I’ve been reading one of Daniel Dennett’s books, Consciousness Explained. Aside from the fact that the author has an incredible beard and is therefore correct on all matters, he can also write a very cogent book. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett outlines what he calls the Multiple Drafts approach to explaining consciousness; this blog post is my attempt to summarise that view in a couple of short analogies.

Dennett starts off by providing evidence that our time-perception is somewhat malleable: we can interpret two dots of different colours (appearing separated by a short distance in time and space) as a single moving dot that changes colour abruptly at some point. The key puzzle here is that we perceive the colour to have changed before seeing the second coloured dot. Dennett then outlines what seem to be the two mainstream points of view on how this happens.

• This is really quite heartwarming: http://www.reddit.com/r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza/
• Interesting article on current trends in fiction: http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2013/01/david-brin-our-favorite-cliche-a-world-filled-with-idiots-orwhy-films-and-novels-routinely-depict-society-and-its-citizens-as-fools/
• A ridiculous reason for a rocket to explode: https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/07/parts-installed-upside-down-caused-last-weeks-russian-rocket-to-explode/
• A very information-dense way of storing data long-term: https://phys.org/news/2013-07-5d-optical-memory-glass-evidence.html (compare http://rosettaproject.org/disk/technology/ which is much less information-dense but much more easily decoded in the event of being discovered after the collapse of civilisation)
• A cool thing to do with a Raspberry Pi and a microwave: http://madebynathan.com/2013/07/10/raspberry-pi-powered-microwave/
• I really want one of these - I think I might order one: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloud-guys/plug-the-brain-of-your-devices (also, the word “plug” is insanely wonderful when spoken in a French accent)
• An interesting idea for making the world a better place: http://web.archive.org/web/20130713135924/http://simulacrum.cc/2013/07/10/three-trends-that-push-us-towards-an-unconditional-basic-income/
• A look at how to infer causality or not, as the case may be, depending on the data: http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/if-correlation-doesnt-imply-causation-then-what-does/
• I hope they get to producing this quickly: http://technabob.com/blog/2013/05/22/lumigrids-bike-leds/
• Thank goodness for that - regular expressions are the most unreadable things ever: https://phys.org/news/2013-07-ordinary-language.html
• Something else I would do if I had eternity to play with: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voB6WiP83NU
• Glass ceiling issues: http://whatwouldkingleonidasdo.tumblr.com/post/54989171152/how-i-discovered-gender-discrimination

Sometimes some people argue that certain things are “priceless” - that is, worth an infinite amount of money to them. I posit that what this really means is that it would take work and uncomfortable imagination to evaluate the worth of that thing to them.

The example that triggered this framework was my evaluation of how much my sense of smell was worth to me. (It was late at night and I couldn’t get to sleep, so I just let my mind wander around for a bit.) I was unable to quantify the amount I would pay to keep my sense of smell, but it is certainly finite, as the following thought experiment demonstrates.

There was once a small website devoted to noting the more interesting quotes from our more idiosyncratic lecturers. It sadly vanished from the web, although after some detective work, I found a copy floating around on one of Amazon’s servers. I stored them for posterity using the archival service WebCitation, which is itself now dead, so instead I shall link to Konrad Dąbrowski’s capture.

Being bored over the summer holiday, I decided that I would document the cool things I ran across on the Internet. Over the last week, there have been many of these. If I see anything particularly amazing, it’ll go in one of these aggregation posts.

• Neurons are surprisingly beautiful
• A rather neat and very short story, Time Loop by qntm
• A bit less short but just as good a short story: I don’t know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility by qntm
• A rant with which students can all identify, in The Cambridge Student magazine: now lost from the Internet.
• An Easter Island word “tingo” means “to borrow objects from a friend’s house one by one until there are none left”: Link to the Internet Archive
• Musings on free will: Is God a Taoist?
• A thing that I just have to share again: Technical hurdles have been overcome for the first human head transplant
• The human brain is a really weird piece of kit: The Apologist and the Revolutionary
• We have to make one of these at some point: the Creme de la Creme Egg
• This is quite soothing in a weird kind of way: Things Fitting Perfectly Into Things
• It is possible to be deficient in arsenic. (Link to the Soylent Discourse forum is permanently defunct.)
• A really useful website for when you don’t want to have to spin up Wolfram|Alpha to work out time differences: Every Time Zone
• Why never to talk to the police (seriously, never talk to the police): Don’t Talk to the Police
• A fascinating book about the power of positive and negative reinforcement, and why they’re often done wrongly: Don’t Shoot the Dog
• The Church of England really took its time, but at last they’ve done it: Church of England makes Chichester child abuse apology
• The Hawkeye Initiative, for the liberation of women in comics: The Hawkeye Initiative

