Category Archives: Science

How the brain would prefer to read written text

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This topic is one of those ‘Where did this come from?’ out-of-the-blue subjects no one ever thinks about but, as is his wont, mariner became interested in the process.

As this post is read, is the reader reciting most of the words in their head? If you must recite each and every word in your head – called subvocalizing – you are a slow reader, about 200 words per minute. The average novel has about 100,000 words so it would take the reader just over 8½ hours without stopping, to read an average-sized novel.

Many people who read regularly, whether at work or for pleasure, subvocalize only key words in a sentence, often overlooking tense, adverbs or secondary phrases. Those who read in this style can raise their speed to about 850 words per minute cutting the novel to about 1¾ hours to be read.

Decades ago mariner took a class called “Evelyn Woods Speed Reading Class”. The objective was to learn how to read without any subvocalization at all – which is difficult to acquire. He was able to reach 1,500 words per minute which means he could read that novel in just under an hour. Amazingly, the best students reached around 8,000 words per minute. They could read that novel in 10 minutes. The trouble is that avoiding subvocalization is difficult and the average reader like mariner soon lost his speed down to about 1,000 words per minute.

These numbers sound fictitious but they are true. What brought this speed reading class back from memory is that he realized that if the brain could only use the eye part of the senses and forego all the mental imprints the ear and mouth have endured to learn to read, write and speak, it would be a lot more efficient. As mentioned in a recent post, the reasoning part of the brain is in a different section from the sense-support part of the brain.

This led mariner to marvel at how fast creatures who don’t use organized language must process reality only with the eyes. It is similar to dogs in a way because a dog’s eyesight isn’t that good but the dog’s reality is interpreted through its smell which is 1,000 times more sensitive than a human. [For this reason mariner always sneaks a bite of supper to the dog who is well aware of all the odors of the meal.]

But the real phenomenon is how fast the brain is. AI is a slowpoke. Whatever the creature, using only the eyes to garner information about reality and to resolve circumstances real time is magical. He suspects even the eyes are modified to see a broader visual reality.

Ancient Mariner

Are food prices really going up?

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There was an informative chart from NPR. The chart pointed out that a frequent pattern was the reduction in package size as a means of not raising prices. Mariner’s local supermarket also reduced options among items by taking more expensive brands off the shelf. Interestingly, the manufacturing sector distributed their goods to fewer but larger retailers. For example, mariner can no longer find Lipton decaffeinated instant tea in his county but it is still available online at Walmart.

Now he can no longer find Planters Honey Roasted mixed nuts. Mariner often has expressed concern about the future of storefront economy. He described in his home town the disappearance of a dozen stores, some were large corporations,  – thereby reducing town domestic product to virtually nothing. Grocery stores are gone, pharmacies are gone, 5&10 store is gone, numerous restaurants are gone, hardware store is gone, car dealerships are gone. One is lucky to have a job less than 20 miles away.

Converts will say, “Poo!” It’s easier to call Walmart or Amazon with our smartphone. Thinking of smartphones, how many old timers realized the precedent that was set when a simple telephone allowed a person to speak to an artificial human being instead of having an interpersonal experience that sustained community society? “Well, it’s easier than harnessing the horse!” Today, that “human voice” can’t be guaranteed to be real – even if you see them on a screen.

Tribes, extended families, individual skills, community-based cultures soon will no longer exist unless they match Google’s data bank of common values – which is an oxymoron.

Perhaps mariner is old fashioned.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner

The Old Bunch

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Picked this article from AOL news:

“This Brain Disease Is Set To Double Worldwide By 2050. Are We Prepared? What Scientists Say.

While a lot of new scientific studies are focused on better understanding and treating the most common neurodegenerative disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, diagnoses in the second-most common one, Parkinson’s disease, are steadily increasing. In fact, new research suggests that Parkinson’s cases may actually double by 2050, which raises a lot of questions about why this might be happening and how you can lower your risk. ” 

An article worth reading, including links. The statistics haven’t changed; it’s really the millennial boom that’s changing the charts

Mariner’s advice is to make an appointment with Colossal Biosciences as soon as possible to get an evolutionary DNA fix. While mariner is there he’s going to get a hair job. (see post ‘Mariner warned about this, March 4).

