Category Archives: science

Germans are intelligent now?

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke.

“You can just go to America!” The USA has the highest proportion of people with a long education, but Japanese schoolkids do as much homework in a day as American kids do in a week, and a German high school diploma is roughly the equivalent of a Bachelor’s Degree in America.

More fun with Quora! Humans can ask the most amazing things. “Why does Germany tend to have a large amount of intelligent people?” This question is correctly marked with the label “Questions that contain assumptions” but is answered with great seriousness. There is even a short answer-wiki that sums up the consensus of the answers.

My first reaction was pretty much today’s subject heading. Germans are considered intelligent now? That was certainly news to me. But then I am Norwegian, while Quora is still somewhat America-centric. And in Norway, Americans are considered stupid (and fat and lazy). Of course, these are simply the stereotypes, we are well aware that there are many who are not. Even that stereotype may be wrong, since it is largely based on tourists. For a long time, America was the only country rich enough that even stupid people could afford to go abroad for fun. Therefore, the observation of stupid Americans.

As for Germans, the observation here in Norway is that they seem to be suicidal. German tourists rent a small boat and go out to sea when a storm is coming, then drown. They decide to hike in the mountains when a blizzard is coming, and freeze to death. They fall into raging rivers, or into cracks in glaciers, or drive with summer tires on icy narrow roads. Not what we consider intelligent, but I suppose they do well enough in their homeland, where nature is largely reduced to decorative parks rather than a main player in everyday life.

***

The generally agreed answer is that Germans are not more intelligent, exactly, they just have better education and live in a society where intellect is regarded more highly and money less, compared to the USA. German schools teach children many seemingly useless things, because a cultured German is supposed to have broad interests, including things that rarely earn money, like literature and arts. And because of that culture, they keep up with this knowledge later in life as well.

If I may here, I will point to my previous entry,  where I mention that children who learn many different things will have a head start on learning later, because as an adult you can associate things with what you already know, which is much more effective than learning something in a void, isolated from the rest of our life. I am surprised if American children don’t also learn many “useless” things, but perhaps these things are chosen differently, and the role of school in America may be more similar to daycare for a longer time than in Europe and specifically Germany.

One point that is mentioned repeatedly is that higher education is free in Germany. Actually I was of the impression that this is the normal in the civilized world, except if you want to attend an elite university and you don’t have any particular qualifications to commend you other than money. Well, it is that way here in Scandinavia, and evidently also in Germany. Of course, it is still not a life in luxury – you usually need to take a part-time job or borrow some money for your living expenses, even if tuition is free. Unless you are lucky enough to live with your parent(s) or working spouse within a short distance from the university, it may not be exactly literally free, but close enough that it won’t hold back those eager to learn.

But perhaps more important than the formal education is a culture where coming across as “cultured” is looked up to and respected, in much the same way as being rich is in America. You want to have a number of fully stocked bookshelves in your living room when guests come over, including classics you may not actually have read. You want to be seen at the opera or theater, and you want to be able to discuss arts and sciences instead of just the weather.

This is not just Germany. The Japanese are very much into this cultural refinement, and being intellectual is a badge of honor even if in many cases it earns you substantially less money than those who are less academic. There is some of it in much of Europe as well, and it used to be some of it here in Norway too when I grew up. We have always been a bit Americanized for a European country though, and we still are, although we may hesitate to admit it.

One thing however where Norwegians and Germans are on the same side, is the feeling that being exceptional is a bit suspicious (unless it is in sports, then it is great). If you are resourceful, you should be a little better at everything, not committed to one thing where you are the best of the best. People who specialize are referred to in Norwegian as vocational idiots (loosely translated, the original Norwegian word would probably be stopped by most English profanity filters.) This is a typical European attitude. An American may ask: “If you are so smart, why aren’t you rich?” but in Europe, we might ask: “If you are so smart, why do you only speak two languages?”

One thing is the same on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean: The day still only have 24 hours, and you cannot do everything in a lifetime. You have to choose. Germans often choose differently from Americans, and this is probably why many of them come across as more intelligent. They have used their time differently.

Improve the ability to learn?

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Screenshot anime Minami-ke

“You try to get good marks by studying just to deal with the tests ahead.” That’s a bad idea. The brain is not that easily fooled.

Let’s play Quora again! Here’s a question in the category Neuroscience: How can one improve their ability to learn?

There are a couple good answers there, most notably living healthy and be physically active. A little caffeine would probably not hurt either, for most people. But this is not really a question that should be confined to neuroscience. Learning is a process influenced by many factors. Let us look at a couple of them.

***

To stick with neuroscience at first, how do we learn? We learn in three phases, four if you count the fleeting phase of sensory input. Next is the bottleneck of short-term memory. On average, an adult human has the ability to keep 7 items in short-term memory, but this ranges from 5 to 9 without a huge impact on daily life. You may be able to increase this number by 1 with systematic training, and it may give you an edge in a few situations. Like remembering Norwegian phone numbers, which are 8 digits. ^_^ (Seriously, for some years most of the calls I received were people dialing wrong number. The surge of smartphones has nearly put an end to that though.)

