Happy Governments

Last year I mentioned happiness and thought the whole idea would self-destruct in a cloud of absurdity. It didn't, of course. So now Frank Furedi had a look at the subject:

Of course, no one wants to miss the point of life. And the platitude that money does not make you happy contains more than a grain of truth. However, what the happiness lobbyists are actually saying is not that we should go forth and discover the meaning of life, merely that we should be content with what's on offer. They claim that concern with prosperity and economic growth diminishes the quality of our emotional life and makes us unhappy. They argue that if we were more modest in our aspirations and lowered our expectations, we would be far happier people.

Daily Telegraph
Eureka or Uriah Heep and his humble happiness?
via Arts & Letters Daily

Word Burst

Not Partner Material put a word cloud on her blog(via The Philosophical Marshmallow). What a lovely idea, I thought and here is mine:

(courtesy of snapshirts)

Would it not be lovely to just project an inner word cloud onto page or post instead of laboriously placing words on a linear string of syntax? Considering that our brains may explode into thousands of words per moment, as Gerald Crow suggests in his paper on The Writing Problems of Visual Thinkers a word cloud may well give a more accurate picture of the racket in our brains.

The increasing use of subliminal audio tapes suggests that the mind may have the ability to think in complete syntactical units at enormous rates of speed, and in several channels simultaneously. One recent experiment suggests that the mind may be able to think a burst of a thousand words as rapidly as it can produce a picture: Korba (1986) estimated that people can think at the equivalent of 4,000 words per minute.

Discussion via Rebecca's Pocket)

And then again - maybe not. NASA - among other things - seems to be working on a device that will read your mind. If you let it.

In space, no one can hear you scream. Use a cell phone on a crowded commuter train and everyone can.
Charles Jorgensen is working to solve both problems, using an uncanny technology called subvocal speech recognition. Jorgensen demonstrates it at his offices at NASA's Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif. He attaches a set of electrodes to the skin of his throat and, without his opening his mouth or uttering a sound, his words are recognized and begin appearing on a computer screen.

The Silent Speaker, Forbes Magazine again found in
Rebecca's inimitable pocket)

Admittedly, words that you merely think of saying are a far cry from the word bursts Grow writes about. Still, I'm glad that as a woman no one could expect me to constantly wear a turtle neck or - perish the thought - a tie that picks up my subvocalisations.

Pattern Competition

Outrageously, circumstances have prompted me to leave my beloved place of residence, a more or less peaceful city made up of almost 2 million inhabitants. I washed up on the shores of the pedestrian precincts of a much smaller town - about a quarter of a million citizens. The people around me seemed locked in a slow motion bubble. Had it not been for a native who held on to me, I'd have shot through this placid crowd like a bit of greased lightning.

Luckily for you and I differing pedestrian speeds are already lovingly described in the Glass Maze (via The Philosophical Marshmallow (via Give me spirit fingers dammit)).

The Glass Maze also mentions different styles of dress between "the sticks" and the city. You bet there was a difference between dress styles in my beloved little metropolis and the provincial town. The dwellers of the provicial plains sport their textiles almost entirely without any style whatsoever. Let them walk in Hennes or Chanel, they uniformly look like freshly licked puppy dogs as opposed to Hamburg where you will find a fair degree of mix and (mis)match - and oh, for goodness sake - some litter in the streets!

There also is a difference in atmosphere and I just love the way the Glass Maze extracts this from a café latte:

There’s a franticness about the city coffee delivery system that differs in both kind and degree from the bustle of your typical suburban Starbucks: it’s more frantic, certainly, but it’s also possessed of a certain kind of paradoxical languor, as if all of this mayhem is right and proper and thoroughly expected, the way things really ought to be.

People do this. Effortlessly, at times even elegantly, we recognise patterns. We do this more often than not without even realising what we are about. And yet it was only yesterday that I was fascinated by Kevin Kelly's predictions for scientific advancements to be expected (to his mind) within the next 45 years.

Pattern Augmentation – Pattern-seeking software which recognizes a pattern in noisy results. In large bodies of information with many variables, algorithmic discovery of patterns will become necessary and common. These exist in specialized niches of knowledge (such particle smashing) but more general rules and general-purpose pattern engines will enable pattern-seeking tools to become part of all data treatment.
SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE, By Kevin Kelly (via kottke)

I was even more fascinated by Kelly's "Multiple Hypothesis Matrix"

Instead of proposing a series of single hypothesis, in which each hypothesis is falsified and discarded until one theory finally passes and is verified, a matrix of many hypothesis scenarios are proposed and managed simultaneously. An experiment travels through the matrix of multiple hypothesis, some of which are partially right and partially wrong. Veracity is statistical; more than one thesis is permitted to stand with partial results. Just as data were assigned a margin of error, so too will hypothesis. An explanation may be stated as: 20% is explained by this theory, 35% by this theory, and 65% by this theory. A matrix also permits experiments with more variables and more complexity than before.

Old hat, you might say: is not this precisely what makes large (non-hierarchical) groups of people more intelligent than any single human being?

Yet I choose to remain fascinated. Not only do we recognise patterns easily and process competing hypotheses in social matrices/systems, we are aware of these achievements and build machines which attempt to emulate them.

Pattern Recognition

Because We Can

Recently I have been doing quite a few things that might seem exaggerated, senseless even. When I asked myself 'why', the answer was: Because I can. Such acts move outside convention and necessity; they are neither art, nor downright silliness. They celebrate the wealth of options at my disposal - at everyone's disposal.

So I am not surprised to find others doing things because they can, but very glad. There is the plan to drive a golf ball into orbit from the ISS. (via Kottke)


Then there are the biologists looking at their petri dishes. They are, of course bent on finding out, what on earth is going on in the strange world unfolding before their very microscopes. But they still leave room to marvel at the beauty of what they see. (via Kottke again)



Oh, alright you nosey-parkers. Just one. My goddaughter had entrusted me with her beloved sheep DingDing (it plays a lullaby, if you pull a string). I felt very honoured indeed, but having been plied with oceans of tea I had to do something about it. So I got up sheep in hand pronouncing: DingDing needs to got to the toilet. And it did.

The Grin

I found this wonderful news on quantum computing. Needless to say I did not understand a word. And yet... I had a vision. There it was, Schroedinger's Cat. Both dead and alive and it did what I always suspected of it: From its sealed box it transmitted its smile into the boughs of a tree where only Alice could see it.

superposition