Human beings are Bayesian thinkers

This report does make sense to me. In particular, Steven Levitt, in his visit to Google pointed out that in the prehistoric world, the cost of making a false causual connection is low (such as carrying a rabbit's foot around), while the cost of not making an accurate prediction from a small sample size (i.e., you hear a roar of a tiger --- the last time you heard a roar of a tiger, your friend got eaten. Do you stop to think, "That's only a sample size of one?") could be very high, hence superstition prevails.

Indeed, some people suspect that the parsimony of Bayesian reasoning leads occasionally to it going spectacularly awry, with whatever process it is that forms the priors getting further and further off-track rather than converging on the correct distribution.

That might explain the emergence of superstitious behaviour, with an accidental correlation or two being misinterpreted by the brain as causal. A frequentist way of doing things would reduce the risk of that happening. But by the time the frequentist had enough data to draw a conclusion, he might already be dead.

The American Pika will soon be extinct

I was very tempted to title this post: "Republicans are Evil, Part V". Lara Hansen, Senior Scientist of Climate Change at the World Wildlife Fund came to give a talk about the impact of global warming on animal habitats, and mentioned in passing that the American Pika is one of the most affected by global warming.

I asked her why if there was such consensus among climate scientists that global warming was real there's so much controversy in the papers. Her response was that the press loves to find "balance", and always quote the same 5 "scientists" in Virginia who on the "opposite side", even though 3000 other climate scientists all come to the same consensus: that the effect is real, and that if we do everything we can, we might be able to limit warming to 2 degrees centigrade. My guess is that those 5 "scientists" were really bought off by the petroleum industry, which like all big-business spends a lot of money lobbying the GOP. (Not to say that Democrats can't be bought off, but they tend to have opposing special interests to support that balance their desire to be bought off by big corporations)

You can see the same effect at work over the so-called Intelligent Design controversy: the only people who see the theory of evolution as being "only a theory" are the same right-wing idiots at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, yet the New York Times (amongst other newspapers) insist on treating those idiots with the same amount of respect as serious scientists like Richard Dawkins.

Anyway, a little bit about this picture: Lisa & I shot this picture in 2002 on a backpacking/hiking trip through Grand Teton National Park. I felt very lucky to be able to get this close with a 200mm lens --- at that time I certainly did not know that the Pika will be a victim of global warming. That trip was photographically very rewarding, and I can only hope that the Coast-to-Coast next year will also be as productive.

American pikas are particularly vulnerable to global warming because they reside in areas with cool, relatively moist climates like those normally found in mountaintop habitats. As temperatures rise due to increasing emissions of heat-trapping gases, many alpine animals are expected to seek higher elevations or migrate northward in an attempt to find suitable habitat. Yet, American pikas in these regions have little option for escape from the pressures of climate change because migration across low-elevation valleys represents an incalculably high risk-and perhaps an impossibility under current climate regimes-for them. 

Movie Review: Lost in Translation

This is not a great movie. It's been widely critically acclaimed (Rotten Tomatoes rating of 95%), but compared to the delightful pair of movies Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, it felt like a complete waste of time. The characters did not have a connection other than a general sense of midlife ennui. The humor is mostly based on the juxtaposition of the typical ugly American who does not bother so much as to learn a tiny bit of a foreign language before landing on foreign shores with a modern Japanese culture that is admittedly quite bizarre. But seriously, I can't believe that a 24-year old in Japan by herself would not find more interesting things to do than what the Scarlett Johansson character did.

Two thumbs down. I feel compelled to try to save my friends the hour and 40 minutes that represent this movie.

Movie Review: Batman Begins

Comic book superheroes are a form of modern mythology. Even the comic book themselves "reboot" the stories on a regular basis, and each writer seems to bring a new sensibility or a different perspective to the stories. What I find fascinating is that there is a sort of "open-source" approach to the mythologies: good ideas get elaborated upon, and bad ideas get ignored in later retellings of the same story.

Batman, for instance, gets retold regularly (by Frank Miller, who did a fantastic job with The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One), and there are perhaps only a few inviolable parts of the canon: his alter-ego is playboy millionaire Bruce Wayne, and his parents were murdered in an alley shooting. All else is up for grabs.

