About Jorge Luis Borges

Nature recently published an interesting article by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga about Jorge Luis Borges. Quote:

A quest for knowledge about Borges led me to visit his widow, María Kodama, last year in Buenos Aires. Borges himself, she explained, had an exceptional memory. He could quote passages in Spanish, English, German and other languages. Borges purposely enriched his memory from an early age, knowing that he had a congenital disease that would eventually leave him blind and unable to read. Ironically, he lost his sight in 1955, the year he was appointed director of the Argentinean national library, but he retained his interest by asking others to read to him. Kodama recalled that, in one of her first meetings with the writer, he asked her to recite a specific passage in a book. To her surprise, he quickly guided her to the exact page, even though he had been blind for many years.

He also devised elaborate plans to murder monks in an european monastery…

spider named after…

The blog of William S. Burroughs

I bought William S. Burroughs Letters 1945-59. What a weird book. Reads like a blog. Unfortunately no discussion threads.

PS: My boy just left, and I can now write with philosophic serenity conveyed by an empty scrotum.

Letter to Jack Kerouac, April 22, 1954. Tangier.

sweet jane

There’s always some evil mothers
they’ll tell you life is full of dirt.
and women never really faint
and the villans always blink their eyes
and the children are the only ones who blush
‘cause life is just to die

but anyone who has a heart
wouldn’t want to turn around and break it
and anyone who ever played the part
he wouldn’t want to turn around and fake it

Sweet Jane by Lou Reed

Is this the greatest rock and roll lyrics ever written?

Something bothers me about Apple

With the introduction of iPad, it becomes very clear to me that Apple is moving away from the desktop metaphor of hierarchical filesystem. This is a very good thing. I hate nested folders*. The more I use iPhotos and iTunes, the more I realize that a lot can be accomplished without knowing anything about files. With a simple device like the iPhone, the iPhoto/iTunes approach to application design makes the desktop concept almost completely unnecessary.

However, it is not clear to me that the fileless concept scales up to a more powerful device, like the iPad. I hope that Apple’s ambition of iPad is a device that is capable of producing contents, because otherwise it would be nothing more than a big iPhone. The demonstration of the iWorks suite seems to confirm that iPad will be running complicated applications. At the very least the iPad will be a portable wordprocessor. The problem is that wordprocessing is HARD. Documents are usually sent around among a group people, and the multiple rounds of editing/merging create lots of versions. How does a fileless system manage this complexity?

I hope Apple knows what it is doing, but it seems to me that Apple is doing nothing more than hoping that the developers will figure out how to make their apps more iPhoto-like. That won’t work. Some kind of systemwide mechanism for file organization must be in place otherwise it would lead to chaos. There used to be a time when Apple actually did user interface research and communicate its vision to the developers. Steve Jobs got rid of that and replaced it with a process that is more similar to art appreciation: developers are left to divine Apple’s vision. I am afraid that there isn’t one and Apple is missing an opportunity to reinvent personal computing. I am very happy that Jonathan Ives is becoming a public image of Apple, which sends a strong message that industrial design is the king at Apple. But isn’t it strange that there is no equivalence of Jonathan Ives in software?

* I am the kind of person who has a messy office but a tediously organized hard drive. I hate folders not because I don’t organize, but because I organize too much, and folders are simply not flexible enough.

My copy of Franny & Zooey

I didn’t ship non-scientific books around the world when I moved. The only exception is Franny & Zooey by J. D. Salinger. It was purchased in 1994 from the campus bookstore of National Tsing-Hua University for $150 NT (amazingly cheap for an imported book). The book was imported by Lai Lai Books, one of the very few importers of English paperbacks in Taiwan at the time. I spent almost every saturday afternoon in their tiny office near National Taiwan University when I was in Taipei. Lai Lai was probably the most claustrophobic bookstore in the world. College textbooks and serious literature were on the shelves; popular novels were on the floor. Salinger was on the shelf; J.R.R. Tolkien was on the floor.

