Ciarán Ryan notebook

Today’s Sunday Times magazine was very strong - May 11 2008.

Follow up on disfigured soldier / photos from crushed Prague uprising - Josef Koudelka, photographer / and a piece about the subject of a forthcoming BBC documentary ‘Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go’ - on BBC4 on Thursday, May 22, at 9pm

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article3886308.ece

“The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire – the subject of a film by Kim Longinotto to be shown later this month on BBC4 – looks after children who have been multiply excluded from mainstream primary schools. These are not yet the hooded teenagers of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company: the youngest is just 6, the oldest 12. All of them are thought to have suffered significant neglect in the first two years of life, which has a ruinous effect on brain development. Fundamentally they are still babies. The building blocks of their personalities are not joined. They are chaotic, unpredictable and unable to function in a group without disrupting. That’s the theory. “

** Is there proof that neglect effects brain development? It sounds convincing - and it seems to be becoming a popular view.

Also: “Children with attachment disorders don’t just rage and spit and climb up on roofs: they connect inappropriately to total strangers, looking for warmth.”

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Also in the newspaper: Spaced learning

Monkseaton, which is a comprehensive in a deprived area, consistently wins high grades and has sent pupils to top British universities and Ivy League colleges in America.

Kelley’s technique, known as “spaced learning”, is based on the research of Douglas Fields, a neuroscientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Baltimore. He has found that connections between developing brain cells form most effectively when they are allowed breaks from stimulation.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. Albert Einstein

Tim Berners Lee talked about the semantic web to Tamsin Toddin - The Independent 17 May 1999.

Berners-Lee: “If the Web turns all the documents in the world into one big book, then the semantic web will turn all the databases in the world into one big database”

This allows inter-operability

Seven years on,  the BBC collaborated with Microsoft Live Labs. Photosynth  creates three- dimensional representations of some of the most dramatic buildings in Britain by combining hundreds of different photographs.

Using metadata.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/bbc/

Does British magician Paul Daniels have negative buoyancy? Apparently he can’t use his swimming pool, because he sinks rather than floats.

A neuron can connect with 80,000 others. Human brain contains 20 billion neurons, capable of 100 trillion connections (does this include the brain gas-stuff used to make connections?).

So in 1999, Charles Jonscher in ‘Wired Life’ book said computers are nowhere near to brains.

And that knowledge is a state of being.

Information is transitive.

“We must not mistake gigabytes for wisdom”

Cyberspace can become a dream world says John Suler.

http://www-usr.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html

Rapid shifts of scenario - without travelling over ground - web surfing is like dreaming. Users can transcend the laws of space and physics.

People and images appear out of nowhere.

Time is irrelevant.

When computer freezes - it’s like a paralysis nightmare?

Dissociation  - people “lose themselves” - in web surfing and dreams. Your dreams may be from you - but are fragmented - and the dreamer is not aware.

Wish fulfillment.

** This reminds me of the san dot paintings - their red line between the human and spirit world.

Evolutionary theory differs from behaviour genetics:

It’s unwise to deduce ethical premises from biology.

But you cannot understand ethics without looking to biology for explanations.

See:

Maths:
Robert Axelrod
John Maynard Smith
(Game theory illuminates why self-interested individual co-operate)

Evolutionary psychology:
Leda Cosmides (cheating causes)

Edward O’Wilson wrote Sociobiology: The new synthesis
Peter Singer attempted to refute in: The Expanding Circle (1979)

People are co-operative and competitive  - see:

Emile Durkheim’s ’social facts’ -  Customs, institutions, nations etc that are more than the sum of their individual parts.

Super-Kamiokande Experiement - Japanese mine shaft.

Scients can’t find 90% of the universe’s matter…

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943

Also:

What happened to the hot badge?

“And if you are the partying type, all you have to do is don your `Hot Badge’ which has electronic information about your taste in food, music, hobbies programmed in it. When you enter a social gathering, it automatically takes you to other like-minded pe ople who are wearing similar badges!”

http://www.hinduonnet.com/businessline/2001/05/13/stories/141339g3.htm

If two identical foetuses look once in opposite directions, their brains will be different.

he wrote to Alfred Lord Tennyson:

“Sir: in your otherwise beautiful poem The Vision of Sin  There is a verse which reads: every moment dies a man/every moment one is born.

“It must be manifest that, if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill — I would suggest you have it read: every moment dies a man/every moment 1 1/16 is born.
“I am, Sir, yours etc, Charles Babbage”

See also: Ada Lovelace.  She tried to resolve the workings of the human heart through a programmable machine?

The station existed until 23 March 2001, at which point it was deliberately de-orbited, breaking apart during atmospheric re-entry over the South Pacific Ocean.

So they never did attach a giant lead to it. Interesting 1999 idea though - becomes an electric motor - allows Mir to reposition itself.

Tether Applications in San Diego

http://www.tetherapplications.com/

More here:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_19991129/ai_n14270283

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir

zif-268 - helps us retain the memories of the day as we sleep?

Is it zif-268? It’s on the tip of my tongue… I’m sure it was zif something… or was it tif? I’m sure I left that piece of paper around here somewhere…

“Likely entry points into buildings are broken or missing airbricks, gaps around
pipework, gaps under exterior and garage doors and faulty drains. Older properties
with cast iron soil vent pipes should have a wire balloon fitted to the top of the soil
stack. If your foul drain has an intercepted manhole you should ensure the
interceptor cap is in place.”

http://www.threerivers.gov.uk/GetResource.aspx?file=EnvHealth_PestFactsheet_Rats.pdf