Thoughts of a Psych/Code Monkey/Guitarist

[side note: if you are looking for the app, it is available here on the play store .] What does red look like? Maybe a flag, or an apple, or blood, but these are all relative terms. It's a notoriously tricky problem to figure out how to explain what it's like to see red to someone who's never seen it - maybe it's not possible? Even stranger is the common realization that maybe it's arbitrary...could it be that other people experience colours completely differently to how you do? Perhaps to them, red feels like green does to you, and vice-versa. They'd still call all the items above 'red', but they'd experience them in the same way you do green. What's more, if this were possible, perhaps you'd never know... It's known as the Inverted Spectrum problem, and it's a tricky one: it's very easy to assume everyone experiences things the same as you. Some people can go a long time before realizing they're colour-blind, where...

A very short update to say that Blogger has launched a collection of new templates . They're a lot cleaner and more modern looking, plus have some nice customization options, so I decided to make the switch. The main difference is the layout is a lot wider, and the non-post stuff on the right has now moved into the left. Hopefully everything still works, but if anything's broken let me know. Also, kudos to the Blogger team, the new ones look rather good! Plus threaded comments still work -(looks like the old code is still used for them, too :p) and the commenting experience seems a bit cleaner now.

Fourier transforms are interesting things - a way of converting repetition to single values and back (roughly). Most commonly known in music (see my earlier post ), it also shows up oddly as the relationship between position and momentum in quantum mechanics. While audio perception takes patterns over time and converts them to notes, our eyes do likewise, but taking patterns over space - called spatial frequencies . Just as with music, there's (bidirectional) ways to convert an image into its spatial frequency representation. Part 1: Frequency swapped images As an example, on the left is a (greyscale) photo of George Bush, and on the right is the frequency version. Note that frequencies are complex numbers: representing both how strong the frequency is (the power - top right greyscale image) as well as the phase - i.e. where in the cycle it starts. As this is cyclical, I'll represent it as colours, from red -> green -> blue -> back to red (bottom right). For co...

One class this semester is mostly aimed at coming up with ideas for what to study as a graduate student (not surprising, being a 4th year subject in a major that aims at getting people into grad school). I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I already have a project lined up for summer, but it was interesting instead using the time to come up with alternatives, and then try to convince myself they were worth discarding. Or at least...putting off until later. Hence this list, using a blog as my external memory  of interesting things, so I can look back later and see if I was stupid or if any turn out to be interesting. Split roughly by subject, from the more abstract/philosophical to the concrete/engineering: Philosophy:  1) For everything (possibly?) true, can it be thought? 2) For everything thought, can it be communicated? Consider this the philosophical version of the Incompleteness theorem (maths), or the Uncertainty principle (physics) or the Halti...

Source: pernambola.blogspot.com I've avoided working in the US for too long, despite being a (now-former) software engineer and it being the source of the majority of interesting opportunities. There's a lot of reasons why, but near the top is its healthcare system. There's lots (and lots) of reasons why it's bad, but despite hearing the problems, it can be easy for people to dismiss them ('hey, it's not really that bad, right?'). So rather than stats, I thought it might be good to present my own anecdote as a case-study instead. As someone lucky enough to have lived on three continents (worked & studied in Australia, worked in Switzerland, and studied in Canada) I'll also add observations of what I'd expect from other countries, for comparison. For some context: Last summer I accepted an internship position at Facebook, and after failing to secure a spot outside the US in their London office, I ended up living in Menlo Park (California) ...

Or: Predictably unpredictable. Source:  The Guardian It was about five months ago that I posted some post-Brexit-vote comment s about the reaction, and while I'm even more annoyed by the recent US election results than Brexit, now in the post-Election period it seemed worthwhile to revisit. First, going over the old stuff: STILL what not to do when a population votes opposite to how you'd like: -) STILL don't ask to change the result. Yes, it happened again. Technically it's asking for the electoral college voters to not match what turned out on election night, which isn't quite as bad as just asking for another vote, but I still don't see why 6 million votes in a petition should count over the 120(ish) million votes during the election. -) STILL don't ask to change the style of voting . There's a lot of problems with the electoral college system : all-or-nothing states, no instant-runoff, unusual weighting system, ... but that...

It's election time in the US, and it's hard to avoid hearing all about it here in Canada (or, I presume, much of the rest of the world). I'm not exception to that as you can probably guess by my previous post. I've been interested to see a few of the psychological aspects of polarization, especially after the Australian elections earlier this year had similar, although to a lesser extent. Two particular stand out, and are worth looking at closer: 1A) Conspiracy theory: Bayes and Unwavering beliefs. Bayes theorem is some maths regarding probabilities: The interesting thing is that it can be used as a way to model how something (e.g. you, or your brain) can end up holding beliefs about how the world works based off experience. To reword the equation above in prose: How much I should believe that a hypothesis is true, given some evidence [ P(H | E) ], is equal to my old probability [ P(H) ] times the chance of seeing the evidence assuming it's true [ P(...

(or: an exercise in selling falsehood. Apologies to the non-CS followers of the blog). My app is going to be the best app you've ever used. There's a team of folks I know - brilliant people, really brilliant people - who build the best apps in the world. THE best. I mean, users pay money to use these apps, and no-one does that. They do, it's true, these people build apps that users pay money for because they're that good. So these people will build an app because I tell them, and do you know what? It's going to be the best. It's going to be so cheap to build, just wait and see. I've got a lot of experience at this, I can build an app cheaper than anyone else out there, it's what I do. Do you know how? This app is going to be so great, Amazon will PAY us to host it. They will! They'll pay us to run our app on AWS. Usually it's the other way around! But they will, trust me - they're smart people, I've met the folks at Amazon, they'...

Or: How to Lose Votes & Alienate People Source:  the Guardian If you've been keeping up with world news recently, no doubt you've heard about Brexit - a.k.a. the 2016 referendum for the UK leaving the European union, which recently passed. Depending on what sort of filter bubble you currently reside in (see my earlier post ), you might have also run across a lot of articles saying why this is a bad idea. In general I agree that it's not the optimal outcome, but was pretty surprised at the way the responses came out, and feel like, if anything, they made the issues worse, not better. Given that many of the readers of this blog live in democracies (it seems a popular form of government), and democracies at times will have votes you don't agree with (otherwise you're either the world's best bellwether, or leading your own dictatorship...), I figured it worth covering some of what I saw happening, and why it did or didn't seem a good idea... ...

Image source I'm sure it's due to the frequency illusion , but having switched from tech into more of the psych/neuroscience fields, I'm starting to notice an increase in the number of articles coming out claiming new findings on how the brain works. For example, this coverage of the effects of LSD on the brain , or this one on creating a map of where each word is 'represented' . (Note: using guardian articles just for consistency, not because they're particularly good/bad). This time related to the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect , I also find articles about the brain to be fairly poorly written - e.g. misrepresent the trial, explain it badly, leap to wrong conclusions, etc. The same is true sometimes also when talking about the research, and surprisingly, even in the research papers themselves! So in case it's useful for anyone reading these things, I figured I'd note a few things to be wary of when reading any upcoming neuro-related news. With the caveat...