Incredibly interesting TED talk about pattern recognition, self-deception, and all those wonderful skeptical things.
[Editor’s note (06/04/2012): I changed the title of this post from “Astronomers got gypped,” to “Astronomers got screwed.” “Gyp” is a racist term that plays off of notions of the Romany people as sneaky and conniving. That’s not something I want my blog to perpetuate. -Spencer]
Just this week, Canada approved usage-based billing for the internet. What’s this mean? Now, Canadian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can place caps on the amount of bandwidth subscribers can use, and charge them heftily for crossing that cap. While this may make sense in the abstract, the implementation is where it’s all shot to hell: Bell Canada is switching to an incredibly low 25GB monthly cap, and is charging almost $2 for each gigabyte past that cap. (The cost to Bell to deliver a gigabyte of data is far less than a penny, for reference.)
This is bad in so many ways. Continue reading
This is what I drew tonight. It’s still in progress, but this guy inhabits the same world as this city— in fact, he’s one of the many, many people living in that city.
Nerd, nerd, nerd.
Have you ever seen your blind spot?
There’s a fantastically interesting demonstration over on Serendip, a science hub supported by Bryn Mawr College. Check it out.
The gist of it is that vertebrate eyes, due to the way they evolved, are naturally set up in a way that leaves a hole in the vision. The retina, which senses light, is behind the nerve fibers that transfer the signals to the brain. In order to get those nerve fibers out of the eye, they bundle up near the back and go back into the skull– but since the retina is normally behind the fibers, there’s nothing to sense light in that spot. (Check out the image to the right in case that description’s not clear.)
The interesting thing, however, is that this doesn’t result in a gaping hole in your vision. Make no mistake, there’s absolutely no way, given the anatomy, that that portion of your eye detects light. Then why is your vision whole?
Enter the brain. Your brain, as the Serendip demonstrations show, is remarkably adept at filling in holes. In the demonstration, you adjust your vision while focusing on a single point, until a large black dot elsewhere on the page disappears. If you do this on a white background, then what you see is an unblemished field of white. But more remarkably, if there is a line running through the blind spot, your brain fills in that line, even though it’s getting no information for that spot. If the blind spot occurs in a field filled with a regular pattern, then your brain fills in the pattern appropriately.
I’m constantly amazed by this for a couple of reasons. First, it’s downright incredible. That our brains are sophisticated enough to patch up the image we’re seeing based on what’s around our blind spot– that’s just cool. And we don’t even notice it. Before I experienced the Serendip demonstration, I had no idea that my brain was doing all this work behind the scenes. Clearly, it’s doing its job, and it’s doing it well.
But the second thing that hits me about this is what it implies about our knowledge. The blind spot demonstration shows the power of our brains, which is incredible, but it’s also a reminder about the limitations of what we can know through perception. My brain is working hard and doing a great job at patching up that image and drawing the line right through the blind spot when that dot disappears, but it doesn’t change the fact that the dot disappears. True, if I stayed in that particular arrangement forever, never moving my eyes, I’d never realize that what I was seeing was not the whole picture. The whole thing seems accurate and truthful– but it’s not. The brain may continue the patterns, but it fails to perceive the big honking black dot in front of it. What we see is not always how it is. Continue reading
According to numerous sources, last night, outside a political debate in Kentucky, a group of Rand Paul supporters threw a MoveOn member to the ground, incapacitated her, and one person stomped on the back of her head.
You read that right. Stomped on her head.
So, let’s be clear here, America. Maybe there’s been some confusion as of late. Not many people have stood up and opposed this sort of behavior. We’ve kind of let it slide. Continue reading
A housemate of mine is coming down the stairs with something in her hand.
“Ah, you going back to the library?” I ask.
She looks at me funny.
Then I realize she’s not holding a backpack– she’s holding a pair of jeans.
Stale Content Alert!
This post was written a long time ago, and my views have almost certainly evolved since then. Please keep that in mind while reading, commenting, or sharing.
For a while, I’ve tried to keep my blog relatively family-friendly. I’ve hidden more vulgar or objectionable things behind “Read More” links, and I avoid swearing. I’ve also, in the past, decided not to post about some things I find really interesting because they deal with culturally taboo subjects, like sexuality.
While I appreciate not trying to offend others, I feel like my blog is my space, and if I feel hampered in what I can post because I’m afraid I’ll tick some people off or disturb their sensibilities, I think I’m ultimately dealing myself a disservice. A blog exists to be written in, and though there are many excuses as to why I haven’t posted much lately, one of them–the question of content–is easily dealt with.
Continue readingEvery day I find new reasons to love sociology, and new places to apply it.
(There’s language in here that some might find objectionable, but at this point, I figure everyone’s mature enough to handle seeing a few naughty words. More on that here.)
It started with this post:
