depth first search

This is an interesting read. I can’t pretend to have parsed the entire argument. I will note that the author subtly assumes a kind of elevated status for psychological explanations.

Unless you accept some kind of divine influence, say a soul, the psychology of a situation is merely a computational relationship we simply don’t understand yet. My intuition is that this view renders the point of the whole article moot.

I’ve heard rumors that Blu-ray DRM is now broken as well.

I don’t know much about the specifics of the crack except for the typical colloquial explanation that the keys for decrypting the data were pulled out of memory. I can only surmise that since decrypting such massive amounts of video data in real time necessitates that programs be highly optimized. What would should optimized decryption code do? Keep the key in cache. Since the rest of the cache data is constantly changing as new frames of data are decoded, identifying static memory locations during video playback may sufficiently winnow down the number of possible key locations in memory.

I’m guessing this is the case, and if it is, we have the unique situation where optimization defeats DRM by limiting opportunities for key obfuscation. Of course even with faster resources, obfuscation methods (which all DRM schemes boil down to) aren’t a panacea. They will just signal the continued arms race between open and closed source developers.

Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula. [via GeekPress]

Yes, but how many self-referential formulas are there?

Perhaps my least favorite task is putting together my resume. This most recent iteration of pain is directed towards finding a summer internship. That’s one of the few problems with the Ph.D. program here at UT. It promotes a kind of journeyman mentality, a regular migration of the minds. Summer money is in short supply (must be inversely proportional to heat).

While walking under rows of trees that were hazardously emitting chunks of ice yesterday I thought of the following problem: What is the likelihood of my being hit in the head by ice as I travel under the trees?

I’ve had the equivalent of three coffees and I still can’t unpack the multiple implications of this. It’s like taking parody and making it recursive.

Some fatherly advice for getting back into the swing of things after the holidays:

Start slow then taper.

Also, The Prime Directive is Stupid.

While the ethics of obligations is a very tricky thing, it is often through our inaction that we cause the most harm. Injunctions against playing God begs the question: if we don’t play God, who will?

Um, no one?

In light of continuing problems configuring my internet connection with Mandriva (a result of the ill-planned wireless fiasco), I’ve decided to take a sledgehammer to the problem and switch to Kubuntu.

This, by the way, is considered trendy in some circles. For others this is merely the action of a habitual poseur.

My internet, however, now works.

Google Earth tells me that close to 1688.07 miles separates Brighton, MA from Austin, TX, making me one of the few people to travel so far just to enjoy the seven-year-old’s luxury of a snow day.

Texas doesn’t really do snow. Texas does ice. A preponderance of elevated highways doesn’t seems so smart now, does it? Last nights URGENT emails with CAMPUS CLOSED were a relief, giving me an extra day of jet lag recovery. I know a one hour difference is barely legitimate; I’m talking about a difference in lifestyle, a jet lag for the graduate student set, where your 9:30am is my 3:00am. These are shifts of consequence.

The “all activities and events are canceled” clause didn’t explicitly say “classes” prompting my always insecure id to wonder if by some chance only extraneous activities were canceled – those different then the core reason for being – that the somber educational faucet of knowledge would somehow open anyway. I suppose the ice storm this morning dissuaded me from making any attempt to explore further the vague language of campus CLOSED – trying to twist it into something less awkward than delaying a typical first day of scurrying around in grad school shuffle.

I checked today for signal theory course in EE. I found a course on information theory, open, but oddly restricted. Restricted is the registrar’s magic word, meaning whatever is necessary to remove the ambiguities of intention and qualification that plague the dubious process of course selection. Information theory is like theology for the modern age. Somewhere in those knotty equations is the key to communicating with satellites orbiting other planets. Old wise gurus on the highest hills imaginable.

I’m thinking about internships and updating my resume. The thought brings me pain, but hopefully I’ll work through it. If you know someone in Boston in need of a Summer Intern let me know.

I found this article from Atlantic fascinating. Highly speculative, to be sure, but tackling the delicate issue of religion in a such a plausibly secular way as to be intriguing despite the obvious gaps.

I’d summarize the essential argument as follows.

1. During development, children learn to apply psychological properties to objects, which are distinct from physical properties.

2. Children begin to exhibit a belief in dualism, meaning that children believe that psychological properties of objects are causally separate from the physical properties of the object.

3. Sociological forces then capitalize on this baseline supernatural belief to organize communities of religious beliefs.

Of course, what is missing is any functional theory of how psychological and subsequent supernatural belief systems actually arise. Such a mechanism seems beyond the scope of psychological inquiry at the current time, so non-atheists are free to believe that such faculties arise precisely because a supernatural world exists, and without such faculties we’d be just a bunch of sub-sentient apes.

I’m confident science will progress to the point where the importance of such debates will begin to fade. As an agnostic, I’m free to speculate either way, and I think the more interesting ideas arise from assuming that no such supernatural world exists (“what you see is what you get” school of phenomenology).

[Aside: Anastasia posed the interesting question. What if such a theory exists concerning the scientific origins of supernatural thinking and we are incapable of understanding it? Or what if past a certain point, self-knowledge is impossible? I'm going to be an optimist and assume it is possible. However, consider Dawkins observation that "it is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism."]

Without a supernatural world, the development of dualism in the cognitive development of children can either be a sort of spurious byproduct of some useful evolutionary trait, or perhaps an essential advantageous trait in its own right. [Religions do have some useful properties: they provide rules of ethics that are typically beneficial to a societies continued dominance. I consider culture in general to be a vehicle for Lamarckian evolution, which isn't a scientific claim, but simply a human one.] But how might this essential divide in how children treat psychological and physical properties arise?

To my mind, the key difference is predictability. A living thing is considerably more dynamic than something purely physical. As we know from Piaget, learning the constancy of certain physical properties does not fully develop in children until ages 5-7. Psychological properties seem entirely less predictable than physical properties. To my mind, they seem harder to learn (do we ever see the reverse of austism?) and are perhaps defined precisely by their apparent non-determinism.

So is apparent non-determinism the property that necessitates cognitive dualism? I’m not sure, but I think simply trying to find methods that identify the difference between physical objects and psychological objects in the environment is a tractable problem, and would fit into current research being done in developmental robotics. I’ll call it developmental social robotics.