In practice, short-term memory does not have the huge impact one would expect. Most things we notice are either deemed unimportant and quickly forgotten, or passed straight on to working memory. While we hold things in short-term memory just for a few seconds, working memory may keep things floating around for several minutes at least. Memory loss after concussions and electroshock imply that memories may not be transferred to long-term memory until after half an hour or two, but some of this processing is surely subconscious.

If we had short-term memory but not working memory, we would not be able to make sense of things like novels, scientific texts or poems, where we have to remember much more than a handful of words, but don’t commit every detail (or even most of the details) to lasting memory. We automatically select the parts we think are important, and keep these around and put them together into meaningful structures, such as mental images or stories. It is unclear to what degree our furry friends have the same ability, since they can’t talk, but our use of working memory seems pretty special.

If the working memory runs full, which it easily does during focused study, you can not add more without losing some of what you already have. There is another bottleneck in the transfer of knowledge from working memory to long-term memory, which is encoded as actual physical changes in the neurons (nerve cells). At a minimum, the sensitivity of certain synapses (contact points between neurons) is changed. Over time the physical size of synapses may change, new synapses may grow, and the tendrils of the neurons may change in shape or size a little. In a few parts of the adult brain, new neurons are born. This applies mostly to the hippocampus, a small part that seems to serve as the brains “index” where links to memories are laid down. A lot of memories exist in the adult brain that cannot be recalled. Electric stimulation can cause such memories to appear, but there seems to be no system in them, except a rough categorization into smell, sight, sound etc. Without the hippocampus, memory as we know it cannot exist, although primitive conditioned reactions can bypass it.

Transfer from working memory to long-term memory is greatly aided by sleep, notably deep (delta) sleep which helps brain cells grow, and dream (REM) sleep which helps integrate memories. Also, during sleep we don’t cram more data into the working memory, so it gets a chance to unload.

Recent studies show that moderate physical activity also helps the brain encode information from working memory to long-term memory. This could be because our species did not originate in chairs, but our ancestors spent much of their non-sleep time on their feet. Or it might be as simple as the increased blood flow caused by a more vigorous heartbeat.

This explains why strategic use of sleep and exercise can improve learning, all other things being equal. It also explains why cramming for long hours is wasted time, and it is better to study in intervals.

***

But neuroscience is not the only aspect of learning, and not the one that makes the most difference in practice, except for the few where it does not work as it should. There is much that can be done to improve learning through the “software”, the data structures, rather than the “hardware” of the brain. I want to say a bit about this.

Adults learn mainly by association. Babies have nothing but basic instincts to associate with, but have a higher ability to just pack random data into their brains and retain them. Then again they spend more than half their time in REM or delta brainwave states, with delta even appearing while awake for a while. As the infants become children, this ability begins to fade, and in teenagers it goes downhill fast. For the rest of our lives, we depend heavily on association.

If you were introduced to many different experiences as a child, you will have the hooks to associate similar things. For instance, if you spent a year of your childhood in a foreign country, you probably have a rudimentary knowledge of the language. This makes it a lot easier to pick up that language later and learn to speak it fluently.

What if we simply don’t have the relevant experiences? Well, we can still learn through repetition. I have occasionally mentioned Spaced Repetition, a system where you recall a fact repeatedly but with exponentially increasing intervals, so as to recall it as close to possible before it is forgotten. It is possible to learn utterly alien things this way, but it takes some time. You cannot do this just before an exam, to put it that way, or just before you go on a vacation to a foreign country and need to understand a bit of the language.

Another strategy is “bridge building”, where you learn something unnecessary but related to what you already know, and then use this knowledge again to learn what you really need. Arguably much of school is spent doing this, learning useless stuff so that we can bridge the gap from counting on our fingers to making a Mars rover. Of course, different things are useful for different people. But learning by association is so powerful that it can be used as a conscious strategy to learn otherwise meaningless information.

The impressive memory feats of memory artists are usually done this way: By associating new data with existing structures in a form that is not necessarily entirely sane if you were to describe it to an outsider. For instance, English is my third language and I may want to remember the word “gaffe”, a social blunder or embarrassing mistake. Being already familiar with the giraffe, which has a similar name in my native language, I may imagine a giraffe tripping over its own legs. There is no actual connection between gaffe and giraffe (I looked it up), but it causes my brain to build a “bridge” from a word I already know to one I don’t. Your giraffes may vary.

