hike up their activity, they require more energy, and so start burning more glucose and turning more HbO into HbR. Therefore, there should be an increase in HbR in the area close to the activity. This means that the BOLD signal should be smaller following stimulation.

Now, other things seem to happen when the stimulus arrives: an increase in the blood-flow rate, and an increase in the blood volume. Again, both of these increase the amount of HbR, and so should decrease the BOLD signal.

BUT, as it happens, over and over again (something like 90% of the studies, according to one source), one finds an increase in the BOLD signal!

Actually, that's not strictly true. There is evidence for an initial "dip" in the BOLD signal, as one would expect³. One possible sequence reconstructed by Malonek et al goes something like this:

sensory stimulus
blood flow increase
as soon as blood flow increases, HbO increases
simultaneously with blood flow change, HbR starts to decrease

But then what causes the much larger BOLD signal? Simultaneous recordings of spikes, local field potentials, blood oxymetry and so on favour a view in which the BOLD somehow reflects

"...population synaptic activity (including inhibitory and excitatory activity), with a secondary and potentially more variable connection with cellular action potentials."

In short, not the spikes, but the more widespread synaptic signalling, whether or not it leads to spiking⁴.

So, one might wonder, how does the big BOLD signal come about?? Clearly, there is much less HbR per unit volume post-stimulation that there was before. How can THAT be? One possibility is that, somehow, the incoming blood is (a) plentiful = large volumes and (b) progressively enriched in HbO.

So, larger quantities of greater HbO-containing blood can both satisfy both the observations - that volume increases and that HbR goes down.

Luckily (for me, at any rate), last year there was a paper in Nature Neuroscience: "Astrocyte-mediated control of cerebral blood flow" by Takano et al. The abstract reads:

Local increase in blood flow during neural activity forms the basis for functional brain imaging, but its mechanism remains poorly defined. Here we show that cortical astrocytes in vivo possess a powerful mechanism for rapid vasodilation. We imaged the activity of astrocytes labeled with the calcium (Ca2+)-sensitive indicator rhod-2 in somatosensory cortex of adult mice. Photolysis of caged Ca2+ in astrocytic endfeet ensheathing the vessel wall was associated with an 18% increase in arterial cross-section area that corresponded to a 37% increase in blood flow. Vasodilation occurred with a latency of only 1–2 s, and both indomethacin and the cyclooxygenase-1 inhibitor SC-560 blocked the photolysis-induced hyperemia. These observations implicate astrocytes in the control of local microcirculation and suggest that one of their physiological roles is to mediate vasodilation in response to increased neural activity.

The crème de la crème is the finding that the astrocytes selectively open up the arterial flow! Here's the graph from their paper, showing the relative changes for arteries, veins and capillaries.

This explains both the increased oxygenation of the blood (and so the lower [HbR]) and the larger volume. Add to this the finding from last year that pericytes - cells sitting around the capillaries - can bidirectionally squeeze capillaries, and you might also understand why local blood velocity goes up.

References

For an excellent online source, look at http://www.e-radiography.net/mrict/mri%20ct.htm.
See this previous post.
Malonek, D. & Grinvald, A. (1996) Science 272, 551–554
Arthurs, OJ & Boniface, S. (2002) TINS 25(1), 27-31

The kind of Pokemon I am

2007-02-19T10:41:00.000+01:00

Starmie You scored 53% Fire vs Water, 47% Grass vs Flying, 43% Electric vs Bug, and 64% Fight v Psychic! You are Starmie! You're happy to go with the flow and use your brain power rather than brute strength. You're logical and outgoing and altogether quite charming. You don't like to fight, that much is obvious, but you aren't afraid to face a challenge and will take it head-on. But you're more laid-back, and are rather calm in your approach to life. Your special attack is minimize. You don't exactly shrink from a battle, but you know when to hold them and when to fold them, and you'd rather spend your time doing something more fun than fighting silly battles. You are a water and psychic type, easy going and intelligent. Your trainer will find these qualities have many benefits in battle.

Link: The What Kind of Pokemon Are You Test written by AaronJJ on OkCupid.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes!

