Nikio

PS: Why monkeys desaturate photos when I upload them to the my.opera server? It really pushes down the quality of the image?

Finally some hot sunny days that deserve to be called summer!

On the other note; this blog is celebrating it's 2nd birthday! Yay!

In that time we acomplished:
- almost 90.000 visitors
- 146 articles
- 66 albums
- "Best blog by a male" award
... and lots more

Today I thaught of strange but fascinating cartoon I have seen as a child on HRT (Croatian national television). The story tells about a beautiful city with happy people. One day a scientist finds out that the whole city is just some person's dream and if that person wakes up, they are all dead. So they build a special portal and send a team to kidnap that very person who is dreaming them and import him into his own dream. They put him in a specially built chamber with no noise and lights that could wake him up. And just as they do that, the guy starts to dream about beautiful pink flamingos.

The cartoon had a HUGE impact on my childish imagination and I still often think about it. I tried various words and phrases on google to find the title or perhaps even a DVD, but no luck. If any of you guys knows something about it, I would really appreciate.

Image source

I read a lot about brains and how they work lately. I just finished reading Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence which made a lot of sense to me. I will pursue this topic in some of my future posts, for now I'd like to stop at a passage which the author wrote as an introduction to the chapter dealing with application of AI, based on his proposed Memory-prediction framework.

Originally posted by Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence:

It's hard to predict the ultimate uses of a new technology. As we've seen throughout this book, brains make predictions by analogy to the past. So our natural inclination is to imagine that a new technology will be used to do the same kinds of things as a previous technology. We imagine using a new tool to do something familiar, only faster, more efficiently, or more cheaply.

Examples are abundant. People called the railroad the "iron horse" and the automobile the "horseless carriage." For decades the telephone was viewed in the context of the telegraph, something that should be used only to communicate important news or emergencies; it wasn't until the 1920s that people started using itcasually.

It is exactly what I have been thinking for a long time and it is not hard to find other examples. Science fiction of late 19th century depicted future with large steam machies. They were unable to think of anything else. Sci-fi of 1960' already had computers, but guess what; no displays! Only flashing buttons. They just projected new applications on the existing technology.
On more realistic side: at first World wide web was just a copy of printed media. Only recently we developed interactive applications that can't be found anywhere else. Or one thing that frustrates me with cars; once a crank handle was required to lower a car glass. It is normal, that the handle was located on the inner side of the car door. But now, since we have electronic buttons, that position is no longer obligatory. Buttons can be placed anywhere in the car! Why not the stearing wheel? Yet only few cars take advantage of the very technology they use. It is still a lot easier to change technology than paradigm.

An other example that effects me a lot more personally now is in photography. If you take a look at present day digital cameras, they don't look much different than their film predecessors. I believe that the digital technology brings a lot of new ways how to build and use camera and we have not yet exploited them.

I observe that thing happening on myself. Recently I bought a decent digital camera, yet I still use it exactly as it was on film. I don't take many shots, I don't experiment enough and I don't play arround in post-production... I just shoot like 20th century photographer.
But I think it is time to move on. I found many photographers on the internet that never used film and their aproach is very refreshing. One of them is Lenart Senica, a young guy from Slovenia, who takes his camera to school. Just look at the results! I would never imagine doing something like that in my highschool days.

So... yes... It is time to rethink my assumptions and rearrange my neurons

Not much to say; the latest my.opera upgrade messed up my costum css designs. I hope that guys will solve this soon. I kinda like this one.
I added a new poll to the the sidebar. I want to know how much television do you watch now. Did internet change your watching habits? It did for me. I voted for the last option

And yes... spring is knocking on the door! Finally!

One thing that strikes me the most when I read books or listen to humanistic [=understanding human] lectures is how impossible it is for us to see our mind the way it really is. The dilemma is the following: how to adress the problem? Should we study the brain as a piece of hardware or our mind as software. Somehow this reminds me on the nature of the light which could be understood both as a wave or as a partice (when in fact it is none of it, really).

There are many who aproach our brain as hardware and achive amazing results. The other day I was visiting TED Talks and found astonishing Vilayanur Ramachandran's talk. You should see it.
The software paradigm has some benefits of it's own as well. For one it's far simpler methods are useful to deal with patients in mental care therapy. Well, Freud took it (too) seriously and his books often sound like a mathematical argument where everything has it's logical place. In his terms, our mind is a large peice of OS software code, where the larger part is hidden (to us) and performs tasks that peak out only when certain results of previously done processing are important. Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but I see no reason whatsoever to study brain or mind by one method only.

The dilemma actually multiplies itself on a smaller scale. Within the hardware paradigm some explain it as the chemistry in the brain (?!!?), others as the sum of connections between synapses. That can be very accurate in many cases. For example; fading memory can be described by less and less active connections (synapses have less and less neurotransmiters active).
Software apologists have their own crossroads; are we programed by our (supressed) desires and ...aammm... chemistry (?), or do we hold the power of free will (Glasser)?

Somehow there just isn't a theory around to condense it all. It seems like we are programed to see either the lady or the man with the saxophone, but not both at the same time ("or are we?" Glasser might say). You might want to see Jeff Hawkins' video for that matter.
Hopefully we'll manage somehow. Our minds have this limited way of thinking that satisfys humble everyday's experience, but science has a good record of breaking them.

Image source.

Every year after the summer, there is a periond of time when it seems like everything beautiful had come to an end. But shortly after, the real autumn starts and eventhough it is not a good time to take a swim anymore (last year was exceptional), there are other things one can enjoy.


One of them are chest nuts. From picking them up in the forest to roasting them on fire, every stage is a celebration of the pure nature, friendship, tranquility and the time of the year when we calm down and rest a bit. It can be especially nice if one is acquainted with some good friends. Then it's almost like a ritual.


More autumn photos can be found in the galery.