I’m not sure if this sort of view of the world is a blessing or a curse, ignorance is bliss right?
Via Abtruse Goose.
Author: Nathan Campbell
Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.
How Scientists See the World
Separated at Birth: the World Cup game, and Steven Seagal
The World Cup has been producing ample fodder for one of my favourite games (which is probably pretty frustrating for other people) I like to call it “hey that guy looks like…”
Here’s an example. The Dutch manager Bert Van Marwijk looks almost exactly like former WWE wrestler Ric Flair…
In unrelated television – Master Chef regular Neil Perry looks exactly like Steven Seagal.
Especially when the latter plays a chef in Under Siege:
Here are Neil Perry’s knife skills on display (in text form) from a Q&A on taste.com.au:
“I love the way you cook and no matter how I try I can’t chop herbs fast or very fine without cutting my fingers. Can you give me some tips on how to chop as well as you do?”
The main thing to remember is to use a slicing action with your knife as opposed to a chopping action. By this, I mean keep the tip of the knife firmly glued to the board and cut/slice in flowing movements. Also, keep your finger tips tucked out of the way at all times. Use the middle knuckle of your fingers as a guide for your knife to lean against and make sure that any part of your fingers below that knuckle are tucked in.
And here, for your viewing pleasure (though it’s probably M rated) are Steven Seagal’s knife skills on display.
And, in a bizarre twist, St-Eutychus has a world exclusive linking the two men, and perhaps establishing that they are in fact the same person…
Neil Perry is the leading Australian endorser of a Japanese brand of knives called Shun knives. Shun knives are made by the Kai Corporation, who in America trade as Kershaw Knives, who just happen to be the manufacturers of the knife Steven Seagal designed.
That’s right. Same knife company. Same hairstyle. Same face. Same Asian flavour. Same person… you be the judge…
Do you have any World Cup lookalikes for me?
Why speech recognition will (probably) never work
Speech to text recognition software is one of personal computing’s final frontiers. The dream of sitting in a room and talking to your computer (and having it understand, compute, and respond accordingly) is, apparently, unlikely to ever become an actual reality. The problems are manifold – the biggest problems being that words are aurally ambiguous and we instinctively translate them based on context and expression, and that certain words have an array of meanings.
Here are a couple of snippets from this fascinating article, that ends up being more about language than voice recognition (you might also notice a couple of things I’ve posted recently in that article).
In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation. But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying “one” into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space…
Many spoken words sound the same. Saying “recognize speech” makes a sound that can be indistinguishable from “wreck a nice beach.” Other laughers include “wreck an eyes peach” and “recondite speech.” But with a little knowledge of word meaning and grammar, it seems like a computer ought to be able to puzzle it out. Ironically, however, much of the progress in speech recognition came from a conscious rejection of the deeper dimensions of language. As an IBM researcher famously put it: “Every time I fire a linguist my system improves.” But pink-slipping all the linguistics PhDs only gets you 80% accuracy, at best…
Researchers have also tried to endow computers with knowledge of word meanings. Words are defined by other words, to state the seemingly obvious. And definitions, of course, live in a dictionary. In the early 1990s, Microsoft Research developed a system called MindNet which “read” the dictionary and traced out a network from each word out to every mention of it in the definitions of other words.
Words have multiple definitions until they are used in a sentence which narrows the possibilities. MindNet deduced the intended definition of a word by combing through the networks of the other words in the sentence, looking for overlap. Consider the sentence, “The driver struck the ball.” To figure out the intended meaning of “driver,” MindNet followed the network to the definition for “golf” which includes the word “ball.” So driver means a kind of golf club. Or does it? Maybe the sentence means a car crashed into a group of people at a party.
To guess meanings more accurately, MindNet expanded the data on which it based its statistics much as speech recognizers did. The program ingested encyclopedias and other online texts, carefully assigning probabilistic weights based on what it learned. But that wasn’t enough. MindNet’s goal of “resolving semantic ambiguities in text,” remains unattained. The project, the first undertaken by Microsoft Research after it was founded in 1991, was shelved in 2005.