The more associations we build to a new fact, and the more vivid they are, the better we learn. Part of the “more” is location. You may have seen people who walk into a room, can’t remember why they came, and have to go back to the room they came from. Then they remember. So that shows that even a small change in location can influence memory. We can turn the tables on this by learning something, then going to another room and recall it. This can be enough for the brain to not archive it as location-specific, but general knowledge. (Of course, if we only need to remember it in one specific place, it is best to learn it there if possible. Or at least somewhere similar.)

Neuroscientifically, it may not be strictly necessary to go through all these tricks to learn things. There are a few scattered persons who seem able to remember pretty much everything in reasonable detail – whether they want to or not. This is a mixed blessing at best, as an endless torrent of memories runs through their head all the time. Remembering just the things that fit into our world and that we meet repeatedly makes life rather easier. So that’s why, if we expect to need something we learn, we should focus on just these two things: Integrate it in our world by linking it to things we know, and repeat recalling it, preferably in different places. Good luck!

Viewpoint character

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai NEXT

“Because I’m chosen by God!” Yes, but to be a viewpoint character, not the main character!

I have been left less than impressed by the MMORPG Champions Online, which I started subscribing to soon after City of Heroes shut down. The two were made by the same company, Cryptic Studios, and Champions was the newer of them. It sure has a lot of options, but it just does not engage me. There is something lacking. Or perhaps that’s just me growing up.

In any case, I came across an entry from early 2010, in which I fretted about the possible negative influence on my soul by all the fighting in City of Heroes (although at least it was heroic fighting – to protect the innocents and chastise the wrongdoers, I descended time after time). Less than two years later, the game closed down. Problem solved! but not by me.

(Incidentally, there are already RPGs where you can level up by healing and blessing people. I just don’t play them.)

Seen from my point of view, as the Very Important Person, I could say that God closed down CoH in order to help me focus on less violent activities. There is nothing wrong with that point of view, as long as one retains enough sanity to realize that this was not the only and hopefully not the main reason why the game closed down. (I believe the main reason was that it stuck out like a sore thumb in NCSoft’s new profile, where they focused on their Asian RPGs. Even though the game was profitable in itself, it might turn off potential customers with its America-centrism. America is no longer cool in Asia, where NCSoft has its headquarters and core audience.)

A bad leader focuses on micro goals instead of macro goals, a good leader focuses on macro goals instead of micro goals, but a great leader is aware of opportunities to combine them. God is a great leader, so it makes sense that he would throw me a boon while taking care of more important business.

The problem arises when the Viewpoint Character mistakenly thinks that he is the Main Character. I attended a Christian meeting here in Norway shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, where an until then rather unassuming elderly member of the congregation informed us that he had prayed for Soviet Union to fall, and now it had happened. Yes, I am sure he had, and it had undeniably happened. Good for him! He had prayed according to God’s will, evidently, which is a comforting thought. But the moment you think God is your hammer that you can wield to bring down empires, you have a problem. Oh yes.

During the last frenzied month of America’s economic bubble, gas prices reached new heights (although they never reached European levels). Faith-filled believers gathered to pray down the prices. Behold! From out of Heaven! The gas prices plummeted. All it took was the crash of the banking system and millions and millions of people losing their jobs, no longer needing to drive to work or affording to drive elsewhere. There we go! Problem solved! Good job, guys! When God is your hammer, anything is breakable.

In reality, of course, God is not our hammer. I am not the Main Character. What I am is a Viewpoint Character. I think it is great that there are viewpoint characters. Sometimes our goals are aligned with the greater good, sometimes the opposite (although hopefully we don’t do that on purpose), and sometimes not really related. The role of the Viewpoint Character, I feel, is quite valuable. As long as neither the Viewpoint Character or others confuse this with being the Main Character.

Self-spaced repetition software

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Screenshot Sims 3

Games are usually the enemy of studying, but some elements of games can be used to improve learning.

Spaced repetition is an amazing technique for learning without understanding. Understanding is certainly superior and in a league of its own, but it is hard to command or even predict; and sometimes you need to memorize for a while before you can understand. One may compare this to gathering ingredients before you can cook. Before you can read sentences, you must know the words, and so on.

Spaced repetition takes advantage of a particular memory effect: The best time to repeat something is just before you forget it. Repeating many times in a row adds little after the first couple repetitions. Repeating at fixed intervals helps, but the best effect comes with increased intervals. You may for instance double the intervals, which is more effective than fixed intervals. But the best effect is when one actively recalls a fact just as it is about to be forgotten: It should take a little effort to remember it, but one should be able to do it.

Since our brain is not under constant surveillance, the only person who can know this time is ourselves. Conventional Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) starts with a standard model of human memory, then adjusts intervals down if people keep forgetting, or up if they remember everything. Good SRS lets the user mark the difficulty with which they remember. But there is an even better solution, at least in some ways, and the Duolingo online language site has found it.

When you start a study unit in Duolingo, the “learning meter” is empty. As you learn, it fills up until it is full. But as time passes afterwards, the learning meter begins to slide down toward empty again. You can see this for each topic, and for each “workbook” in a topic. (This is a session that typically takes 10-15 minutes to go through.) You can then go back and test yourself.

