Monthly Archives: March 2011

Human memory limits

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The details in the face are based on common Japanese characters. That is not a very effective way of remembering faces, I suspect.

Human recall is far more limited than we usually think. There are variations, which roughly follow IQ, and a few puzzling exceptions. But overall, most of us can only recall a few tens of thousands of facts, and this does not change after we are grown up, until illness damages the brain. So while you learn something new, you forget something old. (OK, you would probably forget something old even if you learned nothing new, but there is a diminishing return at least.)

Why does it not look that way? I will highlight two reasons why we can and should keep learning anyway:

1) Recall vs recognize.

While there are fairly narrow limits to what we can recall, we can recognize much, much more. A great example is the difference between active and passive vocabulary. An ordinary person uses only a few thousand words over and over. If you record everything they say over the course of a week, it will increase only slightly by expanding the time frame to a month. And if you record them again a year later, they still use the same few thousand words. The exceptions will be words that are used by others in the conversation, or that they have just read or heard in some source material they discuss. These words disappear out of the vocabulary again almost at once. In non-work English, 2000 words will cover over 95% of the speech! To not be outed as a foreigners, you will need at least 5000 though. (For instance, I would be outed as an alien if I started discussing female clothing in any great detail. Well, actually I am outed as an alien if I try to discuss these in my native Norwegian too, but you get the point.)

In contrast, even with just compulsory education you will be able to understand tens of thousands of words, without effort or particular talent. Just before Alzheimer’s sets in, you may well recognize 100 000 words if you are an office worker, even if you don’t work in education. The degree of recognition varies, but I personally would say you have a word in your passive vocabulary if you react when it is used in an incontrovertible way. (<– The word “incontrovertible” is wrong here. I used it as an example. It is completely meaningless in the sentence where I used it. Hopefully you noticed this immediately if you’re an English speaker, even if you did not know it means “unquestionable, agreed on, absolutely certain”.)

So, there are tens of thousands of words that you can recognize but don’t use. This is the case with other knowledge as well. If you’re older than 30 at least, you should jump a little in your seat if you hear someone say “We should not forget the 6 million Chinese who died in Hitler’s labor camps.” Even if you missed school that day and have no interest in history, some facts are used so frequently that they leak into your brain. (Incidentally, some of the commonly known facts are doubtful or just plain wrong, but generally not those that relate to Hitler.)

Because of this “passive knowledge” which keeps increasing faster and for longer than the “active knowledge”, learning is still worthwhile. But I will show you an even better way.

2) Layers of abstraction.

When we are babies, every experience is new, every observation is unique. But soon we master the noble art of generalization. For instance, all people have faces. (Insert joke about faceless bureaucrats as needed.) Chairs are chairs and not tables. Doggies and horsies are different from each other, but all of them are animals. As the years go by, we acquire more and more such generalizations, but they also get more and more precise.

The more we study a particular topic, the more we are able to generalize correctly, neither too little nor too much. Having precise generalizations saves a lot of “disk space” in our mind. We don’t need to keep a list of each case, or of each exception to the rule. We can handle these units without thinking much about them.

A related topic is mental pointers. (This is not a commonly used concept. I will explain what I mean by it.) For instance, the human short-term memory has a hard time remembering more than 7 units such as digits. Here in Norway, the phone operators are getting a nice little extra income after the phone numbers were changed from 3+5 digits (area code and number) to 8 digits. This is just a little more than the average person can hold longer than they can hold their breath, and so a lot of people dial the wrong number. Back in the old days, people usually only called within their own area and the couple nearest, and sometimes to an area where they had lived before or had family. They remembered the area code as 1 unit of information, which made it easy to remember long enough to dial.

To take another example, my birthday is December 27, which in Norwegian usage is written 2712. Therefore if I come across a phone number that is 27122712, I will instantly remember it for months or years, even if it has no other virtue. It is only 2 pieces of information to me, while to you it is 8.

A chess newbie will be happy to remember how each piece looks, what it is called, and what moves it can make. These three different types of information are stored as one unit in his memory. (Physically they are probably stored very differently, but they are retrieved in one unit. If you say “rook”, a chess player will immediately know roughly how it looks and what moves it can make.) You would think that a chess grandmaster must remember an inordinate amount of information, or else calculate his strategy anew each time. However, interviews have shown that these people think in a different way. They have pointers to far larger concepts, such as whole openings and endgames, which are stored in their long-term memory as one unit. When something similar comes up, even if it is not identical, they only need to remember that which is unique about the variant.

Well, that should be enough for now. I have passed a thousand words, which are like 993 more than you can remember. I hope this entry has been of some use to you, even though tomorrow you will not remember what it was you read today. Possibly not even that you visited this site at all.

Take this for a parting gift: If we cannot remember everything, then we should strive to remember the right things.

