Re: Pi Forums

This is to about 6 people. Many thanks for your efforts on my behalf and your replies. I'm feeling rather weary as I haven't had my after lunch nap and will be getting ready for bed after this. I'll read your replies more carefully tomorrow and hope to get the RPi connected up again. It's not easy as SWMBO gets very concerned when she sees me doing anything that requires mental or physical effort, so I try to do it very early in the morning. (I had a slight stroke recently.)

I'm a bit of a nit-picker, so I like John's comment about the spelling of "complement".

Frank

I can never aspire to be as good a writer as Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson, W. C. Fields or any number of worthy gentlefolk who despised spellling. Although the actual provenance of the genre of quotes that contain the meme "I have nothing but contempt for anyone who can spell a word only one way" is unknown, I take it as a truism. At best it demonstrates a lack of imagination.  I do believe that it is a skill [?] which will go the way of the buggywhip industry as spell checkers continue to encompass an ever increasing share of the written word.

they can't be determined analytically

Google translate works by analytically determining weights, based

on having scanned lots of documents, rather than having lots of

English teachers write down lots of grammar rules.  

I think a computerized legal system would have to work the same way.

John Beetem wrote:

 

... causes me to doubt the ability of humans to tell stories accurately -- not so much because they want to lie, but because their brains cannot accept the truth as seen and substitute an alternate version.

Yes, I think that's quite accurate, and in fact extremely common (example in next paragraph).  With training though, I suspect that we can discipline ourselves to approach the goal of being purely factual.  We could still be mistaken because our perception is sometimes not clear, but that's slightly different to succumbing to a false reality imposed by our brain.

The example of this that I often give relates to door edges, as follows.

(Don't try this yourselves unless you accept full responsibility for the consequences.

This is not encouragement to try it, only a description of my own experiments.)

If you look at a well illuminated straight door edge with normal eyesight, it does of course appear straight.  It appears straight even if you put your eye right next to it, which anyone who is well acquainted with photographic lenses (especially fisheyes) probably realizes is highly unlikely.  If you then consider the organic nature of the component parts of the eyes and their optical quality compared to a highly engineered photographic lens, you realize even more that a real optical straight edge being projected by your eye's lens on your retina is even less likely than you first thought.

But here's the acid test.  If you now close one eye and deform the eyeball of the open eye by applying gentle pressure, the edge of the door still remains straight despite the fact that the optical projection is being messed up deliberately.  Apply steadily more and more pressure (as I said, don't do this) and the door edge continues to be straight until a point where the nice image suddenly breaks up and distorts.

It's clear what is happening here.  We don't "see" the image that is cast on our retinas.  Instead, our minds model the world around us, and as long as there is a rough correlation between the model and incoming optical data, the mind assumes that the model is still the correct one.  We know that door edges are straight, so that's what our mind tells us we see despite a wide range of optical distortions actually entering the mind as raw data.

In addition to the above test, by concentrating you can train your eye-brain system to display imperfections in the two humours of the eyeball as a fuzzy shimmering of the image.  They're organic gel/fluids and are certainly not perfectly transparent so that shouldn't come as a huge surprise, yet we never see the imperfections under normal circumstances because what we're really seeing is a mental reconstruction, not the actual optical image.

So, I think my little experiments in personal optics (done many years ago) are consistent with what you wrote.  Our brains really do supply an alternative reality ... continually.

Wow, we really are making this thread drift.

Morgaine.

Wow, epic thread. I would do proper quotes and whatnot, but it seems the only way to do that here is longhand HTML and it's 2013 already...

Morgaine: you're right on the money with the way that the brain applies post processing to the raw signals from our organic transducers. It can at times yield misleading results, but on balance it works pretty well - maybe well enough for designers of smarter technology to take some cues, rather than reinventing the wheel (only using half a dozen triangles...)

