thoughts on things

Who knew that a woman could be so well spoken?!

I kid, I kid...

But no, seriously, who knew that life, culture and political geography, could be so accurately described using circle-shaped metaphors?!

I'm filing this one under 'cool things I should try out when I'm emperor'.

I really lack the economic background to comment properly on this, but it sounds really cool.

Watch it, it's only 7 minutes. I think you'll find it unsurprising that most people have tagged it as 'jaw-dropping'.

She makes an incredibly good point, and one that strikes very close to some ideas that have been whizzing around my brain recently. Why do we use physical manifestations to diagnose mental pathology?

We actually diagnose things like depression, ADHD and autism based on observed behaviour. No proof, no science, just... interpretation of physical manifestation. It's crazy. It's barbaric. It's like using leeches to suck out your melancholia. It really makes no sense, when you think about it -- as the speaker says in the video: we don't diagnose a heart condition without first using the technology available! In fact, you'd probably get a medical malpractice suit if you did -- yet psychiatrists continue to diagnose children with reckless abandon.

As you can see from the talk, we now have the technology to scan the brain and deduce any extant mental maladies with excellent accuracy. It's safe, it's quick and it's non-invasive. Look at those happy children in the video! Marvel (or glumly gawp) at how many kids with autism, ADHD or any other learning disability might be suffering from something else -- something that can be remedied with non-psychoactive drugs. 

Look! Another TED talk that agrees with me exactly!

It's always weird, when you have very strong prevailing ideologies, to find someone that thinks or writes or speaks in exactly the same way.

In this talk, he probably spends too much time being funny (but he is funny), but by the end he builds a fantastic case; a case that I think almost every sensible being will agree with.

My earliest rant on education focused heavily on empowering teachers -- something that I later refined into depoliticizing of education and school specialization. Ken Robinson's anecdote about the ballet dancer at the end of the speech is perfect, to say the least.

I had never considered the 'education is a 19th century construct for the sole consumption by the burgeoning industrial sector' point of view though. Now I can see that it's not so much that education has been politicized -- more that our societal values (or at least those extolled by politicians?) need to be reworked.

For further reading (or watching), check out Charles Leadbeater's recent talk on 'education innovation': http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education.html. Basically, our current model of teaching with teachers doesn't scale to a world with billions of Indians, Chinese, Brazilians, Nigerians -- other methods of teaching are required!

There's nothing new here -- at least for rational, non-mad humans. It's nice to hear someone (more qualified than I?) reaffirming exactly what I think, though.

The best bit -- the bit that shows how close we are to knowing what chemically makes us tick -- is the bit about dopamine levels in the brain. More dopamine = hyperactive imagination, see patterns everywhere and in everything; not enough dopamine = dull, sluggish, unable to make potentially life-saving associations.

That a single neurotransmitter can play such a vital role in our lives is scary. My point of view is that humans are basically pattern matching machines. We do carry out extemporaneous acts -- we do sometimes act without actually thinking of the consequences -- but ultimately, living life is a matter of matching objects, ideas, thoughts and people against archetypes held in cranial memory.

I don't think people realise that without accurate, rational pattern-matching abilities, we basically fail as human beings. Fail to associate a road sign with 'stop' -- you're dead. Fail to associate a pointed gun with 'stop talking' -- you're dead.

You can take the pattern-matching thing even further. Consider laboratory scientists -- specialist humans designed to spot very specific patterns, often at the expense of having weaker pattern-matching in other areas. The same goes for any specialist: they all spot patterns, or make best guesses based on known patterns -- a bomb defusal expert (circuits, wiring, smell, sight); a video gamer (peripheral vision, color processing); a lawyer (similar cases, concepts, human traits).

I need to learn more about how dopamine affects our rationality; it's an interesting vein of thought, that's for sure.

Not the best-delivered talk I've ever heard -- and he definitely loses it a bit towards the end -- but still, it's interesting.

I'm sure I've heard the artistic 'limited by the shape of the vessel' argument before, I'm just not sure where.

I guess a portable MP3 player is simply a tool. Much like a painter's work extends beyond the canvas, to the frame, to where it will hang.

And if you agree -- if form really does limit function -- then surely that puts engineers above artists.

I wonder if Michelangelo would've invented the chisel, if someone hadn't done it before him...

... and now I want to go to New Zealand! And do underwater photography!

This talk's an almost perfect blend of insightful commentary, beautiful photography and chilling reality. (Eleni, this one's for you!)

Watch out for the bit on Blue Fin tuna -- I had no idea that FISH (not sharks, not whales) could weigh a ton. A ton tuna would be about two or three times the size of the tuna in the above photo, by the way... about five meters in length...

(I'm sure I know Brian Cox, but I'm damned if I can remember how or why...)

The talk itself isn't particularly convincing, but! The three quotes he uses! I've dug them up:

When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic.

Alexander Fleming (inventor of penicillin)

Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume our views of science are ultimate, that there no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.

Sir Humphry Davy (Michael Faraday was famously his protege)

Aaaand... an excerpt of the epic Carl Sagan quote (I can't believe I've never heard this one before, considering he's a hero of mine):

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Carl Sagan, on the Pale Blue Dot (Full quote here)

Now that's what we call 'putting it into perspective'.