Little bookstores like Lai Lai served two niche markets almost exclusively: 1. humanities students looking for cheap copies of T. S. Elliot and Jean-Paul Satre, and 2. nerds looking for cheap copies of StarTrek novels and Dungeon & Dragons books. There was a time when these two groups coexisted comfortably – shoulders touching shoulders, talking across each other in very confined spaces. Very soon afterwards big international bookstores invaded and compartmentalized the two cultures. Serious literature is now on the second floor near the coffee shop; sci-fi and fantasy are relegated to the basement. Students of literature no longer have to tolerate discussions of warp drives within earshot.

J. D. Salinger on non-euclidean geometry

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

from Franny & Zooey by J. D. Salinger

My geometry is pretty bad so I might be wrong, but I imagine if you define the distance between two points on a sphere as the longest path on the great circle, instead of the shortest path on the great circle, the geometry remains the same.

“philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex”

[via Jerry Coyne] I couldn’t have said it better. Jerry Fodor is still around? Jerry Fodor is a shining example of why philosophers do not deserve to be called cognitive scientists.

PS: Here is a better quote: “Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.” – Richard Feymann

PPS: More quotes: “In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.” – Paul Dirac

Grid cells in the human brain

Terrific fMRI study found evidence of grid cells in the human brain:

Doeller, C.F., Barry, C & Burgess, N. (2010) Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network. Nature.

今天是看香蕉魚的好日子

美國作家沙林潔 (J.D. Salinger) 過世. 我想, 也許沙林潔是本世紀影響最多人的作家.

Never heard of qualia

I always wanted to ask my friend Adrian about qualia. Adrian is a behavioral scientist who specializes in comparative color vision. As someone who devotes himself to the study of insect vision, he must have asked himself “how does a honeybee experience the visual world?” millions of times. Philosophers can talk about experience and qualia abstractly, but Adrian, who routinely tricks insects to do things that nobody believed were possible, must get into the minds of those little creatures to do his job. If anyone is serious about understanding the mental world of an insect, Adrian must be one of them.

Today I made a trip to his small office crammed with color chips, mirrors, hand-made cameras and all sorts of equipments. “Adrain”, I asked, “what do you think about qualia?” I asked this question apologetically because proficiency in philosophical jargons is hardly something to be proud of among scientists. Adrian answered, “I beg your pardon? Qua..what?” He never heard of the word. Still apologetic I waved my hand and suggested that we moved on to more pressing issues, but he wouldn’t let it pass. He was challenged. He couldn’t believe that there was something about color that he never heard of. “Aha!”, he cried, “I bet this book has a reference!”. He finger danced across books on the crowded bookshelf about psychology, ecology, sociology and all kinds of other -gy and finally landed on a big book, the most non-technical book he has about color and went straight to the index. Nope. No qualia. We spent the next 20 minutes searching the index sections of his book collection about color vision, trying to find one single instance of the q word. Zero. Nobody cares.

I recently realized that the qualia argument for non-physicalism is just a form of the god-of-the-gap argument. The support of non-physicalism, insist the philosophers, always lies in the gap of our knowledge. The more I read about Chalmers, the more he appears to be a mystic.

My visual blogging

I have some photos and diagrams at:

Turtles, all the way down (mostly hacks), and

raxacoricofallapatorius, photos.

A good read

I enjoyed reading this statistics paper:

Kent, J. T. (1982) The Fisher-Bingham Distribution on the Sphere. J. R. Statist. Soc. B. 44. 71-80.

I was afraid that the Kent distribution would be messy and difficult to use. But it’s actually quite elegant.

I plotted the distribution here.

知名的病人

這張十九世紀老照片裡的人是誰? 為什麼他只有一隻眼睛, 而且還拿了個棒子? 擁有這張照片的收藏家一直稱這張照片為 “捕鯨人”, 因為他以為那根棒子是魚叉. 前一陣子有人在 flickr 上看到這張照片, 發現這個所謂的 “捕鯨人” 也許其實是 Phineas Gage 唯一流傳下來的照片. 誰是 Phineas Gage? 他是神經科學史上最重要的病人.