They’re not the Messiah…
Throw three delusional patients of a mental institution together in a locked room and conversation is likely to be awkward. But if you put three with the same delusion in a room it’s a recipe for trouble. Even if a three of them think they’re the messiah… But when you put a psychologist who has a bit of a god complex in the mix bizarre things happen. Here’s the story of the story of “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti”…
“Frustrated by psychology’s focus on what he considered to be peripheral beliefs, like political opinions and social attitudes, Rokeach wanted to probe the limits of identity. He had been intrigued by stories of Secret Service agents who felt they had lost contact with their original identities, and wondered if a man’s sense of self might be challenged in a controlled setting. Unusually for a psychologist, he found his answer in the Bible. There is only one Son of God, says the good book, so anyone who believed himself to be Jesus would suffer a psychological affront by the very existence of another like him. This was the revelation that led Rokeach to orchestrate his meeting of the Messiahs and document their encounter in the extraordinary (and out-of-print) book from 1964, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti…
very little seems to shift the identities of the self-appointed Messiahs. They debate, argue, at one point come to blows, but show few signs that their beliefs have become any less intense. Only Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” Rokeach interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change. The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say.”
You aren’t as clever as you think you are…
And this blog is here to tell you why not… You Are Not So Smart.
This is one of my favoruites – the myth of not conforming to capitalism by buying non-mass market products.
“You needed to self actualize, to find your own way, and you sought out something real, something with meaning. You waved your hand at popular music, popular movies, and popular television. You dug deeper and disparaged all those mindless sheeple who gobbled up pop culture.
Yet, you still listened to music and bought shirts and went to see movies. Someone was appealing to you despite your dissent.
If you think you can buy your way to individuality, well, you are not so smart.
Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the free market has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to purchase no matter your taste.”
Unknown bands are a special sort of commodity. Living in a loft downtown, wearing clothes from the thrift store, watching the independent film no one has heard of – these provide a special social status which can’t be bought as easily as the things offered to the mainstream.
In the 1960s, it took months before someone figured out they could sell tie-dyed shirts and bell bottoms to anyone who wanted to rebel. In the 1990s, it took weeks to start selling flannel shirts and Doc Martens to people in the Deep South. Now, people are hired by corporations to go to bars and clubs and predict what the counter culture is into and have it on the shelves in the cool stores right as it becomes popular.
The Internet: Now with Vuvzelas
If, like me, you’ve been up late at night watching the World Cup and you’re finding it hard to adjust to life without the drone of the vuvuzela – then I have a solution for you. Use this site as the gateway for your browsing and you can add the monotonous (in b flat) buzz of the Vuvuzela to any web page.
Here’s St Eutychus with Vuvuzela.
Cheer up Keanu day
The Keanu Reeves meme is gathering steam. Someone, somewhere, introduced this photo of Keanu looking very sad to the picture:
And the previously reported “Thank You Keanu” movement has become “Cheer up Keanu” day (Facebook Event).
Here’s the photo in various forms. Because this is what the collective power of the Internet produces… and here’s a sample.
Now if only Chuck Norris would send him a message of support.
How to write like Malcolm Gladwell
Gladwell is a phenomenon. His books sell like hotcakes. He’s a compelling storyteller and he uses this ability to stitch together anecdotes and essays in a cohesive way. His books are famous for pushing one big idea using several supporting examples presented in an amusing and engaging way.
Here are eight tips for writing like Gladwell. In sum:
1. “Your book is actually going to be a collection of essays drawn together by a loose thread” – You should start writing a bunch of essays about loosely connectected topics.
2. “Each of your essays is going to revolve around a single idea” – Conveniently, these idea then become a chapter.
3. “Illustrate the idea with stories about real people” – Everybody likes a story about real people (this works with media releases too).
4. “Get a professor” – find an expert who is willing to put their names to conjecture and unproven theories, present them as fact.
5. “Best to have some sad stories to illustrate your points well” – You need to balance out all the success stories with stories of people who have failed because they haven’t embraced Gladwell’s concept.
6. “Give things names and remember Douglas Adams’ rule of capital letters” – basically give the concepts you’ve come up with names, catchy names, expressed best by the power of proper nouns.
7. “Don’t fret too much about accuracy, concentrate on telling a good story” – some of Gladwell’s work has been shown to be either based on conjecture or old wives’ tales.
