Human Mind!!

Variable B “screens” variable A from variable C when learning the value of B makes A and C no longer dependent on one another; once you know B, A says nothing about C.   Screening is a useful concept, but we are often over eager to apply it.  For example:

Mood Swings – Since your internal state must pass through time, you know that in the absence of outside influences, your state today can only depend on your state two days ago via the intermediary of your state yesterday.  So if something bad happened to you two days ago, but yesterday you felt fine, you might conclude you are over it; that bad event can’t hurt your mood today unless it causes some new outside influence on you.  Alas, your mood only summarizes a small part of your internal state.  What happened two days ago can pop up and bother you today, even if yesterday you were fine.

Disagreement – When someone disagrees with you, you should wonder what they know that you do not. They might explain their reasons for their differing belief, i.e., their evidence and analysis, and you might hear and ponder those reasons and yet find that you still disagree.  In this case you might feel that the fact that they disagree no longer informs you on this topic; the reasons for their belief screen their belief from informing your belief.  And yes, if they could give you all their reasons, that would be enough.  But except in a few extremely formal contexts, this is not even remotely close to being true.  We are usually only aware of a small fraction of the relevant evidence and analysis that influences our beliefs.   Disagreement is problematic, even after you’ve exchanged reasons.

Evolved Betrayal – We take actions that influence people around us, and we wonder how blameworthy we are regarding those actions.  We know evolution shaped our minds to promote our selfish genetic interests relative to others, but we’d like to feel we can ignore that fact when we are consciously aware of positive intentions toward them.  If our conscious intentions toward others were our only evolution-influenced mental factors which change our behavior toward others, this would be correct; intentions would screen evolved selfishness from our behavior.  Alas, this seems quite unlikely.  Our minds are very complex, and a great many processes influence each choice we make, processes about which we are mostly unaware.

For example, if we take an action that gives us selfish benefits, and if our minds saw clues with enough info to feasibly identify that selfish action, the fact that we had no conscious awareness of intending to achieve that selfish benefit should offer little reassurance.  It is a good bet that our mind was influenced by this selfish benefit, as well as by the impressions others might get from seeing such a selfish action.  You can hurt the ones you love, on “purpose.”

Water Under the Bridge

This is the most extraordinary, poignant, cartoon I’ve seen in a very long time. Bravo, Mr. Fish. It captures it all, the sorrow and struggle and final triumph of the last 148 years.

Human Thought

I was a having a discussion with a well thought  friend of mine  but on  a different topic but that made me to think  what are the basic characteristics of Human Thought Process.

I see four  board categories :

• The ability to combine and recombine different types of knowledge and information in order to gain new understanding.
  
• The ability to apply the solution for one problem to a new and different situation.
• The ability to create and easily understand symbolic representation of computation and sensory input
• The ability to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

Want

Want
Joan Larkin

She wants a house full of cups and the ghosts
of last century’s lesbians;I want a spotless
apartment, a fast computer.She wants a woodstove,
three cords of ash, an axe;I want
a clean gas flame.She wants a row of jars:
oats, coriander, thick green oil;
I want nothing to store.She wants pomianders,
linens, baby quilts, scrapbooks.She wants Wellesley
reunions.I want gleaming floorboards, the river’s
reflection. She wants shrimp and sweat and salt;
she wants chocolate.I want a raku bowl,
steam rising from rice.She wants goats,
chickens, children.Feeding and weeping.I want
wind from the river freshening cleared rooms.
She wants birthdays, theaters, flags, peonies.
I want words like lasers.She wants a mother’s
tenderness.Touch ancient as the river.
I want a woman’s wit swift as a fox.
She’s in her city, meeting
her deadline; I’m in my mill village out late
with the dog, listening to the pinging wind bells thinking
of the twelve years of wanting, apart and together.
We’ve kissed all weekend; we want
to drive the hundred miles and try it again.

Alexia Sinclair

The best Protifolio I have ever seen :

Alexia Sinclair is an award-winning Australian photographer and digital artist.  Her digitally montaged work has been described as dark and sexy, baroque and magical, mixing avant-garde fashion and her work with contemporary fashion models with exotic European landscapes.

Reflections

Today I had a good discussion with a well thought friend of mine.But what I observed of myself was that I just cant speak I feel let them understand when they  really want to  get it .I just said them I am JUST FINE ITS OK but was never OK with all this ..

People say they are living the moments but I question them how can they live the moment if the minds are so heavily scripted /wired knowlingly or unknowlginly    with the senses feeding the brains .This brain taking into these reaction processing them taking in what it is needed for the present and preserve others furthur processing …connecting them with the context and making us giving a reaction which we might not be the real US reacting.. but this non contexual responses which generate all this mess …

And one thing was You Fall ,You get Up and the process of getting up is the kickass process …this is the time we have to not to loose The Self this is the this state projected  which is coming out of the your prism .Things aka PPL when see you thru this prism will  not see the true colors …but its  only you who know what you are how you are and how  to deal with it thats it and once you are over just wait for the next fall ….

Just gathering some other  audio/video  which was captured in my left brain are something like:

You can’t make someone share their knowledge , because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.

We only know what we know when we need to know it. Human knowledge is deeply contextual and requires stimulus for recall. Unlike computers we do not have a list-all function. Small verbal or nonverbal clues can provide those ah-ha moments when a memory or series of memories are suddenly recalled, in context to enable us to act. When we sleep on things we are engaged in a complex organic form of knowledge recall and creation; in contrast a computer would need to be rebooted.

