Author Archives: Michael

It isn't worth it.

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I stumbled upon this article:
http://exp-platform.com/semmelweisReflex.aspx

And found an interesting extract from it:

“According to Childbed Fever: A Scientific Biography of Ignaz Semmelweis (p. 69) an 1856 publication in a prominent Viennese medical periodical, Viennese Medical Weekly, by Jozsef Fleischer, a student of Semmelweis, showed success of chlorine washings. However, the editor for the periodical wrote at the end of the report “We believe that this chlorine-washing theory has long outlived its usefulness. The experiences and statistical results of most maternity institutions protest against the views presented above. It is time we are no longer to be deceived by this theory.”

Vienna continued to ignore his recommendations. In 1861, he published a book, but the community rejected his doctrine. In 1865 he suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital, where he was beaten by asylum personnel and died. It took another 14 years for the discovery to be accepted, after Louis Pasteur, in 1879, showed the presence of Streptococcus in the blood of women with child fever. Semmelweis is now recognized as a pioneer of antiseptic policy.”

First of all, I’ve never heard of Semmelweis before this, but I certainly have heard of Pasteur. Second, Semmelweis’ work had literally no impact in the scientific community because it was ignored until Pasteur replicated the findings (upon which everyone suddenly started paying attention, and probably attributed the discovery to him for quite some time).

Finally, and most compelling, taken from Semmelweis’ perspective, this was an utter loss. He found a way to save lives and greatly advanced medical practice (even if he wasn’t quite aware why), and for it, he was variously ignored, denounced, and vilified to the point of his own death. So what if he is now remembered? What good does posthumous recognition do him?

Beauty as an exclusive ideal

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I thought I’ve mentioned this here, but perhaps not. My observations on beauty ideals can be summed up as follows:

“Beauty is what most people are not, but the elite are always beautiful.”

I call it the “white face” hypothesis. Beauty ideals (across many different cultures!) traditionally favored pale features prior to modernity, as they were indicators of high social status (everyone else was out working in the fields all day). When the connotation of social status disappeared, tan suddenly became in. I suppose one reason for this may be the indication of enough money to spend it frivolously, but more likely it’s just a trait idealized by celebrities and televised role models.

Does the disk matter as much as the filesystem?

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It seems, at least in the case of NTFS and ISO9660, that the filesystem is actually more of a bottleneck than the disk itself. Lots of small files can cut the transfer speed down by 2-3 orders of magnitude, even down to about 100 KB/sec. Linux filesystems seem to do much better on small files, but it makes me wonder what particular access strategy is causing the bottleneck.

The data should even be sequential on disk, making this all the more puzzling.

The Decreasing Requirements for an "Advanced User"

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Perhaps technology is just maturing, but the questions installers and other computer programs ask for “advanced users” have decreased significantly in difficulty. Whereas 10 years ago, an “advanced user” may have been expected to manually specify IRQs of legacy devices such as soundcards in something as simple as a game, there are a number of installers today whose “advanced” options simply allow the user to specify the installation directory.

Much of the complexity is being hidden within the operating system as well; with every new version, Windows hides more and more of what is going on under the hood. This is fine as a setting; it is extremely annoying (to people who understand what is going on) as a standard way of doing things. Windows 7 Explorer no longer even shows you which folders it is copying files from when performing a recursive copy or move.

I can’t help but think that the end result of this is something out of “Idiocracy”, where the only requirement for being a “computer technician” is knowing what a directory is and everyone stares in amazement at simple file system navigation.

Different Ring Behaviors at Different Times of Day

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My father complains of a friend who routinely calls at 7 AM, often waking him up. This led me to wonder why phones don’t have an option for different ring behaviors at different times. For instance, between 12 and 7, one may wish to have the phone vibrate rather than create an audible ring, or to create an audible ring with lower volume (to avoid waking others up).

An interesting brain/learning tidbit…

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When performing working memory processing tasks, the anterior cingulate cortex lights up. It does not during memory recall (the medial temporal lobes do, which sort of makes sense as the medial temporal lobe is the location of the hippocampus). The ACC also responds to pain, fear, and other unpleasant “avoidance” sensations.

Maybe there’s a physiological basis for the avoidance people display to challenging mental tasks? Can it be that the body interprets it as another form of pain?

Edit: Ooh, it increases with task difficulty too.

Fuller on change means geopolitical power cannot remain concentrated in one place.

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“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
–R. Buckminster Fuller

When this is applied to governments, it becomes painfully obvious why the center of political power is destined to continually shift. Disruptive paradigm shifts are seldom initiated by those who benefit most from the current paradigm!

Solution: KDM launches an xterm at login

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I just upgraded my old system and ran into an issue where KDM would launch an xterm rather than executing startkde when logging into a KDE session (and would perform similarly when any other session was selected).

I spent hours troubleshooting this problem and checking that all of the config files were correct. They were.

Finally, I realized that KDM may be reading kdmrc as root, but may be trying to execute the Xsession script as the user that is logging in.

The /usr/share/config directory was currently mode 700. I chmodded it to 705 and the problem was resolved.

Moral: if everything else seems right, check your permissions.

More on the Working Set Theory of (Human) Memory

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I hypothesize that evocation of one concept triggers additional concepts learned to be similar to that one by association. Think of one thing and related things are involuntarily pulled in as well; you import a whole cluster of memories rather than a single one. (Incidentally, this is how disks pull in data – by block – except that there is usually little conceptual locality to the way the data is arranged on disk… maybe there should be, as this would be far more optimal for caching and other purposes?)

Furthermore, I hypothesize that this influences the use of additional associated concepts even outside of their intended use; i.e., it is a more general form of priming. For example, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on retributive justice makes use of the term “eye” outside of the obvious association “eye for an eye” (which appears further below):

“Retributive justice is a theory of justice that considers that proportionate punishment is a morally acceptable response to crime, with an eye to the satisfaction and psychological benefits it can bestow to the aggrieved party, its intimates and society.”

I postulate that this is not at all incidental, but due to the pulling in of “clusters” of related ideas in memory.

There is a further use for this theory in pedagogy: by moving on from a single topic but integrating certain “key ideas” or even “key words” from a previous topic, you can reinforce that topic while introducing new material. For example, if I used the term “phylogeny” extensively while teaching students about tree data structures, then moved on and discussed genetic algorithms, I could cause students to recall the tree lecture by using the term “phylogeny” in a different context. It has essentially become a trigger point for recalling an unrelated memory.