If you go back and run the test while you remember everything, you will certainly get the learning meter back to full again, but the experience will be rather boring. Duolingo is a very game-like learning system, where you have to translate back and forth, listen to sentences in the target language, describe pictures or pick from multiple choices. You never know what the next question will be. But if you know everything by heart, it is not very exciting. It is like winning chess against a small child.

On the other hand, if you wait too long and have forgotten the words or phrases, you will be thrown out after three mistakes and have to start that workbook over until you get it right. That is not too much fun either, even though it only costs you a few minutes.

The result is that the users themselves find out how long to wait to get the most rewarding “game” experience. If it was too easy, you learn to wait longer. If it was too hard, you make sure to return earlier next time. There is no need for the software to know whether you learn fast or slowly. All it needs to do is reward you when you get the balance right, and it does so with an exciting learning experience and a feeling of winning against a worthy opponent: Your own forgetfulness. You pick your battles, so with a little experience you pick the best time yourself.

I am not sure how easy this is to translate into other forms of learning, but I think it may be easy with anything that requires memorization of facts. Geography and history come to mind. Make small, focused units and a table where one can see which ones begin to slip. Adjust the speed at which they slide depending on past performance. It can probably be done better than it is in DuoLingo, but the principle works amazingly well. Humans are very good at learning things when having fun.

Back in the real world?

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Screenshot anime Boku wa Tomodachi ga Sukunai Next

“I’ll just escape to the 2D world and console my broken heart.” But the 2D world is not just for escaping anymore – it is invading the “real” world on a broad front, or at least mine.

The Sims 3: University Life is fun and all, but perhaps it did not really deserve four entries. Then again it seems harmless, and does not require lots of special training and strange thinking. The Sims games are a great way to connect to people.

Back in the real world, I will gladly admit that I have mixed feelings about my own scarcity of higher education. I only took two winters of tertiary education. It was a lot of fun, but I was broke and living on my own. My parents were also poor and could not really have helped out much. Student loans were available, but the truth is that I had (and have) no ambitions of career in this world. I enjoyed learning just to learn, but I had no interest in competing and using my elbows to get ahead in the world. As such, I would not fit in too well with the type of people who took higher education in Norway in the early 1980es. It was still some years before college became a natural part of young people’s lives.

If I were suddenly to become rich, I might enroll at a college or university just for the fun of it, but at my age it has no monetary value at all. I would not be finished with a Master of anything until I was 57 or 58, and with the lower bound on retirement age now at 62, no employer would even consider me. We lack qualified workers of many kinds, especially engineers, but the best one can hope for when over 50 is working for a temp agency. I have every intention to work until 75 (the current upper bound on the flexible retirement age) unless some dire illness strikes me down. Which is certainly possible, but what I mean is, I have no intention to ever retire. I intend to work until I die or become disabled, whichever comes first. Work is love. Work is service to God and country and humanity. It is what we were born to do. But learning, learning is fun.

Luckily, unlike my sims, I can study online, and even for free. I can learn math at the Khan Academy, languages at Duolingo and Livemocha, all for free. There are also several traditional universities that offer online lectures and courses, some of these for free as well. I haven’t looked into that yet.

(Livemocha, despite its random name, is a website that helps arrange community-based language learning online. You study some small piece of the language with their course, then practice it with real people who already speak it. Or that is what it looks like from the description. I hear good things about it – it has a lot more languages than Duolingo, for instance – but I would not impose on real people unless there was some dire need. And since I am trying to learn to read, not to speak Japanese, it is anyway not what I am looking for. But it sounds awesome for neurotypicals, who love to do all kinds of things together with real people.)

When not playing The Sims 3, I find myself “playing” with French on Duolingo. It is quite a bit of fun, actually. Between the two, I am even lagging behind on my favorite anime. There are several decent series this year, and I am a couple weeks behind on most of them. What is the world coming to, when learning a random language is more fun than watching anime?

And of course, by now we have to wonder what I meant by “real” world. I suppose studying is more real than watching my sims study, kind of, but I am still listening to a robot voice on the Internet. Between studying French on the Internet and Japanese on my smartphone, playing games and watching anime, there isn’t much that is “real” in the way my grandmother would have meant “real”. But at least i eat real food (noodles are real food, yes?) and sleep in a real bed! Long may that last.

Our 3 types of sleep

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Screenshot Sims 3

The three types of sleep may look practically the same from outside, but they are actually surprisingly different.

Even though humans have slept since before the dawn of history, it is only a few decades since we found out that we pack three types of sleep into each night. (Well, a few Buddhist monks have managed to extend their consciousness into the realms of sleep and tried to describe them, but it is hard to understand for outsiders.) Today we know from electrodes on the head that we all go through these phases, every night for most of our lives.

