Helsingin Sanomat ran a story on the brain and how it processes stimuli. The story, published on February 12th, is behind a paywall, but I thought I’d post some of the links mentioned.

At first listen, this clip doesn’t make sense. But then listen to this, and return to the first clip. Sine-wave speech becomes decipherable after the brain knows what it is listening to.

Dropping syllables from recorded speech makes it nearly unintelligable (listen). But filling the gaps with static restored their comprehensibility (listen). Makio Kashino’s paper.

McGurk Effect — how your eyes throw off the ear. A great demonstration that visual cues are an integral part of speech recognition.

Looking isn’t necessarily seeing. For an infamous example, watch this video and “count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black.” Then proceed to step two.

Another example of attention in seeing is shown in the flicker paradigm: “A large fraction of traffic accidents are of the type ‘driver looked but failed to see’. Here, drivers collide with pedestrians in plain view, with cars directly in front of them (the classic ‘rear-ender’), and even run into trains. (That’s right — run into trains, not the other way around.) In such cases, information from the world is entering the driver’s eyes. But at some point along the way this information is lost, causing the driver to lose connection with reality. They are looking but they are not seeing.”

The picture on the right is from the downstairs bathroom at Vltava. Counting the handle, there are four potential ways to open or unlock the door.

(The text around the green button says “Open Door” in Finnish and Swedish.)

Näin eilen Keskustassa vaateliikeen, jonka jokaisessa ikkunassa luki “turkisviikot” isoin tikkukirjaimin. On varmasti ainoastaan onnistuneen propagandan ansiota, että täysin vailla mitään erityistä tunnekuohuntaa mietin miltäköhän näyttäisi, jos ikkunoissa lukisi “murhaviikot”.

Köyttöliittymäblogi: push or pull?

Answer: push (paint to see answer)

Understand, a novelette by Ted Chiang, explores superintelligence, as in “at which [point do] quantitative improvements — better memory, faster pattern recognition — turn into a qualitative difference, a fundamentally different mode of cognition”.

Passclicks is an interesting alternative to traditional passwords. Passclicks are made up of a set number spots (“clicks”) in an image. The rationale is that people are better at remembering visual cues than random strings of letters and numbers.

I do wonder though, how “strong” passclicks can be considered? Taking into account the fact that most pictures will have certain focal points that most people will click, it might, statistically speaking, be quite weak.

While I haven’t jumped on the GTD bandwagon (yet), I really like Cory’s transcript of Danny O’Brien’s talk about the productivity of alpha geeks.

I have a dozen text files on my desktop with various lists. Mainly URLs, but also song names and notes and books recommendations. I never used the desktop until I stopped blogging for a while and started keeping this miscellaneous stuff in flat text files.

Robert H. Frank writes about how the self-interest model may skew the perspective of economists. “Repeated exposure to the self-interest model makes selfish behavior more likely.”

“The narrow self-interest model, which encourages us to expect the worst in others, often brings out the worst in us as well.”

“Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists. I read this David Brin’s article from 1999 yesterday for the first time. It touches on the topic of why the scifi genre is held in such little regard outside of its fanbase. Be sure to read Brin’s note on the Enlightenment, Romanticism and science fiction.

Neal Stephenson discussed a similar topic, why commercial authors aren’t respected in the literary scene, in an interview on Slashdot a while ago.

Trevor Smith has an awsome speed-reader applet that flashes Cory Doctorow’s novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, on the screen, one word at a time. It’s an interesting experience of reading.

Cory’s been up to a lot. He loosened the (Creative Commons) license of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and gave an interesting talk at the Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books event.

There’s also an Ogg file of Cory’s speech, Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0?, available through BitTorrent.

To all of you, who I fail to see regularly because of my inability to schedule appointments, let me say: I am sorry, I truly cannot help it. I like the way Po Bronson put it: “I'm not very good at planning. Thinking ahead makes me frantic and depressed, because inevitably I see that there is a lot of work in my future.”

From Surowiecki’s story on why people got so upset over Dick Grasso’s huge paycheck.

Take two people. Give them a hundred dollars to split. One person (the proposer) decides, on his own, what the split should be (fifty-fifty, seventy-thirty, or whatever) and makes the other person a take-it-or-leave-it offer. If he accepts the deal, both players get their share of the money. If he rejects it, both players walk away empty-handed.

The rational thing for the second person to do is to accept the offer, whatever it is, since even one dollar is better than nothing. But in practice this rarely happens. Instead, lowball offers are almost always rejected. Apparently, people would rather throw away money than let someone else walk away with too much.

Remember, fairness is not equality.

Joi Ito notes that English is readable if the letters of words, except the first and last, are scrambled. It works in other languages, too, but nearly as well. English is also quite legible even if vowels are dropped. Finnish, which relies less on whole word recognition, is much harder to read when scrambled or vowels are dropped. Jamie Zawinski has written a perl script that scrambles words.

When perusing through Helsinki’s second best used book store this summer, I picked up slim paperback called The Use and Misuse of Language, edited by S. I. Hayakawa. Paging through it quickly, I assumed it was about English usage and grammar. When I started reading it today, I was surprized to discover it’s about general semantics. Read more

Memories as objects. This is an interesting way to record thoughts and stuff, much like a weblog, only much more advanced. It requires onerous use of metadata though, which as a recent backlash has proven, isn't always as great as it's cracked up to be. Some might even call it a pipe dream.

This article on structured procastination has just made my day. It's so true. My best artwork, best writing and most ingenious rearranging of the furniture in my room have all come from a hideous number of urgent and important tasks weighing down on my shoulders.

Evidently I was born with the same innate math ability as Einstein. Pretty cool. While psychology proved that race doesn't affect intelligence already some time ago, this goes to show that even the individual differences aren't necessarily so great.