CPSIA

The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) isn't exactly news, but I found out recently that most of the people I know aren't really aware of some of the controversy surrounding it. This article on Forbes has a fairly good roundup of some of the consequences of the law, and as far as I know, any attempts made to modify the law have failed so far.

Where Does the Time Go

So, about a year ago, the company I was working for had an employee art fair. It was a neat idea, although they only gave about 20 days between the announcement and when everything would be put on display. I knew it wasn't enough time for me to make something new, but it had inspired me to take a couple things that had been on my mind then and put them into a 3D scene. At the time, I figured it would take two, maybe three months to make it.

After about four months of working on it, it became fairly apparent that I had overestimated my ability, and probably underestimated the complexity of what I was trying to do. There were quite a few times I thought about writing something here, and a few times I even started to, but I kept telling myself that I decided to do this other project and I wanted to finish it, or at least have something to show for it, before getting back to writing.

I started over a couple times as it wasn't turning out the way I wanted it to, and I've basically put it aside for now. I've only completed about 20% of what I had originally pictured, and even what I do have I'm not that happy with, it has some flaws and less detail then what I would like it to have, but it's something.

Full image

A few months ago I realized that I had been making a few mistakes. One I've mentioned a few times here, that unhappiness can be defined as the distance between the reality that you believe, and the reality that is. I think this actually applies in a couple ways.

The first being my estimate of how long this project would take me, and even though I was somewhat aware of it fairly early in the process, it was still a difficult one to let go of. There was a part of me that thought I might just whip together everything that was missing in a burst of inspiration. Those unreasonable expectations made the project less enjoyable, more frustrating, and that frustration made the art project more like a chore then something I wanted to do, and my progress was that much slower for it.

The second mistake, or mistaken perception I had, I think was much worse. It's an insidious viewpoint, one I've seen other people take, with what I would describe as tragic consequences. Luckily, I held this viewpoint with something fairly minor, but I'm still pretty disappointed with myself that I fell into it. I'm not really sure what the best way to describe it is, I suppose we can call it the fear of "wasted time". That was what kept bringing me back to working on that picture, the thought that I just need to have something to show for the time I had spent working on it. That if I didn't have anything, that time I spent on it would have been wasted. I was too focused on getting results to appreciate what I was learning along the way. I could have stopped working on it before I had anything completed, and I still would have learned something. I still would have had that experience, that was bringing my ability closer to what I had originally overestimated it to be already. Instead though I was focused on what it could be, what I thought it should be, and anything less was failure.

Those two perceptions combined were pretty self defeating. Even if I had gotten the entire scene close to what I had first pictured, if it would have taken me three years, then at that point all I would have seen was something much less then what it should have been after three years of work. In some sense I do look at it that way, I'm not happy with the results I do have. It's a perception that's hard to let go of.

I find it somewhat disconcerting that I fell into that trap, as it was one I was already aware. I know I'm not perfect, but I do like to think that foreknowledge of these kinds of things would let me see them coming. I said I've seen people make this mistake with what I would call tragic consequences. That story is actually how I became aware of this point of view originally. When I was living with Jim & Cheryl I had a friend who was in an abusive marriage. I think she opened up to me about it more than with other people, because in some way I understood that what she needed most was some one who would listen, without telling her that she should leave him, that she was making a mistake. She already had those people in her life, who were always disapproving. Instead, I listened to it all, the good and the bad. I think she just needed someone to know, to understand, and I tried to be that person. There's more to it of course, but that's a whole other story. However, one time I did ask her, why hadn't she left him? Her first response was to say, "But, we've been together for eight years." It took me a while to realize the implications of that statement.

That wasn't the only reason she stayed of course, but I thought it was telling that it was the first thing she said. That marriage was eight years of her life that she didn't want to see as a failure, as wasted time. And that only becomes a tighter trap as time goes on, how can it get any easier when it's ten years, twenty? I don't believe that view point of wasted time can apply to the past, I don't think there's anything we can do today, that will change yesterday from meaningful to meaningless. But when that becomes the only reason left, when the fear of having wasted time already past is the only thing tying us to a situation that will never be what we want it to, perhaps we can waste that moment, and all the one's that follow. That would be tragic indeed.