Ancient Mariner

The other side

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Mariner has had 38 distinct jobs in his life. Everything from delivering newspapers to a contract in Taiwan building a computer system for the nation’s first fighter aircraft. He can avow that jobs shape one’s ethic and one’s place in the culture. He has had luxury dinners with CEOs and generals; he has seen a dead dog in the basement of a row house with an unused kitchen and a destitute family. He could go on about a 90-year-old woman offering sex for 75⊄, confrontations with guard dogs, a bull and an armed woman – to say nothing about belligerent executives.

But this post isn’t about bar stool stories. Of the 38 distinct jobs in his life, four have had a profound impact on his ethic, philosophy of life and his role in society. In chronological sequence they are gas & electric meter reader, Methodist preacher, parole officer and coding supervisor for an insurance company.

During 4½ years as a meter reader, he visited the homes of the very, very poor, the laborer, the white collar worker, the wealthy and many homes that were converted to small businesses and one-nite motels. These visits provided a belief that the separation of economic classes is severe, unfair and ignored by society. Each culture has its own style of community interaction, behavioral mores and even its own dress code.

As a Methodist preacher, he learned that religion is a specialized form of politics. The Christian theology is not a mainstay; the vast majority of church goers accept a parochial set of beliefs born out of tradition rather than faith. The socializing effect of belonging to a community is a positive trait but the church building is more important. Few attendees abide by the Second Great Commandment.

Mariner was a parole officer for three years. The job exposed him to the more complex side of human experience. Life is made up of many stresses that present emotional injury, loneliness, passive/aggressive behavior, debt, health and stressed relationships due to mental disorder and abuse. He learned that the personal side of life has its own mores, taboos and rituals. As with economic classes, home life is given little importance by community or by society in general.

This last job is cited because of its similarity to today’s Trumpian world of work. Mariner worked as a supervisor in the data processing department of a large insurance company. Like every other business of its time, the computer language was COBOL. Suddenly, thanks to IBM and Microsoft and Apple, COBOL was dropped in favor of new technologies and coding methods. In the blink of an eye, mariner was laid off. All the other large companies had simultaneous layoffs for the same reason. Locally, he was left without a career. It took a long time to rebuild a career in another field. His learned ethic is that corporations are politically independent and feel no need to incorporate themselves into the worlds of workers. Just profit, profit, profit.

Humans are intelligent and very much a caring species. It seems to mariner that humans, like 3-year-olds, have no sense of decorum and make life difficult just because they can. Given overpopulation, environmental abuse and provoking Mother Nature, perhaps humans should clean out the pantry and start over again.

Ancient Mariner

 

Change

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Change can be good when it is needed. Changing underwear for example or cleaning the attic or buying another car. Every once in a while governments need to change, too. The issues are who (who changes one’s underwear), how (who decides which antiquities in the attic are kept or not kept) and why (when one already has three cars).

Change seems to be an authentic phenomenon. Often, change comes later than it should. Then change becomes difficult, even disastrous. Suppose one didn’t change their underwear until they were on the bus riding to work. Mariner decided to visit Guru to talk about the validity of change. He took a trip to Guru’s remote mountain retreat.

Mariner began their conversation by citing the broad dissatisfaction that exists in the world today, the turmoil of war and authoritarianism, and the fading confidence toward economics.

“Change”, Guru replied, “is an absolute part of existence. There is not one ion in the universe that exists without being the product of change in the  state of its energy. Where there is energy, there is change. Otherwise there would be no universe.”

“But must change be so disruptive?”, mariner asked.

“At the level of living creatures here on Earth, change is always disruptive but in smaller scales of change, it sometimes can pass without being obvious. When a newborn has a different shade of hair, it is noticed but doesn’t seem disruptive. However, the level of DNA involved in that change that forced a modification in a sequence of otherwise ‘happy’ cells was significant.”