2007-02-15T16:33:00.000+01:00

What a find! The opening theme from the bestest adaptation of a fictional person for the telly: Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes in the Granada production The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Imitating

2007-02-14T18:41:00.000+01:00

A casual statement in a Journal Club article in the Journal of Neuroscience set me thinking: what if an infant were confronted with two people doing some common action, e.g., tying shoelaces. However, while one of them is an expert, the other is not. (a) would the infant be able to discriminate the two? (b) would it choose to imitate one adult over the other? (c) would infants exposed to the expert be more faithful in their reproduction of the action? The point is, if imitation is "dumb", then one shold imitate anything at all. But, if imitation is smart (a la György/Gergely), then infants might be able to compute efficiency and prefer to imitate the expert.

Blood in the brain

2007-02-06T10:02:00.000+01:00

Over the last few days we had a remarkable series of talk on funtional neuroimaging of the human brain by Hellmuth Obrig; a most likeable and clever person. The main lessons learnt from these talks (for me), was what exactly is being measured by functional neuroimaging methods. I should 'fess up - my ideas were pretty crap on the topic.

Anyhow. What's clear is why it is called a Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent measure. What's far from clear is what causes the change in blood oxygenation in local pieces of the brain tissue. There is some serious energetic stock-taking to be done in brain tissue, and it's time to look at the literature.

What I Learnt: Here's a model. The brain cells are idling, sending the occasional spike and so on, breaking down glucose through the TCA cycle and making ATP through oxidative phosphorylation. Along comes a stimulus, and the cell tries to step up ox. pho.; and in the meantime uses some anaerobic means to break down glucose, which is energetically demanding, and produces lactic acid. [although, neurons also seem to use lactate, presumably produced by astroctytes, as an energy source; ref1, but see ref2]. The cells somehow signal the need for more oxygenated blood, and so the blood flow rate goes up. This brings about an increase in the concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin (Oxy-Hb), presumably because the concentration is something like an integral over time in a certain volume, so faster rate = higher concentration.

Clearly, the higher flow rate is to supply more O₂, so more Oxy-Hb should be getting converted to Deoxy-Hb. But, since overall Oxy-Hb seems to increase, it looks like the extent of Oxy-Hb increase is greater than its conversion to Deoxy-Hb. Consequently, the increase in [Deoxy-Hb] is smaller than the increase in [Oxy-Hb] (square brackets - concentration), and as a result, because conversion to Deoxy-Hb cannot keep up with the increased flow-rate, the [Deoxy-Hb] goes down a little, explaining the observation from Optical Topography as in this figure (courtesy of Herr Obrig; thanks!): the red dots are [Oxy-Hb], blue dots are [Deoxy-Hb]; the x-scale is seconds of visual stimulation, the data is recorded from a near-infrared emitter-detector pair over the visual cortex (back of the head).
Presumably, once the stimulus is switched off, the balance between energetic need and enhanced blood flow is re-established, with some overshoot, and the neurons are back to idling.

Another cool thing was about the difference between volume changes and flow-rate changes. You could imagine that either the flow-rate speeds up, somehow, or that the local volume diminishes: both lead to faster blood flow. But how do you get local changes in blood velocity?

Two things: first, several blood vessels in the brain, specially the larger ones, have smoothmuscle control. Even cooler, the very smallest capillaries, which don't have muscles, have pericytes, which grasp the capillaries and squeeze them when required (ref)!

question

2007-02-01T13:07:00.000+01:00

If I give you the article, will you keep in indefinitely...?

Python for MATLAB users on the Mac

2007-01-30T15:30:00.000+01:00

I've been pretty much wanting to go and learn stuff like Perl or Python, and after a careful scouring of the net, decided upon Python, mainly for the ease with which you can use it.

But then, being such a MATLAB fan, I didn't seem right to not be able to pop a graphics window and visualize the data. So, more netsurfing later, I came up with the following way to get Python running on a Mac so it feels a bit like MATLAB.

If you do get around to trying this, make sure you're all up for taking responsibility for using sudo and the rest. Also, I've tried this on machines running Tiger; both PowerPCs and Intels, and it looked pretty ok, but ymmv. I'm certain there is a way simpler way of doing this, and if you know of one, let me know as well!
nb. Install in this order, as some things depend on others...

Get and install Python 2.5 for the Mac (dmg), from from this excellent repository by Bob.
Get and install freetype2, libpng3 (Use Fink/FinkCommander).
Get and compile+install zlib. To compile+install, navigate to the directory in Terminal and (the $ is the bash prompt):

$ ./configure --shared
$ make
$ sudo make install

Get and install this patch for Tiger.
Get and install wxPython (dmg) from Bob's repository.
Get the source for IPython from the SciPy site. To make and install, navigate to the folder from the Terminal and:

$ sudo python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install
$ sudo pythonw setup.py install_scripts --install-dir=/usr/local/bin

Get and install from the disk images on Bob's repository the following (these are required by matplotlib): python-dateutil (dmg) and pytz (dmg).
Get and install numpy (dmg) from Bob's repository
Get and install matplotlib (dmg) from Bob's repository
Thank Bob (page top).