Christopher Nolan, who also made Memento, takes a non-linear approach to the story, spending a good hour on the development of Bruce Wayne and his transformation from rich orphan to vigilante to hero. I thought the choice of Ra's Al Ghul, and the Scarecrow as the villains of the piece to be a great move: the story becomes much more about Bruce Wayne and Batman than it would be about his colorful adversaries.

Highly recommended. (And for a more in depth review, see: Matt Brunson's)

Ipod photo 60GB review

My brothers gave me an ipod photo 60G for my birthday, and it's taken me this long before getting around to a review. The first thing I did was to take it on a 16 mile hike up half-dome. (Half-dome is not a wilderness experience, so it's not like you're losing anything by listening to music) The ipod held up fine on the 10 hour hike, and seemed to handle abuse just fine.

I did acquire a Speck skin for the ipod (hint: don't use the screen protector, it scratches the screen!) pretty early on.

There's something special about having your entire music collection in one place (and having 60GB means you'll never have to choose which CDs you bring with you), and the ipod does sound good when used with a decent set of headphones.

The big minuses have to do with the hard drive: my ipod seems to be particularly sensitive to knocks or sharp motions, which don't cause my ipod to skip but do cause it to suddenly stop playing until I push the play button again. It even does that when I'm just moving the ipod a little quickly. The sudden stop doesn't happen a lot when hiking with my ipod in my camelbak, but does seem to happen a distressing number of times when cycling with it in my jersey pockets. (I've since switched to an ipod shuffle for cycling) I see people running with the ipod strapped to their arms, so clearly, those armband things would probably work for cycling as well, but I don't like the idea of having something wrapped around my arm, and my shuffle works just fine for situations where I'm likely to get knocked around.

In any case, I have the ipod to thank for the sudden increase in music listening (much more in the last 3 months than in the previous 3 years combined), and access to podcasts (I highly recommend Radio Memories podcasts, a nice collection of old-time radio broadcasts during the golden age of radio). On the other hand, given how it has caused me to spend more money buying CDs to feed the darn thing (a direct consequence of my listening to more music), maybe I shouldn't be so thankful!

Stereo Systems

Lisa's all-in-one stereo system broke, and she asked if I would get her one. "It doesn't have to be too expensive," she said, "it's not like either of us are picky about sound systems." "Wait a minute, I'm picky!" Then I realized that for my entire adult life, I had never even owned a pair of speakers.

So the day after Christmas, we took the time to visit Magnolia Audio/Video in Palo Alto (we were on the way home after a lunch with some of Lisa's friends in South San Francisco). My best audio system is a pair of Sennheiser 600s hooked up to a Headroom headphone amp. The combination sounds incredibly good, and I didn't expect to be able to approach the quality in a full size stereo system without a lot of money, but I wanted a calibration against what was possible.

I hate shops that employ sales people, so we first had to wait patiently to find a sales guy who would open up one of their listening rooms so we could hear what a really good system would sound like. Our first listen was to a pair of $1400 speakers mated to a $1400 integrated amp. This was our first experience with a true hi-fi system, and it truly was amazing. The speakers did disappear into the background and we could locate the singer and instruments in appropriate locations inj front of us. We were impressed, but not prepared to fork out $2800, especially since we knew our listening location would not be as ideal as a listening room in a hi-end audio shop.

We walked out to try to find another audio shop, but none of the other audio places were opened on the day after Christmas, so we came back and walked around. In the clearance area of the store, however, I spotted a pair of Boston Acoustics CR95 speakers at 50% off. ($300 a pair) Lisa admired the maple box, which would fit in with the rest of the decor, so we asked to audition it against other speakers.

The sales guy moved the speakers into the room and wired it up, and after some time, we got to compare it against a set of $1200 speakers. These sounded just as good to us as the more expensive pair, so I knew we would buy the speakers. Then it was a matter of finding an amplifier. We auditioned three Denons: the DRA 295, a 50W amp, the 85W version, and the 100W version. The 100W version was clearly bad --- the speakers sounded like they were being overpowered. (All amplifiers sound the same, so there's no point auditioning different brands --- shop by power, price and features) The difference between the 50W and the 85W version was subtle --- Lisa couldn't tell the difference, and I could barely tell the difference (and it could easily have been my imagination). Given that our apartment was so small that even the 50W could drive the speakers louder than our neighbors could stand, we saved the $100 and bought the 50W integrated amplifier ($230), which came with AM/FM and video capability. The Toshiba DVD player I'd bought 4 years ago would play CDs, so we were set except for cables, one set of which would be used to drive the amp from my ipod.