“But humans are so proud of their mastery of so many of Earth’s processes. Why can’t they manage change better?” mariner replied. He submitted a Wiley calendar subject to make his point:

“Your cartoon reflects the difficulty and disruption caused by change”, Guru replied. “Nothing, not an ion, a sea nettle, a crow or a human makes changes until they are forced upon them. Some changes are incremental and even greatly beneficial but these are not large changes. Change becomes disruptive when entire concepts and procedures must undergo total change in a short amount of time – that is, not as slow as evolution.”

Guru continued, “The cartoon also demonstrates that change must relate to genuine pressures that are hurting life’s processes. Making changes for ulterior or irrelevant reasons only adds to the cacophony.”

Mariner thanked Guru for his insights and headed home. Mariner’s assumption is that humans aren’t as smart as they should be about managing themselves. AI can’t do it, either – because AI is a human invention.

Ancient Mariner

 

Mariner warned about this

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The biotech company Colossal Biosciences has long aspired to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth, which roamed the Northern Hemisphere thousands of years ago  during the last ice age. But for now, as a step along the way, the company has come up with something decidedly less mammoth: meet the woolly mouse.

What was the purpose of this feat of genetic engineering? Colossal’s pitch is that, with biodiversity going the way of the dodo (which the company also hopes to resurrect), saving existing species will require tweaking their DNA to make them more resilient.

In other words, Colossal has decided to fire the planet’s ecosystem and take charge of the planet’s evolution process. Ain’t the mouse cute? Just think, your great grand children will be able to go to Walmart to pick from a menu what their children will look like – sort of like buying a puppy.

Well, mariner could use some hair . . .

Ancient Mariner

About Era shifting

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Greetings, Readers

It has been pleasant, if not rewarding, avoiding television news. Watching headlines is a lot like taking slaps to the face over and over. Mariner does keep track generally through his own news email services and a number of trustworthy magazines. Television still has its saving grace through shows like NOVA (PBS) and documentaries on Netflix.

Just the other night PBS ran a show about Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two early presidents who had different perceptions about the structure and role of the emerging United States. They fought tooth and nail and were brutal politically. Honestly, there were as many dirty tricks as one witnesses with politics today. An important difference was that back then, each political battle added to the Constitution with the intent of strengthening the nation whereas today it is petty payback and disassembling the Constitution without a plan to improve it.

The general observation mariner took from the show was that moving from one era to another, whether presidents, migrating fowl or coral reefs, it is grotesquely disruptive to normal expectations. There is abuse at the individual level. New rules are yet to be known.

So it was with those early days when Europe, Russia and The United States (and indigenous natives) had several wars to determine how the new world would be split among nations.

Similarly, today a new economic future that has little to do with contemporary practices has led to a global scramble to acquire a dominant position in the ‘new world’. What frightens mariner is that the planet has its own Trumpian plan to force human life to pay for the ‘borrowing’ of too much of nature’s resources – including global warming, overpopulation and gross extinction of the planet’s biomass.

Under the circumstances, the best one can do is to love family, share with the community and be careful about insecure assets and income.

Armageddon progresses.

Ancient Mariner

Ever metaphor?

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Greetings, readers – This is an unusual post about one of our intellectual tools – the metaphor. The human brain has a logical process that, he suspects, AI and all its fellow technologies will never master – human comparative analysis (HCA).
There are about 80 million neurons (brain cells) in the human brain. On top of that, each neuron has over one million atoms. Recent scientific discoveries show that each neuron can reorganize itself internally based on the situation. A recent article wrote “The cell can call together committee meetings within the cell when conditions call for it.” It will be very hard for common electronically-based atoms to compete with neurons that can reorganize their algorithms in committee meetings at the level of an atom.

Here is a simple metaphor that encompasses the entire Trump conflict:
A cup on the counter contains creamer, honey and coffee, three liquids which have been taken from their normal world in containers. They are confused about what is happening. Then they see the approaching spoon. In fear they say, “Oh no! Here comes a spoon! What will we become?”
The spoon is Donald Trump. The liquids can only hope all will be well in the end but who knows, maybe they will end up in the kitchen drain.