To see if everything is OK: fire up Terminal and:
$ ipython -pylab
(On the first run you should see lots of stuff happening). The prompt changes:
In [1]: plot(sin(arange(0, 10, 0.01)))
...and you should have a nice sinewave as in this screengrab!

Next step: writing the Python-Programmer version of the Lumberjack song.

At Bogart's

2007-01-28T16:53:00.000+01:00

If you are ever in the vicinity of Padova, you absolutely must stop by Bogart's, a restaurant run by a friend of a very close friend.

So, anyhow, it was the first time inside a restaurant for lunch, with absolutely no one else except me, Stefano (owner/chef), Giovanni and Debora.

The restaurant itself is pretty large (150+ seating), with a very upscale look and feel, which is matched by a very fancy menu, excellent food, so the low prices are shocking enough so you feel something is wrong. But there isn't!

The food: me and Stefano threw together some chicken with the standard tandoori mix, with some lime juice and cream. They keep onion and garlic as a paste under oil, so it's throw, throw, throw and cook. The cooking range is just massive... and the smallest pot makes enough for 5 or so at least. (I won't talk about the rice as it was a disaster).

Then Stefano puts together homemade gnocchi that he makes himself every two days, and a sauce with capasanta (Mediterranean scallop) and calamari (squid), with onion-garlic, olive oil, tomato paste, zucchine and flambéd with brandy. Although I'm not much of a sea-food person, it was just VERY tasty!!

Then there was a cake topped with fresh strawberries in cream. And then, extremely good coffee (Lavazza); another thing I'm not, in general, terribly fond of.
*Sigh*. I need more days like these...

ps: here are the coordinates of Bogart's (take note, Cristian.G-M!):

Bill Bryson's Brush with Science

2007-01-26T15:40:00.000+01:00

I recently finished reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and here is a 'review' (Gamespot style) The Good: A very good introduction to the nature of nature, specially the nature of our little planet. Bryson-style writing, occasionally guffawable. The Bad: Waaaay too many facts, and very little to actually understand the science behind it. Very little about how problem-solving gets done in science. Few scientists and far too many boffins and nerds dot the landscape.

I loved the older B.B. Books like Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe. So, when I saw a book that looked like he was taking on all of Science, naturally I went and bought it. aSHoNE starts off with the kind of stuff I was expecting: BB creates a childhood image of himself as a child peering into a scientific textbook, captivated by the image of the earth with its innards exposed, and trying to understand how on earth (sic) anyone could know that. "Here", I thought, "is a book that will tell me answers to questions like, 'How do they know what goes on inside an atom?', and will be funny!". Well, at least there is some of both. There are some funny stories and there is some of how science is done. But what you really walk away with is a collection of semi-isolated facts and any number of doomsday scenarios. Based on hard fact, to be sure, and many of these stories are chilling in their telling. But this book doesn't really tell you how things get done, and there is too much of "... and then Stevenson used the well known principle of Blatchard Von Prissley, invented to understand the eyestalks of juvenile snails, and applied it brilliantly to the Neanderthal molar to show that ..." kind of stuff that is not really fun. Then there is the matter of the scientists. Most scientists are not people you could write funny stories about. Rather, they are no more or less interesting (in my opinion) than are gaffers, exotic dancers, bricklayers or airline crew members. So, of course, BB zeroes in mostly on the oddballs. But, another way of looking at it is that it is BB who is the interesting person, who, upon meeting the dullest of scientists, has an eye for those quirks that make fantastic storytelling. I'm not sure. All in all, it's a book to read mainly cos it's written by BB.