8. “Don’t worry about the new, new thing” – some of Gladwell’s ideas are from papers or events more than ten years ago.
New South Wales State of Origin Player Ratings
Out of ten:
- Jarryd Hayne: 1
- Brett Moris: 3
- Beau Scott: 1
- Matt Cooper: 1
- Joel Monaghan: 1
- Trent Barrett: 1
- Mitchell Pearce: 1
- Michael Weyman: 0
- Michael Ennis: 1
- Brett White: 3
- Nathan Hindmarsh: 0
- Ben Creagh: 0
- Paul Gallen: 1
- Tom Leoroyd-Larrs: 1
- Luke O’Donnell: 2
- Kurt Gidley: -10
I can’t even remember who the other player for New South Wales was. He must have been invisible. If more than three of these players are picked next year we’ll lose again.
How to be a gastro-snob
I take great pride in being a coffee snob, but I’m not one of those people who complies copious volumes of “tasting notes” trying to identify nuanced flavours like berry, or citrus, or caramel, or dark chocolate. But if you want to be that type of person, in any field of gastrononomy, here are some tips.
- Use your nose – “Our tongues are equipped to experience only salty, bitter, sour and sweet flavors, plus umami, a newish term we borrowed from the Japanese to define a savory tasting sensation… Flavor — the citrusy essence of lemongrass, that lusty smokiness of chipotle peppers — comes mainly via our nose, he says, and largely through what’s known as retronasal or orthonasal smelling.”
- Develop a mental flavour bank – “Get in the habit of tasting all the ingredients that go into a dish you’re cooking before it’s made… so you can see what they’re like raw and cooked in certain ways and with certain components.”
- Practice identifying flavours in your own words – “Wine tasting, you might have noticed, is big on cognition of a certain kind: a vocabulary of comparison, all that jazz about wine tasting like oak and petroleum and passion fruit and cat pee. Having “the balls”… to put what you’re tasting into new adjectives is what makes great tasters, great tasters. But the rest of us usually just learn the old adjectives that turn into jargon, usually by tasting something that is already agreed-upon to be apple-y or citrusy or whatever — Merlot and plums, Riesling and petroleum — rather than trying to pick it out ourselves.”
Caffeine high is really just undoing no-caffeine low
Some people think caffeine gives them a boost. And it does. Back to your normal baseline.
Apparently your daily pick me up is more “pick me back up” than a boost to your performance.
Peter Rogers, from the University of Bristol’s Department of Experimental Psychology and one of the lead authors of the study, said: “Our study shows that we don’t gain an advantage from consuming caffeine — although we feel alerted by it, this is caffeine just bringing us back to normal. On the other hand, while caffeine can increase anxiety, tolerance means that for most caffeine consumers this effect is negligible.”
Approximately half of the participants were non/low caffeine consumers and the other half were medium/high caffeine consumers. All were asked to rate their personal levels of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after being given either the caffeine or the placebo. They were also asked to carry out a series of computer tasks to test for their levels of memory, attentiveness and vigilance.
Like all drug addicts I drink caffeine for the taste, and not for the effect… and to get rid of my nasty withdrawal headaches without resorting to nurofen (panadol doesn’t work).
You do the math, you do the monkey math…
Thanks to RodeoClown, in the comments of that last monkey theorem quote, I now know the magnitude of improbability involved in a monkey creating the works of Shakespeare (or, even just one line from Hamlet).
The balance of probability is so incredibly weighted against a monkey even getting the right sequence of letters in order (every time the monkey strikes a letter there are 31 other keys he might press rather than getting the next stroke right that it is only the constraints of logic that mean we can’t call the situation impossible.