The three types of sleep have very different functions. The deep, dreamless Delta sleep restores the body. In this sleep, a hormone is released that sets off a cascade of repair in the body, as well as growth in children. The slow brain waves also allows the brain to rest, in so far as it is possible.

The intense electro-chemical storm that fuels our most vivid dreams happens on the opposite end of the 90-minute sleep cycle. It is the REM sleep, after the rapid eye movements that are eerily similar to waking life. Also the heart and lungs are working hard to supply the bursts of activity that pass through our brain at this time, as the brain compares memories, combines them … and perhaps destroys them. One theory is that erroneous combinations are flushed from the system, which would explain why people who don’t get this type of sleep tend to go temporarily insane (hearing voices, becoming unable to control their emotions, feeling hunted and sometimes seeing things that no one else can see.)

Both the deep Delta sleep and the intense REM sleep are necessary for memories to settle properly in the brain. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, children have a lot of both, but as we grow up we have less and less of them. Some elderly people hardly have deep sleep at all, and very little REM. They may sleep less overall, but mostly it is the third type of sleep that expands to fill the night.

As adults, most of our night is filled with Theta sleep. The theta brainwaves are slower than alpha, which is the relaxed waves of contentment, meditation and the feeling of just being alive with no worries. Actually alpha waves also are found in sleep to some degree, especially shortly after falling asleep, but theta waves dominate. The experience of Theta sleep varies somewhat, but if woken you may remember drifting images without intense feelings and without much of a plot. Some people when woken from Theta sleep will say that they were not really asleep, they were thinking.

It seems likely that theta sleep has no “medical” purpose, but simply serves to conserve energy and keep us from waking up and becoming active at night. For our ancestors both of these functions were very important, of course. Food was often scarce, and humans have poor sense of hearing and smell compared to predators. Staying in the cave with a fire by the entrance was definitely the way to survive long enough to pass your genes on to the next generation.

In today’s brightly lit world, it would be nice if we could cut down on the theta sleep. Alas, it is hardcoded into our brain. Sleep happens in “cycles” of up to 90 minutes, although in some people they can be shorter. After we fall asleep, we spend a bit of time in Theta sleep, then slide down to Delta for the first time that night. After 15-30 minutes, brain waves become shorter and faster again and we spend most of our 90 minutes in Theta, before having a short intense REM sleep of perhaps 5 minutes. Then slowly down again for a second round of Delta, unless you are too old. This Delta is typically shorter than the first. The next time we come to the top of the sleep cycle, the REM episode lasts longer.

The third Delta is quite short in college students, which are the usual “lab rats” of research on humans. It is longer for teenagers and children, and entirely absent for most adults. But the REM periods get longer and longer for each sleep cycle, and can grow into long, elaborate adventures in dreams that leave us tired. Fueling a raging brain is hard work, and sometimes asthma attacks and heart infarcts happen in the last REM sleep of the morning, especially on weekends when people can sleep an extra 90 minutes cycle or two. Less dangerous but somewhat embarrassing, young men frequently have orgasm during their longest REM sessions. This is much less common in women – probably. A number of boys and men don’t actually remember the orgasm, but ejaculation of semen leaves a sticky proof for when they wake up.

With this understanding of the three phases of sleep, we have an idea why some people can get by on 3 or 4.5 hours of sleep – they need the delta sleep but for some reason require less REM sleep than most of us, or possibly they start having longer REM sleep already during their first sleep cycles. Generally, the more Delta and REM we manage to pack into the first sleep cycles, the less we need to sleep overall. This happens naturally to sleep-deprived people: Their first sleep cycles contain lots of delta, which is the first sleep debt to pay off, and REM also takes up more time than usual. Unfortunately, sleep deprivation is not a good solution, since it also has the side effect that sleep intrudes on waking life in short burst. These intrusions happen when we are sitting still in a static landscape: At school, at work, and on the highway.

Well, that seems like a good place to stop for this time. On the highway. We may have the technology to move faster than a speeding cheetah and with the weight of a rhino, but we still have the brain of a caveman. Especially when sleepy…

I am energetic?

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Screenshot anime Sakurasou, featuring Misaki

Genki girl. Not larger than life, just much more energetic. Not like me. For one thing, I am not a girl.

I couple of things came together recently. The Norwegian winter seems to have a dragged on for months now, and it came on the heels of the rainiest November I can remember (at least here on the South coast of Norway). So I haven’t really exercised my body since sometime in October. Instead of a 1 1/2 to 2 hours of walking and jogging, I am just walking briskly for about half an hour a day.

Wait, what? The other day I read an article by a Norwegian cardiologist, who said that he personally walked half an hour a day; that was a sufficient, in his opinion. I’ve seen a number of seemingly sane medical experts say approximately the same thing, some of them adding that if you can’t walk half an hour a day, you should at least try to walk a quarter of an hour.