美國鐵路工人 Phineas Gage 在 1848 因為炸藥引起的意外, 被一支長鐵棒打穿了腦子. 從底下的電腦重建影像你可以看出來這場意外有多麼嚴重

Phineas Gage 不但沒有當場暴斃, 他還能夠很冷靜的跟醫生描述意外現場的狀況. 醫生本來以為 Gage 只受了輕傷, 不過幾分鐘後病人開始嘔吐, 醫生很驚訝的發現嘔吐物中有一小塊腦子!

雖然 Gage 活到 1860 年, 但意外後的 Gage 個性大幅改變, 朋友都說他完全變成了另一個人, 神經科學家才因此了解到被鐵棒刺穿的 frontal lobe, 跟 “高階認知”, “決策”, 甚至跟 “人格” 有關. 目前神經科學對 frontal lobe 的理解還是非常的粗淺. Frontal lobe 的功能仍然是神經科學最神祕的領域.

教科書常常提到 Gage 在意外後 “變成了另一個人”, 但這句話到底是什麼意思? 由於當時留下來的紀錄很不精確, 這個問題可能會永遠的成為歷史的懸案.

Centenary of Brodmann’s map

Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a very interesting piece about the cortical map of Bordmann. Curiously it features a “fictive interview with Korbinian Bordmann”. I personally don’t want to see this literary device used too often in scientific writings, but in this context it’s cool.

Color vision did not replace olfaction in primates

A terrific blog entry by Matthew Cobb. I always find the vision/olfaction trade-off theory plausible but unsubstantiated. Finally the theory is challenged by molecular evidence. Unfortunately the analysis is restricted to primates and the tree shrew. I’d like to see it expanded to include more mammals (especially rodents).

Random notes

Thomas Pynchon is notorious for giving characters ridiculous names. Genghis Cohen, a philatelist in The Crying of Lot 49, is one of the worse (or one of the best?) offenders. Additional examples: Dr. Hilarius (also in Lot 49) and Darby Suckling (Against the Day).

I was watching the famous Seinfeld episode, The Chinese Restaurant. According to Notes about Nothing on the DVD, that episode was inspired by Larry David’s experience in a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles called … Genghis Cohen.

I don’t suppose the restaurant was named after a Pynchon character. See this note written by Thomas Pynchon about another Gengis Cohen.

My Facebook status updates: greatest hits (vol. 1)

Research assistant: So, I tried to play Leisure Suit Larry with a DOS emulator last night…

Me: Did the penis of your character explode from having unprotected sex with that pixelated hooker?

Assistant: YES! I was going to tell you about that pixelated hooker!!

Y Chromosome Evolving Rapidly

ScienceNow reports an exciting studies comparing the Y chromosomes of humans and chimpanzees.

As is well-known, humans and chimps share 98% of their DNA. But more than 30% of the DNA differs between chimps and humans in the region of the Y chromosome that determines sex. This suggests that the Y chromosome has undergone “extraordinary” remodeling in both species in the 6 million years or so since they split from a common ancestor…

Brains wide shut?

I like this 2005 essay by philosopher Patricia Churchland published in New Scientist.

… such a wide-open empirical playing field motivates authors to wrestle feverishly with each other, hurl mud, vote one another off the island, and draw endless boxes with connecting arrows. Naturally, it is vastly easier to hunker down in the hot tub to introspect one’s inner milieu than to do the painstaking work of neuroscience. As a result, legions of hopeful Darwins-of-consciousness flock to conferences, vying for attention, and philosophers, horrified by the spectacle of the empirical sciences treading on their sacred territory,try to scare off interlopers with extreme threats of conceptual necessities and logically adequate criteria.

In page 3 Churchland briefly mentioned the work of neuropsychologists David Milner and Melvyn Goodale. I think it is a perfect example demonstrating why the traditional philosophical approach to consciousness is unlikely to get us anywhere. You can’t understand consciousness without knowing the processes that do not enter consciousness, and scientists have shown “unconsciousness” is completely unlike anything we had imagined.