Which kind of makes you think. One of the arguments against God is broken down into two similar questions of probability (which seem a bit like a paradox to me) – those suggesting the idea of the God of the Bible occurring is so improbable that it’s impossible are, at the same time, suggesting that the improbability of the universe must, by definition, have occurred given infinite time and space. To me, both seem equally improbable. In any moment prior to the world (as we know it) existing it was much more likely not to start existing than it was to start existing. That little conundrum seems to be pretty easy to resolve to me – if one is true, then both can be true, but if one is false then both must be false. Wouldn’t an infinite universe over infinite time inevitably produce each possible permutation of God until it produced one able to control the parameters? Namely, the infinite space part? I think at this point it’s more logical that something pre-existed the nothing. That skews the probability pretty dramatically. Am I getting something wrong with my logic here? Now that I’ve read the math guy’s answer right to the end I can see that he agrees with me. He also wrote a follow up piece in which he answers my conundrum from the previous post.
“So what happens if you have an infinite number of monkeys typing away? Do we get a script for Hamlet as Mr Adams suggests? Yes, we do! In point of fact, we get every combination of letters possible with the given typewriter, and that in infinite quantities. So not only do we get Hamlet, we get Shakespeare’s complete works, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, this document, and incomprehensibly vast quantities of random garbage. (Note that this document may also qualify as garbage, but I object to it being described as “random”.) An infinite number of monkeys typing randomly will rapidly produce every possible written work. “
The Math
Each time it presses a key, there is a one in 32 chance that it will be correct. To get our little snippet of Hamlet, it will need a total of 41 consecutive “correct” keystrokes. This means that the chances are one in 32 to the power of 41. Let’s look at a table of values.
Keys Chances (one in…)
————————————
1 32
2 32*32 = 1024
3 32*32*32 = 32768
4 32*32*32*32 = 1048576
5 32^5 = 33554432
6 32^6 = 1073741824
7 32^7 = 34359738368
8 32^8 = 1099511627776
9 32^9 = 3.518437208883e+013
10 32^10 = 1.125899906843e+015
…
20 32^20 = 1.267650600228e+030
…
30 32^30 = 1.427247692706e+045
…
41 32^41 = 5.142201741629e+061
…
204 32^204 = 1.123558209289e+307The last figure is included only because it is the largest value that the MS Windows calculator can handle — it’s doing better than my hand-held Casio (old faithful!) which only goes up to 1e+99. Okay, so these figures are pretty vast, but we have a lot of monkeys and they can type fast. So how long will it take, on average, for one of my monkeys to type a line matching that sentence? Hard question. Let’s get an idea of how long we are talking here. How many lines can my monkey type in a year, given that it types at a rate of one line per second?
1 line per second
* 60 seconds per minute = 60 lines per minute
* 60 minutes per hour = 3600 lines per hour
* 24 hours per day = 86400 lines per day
* 365.24 days per year = 31556736 lines per yearIf you have access to Unix, you can calculate this with the dc command, but be warned that it may take quite a while to calculate and annoy other users because the computer is so slow. Use of the nice command is suggested. The syntax, should you care to try, is as follows. Type the dc command, then type the following lines.
99k
1 1 32 41 ^ / – 60 ^ 60 ^ 24 ^ 365 ^
pThe figure that is eventually printed will be the probability (expressed as a value between zero and one) of our monkey not typing our little phrase from Hamlet in the space of one year’s worth of continuous attempts. The answer that it prints looks like this:
0.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999938
6721844366784484760952487499968756116464000Notice all the nines? Even to fifty or more significant figures, this reads 100%. Okay, so realistically, there is no way that our monkey can do its job in a year. Maybe we should start talking centuries? Millenia? As I understand it, common scientific wisdom suggests that the universe is about 15 billion years old (although they may have revised their dating since I last heard about it). We can easily extend our current figure of one year to count many years. Our calculator will be much faster if we break the calculation down to powers of two and just use the “square” operation, so let’s choose a nice even power of two like 2^34, which is about 17 billion (17,179,869,184 to be precise). The new figure is:
0.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999998946
3961512816564762914005246488858434168051444149065728
Infinite monkey theorem meets infinite sentence theorem
You’ve no doubt heard the theory that if you gave a monkey a typewriter and infinite time he would eventually compose, in order, the complete works of Shakespeare. This may take him a very, very long time, but it possibly, if this other theory is correct, would not require infinite time.