A trick I discovered in my teens: Open a text book and focus on a word at the centre of the page. Now, without moving your eyes, try to make out as many words as possible around your chosen word. Two things will become apparent:

1) It's very hard to stop the eyes from scanning the surroundings.

2) the actual field of detailed view is very narrow.

It's clear that much of what we "see" is actually a seamless patchwork of recent memory and guesswork based on previous experience (wot we've learnrd). Peripheral vision is sensitive to change (not just motion), but it's definition is pretty low. How could we apply this? Well, say we had some autonomous robot with a stereo pair of gazillion pixel cameras. We could either give equal weight to every pixel and process a load of garbage, or we could have an area of high definition surrounded by less sensitive areas. The pixels are baked on the CCD's, so we can swivel the sensitive areas around pretty easily if we detect peripheral interest, but we save a lot of bits.

Unfortunately, it's far sexier to just toss bus width and processor speed at these problems - which is what happens when you leave engineers in exclusive charge of creating solutions! Consider the humble mp3 (and ogg). An ingenious solution to a data rate problem that uses human psychoacoustics to toss out the chaff. Given that now everyone takes broadband and huuuuge data storage as a given, one wonders if it would even be considered as necessary to invent today, because instead we could all be downloading 32bit float wavs (or some proprietary Apple aiff with drm and all the trimmings).

Did someone (coder27) mentionGoogle Translate? LOL, as my friends' children would say. Evidence, if any were needed that it takes more than a mere warehouse full of computers and a bunch of smart people to ape the intelligence of a fruitfly. "The pen of my aunt"...

A computerised judiciary? Hmmm.

Fuzzy logic? Why fake analogue when you can have the real thing? Although to be fair, everything is digital, It's just that electrons are very small and prone to nearly being in two places at once while at the same time nearly being in neither. Trying to ape that bit depth and data rate is hard, so why try if you can avoid it?

So, the Foundation's forum? Pretty much company support forum model 1*. Heavy handed, evasive, letting the fanboys weave their spin, exploiting the minority of people who are diligent enough to answer the same three queries month after month. The usual.

*Model 2 is the company that lets their forum go all Lord Of The Flies. Funny, if you have nothing invested in their product, or their stock.

The educational thing? This is what it's all about after all. It is a little quiet on that front (and has been since day #1).

Perhaps the fact that Pi sales have exceeded expectations by two orders of magnitude means that (apart from commisioning that new kitchen) they will be hiring people, rather than herding the community cats (who are too busy consuming pirated media and whatnot). I dunno. I'm willing to cut the Foundation a little slack here, because it's all so unprecedented. Perhaps this little pcb is the indirect means of change, rather than the specific piece of hardware. Hardware is less than nothing without well written software that doesn't take the patience of a saint to get running, after all. They do have to deal with Gove too. The man is an imbecile chasing a flawed and naively populist model.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things that the Pi can do is make school boards of governers ask "Why are we paying a stupendous lease on PCs that are apparently no use to anyone at all? Perhaps it's not the machines, but the people in charge, no?"

Whither Linux? Not in my lifetime. Pidora? Pot smoking hippies who couldn't run a bath. As a life long socialist it pains me to say so, but there's just no imperative. We demand value (i.e. cheap) so when once companies like Bell Labs would do pure research and the results would end up in the public domain it just doesn't happen any more. Google and the like do nothing "for free". Public institutions like NASA, the BBC and such are being increasingly put under the cosh, so don't expect freebies from them either. Nor will it happen in FOSS, because under it all it's just as self-serving. Sorry, but that's how I feel, based on a couple of decades of watching glacial ineveitability.

ARM? Well, it's nice to have so many low cost boards out there - and to have the profile of the platform rsised by the Pi, but it's not the x86 killer yet. Nor is it the Windows / Mac killer. Room for both, with just a little crossover right now. And market share is no guarantee of profit.