Kiseki worldbuilding

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“and I will discover my overwhelming strength”. (Screenshot from Kyou Kara Maou.) This is a recurring topic in my fiction writing, but I would not call my current project autobiographical, really. Not in a literal sense, for sure.

“Kiseki” is simply the Japanese word for miracle, although they sure use it a lot more in love songs than we do. That may be because it sounds better, perhaps, or there is some nuance to the word that eludes me, or their culture is simply that much different.

In today’s context, however, Kiseki is the power to perform miracles, inherited by some people in my newest fiction sketch. The origin of the word will probably be explained in passing, at least I have sketched it in, in chapter 2.

As is often the case, this is inspired by some other work of fiction.  This time it is Kimagure Orange Road, a manga and anime from some 25 years ago. You can see it in the style too, it is amusing to see what was trendy back in my youth. Oh well.

When I say “inspired by”, I don’t mean that I am writing some kind of fan fiction. Rather, as usual, I compress the original story down into a long sentence or very short paragraph, then expand it again in a completely different direction. While the two stories may seem identical in their compressed form, it is highly unlikely that a casual reader would recognize any relationship between them when reading the story, if they haven’t read this explanation.

Condensed form: A teenage boy has near-miraculous powers, but have to try to not use them. This is not so easy when there are girls taking an interest in him or the other way around.

In Kimagure Orange Road, the reason to not use The Power seems to be simply to not attract unwanted attention to the fact that they are psychics. Every time the family attracts too much attention, they have to move and break all ties with the past, so that is a fairly convincing reason actually.

In Kiseki, there is additionally a motivation in the way the power works. It can be stored without limits, and the more of it you have stored at any one time, the faster it accumulates.  This is compared to a circle or sphere, which has an ever greater circumference or area as it grows. The larger this is, the more energy is drawn into it, and the faster it grows.  In addition, keeping the Kiseki in your mind for a long time changes you so that you for all future will be able to replenish it faster. It also slows down aging when you grow older.

In the story, it is speculated that this may be a case of intelligent design. People who lack patience and self-restraint are basically not trusted with as much power as those who are more careful and in control of themselves.  It is implied that many of the world’s top athletes and other prominent people are born with Kiseki, but because they use it every day, they never store up enough of it to do anything obviously miraculous. Just enough to give them an edge.

Even so, the young boy is strictly commanded to not have any children out of wedlock.  Even though these children will most likely not have Kiseki, they will carry the gene, and in a later generation they may have children with another carrier, and suddenly some random person grows up to have superpowers but without being prepared for it. The result could be pretty bad.  So the main character, at the age of 15, are told that his sperm is a weapon of mass destruction and could end the world as we know it.  (I did not find a way to literally insert “every sperm is sacred”, but I still may. It is still a rough sketch.)

There are certain things Kiseki cannot do, no matter how much you have of it. Most notably, it cannot bring back the dead. On a related note, it cannot heal someone who wants to die. It also cannot create something from nothing. Among the things that can be done, some take more Kiseki to accomplish, such as transmuting one substance into another, especially if you transmute the basic elements, like lead into gold. Healing is also quite Kiseki intensive, as it has to operate on billions of cells.  Even if it does not require much physical energy, it still takes a lot of “control energy”, which is more what Kiseki is here.

Obviously Kiseki cannot predict the future if doing so would change it. Apart from this, however, it can gather all kinds of information and augment the senses. This is fairly easy. Strangely enough, moving things – including oneself – is also pretty easy.  Flying, teleporting from one place to another in the blink of an eye, or moving at high speed are all fairly easy to accomplish and take little Kiseki. But if you do it often enough, it will still drain you, and there is always the risk of being caught. You don’t want to be “dissected like a frog by secret service” as one parent puts it.

So that’s it for the Kiseki part.  The girls are next up, they are still pretty vague.

***

I think the feeling of being special and having to hide your bright side is pretty common for young people. As for accumulating power and not being allowed to use it yet, I guess that may be derived from the way to wisdom, where you have to store up your reading and revelations and not blather them as soon as you get them. Obviously I still have a tendency to use them at once.  I am sure this will reflect itself in my poor main character. ^_^ But apart from that, not autobiography.

Two green lights

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Good thing I am not actually a teacher! Even so, I was only a couple steps from the grave. So I may as well share the lesson (while I remember it…)

On my way home from work, I passed a street crossing with traffic light. As it happens, here in Kristiansand it is not unusual that the pedestrians and one group of cars get the green light at the same time. I disapprove of it, but this used to be a fairly small town until recently, so people are probably happy to have traffic lights at all.