The number of possible sentences in the English language is apparently finite. Indeed, the Macquarie University has calculated that there are 10570 possible sentences in English. They used these suppositions:
- that English has about 500,000 words (there are about 450,000 in the 20 volume Oxford English Dictionary, but this excludes many colloquial forms – although it does include many obsolete forms),
- that English sentences can be up to 100 words in length (a fairly reasonable working assumption)
- that any individual word can occur 0 to 100 times in a single sentence (an unrealistic assumption)
- that words can be combined in any order (a false assumption)
Now, they even acknowledge that some of their assumptions are unrealistic and false – but using these assumptions they’ve given us a pretty reasonable guess at the number of permutations available in English. I guess you could go a step further and introduce “texts” to the equation – if each text is assumed to be 100,000 sentences long, or something unreasonably high, we’re still in the realm of calculable numbers.
Then we could figure out how fast a monkey produces a sentence, and get an upper limit for how long a monkey would take to produce every possible combination of words within those parameters to figure out the maximum amount of time required for a monkey to produce the works of Shakespeare. Simple.
The Macquarie University used the calculations above to demonstrate that English is an open language – full of unique sentences that have never been written before. My aim when I write, is to produce as many unique sentences as possible. To claim my place in the lexicon of life. I am pretty sure that at the point of writing, those two sentences are unique and have not been read by imaginary dinosaurs before. This process of trying to achieve the maximum number of unique sentences may lead me to introducing an odd adjective, and a MacGuffin, in every tremendously Jurassic sentence. Then I could rewrite the same sentence over and over again in order to claim maximum mileage from the one creative work (ie the writing of a unique sentence).
Lets try.
- As I wrote this, sitting next to a coffee pot plant, with my hot wife, I produced a uniquely blue sentence.
- As I wrote this, sitting next to a ceramic pot plant, with my hot wife, I produced a uniquely green sentence.
- As I wrote this, sitting next to a yellow dinosaur, with my hot wife, I produced a uniquely green sentence…
Producing unique sentences in an open language is relatively easy. Here’s what the Macquarie researcher had to say:
Grammatical rules would greatly reduce this number of sentences, as would the requirement that all sentences be meaningful, but the resulting number of possibilities would still be extremely large (more than could ever be spoken in the entire history of human languages let alone during the much shorter life span of an individual language). So for all practical, non-mathematical, purposes we can say that the English language, or any other living language (1), is an open system. It’s actually quite easy to come up with a unique, never before produced, sentence. To do so, for example, combine an unlikely (or impossible, or meaningless) event with a particular named person on a particular date. For example: “On 31st October 1999, whilst writing a lecture on animal communication, Robert had a colourless green idea.” (2) Once this sentence has been written or spoken, subsequent productions of this same sentence are not unique, but unique sentences may potentially be generated from it by making slight changes to it (eg. change “green” to “red”).
Got any unique sentences? Care to claim your place in history?
And perhaps a mathematically minded commenter might like to resolve this infinite monkey conundrum for me – if I have an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters will one monkey come up with the works of Shakespeare on his first go?
If you go down to the woods today… you’d better take someone slower than you
In countries that have bears (or other dangerous animals) and hunting (or in this case vets who shoot bears with tranquilisers) there’s a rule that is probably codified somewhere. Always make sure your hunting buddy runs slower than you. Here’s why (via 22 words).
Exit with style – environmentally friendly and artistic cardboard coffins
Rest in peas my friends:
Or remember that life is like a box of chocolates…
There’s nothing like a personalised coffin to enhance your personal brand. Just make sure that whatever you say, you say it in 100% biodegradable, recyclable style. It’s the circle of life my friends. Didn’t you learn anything from the Lion King.
From Creative Coffins – the green way to go…
“We offer a free personalisation service and can add a memorable saying, name or dates to all of our designs.
Alternatively, we can interpret your ideas to create a completely new coffin design*. This is also free, provided we can add the design to our range for future use.”
And if you’re curious about the environmental credentials…
“All of our coffins are made from cartonboard materials produced from unbleached pulp containing at least 60% recycled paper plus wood pulp sourced from sustainable forests.
We use only natural starch based glues in assembly – no bolts, screws, tape or other fixings. Our handles are made from natural woven cotton.
The patented design of this casket allows for a dignified and beautiful appearance which does not cause undue pollution or take up excessive amounts of valuable trees and yet is exceedingly practical.”