BTW I gave up being an engineer when I bailed from aerospace to join a band more than half a lifetime ago and these days I'm just a technician who fights the corner for ordinary people who would rather that "stuff just worked", so feel free to disagree with my pov. I'm used to it. There was a time before colour TV when motoring enthusiasts might expect to stop at the roadside to e.g. reseat a leaky exhaust valve with a smear of oil and a bit of roadside grit, or toss a handful of Fuller's earth into their clutch bell housing so as to get  up a steep hill. That period has long gone in the automotive world, but in computing we're still there, after more than fifty years. It's just not good enough and it's not the fault of the users.

Perhaps if we put a ten dollar tax on qwerty keyboards the personal computer would improve as a labour saving device overnight. We might even get more intuitive modular programming environments that creative people can just get creative with. It's not like your average compiler isn't doing most of the hard work anyway. Perhaps it's time for the nerds to let go.

epic post.

btw, the "Quote Previous Message" icon has a second purpose.

If you have selected text in your draft, it will quote that. 

So to selectively quote, just paste the quote, select it, and hit

the Quote icon.

coder27 wrote:

 

btw, the "Quote Previous Message" icon has a second purpose.

If you have selected text in your draft, it will quote that. 

So to selectively quote, just paste the quote, select it, and hit

the Quote icon.

Aha thanks, I think that worked - we'll see.

Call me a Luddite, but this is the first forum I've seen that required an instruction manual.And an undo button.

Just two little points I'll address there, extracted from your post in reverse order to reflect their dependency:

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

There was a time before colour TV when motoring enthusiasts might expect to stop at the roadside to e.g. reseat a leaky exhaust valve with a smear of oil and a bit of roadside grit, or toss a handful of Fuller's earth into their clutch bell housing so as to get  up a steep hill. That period has long gone in the automotive world, but in computing we're still there, after more than fifty years. It's just not good enough and it's not the fault of the users.

Correct, it's the fault of the entire software development community and industry and academia, who despite the known complexity of the systems before them and in total disregard of the daily evidence that they cannot cope with this complexity in a reliable manner, nevertheless continue like lemmings to create systems through manual programming.

They are doomed to failure, as we have discussed many times before, the latest over in this thread about software engineering.  It's extremely blinkered of us, and an utter waste of humanity's time all around the globe.  To put it bluntly, we are behaving stupid.

Fuzzy logic? Why fake analogue when you can have the real thing?

For the reason of the first paragraph.  We are dealing with systems that are vastly too complex to be handled in an analytic manner (both in size of state space and in algorithmic complexity), by orders of magnitude, and those who attempt to do so (all of us) are deluding themselves that homo sapiens' limited mental ability can grasp the extreme complexity of real systems (beyond trivial ones) and program them without error.   They're not the toy programs that we were taught as examples, but we are behaving as if they were.

In the case of control theory, engineers have at least faced the reality of some systems not being analytic for a variety of reasons, either formally or as a result of their complexity or because of limited knowledge of the domain or because of incomplete data acquisition (some parameters may be hidden).  Faced with this understanding, they developed fuzzy logic as an incremental approach to tame the barely tamable in a piecewise manner that the mind is able to grasp.

It's not perfect, and because of the use of heuristics it's partly guesswork, but it's more in line with the inherent limits of our minds than pretending that we can manage these systems correctly through the analytic/synthetic process of conventional programming.  Politico-socio-economic systems are likewise non-analytic and way beyond our ability to comprehend fully, so fuzzy logic is perhaps the best way of tackling that domain.

Harry Seldon's psychohistory has an analytic solution of course, but we're not there yet.

Morgaine.

PS. Jonathan, thanks also for your good point about the mind manufacturing a wide detailed view for us despite our optical system having high resolution only within a very narrow area.  That's another great example of the mind constructing a mental model for us, and making this virtual reality our "perception".  We don't see actual reality at all --- it would be incomprehensible chaos if we were presented with the inputs directly.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

If you like SciFi, it's a must-read!  Although I'm biased, since I have almost all of his books.