Be that as it may, one of the drivers (probably not from around here) put the petal to the medal, or something like that, accelerating impressively. If I had stepped out as the green light recommended, both of us would have received a much reduced quality of life for a while onward. In my case quite probably a reduction to zero.  Luckily I was more aware of the situation than him, this time. At other times it has been the other way around, although probably not often.

I don’t hold it against the guy, he saw the green light and went ahead. There is no reason to believe that he was thinking to himself: “Self, someone might step out in that street and not only will you get blood all over the car, you will probably face a couple years behind bars, ruin your career and risk that your wife runs off with the mailman while you’re there. But it is all worth it for the glory of helping Evolution create a race of lightning fast pedestrian, through the amazing power of Natural Selection.”

No, we can safely assume that he simply saw the green light and thought, or rather felt without needing to form it into words: Driving now is MY RIGHT.

And this, dear congregation, is how bad things happen to be done by good people. When two people Have The Right to do something that is bound to collide.

This is obviously not restricted to traffic, although it gets very concrete there. But it appears on so many scales, from the clash of civilizations to “the homicidal bitching that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat”, to quote master Leonard Cohen in his aptly named song Democracy.

Many years ago, a young friend in the Christian Church here in Kristiansand had a revelation. And because it was so clear to him, and he did not try to make a long sermon from it, I remember it still.  “When two people meet in court, almost always both of them think they are right.” That’s it, exactly. Both of them had the green light.  Of course there is the occasional smooth liar who knows he is wrong but hopes nobody will find out. But that is not the rule.

For this reason, when someone loses in court, or in some other arena of conflict solving, they tend to become bitter and lose faith in society and fellow humans. In many cases they begin to be surrounded by a demonic aura, figuratively speaking. They are not only in a bad mood, but actively try to infect others with the same mood, not only through their words but through their tone of voice, facial expression and body language. In their suffering, they actually become a force for evil in the world.

I cannot honestly say that such a fate is better than death. It is, in one way: As long as you live, there is hope.  But the hope is very small for such people, who have lost a collision of the soul.

I wonder if I would have been like that if I had walked out in the street today and survived, perhaps minus the use of arms and legs.  If I would have spent the rest of my earthly life bitter and hateful, waiting for that evil, evil driver to go to hell and burn and burn for ever and ever. All the while being in Hell myself even in this life, burning and burning with the fire of hate and the poison of bitterness.

Luckily for all involved, none of that happened today. May it not happen to any of us.

Comment on the iiPad

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In utterly unrelated news, it is kind of just a little disappointing that the only serious rival for iPad 2 is the iPad 1.

One would have expected that the competitors would have a vaguely similar object to the iPad actually in stock before iPad 2 came out. It must be lonely to only compete against yourself.

(HTC Flyer looks good, possibly Xoom as well, and the new Galaxy. But they are not here. And even the old Galaxy Tab, half pad and half mobile phone, cost far more than the iPad. To steal a phrase from a friend, at that price you should be able to ride them.)

Not that it is a big deal to me. But they could have avoided being caught with their pants down if they had read the Chaos Node back in the year 2000, when I announced 2010 as the year of the Datapad. Of course, the datapad I envisioned was more similar to the smartphone than the iPad, which I still think is too big to bring with you unless you aim to show off. And I still think the iPad is too big to be the winner in the long run. It is mostly suited for the couch, and there you are probably watching your big flat-screen TV most of the time anyway.  (Not that I have a TV, but then again I don’t have an iPad either.)

So I still consider iPad mostly a way to show off that you are avantgarde. But unfortunately, it is also still true.

Hearts and dreams

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Want to know where your heart is? Watch where your mind goes when you daydream.

I approve of this meme, which goes around among friends and friends of friends on the Internet. After all, it is reasonably close to Jesus’ observation that “Where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” But it also is practical, so you have a harder time deceiving yourself.

This time, when I say “you”, I don’t mean “I”. I may still be able to deceive myself, because I don’t daydream, at least not in the usual sense.

I have come to understand that for neurotypicals, daydreams are involuntary and spontaneous. For me, creating and maintaining a daydream requires concentration, and lots of it.

If a daydream is something I initiate of my own free will, consciously,then it is probably not telling me much that I didn’t know already.

A better measure might be what I repeatedly think about throughout the day. Or even what I dream about in the night. Curiously, these two are not even remotely similar most of the time.

When my mind reboots after having concluded a train of thought (or resigned from it), it will typically soon go back to one of a few things:

-Strategies for the computer game I am playing that week.

-A novel in progress (the progress stops when I stop thinking about it).

-A topic to write about in one of my journals.

Actually that is pretty much it, since I write about almost anything.

Neither of these take up all that much time, however, since I am usually either at work, or sleeping, or in front of my computer. The notable irregular here is that I don’t think about work when I am not there, while I may think about the other two while I am out walking or sitting on the bus. Thus, my heart is at least not at work, for better or for worse.