When I try to imagine someone exercising less than a quarter of an hour a day, I automatically imagine something like the illustration photos for articles about the “obesity epidemic”, a triple-sized American whose gender is half lost in the rubber tires surrounding their vaguely humanoid body. (My visual imagination is very hazy, admittedly.) I am like “how do they do that?” because I hurry to the bus, hurry from the bus to the office, hurry up the stairs, often take a walk during lunch break, and do the same thing again on my way home, except I hurry to the bus station across downtown. Then I may or may not go get some groceries after I am home. I guess having a car can be pretty bad for your health.

But the thing is, it does not feel like I am exercising or even being active. These are all things that just happen. And it matters who I compare myself to.

***

If you have read the early years of the Chaos Node, you will notice that I occasionally wrote about my then best friend, the girl I loved approximately like myself, the amazing Supergirl (later called SuperWoman, at her request.). (She has a name, but did not feel comfortable with being online, so I don’t have her name or address or photo anywhere on the site.) What I noticed the most about her was her intelligence, because she was one of the few people I had met (at that time) outside my family that was actually more intelligent than me. This fascinated me. She was much younger than me, so I knew and understood many things she didn’t (at least back then), but in raw processing power she was high, high above me.

But intriguingly, this was not the only thing she excelled at. She was also good at sports, good with people, played a couple of instruments and could sing and dance well. It was as if everything she put her mind to, whether for the body or the mind or a combination of the two, she mastered easily. Well, it did not always seem easy to her, but by human standards it was amazing. It seemed like she came with 300% energy in a human-sized body. That is the best way I can think of it.

I came to think of this because I recently watched two episodes of an anime, Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo (the pet girl of Cherry Hall). One of the characters there is a girl who is just way too energetic for a single human body. Her teacher refers to her as an alien, hopefully in jest, but she feels kind of lonely among all the normal people who cannot do what she can and who grow tired easily. It was hauntingly familiar.

***

It really seems to me that some people come with more energy than others, and that this energy often shows both in the body and the mind. (Of course, the two are not really separate beings that just happen to travel together for a while – they are very much intertwined or even aspects of the same being, I have compared them before to the metal and the imprint of a coin.)

I have not thought of myself as an energetic person, although I have learned things fairly easily all my life. I did not do really well in grade school and even most of middle school, as I was home sick whenever I could think of an excuse for it (so as to not be bullied) and because I was lazy and did as little school work as possible. But when something interested me, I learned it easily. But only theoretical knowledge. I was small and weak and frail, and moved as little as possible. Therefore, I could never see myself as energetic.

Ever since I started running around as a toddler, I had asthma attacks. Likely I was born that way and am still that way – the attacks may simply have stopped because it was exercise asthma and I stopped exercising. The last years before the attacks stopped (around the age of 10, I think) they mostly appeared in the morning, I woke up gasping for breath. This week I am doing that again and it really drives home how creepy it was. But I realize, looking back, that the attacks back then were probably triggered by dreams of running and jumping and all the things ordinary humans did. Only when I became very, very quiet even in my dreams did the attacks stop.  And that is how I remained for the next four decades or so.

I have had my heart tested a few times during the last decade or so, last May very thoroughly by a cardiologist with modern equipment, and before that a few times with EKG machines for anything from a few minutes to hours. In each case, the result was something I had a hard time believing: That my heart was like that of an athlete. Not a world class athlete obviously but perhaps not too far off: The cardiologist said I could participate in “Birken”, the Birkebeiner race which is a national-level competition of unusual endurance. Surely the man was exaggerating, but my resting pulse was in fact squarely in the bracket of endurance athletes on a regional level. (It is higher now, but then I have a chronic infection these days.)

If not for the asthma, it seems, I might have been an athlete as well as a genius, like my brother, although perhaps not quite at the same level in either. That would take a lot.

What does this difference in people come from? Is it some kind of spiritual “life force” or does it come from differences in the metabolism? Perhaps in the mitochondria, the organelles in each human cell which is the only part of the cell that transforms fat and sugar and oxygen into energy for the cell? But the mitochondria are all inherited from one’s mother – the sperm cells leave theirs behind when they enter the ovum. If the mitochondria were to blame (or praise), you should be roughly as energetic as your mother. I am not sure that is how it works: Supergirl had the energy and smarts of two normal girls ever from she was little, but her numerous siblings were quite normal, as was her mother from what I could see and hear.

I don’t have all the answers, although I like to play someone who has all the answers on the Internet. Perhaps I will learn the answer if I live long enough. For now, I wish my supposed energy could be used to get rid of this infection of the sinuses and thereabout. Even with the return of daylight up north here, I can’t exercise with infection in my body. If I do, I tire quickly and the infection flares and spreads.

The Japanese word “genki” translates both as “energetic” and “healthy” or even “well” (Genki desu ka = How are you?) “Ki” is of course the Japanese word for energy and also spirit (also known from Chinese as “chi” or “qui”). I don’t feel entirely genki these days, but perhaps I am simply used to being among the 1% of energy?