Let’s label this the ‘spoon metaphor’. In one simple picture, the brain can pull together the context of its human experience involving many subconscious experiences, spatial conditions and conscious awareness to understand the comprehensive, real world experience from an approaching spoon. Mariner can’t accept that AI, seeing an approaching spoon, could interpolate the specific, undocumented meaning and provide a correct assumption.

Metaphors come in all sizes, shapes and scope. It is a common way to transfer broader meaning without using a ton of words; it a key teaching method as well as an expression of attitude. Waiting in a doctor’s waiting room, one could say they’ve been there so long that the doctor should provide beds; a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the situation is provided by the metaphor ‘provide beds’, reflecting emotion, physical restraint and organizational efficiency.

Metaphors are especially powerful when they are used to provide insight into very complex ideas. Last November 30 mariner wrote a post about what reality really looks like. He pondered the different reality seen between a human, a snail and a dog. Each will claim they see what reality really looks like but actually, the structure is completely different for each species. Without the use of broad metaphors, an article on the same phenomenon was published in an online magazine called Salon referencing an article in Discover Magazine. It ran on for pages.

Mariner habitually converts experiences into metaphors. Be glad, he saves the reader pages of reading which is often replaced by a simple and often entertaining metaphor. Eat your heart out chatGPT.

Ancient Mariner

Good AI perspective

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Virtually every commentary about AI approaches the topic at a too low perspective: the impact on jobs, privacy, energy vulnerability, etc. In fact, AI is a global issue that will change global politics, global trade and a new era of feeding the world. Below is an expert’s insights as to how AI will change the world – worth reading. From AXIOS:

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-am-167e2440-d545-11ef-86f8-718f1121da12.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

Ancient Mariner

Homo’s predetermined job for Planet Earth history

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It was just yesterday in Earth years that the first placental primate emerged, about 87 million years ago. It was the beginning of the Mammalian Age. Over those centuries,  mammals took many paths to become all the warmblooded, childbearing creatures that are around today; for example, mice, gorillas, reindeer, panthers, lions, beavers, monkeys, cattle, squirrels, bears, horses, gophers, whales, rabbits, sheep, wolves, warthogs, etc.

Dendropithecus turned up 13 million years ago, an early ancestor to a new line called Apes. Gibbons diverged from the line of great apes some 18–12 million years ago and that of orangutans (subfamily Ponginae) diverged from other great apes at about 14 million years ago.

African hominids diverged from orangutans about 12 million years ago. Hominins (including precursors of humans and the  Australopithecine and Panina subtribes) parted from the Gorllini tribe (gorillas) between 8 and 9 million years ago; Australopithecine (including the extinct biped ancestors of humans) separated from the Pan genus (containing chimpanzees and bonobos) 4–7 million years ago. The Homo genus emerged as H. habilis over 2 million years ago. To cut ancestry short, 300,000 years ago, the early relatives of Homo sapiens arrived.

The point is this: Homo sapiens and all its fellow mammals, some plant eaters, some scavengers, some herding, some predators, are in this Mammalian Age together. In an era that began 87 million years ago, it has become clear that humans have a predetermined role that in just 300,000 years mammals are disappearing at increasing rates. 10,000 years ago, wild mammals represented 99% – today only1% represent wild mammals. The rest have been scavenged big time by Homo who represents 32% of mammals along with 67% represented by homo-owned mammalian livestock.

Are humans just a pawn in the planet’s galactic history? Are we  another version of the giant dinosaurs who were bringing the Pleistocene Age to a close when the asteroid struck? The planet has few rules life forms must follow; one of them is ‘survival of the fittest’ Twice in the far distant past the planet wiped out all life with ice and with volcanic reorganization of the earth itself.

After an unusually long period of stable, supportive weather, the planet has begun to respond to another Homo behavior, carbonization, to begin raising the surface temperature of the planet. Further, Earth’s molten core is becoming active. Does Earth have plans to begin reorganizing the continents? It is predicted that Earth will undergo a global ice age in 200,000 years.

What does the future look like? Homo will have to wait to see what future versions of AI and chatGPT have to tell us. Is AI part of the next age sans mammals?

Ancient Mariner