My dreams, in contrast, are usually utterly alien.  I am in a different place, with different people, often a different name and a different family and work and friends, and sometimes different laws of nature.  It is exceedingly rare, if it has happened at all, that I wake up from a dream about doing my job, or playing a computer game, or writing.

The only thing I can remember that I both dream about and think about is sex, and that is not something I am unaware of.  There is usually a reason why I am reminded of it, and I notice immediately.  I don’t think it is important to get into details about this, since it does not noticeably impact my relationship to actual humans. But I do think about it from time to time, and I do dream about it from time to time.

I doubt my heart is in it though, anymore than it is in food when you starve. Those dreams will likely disappear with my body. Or so I fervently hope.

Still, I probably do have a heart. I just don’t know where I’ve hidden it.

“The Next Great Awakening” review

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The Next Great Awakening? Let’s hope not.

For the love of Buddha, don’t buy this book as your first Okawa book, because in that case it will probably also be your last. That would be a pity, I think. Even if you don’t believe that Ryuho Okawa is a god from Venus, there is still a reason why he is a bestselling author in Japan. Unfortunately for the expansion of his new religion abroad, Japan is a bit different from the West when it comes to UFOs and such. Or perhaps I am different from both Japan and the West, but let us hope not.

For the new reader, Ryuho Okawa is the founder and leader and god of the Japanese new religion Happy Science. Technically Happy Science (Kofuku-no-Kagaku, more literally the Science of Happiness) is clearly a cult, in that the members actually worship their founder as divine. Most of us would not do that. But that said, this is not your average loon. He is clearly extremely intelligent and knowledgeable, and has read several tens of thousands of books during his lifetime, from different cultures and ages in history. From these he has distilled the tenets that everywhere and in every age have led to happiness, harmony and prosperity. Given the quality and quantity of his work, it is kind of understandable that he feels like he belongs not just on another planet, but in a completely different order of being from the usual “expert” who has simply attended a socialist university, read a few hundred books and never reflected much on ultimate reality.

Mr Okawa’s self-help books are quite thoughtful and inspirational, in my opinion. Unfortunately, this latest book reads like something written by a random jobless person who has spent too much time in the dark and refuse-strewn back alleys of the Internet. Or more charitably, as a science fiction novel set in an alternate history where Erich von Däniken’s space gods were not only real, but are still around and messing with people’s heads.

The plot is that Earth (and other backwater planets) are protected by a Galactic Treaty. Eerily similar to the Prime Directive of Star Trek, it forbids spacefaring aliens from interfering with non-spacefaring civilizations, although small-scale research expeditions are allowed, as long as these happen in secret and with as little influence on the planet as possible. There are two exceptions though. One is if the aliens are invited by the local god, in Earth’s case called El Cantare.

The other exception is if the local civilization is in the process of exterminating all intelligent life on the planet, for instance through atomic war or worse. In that case, other civilizations are allowed to intervene to stop the madness and save the species. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Earthlings have been on the endangered species list. There are currently two opinions on how to save them.

A minority, but with a heavy local presence, advocates basically bombing us back to the stone age. Using terraforming tools like tsunamis, volcanoes and mass crust movement, looking like natural disasters to the locals, they are thinking of erasing civilization to the ground. If this is not approved, they will punish advanced societies by inducing large-scale mental disorders. (There is no reference to the Tower of Babel episode, strangely enough.)

The larger faction wants to give humans a chance, by encouraging them toward love and tolerance so that they may refrain from actually using their weapons. The tentative plan is to get the world’s religions to cooperate about their shared values, rather than fight over details. Unfortunately, the more warlike aliens are fanning the flames of conflict, currently between Christians and Muslims, conveniently for the more draconian solution.

If this had been a novel, it would actually had been a pretty good one. Unfortunately, there is nothing to imply that Mr Okawa and his followers don’t actually believe it all, and then some. UFOs and various more or less humanoid aliens are already among us, and more are on their way. We have to make haste to create a civilization that is not only found worthy to survive, but is also able to integrate visitors and immigrants from numerous star systems in a galactic melting pot. The plan is to make Earth into a cosmic “Planet of Love”, where aliens from technologically advanced but culturally less refined planets can come and learn religion and politics.

So there you have it. Definitely a break from the usual self-help books. And there is more to come. Okawa is currently studying the Laws of the Universe, and will be back with a book detailing Truth that surpasses this single planet.

Warmly recommended if you actually believe there are UFOs and aliens on Earth now. Otherwise… well, I suppose you may want to read it if you think Happy Science is a crazy cult and you are looking for indications of this. I fear this will be its most common use. Alas for the many years of hard work that Okawa and his followers have put into making an organization based on universal principles of love, wisdom, self-reflection and progress.

Of course, once the aliens show up, I will have to reconsider…