Duolingo

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Screenshot anime Osaka-okan

To someone from Osaka, there may not seem to be much difference between Jalapeno and Frappucino. Today’s topic: Learning languages for free on the Internet!

When I wrote about the Khan Academy, I mentioned that it was very good for math but you would have to go elsewhere for languages. Well, I’ve found one place you can go, but the range of languages is a bit limited yet. Still, the idea is very interesting. And, it is free!

One day, one of those university intellectuals was pondering the troubles of the world: Not only was learning a new language too expensive for most of the human population (typically costing $500 for a self-learning kit, and most of the world does not have hundreds of dollars lying around – let us not even talk about going to a school that teaches foreign languages). But in addition to this, most of the world did not have all the information of the English-speaking Internet in their own language, either. Spanish is a big language used in rather advanced nations, but the Spanish Wikipedia is only 1/5 of the English. Life is unfair, and then you die. Intellectuals know this.

But this particular fertile egghead came up with an idea: How about we teach people a second language for free, and in the process make them translate the Internet? And so, Duolingo was conceived. Some months later, as is good and proper, it was born. It’s been going through some childhood diseases, or at least warts, but it is thriving now.

The website presents you with a range of exercises, starting at the most basic with words like “the” and “woman”. As you begin to get an idea of the language, you get to translate expressions and short sentences between your starting language and the target language. You translate both ways as part of the basic training. Several possible translations are often possible. You get used to all that. As you gain confidence, you learn to translate longer sentences.

At some point in your linguistic ascent, some of the translations you are given are actually from the Internet, not from your teachers. The website then uses “crowdsourcing”, in this case a kind of election system, to determine what translation is best. If enough people try to do the right thing, the right thing will likely emerge, if it is within their skill level.

(We are not talking about religious truth here, where it is an axiom that the majority is always wrong…)

The learning process is “gamified”, much like at the Khan Academy, with skill points and small data sets which you complete to “level up” to more advanced sets. At the beginner level, you typically go through around ten words at a time. Or at least that is the case for French, my test language.  (English is already my third language, so I am doing this just for the test. The only other language I want to learn right now is Japanese, since it is the only language I don’t understand but still hear pretty much every week, besides being almost impossible to translate by machine.)

The available languages at the moment are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German. Or English for those who speak those other languages. Thus the “duo” – it works both ways. This will come in handy when we translate the Internet, since it is always easier to translate into a good-sounding form in your native language. (For instance, I doubt a native English-speaker would say “good-sounding form”! ^_^;)

The languages just happen to be those used by the imperialist powers of the 19th-20th centuries. This may sound like a bad idea, but it has some benefits. Remember, the problem was that the developing world could not afford expensive language training? Much of the developing world is former colonies, where one of these languages is used either as the national language or as a second language. (Actually, I am not sure any of the former German colonies speak German anymore, and if any speak Italian, it is probably just one or two countries. But still, they are among the more popular second languages.)

One benefit of having only European languages is that they are very similar. They may not look that way to you, gentle reader, but if you have ever tried to learn more than a dozen words of Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Hebrew or even Finnish, you will realize that all of the big European languages are siblings of English on one side or another. English is originally a Germanic language (actually more related to the Scandinavian languages than to High German) but with a large vocabulary from the Latin-derived (or Romance) languages, most of which are quite similar to each other. Again, they may seem alien to you if this is your first time learning a new language, but they present minimal challenge compared to learning a language with completely different cultural concepts, like personal pronouns that depend on who you speak to as much as who is speaking.

Basically, you cannot translate a simple sentence into Japanese without knowing the relationship between the people involved. If there are no people in the sentence, then at least the relationship between the speaker of the sentence and the listener. (What other language programs usually do is default to formal or polite speech, which is great for business but quite different from what you’ll hear in a movie or on the street or in a family.) I am sure other non-European languages have other hurdles that I cannot even imagine. I know Chinese have tones that “sing” the same syllable differently, although they sound much the same to us. Hebrew and Arabic have sounds that seem more like a symptom of strep throat than a part of western speech. Some languages don’t have past and future tenses, and so on.

But for now, you can learn a related language with Duolingo. That seems like a good start. The sooner you get going, the more time you have to open your mind and realize that words and reality don’t map exactly one on one. If you live in America and only speak English, you should have at least learn Spanish before your first Spanish-speaking President. I am sure you have time if you start now. And it’s fun!

http://duolingo.com/

Quick recipe for happiness

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Screenshot anime Little Busters

“When you make someone happy, in turn it makes yourself happier as well.” It is like a garden hose never becomes dry as long as it is in use. If happiness runs through us, we have happiness in us.

