A while ago I was at a conference with a bunch of people and we were standing around in the lobby of the hotel waiting to set off for supper. From arrival of the first of us to actual departure took about half an hour. First a couple of those who were supposed to be coming hadn’t turned up so a posse went off to search for them. Next no-one had yet agreed where to go so a whole discussion ensued as to what kind of food was wanted, what was the price range and who had the local knowledge suited to making quality/price recommendations. Finally by the time this had got resolved and the two people originally missing had been located some of those orginally present had wandered off to the bar to check email via wifi and grab a drink. Prising them loose took another five mintues. But eventually we did set off — half an hour late mind you.

Philosophy lives with a permanently open horizon, leaving unsettled many basic questions regarding morality and mortality. Most people, and all societies, need settled answers to those questions.

Mark Lilla, NYRB 2004-10-21, p.59, col. 4.

Interesting discussion with a friend of mine that led on to subject of addiction. He brought up recent research on dopamine activity in monkeys by Schulz. This was continuing a long line of work which had originally demonstrated a learning effect in the dopamine system as follows. Take a monkey and give it a reward. You see dopamine get released as a form of reward (dopamine is a neurotransmitter that appears to both act as reward and increase plasticity of synapses and neurons). Next you start pairing the reward with a previous signal stimulus such as noise. Gradually over time you see the dopamine release move backwards in time from the point at which the reward is actually received to the point in time when the signal is given. (Aside: interesting parallel with adaptive expectations in economics).

OPIATE, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.

From THE DEVIL’S DICTIONARY (1911). Read online at www.dict.org

2.4 Efficiency and Fitts’ Law

“The efficiency of locating and operating screen objects near each other – in this case the navigation menu and scrollbar – as observed by researchers at the NCI and theorized by Nielsen (1999), can be explained by Fitts’ Law, a robust model of human psychomotor behavior developed by psychologist Paul M. Fitts. Essentially, movement time is affected by the distance moved and the precision demanded by the size of the target to which one is moving. Fitts’ Law enables the prediction of human movement and human motion based on rapid, aimed movement, such as found in the use of a computer mouse. Fitts (1954) discovered that movement time is a logarithmic function of distance when target size was held constant, and that movement time is also a logarithmic function of target size when distance was held constant. The time to acquire a target is therefore a function of the distance to and size of the target.

Quantity changes quality

Engels (source as yet untraced)

For months I have been getting grief from a toshiba laptop problem wherein the screen fades to invisibility after some random period of time (anything from 5s to several hours). Finally, thanks to the wonders of search engines, I’ve discovered the cause of the problem (and the solution): http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/13841/.