Monkey knows

2007-01-24T16:30:00.000+01:00

No, the article is not about the dude; but looks a lot like the author Webb Phillips who with Laurie Santos , both from Yale.edu, wrote the piece. Basically, the idea is to show that monkeys can hold representations of kinds of stuff . For example, if you see a white cuboidal piece of fruit, it could be cut out of an apple or out of a coconut. But if you liked coconuts and not apple, you would feel differently about these two pieces that look (but not smell/taste etc.) pretty much the same. In their experiment, P&S show monkeys sequences like the above, where a white cuboid is extracted either from a coconut or from an apple, and 'placed' into a box (which already contains a piece of apple/coconut), but is actually slipped into Webb's pocket. Essentially, monkeys scour the boxes longer if they saw a piece of apple placed inside but found a piece of coconut (and vice versa), implying that they expected not just a bit of fruit, but a specific piece of fruit, independent of what they saw (the same thing, each time). It would have been SO cool if they had gone a step further and showed that the same thing happened with a fake fruit. As they discuss, their monkeys might have learnt: "coconut shape" => "coconut taste", and so might continue looking for a coconut even if they found a piece of apple. But, if the piece came from some unknown (to the monkey) fruit, and if it still searched longer, the monkey would have had to have made the inference: unknown fruit -> unknown flavour; known flavour -> known fruit, != unknown fruit. Essentially, it might be better evidence against the associationist accounts, although I suspect nothing short of a 16-ton, Monty Pythonesque weight will convince them... Webb Phillips and Laurie R. Santos, Evidence for kind representations in the absence of language: Experiments with rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), Cognition, Volume 102, Issue 3, March 2007, Pages 455-463.

Advait meets the Prez!

2007-01-19T16:02:00.000+01:00

The Indian President Dr. APJ Abdul was at the Dinanath Mangeshkar, and little Advait, a very cute (somewhat distant) cousin of mine was there to give him a bunch of flowers :)

Why eyelids?

2007-01-18T12:23:00.000+01:00

One of those early morning, just-awake question: why eyelids? Thoughts:

to block especially harsh visual input (so why not for sound or smell?)
as windshield wipers, with the tear ducts as the things that squirt soapy water from the nozzles onto the windshields
to "see" dreams better? If dreams are somehow important, and if they need access to primary visual cortices, then it might be a good idea to shut down V1 requirements through the thalamus?

Here's another thing: if you flash a bright white light onto closed eyes, you see red (not literally, unless you weren't expecting it), which means that eyelids let red frequencies through, which in turn means that they don't let blue through. Now isn't that just neat: moonlight or nighttime light sources in general - the natural ones, not flashlights - tend to be blue, so our eyelids are actually not just filtering out light in toto, but specifically those bits that are most prominent during the night time. Neat! Question: is there a relationship between the size of the visual cortex and the kind of eyelids and what they can do?

Casablanca

2007-01-07T17:19:00.000+01:00

Finally finally got around to seeing Casablanca. It's so darn hard to say what it is exactly that's so brilliant about the film, but the film is absolutely fantastic.

Marketplace

2006-12-10T18:58:00.000+01:00

Pune has grown to include nearby villages. So we now live close to the Pashan village, which has a colorful Sunday marketplace!

Bangle shop: the women sit like they are at school. Instead of a blackboard, there is that wall of bangles, and this haggle-and-trial session lasted at least an hour

Dried fish shop. I didn't really know there were shops of this kind! The shopkeeper saw me with the cam and asked me to take a pic :)

Vegetable shop: Gourd Section. I won't pretend I know ALL the names...

Fast food stall: Mainly deep-fried stuff that should keep the carb-watchers busy.

Veg shop redux: with the local temple in the background.

Brother & co.

2006-12-10T18:50:00.000+01:00

Almost a picture blog, this.

Me and boo

My brother and his son in front of my bro's office building..

Pune people

2006-12-07T05:09:00.000+01:00

Pune is full of interesting people. They might not be able to send bricks to sleep with thought alone, but interesting nevertheless.

Milind Watve, head of Microbiology at Garware

One of the people responsible for getting me started on a career in science. This last time I visited his office he had a snake on his table.

Sonalee Hardikar, creative mom

What does one do after a B.Sc. in Chemistry? If you're the kind of Puneite Sonalee is, you gofor mass communications, spend some time learning wood-carving with Buddhist refugee nuns somewhere in the Himalayas, study at and then teach at the marvellous National School of Drama in Delhi, and then set up an intense and very beautiful exhibition in the cultural heart of Pune. Digitally manipulated pix.

This is GIMPed... :)

More Indian strangeness

2006-12-05T04:17:00.000+01:00

Pizza. It’s gone past the Italian variety and the American variety and evolved into a distinct species. Including Chicken Tikka Masala pizza and, my favourite, sheek kabab pizza with fresh coriander and onions

Cricket. Miserable Indian form. We lost 4-0 of a 5-match series (1 was rain-washed) against South Africa. Consequently, the issue was raised in the Indian parliament, and it’s been going on for a couple of days. Yesterdays the Times of India had a mid-page twin columns on whether or not parliamentarians ought to discuss cricket while in session.\

Food. Went to an interesting restaurant last night. "Continental" dishes, chicken tikka, nans, mexican quiche, carribean grilled chicken, shepherd's pie, and desserts like tiramisu. Here's a bit of the menu.

I wasn't brave enough to try the pasta... the al dente scare. Otherwise the food was good - excellent; although the chef was quite generous with the garlic.

Autorickshaws. My mom and aunt went to buy stuff, and their autorick ran out of petrol, so the person got them another one. Except, this other autorick had 3 kittens sitting underneath, so they had to wait till a bunch of schoolkids took them out and carried them away...

Riots again

2006-12-01T04:17:00.000+01:00

The riots are spreading. Yesterday people torched the Deccan Queen, probably my favourite train anywhere :( Turns out the guy who vandalized the Ambedkar statue was drunk (so he says). And not politically affiliated at all. Of course not. Never. Doesn't happen.

Car park :)

2006-12-01T03:51:00.000+01:00

I learnt driving a car in the Fiat Premier Padmini, with the gears behind the steering wheel when I was ~17. Since then I've hardly driven at all, but I guess it is early parameter setting, and the fact that I play video games, I feel great driving around the Pune traffic! Here is a sample from a tight parking spot: Of course power steering and floor gears play a part :)

Baby nephew

2006-12-01T03:43:00.000+01:00

Here he is :)

Riots!

2006-11-30T16:13:00.000+01:00

Riots in Pune today. More Indian madness; someone burnt a statue of Ambedkar, a guy who worked for the dalits (untouchables, downtroddens) in the city of Kanpur, and today in parts of Pune there was curfew. I went with my cousins and uncle to Deccan, and most of the shops were closed. My family had a lucky escape. They were sitting in a restaurant, and mom was outside with the baby, when the owners got everyone in and closed the shutters and turned off the lights. A little later people were throwing stones at the closed shutters. Luckily it got over quickly and they drove home asap. Three people are dead and the streets are not safe anymore. Brilliant...

Indian curiosities

2006-11-29T10:15:00.000+01:00

1) Went to get passport photos for some stuff here. The guy carefully twisted me into what he thought was the ideal configuration- the shoulders a little this way, the torso straighter, and the final little turn of the head to my right. Then he gets behing the digital camera and asks me to turn my head to my left again. 2) At the vegetable market, the guy in front of me has these sunglasses where, instead of the more typical European texts like Christian Dior or Chanel, is inscribed the name of (his favourite?) bollywood film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.

Return to India

2006-11-29T04:38:00.000+01:00

With a 7-year stay outside, I think this is the first time I see India from an almost outsiders perspective. And me and Adish agreed that it is like living in a comic book.

Day 1

(a) Land at Bombay airport, and the guy at immigration accuses me of forging my passport, and says he is keeping it and I have to make a new one. So I said I can't since I have to return in less than a month. So he gives me back my passport. (b) Dad has booked a shuttle service, from the Bombay airport to home in Pune. The shuttle service is a beat-up 7-seater van with a cracked windshield, exceedingly dusty seats and eventually rattles and thumps along the roads. It nevertheless proclaims itself to be a limousine. (c) Along the Bombay link road there is little traffic at ~2 in the morning. So two horse-drawn chariots are having a race near Chembur. It's like Ben Hur, except each chariot is loaded to capacity. (d) On the highway. The van manages 80kmph despite the potholes and the crazy weaving and zagging traffic. And the driver has just one hand on the wheel; with the other he is fixing himself a shot of tobacco with lime; every so often yanking the wheel to dodge the odd pothole.