So yesterday the Wimbledon tennis tournament was decided. The system for verifying whether the tennis ball is out or not (and hence whether play for the point stops or continues) on the main courts is as follows:

1. The ball lands.
2. The linesperson keeping charge of the line nearest to the landing point of the ball works out whether the ball landed inside or outside the region demarcated by the line.
3. The umpire decides whether or not to overrule the linesperson’s decision.
4. The Hawkeye ball-tracking system determines whether the ball landed inside or outside the region demarcated by the line.
5. If either player disagrees with the official decision (that is, if the linesperson called “out” when the player thought the ball was in, or the linesperson was silent when the player thought the ball was out, or if the umpire overruled a decision that the player thinks was correct) then that player informs the umpire that ey wishes to “challenge” the linesperson. In this instance, the Hawkeye reading is consulted (and the ball’s trajectory slowly animated on a big screen, for added tension) and regarded as definitive.

The problem I have with this system is the process of “challenging”. Each player starts out with a challenge count of three. If a player makes a challenge, and Hawkeye contradicts the official call, then the challenge count is maintained at its current level. If a player makes a challenge, and Hawkeye agrees with the official call, then the challenge count for that player is decremented. A player cannot challenge if eir challenge count is 0. On entering a tie-break, each player’s challenge count is incremented.

I have stumbled across a LessWrong post on the importance of seeing what is real for just how cool it is. It lists such examples as:

• Vibratory Telepathy.  By transmitting invisible vibrations through the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts.  As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much deeper than those possible to other primates.
• Psychometric Tracery.  By tracing small fine lines on a surface, the Psychometric Tracer can leave impressions of emotions, history, knowledge, even the structure of other spells.  This is a higher level than Vibratory Telepathy as a Psychometric Tracer can share the thoughts of long-dead Tracers who lived thousands of years earlier.  By reading one Tracery and inscribing another simultaneously, Tracers can duplicate Tracings; and these replicated Tracings can even contain the detailed pattern of other spells and magics.  Thus, the Tracers wield almost unimaginable power as magicians; but Tracers can get in trouble trying to use complicated Traceries that they could not have Traced themselves.

I thought I would give a few more. First, I hereby rename The Eye (as that post’s author names this ability) to Force Perception, and I dub a user of any of these magics a Mage.

There is an awfully large collection of confusing words you will encounter on first coming to study at Cambridge. You pick them up really quickly in the natural run of things, but I thought perhaps a mini-dictionary might be helpful. The list is alphabetised (if I’m competent enough, anyway) and may, like so many of my writings, grow. Apologies for my crude attempts at pronunciations for the non-obvious words, but it’s very hard to find someone who can read IPA.

I wrote this when I was excessively bored during exam term of my first year. It may grow as I get better at working (I’m something of a revisionist). The advice is entirely Cambridge-based; a lot of it probably applies to other places with minor alterations. Most of this comes from personal experience.

During a supervision, your supervisor will be writing all the time. As soon as you leave the supervision, mark the sheets that are particularly important in some obvious way (eg. by colouring in the corner). That way, when you’re frantically flicking through the notes at the end of the year, you’ll see where the information you need is. By “most important”, I mean the places where the supervisor explains something fundamental to many questions, rather than the ins and outs of one particular question.

A few dubiously-real words which I think should be more widely used.

At the end of last (that is, Lent 2012-2013) term at Cambridge, I took part in the Cambridge University Computing and Technology Society Puzzlehunt (for some reason, as of this writing, they haven’t yet updated that page for this year’s Puzzlehunt, but last year’s is up there). A short summary: the Puzzlehunt is a treasure hunt around Cambridge, crossed with a whole bunch of online computing-based puzzles. It’s very difficult, and it lasts for twenty-four hours.

Hello all!

In the spirit of shouting into an echoing void, this is my first post, testing whether the setup works. Some content will probably turn up soon.

A fairly long and winding way through a proof of the three Sylow theorems.