Free Will

A recent article in Wired discussed a study that may show how brain activity can predict your decisions before you make them. The study only involved very simple decision making, whether to push a button with your left or right hand, but they were able to predict what people would choose to do seven seconds before they did it. They didn't have complete accuracy, and say it may not apply to more complex decisions, but it does bring up an interesting subject.

Could our actions be predetermined by the laws of physics? If every thought and action could be linked to a chemical process in the brain, and those reactions were predictable, then animals would be organic machines, simply carrying out the programming encoded within their DNA. That may not be the case, but assuming that it is, does that leave any room for free will? I think that it could, and I'll come back to that.

For now, please watch this cartoon.


Double Slit Experiment

Ok, everyone familiar with quantum physics now? Good. Now this dealt with electrons specifically, but actually everything travels as a set of wave functions at the subatomic level. There are different interpretations of this, but I'll just stick to one as it doesn't really affect my main topic. So, in answer to the old question "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?", we would have to say yes, it does. And no, it doesn't. And at the same time, it didn't fall, and it exploded, and it traveled to mars. The wave function of the tree (or the wave function of every subatomic particle in the tree) and the air that would make the noise encompasses every possible path that they could take. And each of those possibilities has a chance of being true. Once observed, the wave function collapses into a single possibility. You could say that quantum physics restates my "perception is reality" belief as "reality is perception".

Quantum physics plays havoc with predestination. This raises some interesting possibilities to inject free will back into biology, even if our actions are based entirely on brain activity. Since we're also made of subatomic particles, the substance of our brains and the decisions that we make could also be said to exist in a wave function. When you pass a coworker in the hallway and they say "Hello", you say "Hello" back, do nothing, slap them the in the face, fall over and make a sound, chew your leg off, drop your pants, and every other possibility. However, we don't experience this because we are constantly observing ourselves and those around us, so the wave functions collapse immediately.

Since information is limited to the speed of light, we get to observe ourselves before others do, and collapse our own wave functions. Quantum mechanics is already the Pope of Weird Town, it doesn't really make it that much stranger to think that the observer may in some way be able to choose among those wave functions to affect their collapse. Bam, free will again.

That does leave one interesting question I will leave you with though. We aren't actually observing the chemical reactions in our brains, we're simply observing our own actions. In the experiment, the observers could monitor MRI activity and observe the brain making it's decision seven seconds before the subject acted. In such a situation, if the scientific observers are collapsing the wave function, before the person has become aware of his own thoughts, how does that affect free will?

Recycling Toxins

I recently came across an article which stated that only a few years we may see plastics made from the air pollution byproducts of other manufacturing processes. Being a fan of efficient systems, I think this is a great idea. Here is a graphic to demonstrate the elegance of such a system.



For those who prefer that joke in video form, it's been done. Between material reuse and electricity generating clothing, the future looks like a bright utopia.

Meanwhile... On YouTube

I've come across/been sent a number of videos lately, so I thought I would share them.

How many men does it take to build Stonehenge? One.

Awareness test more interesting than it sounds.

Nothing beats water balloons in slow motion.

Obligatory robot suits.

And... live action Mario.

Ingenious Means Genious? What A Country!

There's something ingenious about garfield minus garfield.

Extra bonus psychiatry rant, that also doesn't explain the post title.

Moore's Law Has Nothing On This

When an article has a title like Tiny Brain-Like Computer Created, how can I not comment on it? I think this article should give a fairly good glimpse of where nanotechnology is going to take us. A quantum computer whose transistors, rather than having 2 states, have 4.3 billion states, is the kind of idea that makes me salivate. Of course, that kind of application for these machines is still a long, long way off. Now we just need the tiny brain-like software.