Days 2-4

(a) Everything has become so expensive!! Actually, it's like this. The tea I used to have in the little shops when I was in college hs gone up from Rs. 2 to Rs. 4. But now there is Cafe Coffee Day, Barista and the likes, with a totally different ambience (flash), and the same tea costs Rs. 50! (b) Adish and me we go to Vaishali; one of our fav. Pune joints. There is the usual queue of people all the way from the door to the eating area. Adish and me just walk confidently in, ask for table and are seated before 90% of the waiting lot. How this happens is a mystery. (c) I find that my vehicle of choice is to be a 22 year-old Bajaj scooter. Takes all of 5 minutes to get my driving feel back. Actually manage to drive the car through Pune traffic. Applause all around. (d) I find I remember almost all of the Pune streets and bylanes! Me and cousin Monu go to a place with an unexpected bowling alley. Monu has spent the day visiting girls that our families had taken previous appointments with, looking for a suitable match. Score: 0. Apparently this business is a bit like the MTV Dismissed: at some point the girl tells the parents hovering nearby that they are in time-out. What transpires then he didn't say. (e) Went to a bollywood film with an old & close friend. She is the only one who, in the first year in college, knew where she wanted to be, and now she is there. I've forgotten that in Indian theatres the sound levels are incredibly loud. And with the whole speaker banks along the sides of the theatre, background songs and stuff come from just about anywhere. And when the hero makes his first appearance, there are the whistles and the cheering from the audience. And the guy next to me is talking all through the film on his cellphone. The film is supposed to be slick. It's simply awful. I almost fall asleep twice. The saving grace is a very very sexy babe (Bipasha Basu) who occupies ~20% of the screentime. (film: Dhoom 2). (f) A car outside the window is backing up. I can tell because it is playing an electronic, beepy version of a traditional religious song, Om Jay Jagadish Hare... Pic: Me and Adish in front of a bollywood poster; Shah Rukh Khan in the Don remake, at the Cafe Coffee Day, FC Road

Doctorhood!

2006-11-21T16:06:00.000+01:00

Funnily, it doesn't feel particularly different inside, actually getting a Ph.D. (cum laude (snigger)). For the perverse, here is the link to the thesis. And this is the pic of slide 1, with Jacques and Marina, who together saw me through.. Thanks! *p.h.e.w.*

D-Day Minus One

2006-11-20T15:29:00.000+01:00

This non-posting frenzy ought to cool down over the next few days. In the meantime, all in preparation for tomorrow, this is for many people who contributed in various ways:

Wisdom of the masses redux. (-> Fodor)

2006-11-11T17:39:00.000+01:00

Some dude with a very Indian name on German telly runs a show called Quarks & Co; and this one Mr. Ranga Yogeshwar recently ~replicated an old old finding by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton; famous for all kinds of quirky things from coining the term 'eugenics' to creating phrenology to determining the distribution of the inter-person distance while sitting watching passers-by on a park bench. Anyhow, Sig. Galton once went to a rural fair, where there was a game, consisting of guessing the weight of a bull (you could say it was a bullish market, that day). Anyhow, what FG did was to record the guesses of all the peasants, and looked at the mean value. As it turned out, the mean was pretty damn close to the actual weight. R. Yogeshwar now did the same thing with a beaker of 5,780 sweets: the average of the ~16,000 viewers who replied was 5,714: within 1% of the actual answer. So why is this? One possibility is that each person "knows" the correct answer, but there is some kind of system noise that interferes with the output. Another is that each person is very sure of his/her own answer, but that this answer draws on different sources of information about the physical properties of matter and stuff in general, built up over a lifetime. And while each individual might have a slightly distorted version of "reality", the fact that on average these versions correspond to reality seems to suggest that these versions of reality are derived from the input. How else could it be? Well, if you have been reading Fodor, it is not clear how concepts are acquired. In fact, it's not clear how the external world drives the formation of concepts in the way that we seem to have them. And that's harsh. But to me this wisdom o.t. masses expt indicates that the world does impinge; perhaps in tuning the concepts.

Values: from Saussure to Pedagogy

2006-11-08T16:36:00.000+01:00

While chatting with Pari, it occurred to me that there is a strange similarity between Ferdinand de Saussure and the Bhagvad Gita. The essential idea in both-- the first for Linguistics, and the second for all of human affairs-- is that nothing has an intrinsic value. Like Chomsky said, (via Lila Gleitman; I can't seem to find the quote online): in the absence of humans, there are no garbage cans. As an extension, neither is anything good or bad. Nor is anything noun or verb, or two different words, differing by a phoneme. As Saussure points out, if we have a certain distinction in the mind, we will attempt to externalize this, whether by changing a phoneme, or sticking a morpheme onto it or just maybe gesturing in a markedly different way. Which straightaway suggests why Saussure insisted in the social aspect: if I make a significantly different gesture, you might think that the reason I do so is because I believe there to be 2 units where previously there was only one. So, a kind of social contract (that I make a dissimilar gesture because I want to say something dissimilar) drives the segregation of what was a single sign into two different signs. Thus, from Saussure, we go-- via Relevance Theory-- to Pedagogy.