It took an hour to get everything set up once we got home, but the sound was still amazing when we were done. I was impressed by how good everything sounded, and Lisa spent a good part of the day listening to music just because of how good it sounded. In fact, the resolution of the system was so good that I quickly became disappointed by how the ipod sounded compared to the same CD played through the Toshiba DVD player. I'd spent the better part of 3 days turning my CD collection into 320-VBR MP3s for my ipod, and now it looks like I prefer the sound of the CDs to the convenience of the ipod.

Excession, by Iain Banks

A culture novel, Banks' utopia where Minds (AIs) determine the future of a human-like race. This is a reasonably good novel, on par with Consider Phlebas, but not as good as his best culture novel, Use of Weapons. A nit-picky detail: 32-bit identifiers for his minds isn't very realistic, even though they look neat (structured like IP addresses). Nevetheless, this book is complex enough that a second reading showed up gaps in my first reading that I missed, so the book is still recommended. In particular, the conversation between minds (which would never be anything like what's described in this book) is entertaining.

The funniest part of the book comes early:
An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilizations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near aboslute power and control which your halloweed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your preists.

Republicans are Evil Part IV

Thanks to Angry Bear for the link and pointer.

Vehicle Hell

First, Lisa bashed the car into a lamp-post after taking my mom to the airport. It's minor damage, but the body shops are quoting $1100 for repair, which is too much for a 7 year old car, so we're just going to spend $8 on touch-up paint and letting it sit as is.

Then, on Christmas day, the front deraileur cable of the tandem broke in the middle of a short ride. Having only the granny to ride home with was kinda fun. Not. This wasn't too bad to fix. After that, we went on a ride on the day after Christmas. There, we discovered that the 30 tooth, the 27 tooth, and the 24t cogs are worn down enough that the (relatively new) chain was skipping, making standing impossible in those gears. A replacement cassette (at a Performance Bikes sale) was $68.

A great way to end 2005!

Philip Pullman in The New Yorker

This week's New Yorker has a great article about Philip Pullman, including his opinion about Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, and the themes behind His Dark Materials. The entire article is worth reading, and Pullman makes great points about Tolkein & Lewis' works.

His books have been likened to those of J. R. R. Tolkien, another alumnus, but he scoffs at the notion of any resemblance. “ ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is fundamentally an infantile work,” he said. “Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He’s interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.” When it comes to “The Chronicles of Narnia,” by C. S. Lewis, Pullman’s antipathy is even more pronounced. Although he likes Lewis’s criticism and quotes it surprisingly often, he considers the fantasy series “morally loathsome.”

In Pullman’s view, the “Chronicles,” which end with the rest of the family’s ascension to a neo-Platonic version of Narnia after they die in a railway accident, teach that “death is better than life; boys are better than girls . . . and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it.”

Sexual love, regarded with apprehension in Lewis’s fiction and largely ignored in Tolkien’s, saves the world in “His Dark Materials,” when Lyra’s coming of age and falling in love mystically bring about the mending of a perilous cosmological rift. “The idea of keeping childhood alive forever and ever and regretting the passage into adulthood—whether it’s a gentle, rose-tinged regret or a passionate, full-blooded hatred, as it is in Lewis—is simply wrong,” Pullman told me.

Christmas Eve Steep Ravine/Matt Davis

With the forecast for weather in the mid-60s, we had to do a hike what I consider the prettiest hike in the Bay Area: Steep Ravine/Matt Davis. Usually, we do Matt Davis/Steep Ravine from Pantoll Ranger Station, but with heavy fog at the start, we opted for the reverse, descending Steep Ravine and coming up Matt Davis. This was the most beautiful I've ever seen the area. As a passing hiker said, "Nothing but scenery and more scenery. You're going to hate it!" Coming up Matt Davis was a surfacing out of the woods into gorgeous open space.

We shot well over 100 pictures on this hike that day, and you can see the selected shots below.

The start of a beautiful hike

 

Larry finishes descending the ladder on Steep Ravine

 

Along the Steep Ravine Trail

 

Looking down into Stintson Beach

 

Stintson Beach on Christmas Eve

Yes, this is why we pay high California State taxes. 

Stintson Beach

 

Along the Matt Davis Trail

 

The Dreamy, Misty Light of Christmas Eve

 

A shaded view of the Pacific