You don't need to be interested in SciFi, Stranger in a Strange Land is a much wider commentary on life in general than the SciFi tag would suggest. Heinlein had a way of doing that while also making a good SciFi story.

Fully paid up member of the biased club here too

John Beetem wrote:

 

That's exactly the problem.  From incorrect premises you can make any conclusion. 

Well said. Of course when the premises almost always come from a value judgement you can do anything you like while feeling smug and satisfied that your conclusion is right and everyone who doesn't agree is a heretic to be burned at the stake

Consider the humble mp3 (and ogg). An ingenious solution to a data rate problem that uses human psychoacoustics to toss out the chaff. Given that now everyone takes broadband and huuuuge data storage as a given, one wonders if it would even be considered as necessary to invent today, because instead we could all be downloading 32bit float wavs (or some proprietary Apple aiff with drm and all the trimmings).

 

The problem is that mp3 encoded material sounds so hideous - human ears and sound processing (even mine which are a bit clapped out) are way more sophisticated than you are giving them credit for. If you get a chance try comparing some mp3 encoded music with a lossless encoding - you don't need expensive speakers - the difference is quite staggering even on my car's bog standard stuff.

Most data processing involves data reduction (eg evidence -> guilty/not guilty) - the hard bit is not throwing out the wheat with the chaff.

(BTW - you might be much better off listening to 32 bit integer wavs because that way you have better resolution at the expense of reduced dynamic range, on the other hand it might not make any difference because the 24 bit resolution you get from 32 bit floating point is better than current ADCs anyway.)

MK

MK

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

We demand value (i.e. cheap)

I see two sides to value, one is that it's cheap enough to just throw away. Second is that it's built to last and can be economically repaired if necessary.  Seems that we don't do the second anymore.

That period has long gone in the automotive world,

and in a lot of other areas too. However it puts us in an akward situation. The thing either works, or it doesn't. No way for the user to fix it, or to even see what's gone wrong. You need an 'expert' and they're always expensive. Often the expert can't fix it either and wants to start randomly changing bits...  at your expense

Morgaine talks about complexity and our inability to comprehend the system. Absolutely true, but the same applies to the 'expert' these days too. 

ordinary people who would rather that "stuff just worked", so feel free to disagree with my pov.

I don't disagree, I just don't think that's ever been the goal of the system.

I might disagree on whether stuff just working is a good thing or not. As long as it does work everyone is happy, but it leaves us halfway down a slippery slope, only takes a tiny nudge and there's nothing anyone can do once it starts.

More and more our lives rely on systems that nobody understands and it becomes very easy for a small spanner in the works to make a really big mess of everything.

Don't get me wrong, I like stuff that just works as much as the next person, I'm just not convinced the price we pay for it is really worth it.

Jonathan Garrish wrote:

 

We demand value (i.e. cheap)

I see two sides to value, one is that it's cheap enough to just throw away. Second is that it's built to last and can be economically repaired if necessary.  Seems that we don't do the second anymore.

That period has long gone in the automotive world,

and in a lot of other areas too. However it puts us in an akward situation. The thing either works, or it doesn't. No way for the user to fix it, or to even see what's gone wrong. You need an 'expert' and they're always expensive. Often the expert can't fix it either and wants to start randomly changing bits...  at your expense

Morgaine talks about complexity and our inability to comprehend the system. Absolutely true, but the same applies to the 'expert' these days too. 

ordinary people who would rather that "stuff just worked", so feel free to disagree with my pov.

I don't disagree, I just don't think that's ever been the goal of the system.

I might disagree on whether stuff just working is a good thing or not. As long as it does work everyone is happy, but it leaves us halfway down a slippery slope, only takes a tiny nudge and there's nothing anyone can do once it starts.

More and more our lives rely on systems that nobody understands and it becomes very easy for a small spanner in the works to make a really big mess of everything.

Don't get me wrong, I like stuff that just works as much as the next person, I'm just not convinced the price we pay for it is really worth it.