Someone on Quora asked if there was a step by step plan to become happy. Well, there are several. Arguably the Dhammapada by Shakyamuni Buddha or the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus Christ could be used as such: Their effectiveness does not depend on believing in the divinity of the men who spoke them, they are effective because they represent unchanging truth about human nature. But presumably people want something that is not tied to classical religions, something more generic. And much, much easier. So, what about something super basic. It is not super high concentrated The Fastest Way Ever to Complete and Everlasting Happiness, but it is simple.

1) Each day, try to give others a little more love (respect, understanding, sympathy, thanks) than you receive. Another way to say this is to put a bit more work into other people’s happiness.

2) Each day, learn something new. Preferably something you don’t need to hide under your bed. ^_^; I mean more like improving a skill, or understanding something (or someone) better.

3) Keep an eye out for your own mistakes and spend some time looking for them. Be grateful if someone points them out, or at least investigate whether it may be true.

4) Keep at it. It takes time from you start planting seed till you can harvest fruits, but if you keep at it, sooner or later you will become a happier person and the world a little better than it otherwise would have been.

Being human is hard enough

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Screenshot anime GJ-bu

I am human too, you know. Just with more books. ^_^;

I have written a number of attempts to describe the reality of spiritual gestation, how the spiritual life begins as a small embryo, stuff like that. But it remains above my pray grade, it seems; I cannot express it in a way that I feel sure will do more good than harm. So let us talk about being human instead.

A lot of humans live in poverty. I am not one of them. Even in my childhood, I did not go to bed hungry. I wore patched clothes when I was at home and played with used batteries and tin cans, stuff like that; but I was never worried that I would not get enough food or that we would be evicted or anything like that. So I can’t bear personal testimony about that kind of thing.

In Norway, there is something like a security net that catches people when they fall on hard times, although they can get through it if they are crazy enough. There is also some resistance for those who try to become rich. Both of these borders are much weaker in the USA, from what I hear. I just read on Quora a highly educated and intelligent man describing his rapid descent into poverty because of medical expenses for himself and a loved one. Once he was poor, medication was hard to come by and his health got steadily worse. He was too poor to go to job interviews even when his health allowed it, because he could not afford to travel to the place where the interview was. Eventually his luck turned and he got a job where he could use his old high-income skills. If he had not had them, things would have been grim indeed. As it was, he was able to gradually improve his health and replace essential things for living in America, like a super cheap car.

This kind of problem would not have happened in Norway, but it is a matter of degree. It is expensive to be poor here too, just not that bad. Higher education is free, but you still have to live somewhere (it is pretty could outside most of the year here) and you still need to eat. You won’t get paid life support by the State if you are taking an education, but you do if you are just refusing to work. I am not sure about the logic of this. I suppose you could stealth educate yourself using the local library (in towns where there still is one) or a cheap laptop and the Khan Academy. But you are unlikely to get a job without an actual college degree these days, so sooner or later you have to go there, or be parked on the side line of society.

If being poor is hard, being stupid is no walk in the park either. Or rather, that may be what you end up doing for the rest of your life. This may actually be worse here in the zeroth world, because we need only productive workers with the ability to quickly adapt to ever new challenges and keep their skills from rusting. OK, perhaps not worse than in the USA, since we at least have health insurance for the unemployable. So they are likely to live to a ripe old age unless they drink a lot, take dubious drugs, fail to take prescription drugs, or eat immense quantities of unhealthy food. All of these things happen with alarming regularity, but it takes quite a bit to kill a stupid person, so they still tend to live quite a while. What they do beside writing comments on Net News sites is a bit of a mystery. But from what I see, ignorance is not bliss.

But even if you are employable, life is not a dance on lilies. People who earn more than me, and have nice homes and nice cars, still suffer. The most common reason is problems with relationships. They have unhappy marriages or almost-marriages, or are living alone with a screaming kid, or living alone and paying child support, or have troubles with their friends, troubles with their parents or children, troubles with their boss or their coworkers, trouble with their siblings or trouble with their neighbors. And almost all of them thinks there is nothing they can do about it. Either it is always someone else’s fault, or (in the rare case where people actually realize they are not anywhere near perfect) they are just born that way and they can’t help it.

There are also numerous health challenges, and even more so for our mental health. There is hardly a person who does not have a phobia or two, or a recurring depression, or an addiction or compulsion, or thoughts and worries that assail them and don’t take no for an answer. And if you are lucky enough to not have any severe disturbances yourself, it is a good bet that someone close to you is suffering, and eagerly sharing their suffering.

With all that, it is a bit of a miracle that there are happy people in the world. But there are. For most people this is the result of being in the right place at the right time, I think. But some people have a tendency to wait out at the right place, while others are rarely there to be found, so there is also partly a matter of character. It is not an either / or, it is about increasing one’s chances, not a guarantee for success. That is life in this world. This world is called Earth, not Heaven. It is not a world of absolutes, there is a random element in it, but it is not completely random, not by a long shot.