In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge. A genuine request for help is not often refused unless there is literally no time or a previous history of distrust. On the other hand ask people to codify all that they know in advance of a contextual enquiry and it will be refused (in practice its impossible anyway). Linking and connecting people is more important than storing their artifacts.

Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.

Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. Let  young  burn there  fingers they will learn more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing.

The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. There is an increasing body of research data which indicates that in the practice of knowledge people use heuristics, past pattern matching and extrapolation to make decisions, coupled with complex blending of ideas and experiences that takes place in nanoseconds. Asked to describe how they made a decision after the event they will tend to provide a more structured process oriented approach which does not match reality.

We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified.

Multivariable Calculus

I will be  on vacation for a couple of days so thought of refeshing myself with problems on Multivariable Calculus .As I am  working full time on other projects this break will help me dustoff my rusted brain.

Thanks to open source,math proffs and MIT open courseware giving access to textbooks,problems and Lectures.Here is the list for  people who are interested

1)Geoge Cain and James Herod, Multivariable Caclulus

2)Gilbert Strang, Calculus (especially chapters 11-15)

3)Michael Corral, Vector Calculus

4)Jeff Knisley, Multivariable Calculus Online (weird formatting)

5)James Byrnie Shaw, Vector Calculus with Applications to Physics (from 1922)

6)Stephen Cowley, Vector Calculus

7)Oliver Knill, Multivariable Calculus

8)Carlos Rodriguez, Multivariable Calculus

9)Kenneth Kuttler, Many Variable Advanced Calculus and Math 214

10)Dan Sloughter, The Calculus of Functions of Several Variables (pdf)

MIT OPEN COURSEWARE (18.02)

Spring 2006 (Mattuck and Jerison): Assignments | Exams

Spring 2007 (Auroux): Lecture Notes | Assignments | Exams

MORE PROBLEM SETS / EXAMS / COURSE SITES

Phillips Exeter Academy puts their MV problem sets online here. (Problem Sets)

An honors multivariable calculus class from Swarthmore (Problem Sets)

Problem sets for Tessler’s Math 10C course (Problem Sets on course webpage)
Exams for Tessler’s Math 10C course (Midterm 1, Midterm 2) [from course webpage]

Davis Arnold’s multivariable calculus page [here]: uses MATLAB to explore multivariable calculus — with great tutorials and problems for each topic.

cstitz42’s VIDEOS FOR MULTIVARIABLE CALC [here]

donnylee’s VIDEOS on MULTIPLE INTEGRALS [here]

The Mathematician in Love

The Mathematician in Love
William John Macquorn Rankine

I.

A mathematician fell madly in love
With a lady, young, handsome, and charming:
By angles and ratios harmonic he strove
Her curves and proportions all faultless to prove.
As he scrawled hieroglyphics alarming.

II.

He measured with care, from the ends of a base,
The arcs which her features subtended:
Then he framed transcendental equations, to trace
The flowing outlines of her figure and face,
And thought the result very splendid.

III.

He studied (since music has charms for the fair)
The theory of fiddles and whistles, –
Then composed, by acoustic equations, an air,
Which, when ’twas performed, made the lady’s long hair
Stand on end, like a porcupine’s bristles.

IV.

The lady loved dancing: — he therefore applied,
To the polka and waltz, an equation;
But when to rotate on his axis he tried,
His centre of gravity swayed to one side,
And he fell, by the earth’s gravitation.

V.

No doubts of the fate of his suit made him pause,
For he proved, to his own satisfaction,
That the fair one returned his affection; — “because,
“As everyone knows, by mechanical laws,
“Re-action is equal to action.”

VI.

“Let x denote beauty, — y, manners well-bred, –
“z, Fortune, — (this last is essential), –
“Let L stand for love” — our philosopher said, –
“Then L is a function of x, y, and z,
“Of the kind which is known as potential.”

VII.

“Now integrate L with respect to d t,
“(t Standing for time and persuasion);
“Then, between proper limits, ’tis easy to see,
“The definite integral Marriage must be: –
“(A very concise demonstration).”

VIII.

Said he — “If the wandering course of the moon
“By Algebra can be predicted,
“The female affections must yield to it soon” –
– But the lady ran off with a dashing dragoon,
And left him amazed and afflicted.

Heart Really Breaks

Did you ever had the  feeling of “Heart broke” ? When someone you care or love is hurt or dies in front of you ..Its like your  heart actually jumps, stomach churns, eyes pop out ..its a very sick feeling of helplessness.

This feeling of helplessness causes diastolic flaccidity – a drastic reduction in blood pressure – It explains the physical heartache of grief, loss or betrayal. In addition, it reduces circulation and causes cardiac irregularity or palpitations, with frightening symptoms such as faintness and tingling in the face and extremities.Thus explaining the symptoms of Heart Break !!!

Carnival Of Rust

This song had been playing since 2 days back to back in my Ipod

Lyrics :

D’ you breath the name of your saviour in your hour of need,
n’ taste the blame if the flavor should remind you of greed,
Of implication, insinuation and ill will, till’ you cannot lie still,
In all this turmoil, before red cape and foil closing in for a kill

Come feed the rain
Cos I’m thirsty for your love dancing underneath the skies of lust

Yeah feed the rain
Cos without your love my life ain’t nothing but this carnival of rust

It’s all a game, avoiding failure, when true colors will bleed
All in the name of misbehavior and the things we don’t need
I lust for after no disaster can touch us anymore
And more than ever, I hope to never fall, where enough is not the same it was before

Come feed the rain…

Don’t walk away, don’t walk away, oh, when the world is burning
Don’t walk away, don’t walk away, oh, when the heart is yearning

Go download it and listen to it !!