W. Bloom

Moonwalking with Einstein

Sep 282012

Awesome book.

Extremely well-written and it makes the subject not just interesting, but riveting. Riveting, I tell you! Joshua Foer tells a personal story but weaves through it all sorts of fascinating neuroscience tidbits.

The book details the author’s journey into the world of memory championships.

He gave a TED Talk on the book, which you can view here, which is nice because his slideshow includes photos of some of the characters from the book. Or listen to the All Things Considered interview on NPR:

I’ve started using the techniques described in the book (with help from the Internet). This stuff actually works. I’ve successfully memorized the 44 US presidents and the birthdays for all my family members. Now whenever I close my eyes I see Grover from Sesame Street sitting in my childhood bed with a sexy nun, while cutting a miniature tract of land in half with a menacing looking cleaver. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. But now I’ll never forget that Grover Cleveland was the 22nd president (and also, oddly, the 24th).

Speed Reading: Reality or Scam?

Education

Sep 262012

I recently finished a book by Dr. Stanley D. Frank called Remember Everything You Read. It’s a book on speed reading.

According to the book, the way most of us read is called “linear subvocal reading.” We scan a line of text from left to right and sound out the words in our heads. Some people even mouth the words. Why do we read this way? The book doesn’t speculate, but I would venture a guess: It is an artifact of being taught to read phonetically. We are told to “sound the words out” from the very start of our careers as readers, and we never stop.

Linear subvocal reading is obviously inefficient. It is limited by the speed of your mental voice, and it activates parts of your brain that should be unnecessary for reading. You are translating text into imaginary sounds, then translating the sounds into meaning, then assembling those meanings into bigger ideas. The Evelyn Wood technique is to stop reading phonetically. “Accept visual, as opposed to auditory, reassurance as you read.” (p69)

The Evelyn Wood approach also involves hand motions on the page while you read. The motions guide your eyes and help you resist regressing over material you’ve already read (and actually understood just fine the first time). It also tries to teach you to read vertically instead of linearly, and to read in layers.

The layers thing is interesting. You don’t just look at the text once. First you get an overview, then a preview, THEN you read it, then you do a post-view, and finally you do a review. The point is not just to read faster, but to improve comprehension and retention.

To summarize the main idea of the book, the goal of reading should be to absorb the meaning out of written passages, not to engage in the exercise of sounding out the words at 250 WPM for its own sake.

After reading the book (at high speed, incidentally) I decided to do research on speed reading. Does speed reading work? Are the claims made in Remember Everything You Read true? Can people read at 2,927 WPM with 92% comprehension, like the student Max mentioned on p161 of the book? What I discovered was… frustrating.

More below the fold.

The Zombies Would Lose

Fiction Writing, Science Fiction & Fantasy

Aug 162012

I’d like to submit for your consideration the fact that the M-4 Carbine, an assault rifle in heavy use throughout the US military, can fire up to 950 rounds per minute. Just keep that in mind and I’ll come back to it at the end.

Now, are you the sort who daydreams frequently about the zombie apocalypse?

Me too!

While eating a butterscotch Dairy Queen dip cone and strolling about a mall, I’ll find myself searching out the best routes to escape a zombie onslaught.

I especially tend to think about zombies whenever I’m in a parking garage. Escaping a parking garage infested with lumbering undead foes is not impossible, but it’s damn tricky. You’ll definitely have to hide under a van at one point and distract a zombie-business-man by throwing coins. Later you’ll be forced to slam a zombie-janitor’s head in a car door. Then you’ll hot wire a Honda Civic while a zombie-grandma pounds your window. You’ll start the engine just in the nick of time, accidentally reverse into a zombie-cheerleader, crush the zombie-cheerleader against a pillar to force her to release your fender, and smack into a few more zombies as you zoom out the exit.

There’s just something fascinating about zombies. They tap into our deep-rooted feelings of alienation.

There is one big problem, though, with the zombie apocalypse, at least as I’ve seen it depicted in just about every zombie movie or television show I’ve ever watched:

The zombies would so totally lose!

There are slow zombies, fast zombies, VooDoo zombies, and science zombies. (Science zombies are the product of either a rabies-like viral disease or radioactive chemicals, and they emerge when either the military–industrial–congressional complex or an evil corporation stops respecting mother nature and puts power/greed above common interests. Those stupid rat bastards.) But all zombies have a few things in common:

They cannot be killed except by decimating their brains. A bullet to the head always seems to suffice.
They are super strong.
Their only real weapons are their nails and teeth.
They desire human flesh.
They carry the zombie plague in their blood or their saliva. You can touch a zombie without being contaminated, but scratches are dangerous, and if you’re bitten you’re definitely screwed.

If you think about it, other than the fact that they spread contagion, zombies are no more dangerous than most wild animals. They have no ranged weapons. Their only melee weapons are teeth and nails. Their teeth and nails are no more powerful, and are probably less powerful, than the jaws and claws of bears or wolves. Plus zombies have a host of other disadvantages:

They are unintelligent, which means they should be easy to trick, to outmaneuver, and to lure into traps.
They don’t communicate with each other.
They feel no pain, which means they’re unable to avoid most kinds of injuries.
They do not heal from wounds, they just ignore them. So they walk around with broken ankles and untreated burns and missing eyeballs.
Most zombies are slow and uncoordinated.

The slow-moving, uncoordinated, unintelligent zombies in the AMC television series “The Walking Dead” have somehow completely defeated the American military, and I just can’t buy that. How do brainless beasts with no weapons more dangerous than bear jaws and claws somehow defeat the American military?

The answer is that they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. The military would win. The zombies would lose.

Now, back to the M-4 Carbine. Just think about 950 rounds per minute of hot lead spraying out of that gun! The M61 Vulcan, a pneumatically powered Gatling-style rotary canon, can fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute. With weapons like these, you don’t even have to aim. Our soldiers would splat zombie brains without even trying.

Also, it would be relatively easy to produce armor that could withstand the bites and scratches of the zombies. Soldiers with such armor, with weapons like the M61 Vulcan, with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment like flying drones, and with armored vehicles to transport them to hot spots, would eradicate the zombie menace within a week. The zombies wouldn’t stand a chance.

I am unaware of any decent solution to this problem for fiction writers…

Romney: individualism vs. collectivism

Politics

Aug 122012

So Romney recently said this:

If a kid makes the honor roll, I realize that he got to school on a bus, and the bus driver got him there, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for honor roll I give the kid credit for the honor roll.

At first blush this seems like a reasonable statement. I give the kid credit for making the honor roll, too. How could Obama possible want to rob credit from decent, hard-working school children for their own accomplishments? Obama is such a socialist jerk!

Behind the straw man argument, what Romney is suggesting here is that a person’s success is entirely due to her own initiative. And this is bunk.

Could the kid have made the honor roll without… how about… TEACHERS?

Or without a SCHOOL?

Or without TEXTBOOKS PAID FOR BY THE STATE?

Back to the bus driver. If the kid had no other transportation to school, then don’t you think the bus driver at least played some role in the kid’s success?

Yes, of course the kid who makes the honor roll deserves credit for her accomplishment. She was the most important factor in her achievement. She decided to work hard and apply herself. No one wishes to detract from that.

But there are great kids in Nigeria who are willing to work hard and apply themselves, but they never get the chance to make the honor roll. Their country has much worse infrastructure and a much worse education system.

Romney is making an either-or fallacy. It isn’t either individualism or collectivism. Both elements are required. The success of the individual relies upon both her individual initiative and the support she receives from her society. Her success is aided by having good schools, good teachers, and, yes, bus drivers.

Venus transit of Jun 5, 2012

Science & Technology

Jun 062012

For only the 7th time in history, at least that we know about, human beings were able on Tuesday to observe Venus cross in front of the sun. There will not be another opportunity to behold this astronomical phenomenon for 105 years.

I saw the event from Lagoon Four at the Ko’olina on the west side of Oahu. Visibility was fantastic. Several kindly astronomers were generous enough to let passersby peek into their telescopes. I met one astronomer who had come all the way from Massachusetts. He said the event was the best moment of his life, and I believe he meant it. His telescope offered a beautiful view of Venus over the sun, with sun spots clearly visible in the background.

If you missed the transit, the next best thing is this terrific video from NASA:

Thank you, University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy! The Bishop Museum had sold out of solar viewers, so it was fantastic that the Institute not only had plenty of them, but was giving them away for free.

In 1760, Guillaume Le Gentil set out from Paris determined to observe the upcoming transit of Venus. He subsequently endured every imaginable stroke of bad luck. He returned home 11 years later, having missed both the 1761 and 1769 transits (the first time because he was stuck at sea, the second because of cloudy skies), only to discover that he had been declared dead and his wife had remarried.

Witnessing the transit gave me a sense of connection with the adventure-astronomers of the 1700s and 1800s like Guillaume Le Gentil, people to whom the event meant absolutely everything. It’s just extremely cool.

The sky is falling?

Science & Technology

Mar 092012

Well, not falling per se, but it’s heating up.

Wasn’t global warming debunked during that whole IPCC Climategate thing back in 2009? Oh wait, multiple investigations concluded that there was no research misconduct. Darn. Looks like we have to start worrying about all this stuff again.

Star Trek Replicators Arrive, Walmart Doomed

Science & Technology

Feb 202012

If you haven’t heard of these yet, they’re called 3-D printers. This particular model is the MakerBot Replicator. You hand the Replicator a design, feed it some plastic, and let the machine work its dark magic. Come back later, open the chamber, and oila! You’ve got a brand new chess piece, cat toy, or death ray gun (whichever suits your fancy). MakerBot has a website called Thingverse where people can trade designs.

Right now domestic 3-D printing seems to be the realm of hobbyists, which was true of computers in the decade or two before the computer revolution, when virtually overnight computers became not just integral to business but interwoven into all aspects of our lives. Perhaps a 3-D printing revolution is on the horizon.

If you don’t have money for a 3-D printer but want to get busy manifesting your own product ideas, there’s an even easier way. Have you heard of Sugru yet? A friend just told me about it.It’s air-curing rubber. It looks like Play-doh. You form it by hand into whatever shape you like and let it cure overnight.

It is conceivable that within a generation or so, the average U.S. household will generate all its own energy (via solar panels, wind turbines, etc.) and produce most of its own goods. If your solar panel breaks, you can just download the necessary replacement part and manufacture it using your replicator. Complete self-sufficiency… as long as the plastic man continues dropping off your weekly bundle of plastic.

Hello world!

Uncategorized

Jan 042012

The Merrily Dancing Ape is born. Weeee!

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