Birds 1, Quantum Physicists 0

Turns out migratory birds might be better at entangling quantum particles than us, and they've been doing it for a long time.

Apparently their eyes can see the earth's magnetic field because they have structures in their eyes that can create entangled electrons from incident photons. As these electrons split apart, they remain entangled but are effected differently by earths magnetic field. This difference effects the electrical signal going to their brain, and is then translated into something the bird can see.

Wild. How did something like that evolve? This is very illustrative of the idea that the way we (or animals) understand the world around us is really only an approximation of reality, and through evolution we have taken advantage of whatever sources of information we can that prove to be useful from a survival perspective.

Augmented Reality

Cell phone v. Zombies

This is so freaking cool. I've seen examples of augmented reality before, but this really shows how interactive and potentially fun this could be.

The graphics seem to be limited by the hardware at this point... Wouldn't it be easier to just transmit the output of the camera to a desktop computer, have the much beefier computer do all of the processing, and then send the processed image back to the cell phone device?

My guess is that sending all of that video data would cause a lot of lag... but then again I just saw a demo of this other really cool technology that allows you to play graphics intensive games in your browser, and all of the heavy lifting is done by servers. If they can do it over the Internet, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do it in this case.

Crowdsourcing Yourself?

Image via Wikipedia

The jellybean jar experiment is a relatively well known study that shows a rather surprising fact. The experiment itself involves asking a room full of people to estimate the number of jelly beans in a jar. Each person comes up with their own heuristic for making an estimate. For example, one person might come up with a guess for how many beans would make up a single layer at the bottom of the jar and then multiply by the number of layers they think would fit. Another person might have a completely different way of arriving at an estimate. Despite the fact that many people are way way off in their guesses, if you take the average of all the guesses you'll get an answer that is shockingly close to the correct one. Interestingly though, if you allow the people in the room to discuss their methods before the estimates, the average of their answers will get worse.

The reason this happens is because each person's original guesses are independent - they may not be good guesses, but the error they introduce into the average is unique. However, when you let them discuss, some will be convinced to use another person's technique. When this happens the errors no longer cancel each other out, they end up reinforcing each other and dragging the average away from the true answer.

This is a pretty interesting result when you think about how financial markets work and the role of security analysts in estimating the value of companies. Do our estimates of the stock prices get worse when a new report comes out? One person's opinion (albeit a much more informed person) is influencing many many people, whos individual trades will determine the actual price of the stock.

Anyway, the reason I bring the study up is because recently some psychologists also thought it was pretty neat. In a study described in Scientific American they wanted to see if they could reproduce the effect in a single persons brain. Two groups made a few estimations of a date in history (like the day the Magna Carta was signed). One group made a series of guesses, one after the other. The second group made several guesses, but had to write down reasons their earlier guesses might have been wrong and to use those reasons to form a new guess. And while their secondary guesses were no more accurate than their first, the average of their guesses turned out to be much better! This is in contrast to the first group, who's averages were not as good.

So it seems that we can harness the power of independent errors to make our own individual estimates more accurate, we just have to act like we have multiple personality disorder. For me this conclusion raised a lot of interesting questions, and I hope the psychologists try to tackle some of them.

• If a person has several facts relevant to a situation, would they make better choices if they try to consider all of the information and try to synthesize it into a single answer (the way we're all familiar with) or would they be better off making a series of estimations based on each individual fact and then averaging them together?
• What other kinds of problems is this method better at answering?
• Should we eliminate debate? Have members of congress vote on things without discussing them?
• The next time I want to count my jelly beans should I just pay a hundred people on the Mechanical Turk service to look at a picture of it and guess?

Blurring the Line

"I hate listening to people's dreams. It is like flipping through a stack of photographs. If I'm not in any of them and nobody is having sex, I just don't care."

Despite what Dennis from It's Always Sunny says, I'm going to tell you guys about two episodes from last night. I'm not really sure if you'd even call these dreams... they kind of blur the line of dreaming and being awake.

1) I wake up suddenly in my bed pumped full of adrenaline and terror. The room is very dark, but I can clearly see movement on both my left and right. As I sit with my back up against the wall, unable to move or speak, the movements resolve into three distinct people. They simply stand there, faces dark and indistinct, but they continue to shift around and watch me. When I can take it no longer, I lunge over to my nightstand to turn on the light. As soon as the light comes on the watchers instantly become familiar objects in my room, a chair and closet doors.

2) I'm having a dream where I am in a room with about 10 other people. Someone cries out and collapses after being bitten by a spider the size of my hand. The orange and black spider scurries around the room and we all begin to chase it to try to kill it before it gets anyone else. I finally corner him and try to smash him with a stick. At the very moment of the deathblow I suddenly find myself standing in my room next to my bed, again filled with terror. I feel something crawling on my arm and look down to see the spider climbing up towards my hand. With a cry I reach out with my other hand and turn on the light. Again, the moment the light comes on the spider disappears, leaving me standing alone in my room.

What the hell is going on here?! Waking up and imagining people and things in the darkness is something that happens to me often enough. But this has to be the first time something from one of my dreams has followed me into the real world... Any sleep-experts know what to call these?

Reading Code

These days I've been reading a lot of source code, and it can get pretty miserable if the code isn't well commented or if it isn't properly formatted.

It's a time-honored tradition (or requirement) to indent code so that you can see when statements are nested. This is ok, but for long documents where the nesting statements can stretch for pages and pages this can be inadequate. I feel like a good IDE must have a way of telling at a glance how deep you are.

I'm sure there are lots of tricks out there, but has anyone thought of displaying the nesting level in a 3rd dimension or colormap? For example, a line of code that looks further away than its neighbors would be clearly on a different nesting level, and you'd be able to instantly grasp the structure of the code you're looking at.

Am I crazy? Someone with more experience please tell me your secrets. (I'm looking at you Paul).

Thunderstorms are even sweeter when you're watching them from a skyscraper with big windows.

Ping.fm is pretty sweet!