Regruntled.com

From the blog at the British Psychological Society:

David McCabe and Alan Castel presented university students with 300-word news stories about fictional cognitive research findings that were based on flawed scientific reasoning. For example, one story claimed that watching TV was linked to maths ability, based on the fact that both TV viewing and maths activate the temporal lobe. Crucially, students rated these stories to be more scientifically sound when they were accompanied by a brain image, compared with when the equivalent data were presented in a bar chart, or when there was no graphical illustration at all.

Do you believe that? Would you believe it without the picture?

Here is a 6-bit binary adder built out of wood. It uses marbles for bits, and gravity for power. Cool! And it doesn’t crash as often as Vista.

How early could something like this have been built? The Greeks could certainly have managed the construction; the Antikythera device (100 BC or so) is much more complicated. Binary arithmetic, in its modern form with the ones and zeros, dates to Leibnitz in 1703. But as far as I can tell, the first binary adders were build out of relays in 1937.

In 1937, Claude Shannon produced his master’s thesis at MIT that implemented Boolean algebra and binary arithmetic using electronic relays and switches for the first time in history.

Scientists at Los Alamos have figured out how to make liquid fuels from atmospheric carbon dioxide and water for $4.60 per gallon, according to the NY Times. So what’s the big deal? We can already do this: sugar cane to ethanol, or soybeans to biodiesel. The trick is doing it without chlorophyll. No sunlight needed, just electricity, and the electricity can be from any source, even… nuclear.

$4.60 per gallon is not competitive now, but sooner or later it will be. If the process works at all, it will be improved and made cheaper and more efficient. We already know one way run automobiles on nuclear energy: generate electricity in nuclear power plants and charge up the batteries in electric cars. It works, but not very well, mostly because batteries are heavy. Greenhouse gasoline might be another way. The technology is centralized, easy to control, and it doesn’t displace farmland used to produce food. It would work with existing cars and distribution systems; no massive network of charging stations needed.

Greenhouse gasoline would mean that a civilization based on liquid fuels and internal combustion engines could be sustainable. People drive around in their gas-guzzling monster trucks, spewing carbon dioxide into the air. The greenhouse gasoline factories scrub the carbon dioxide back out of the air and make gasoline and the circle is complete.

An article at Physorg.com says the concept is called Green Freedom… is that brilliant marketing or what?

At the heart of the technology is a new process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production using a new form of electrochemical separation. By integrating this electrochemical process with existing technology, researchers have developed a new, practical approach to producing fuels and organic chemicals that permits continued use of existing industrial and transportation infrastructure. Fuel production is driven by carbon-neutral power.

Up close, it’s Albert Einstein. At a distance, it’s Marilyn Monroe. Talk about beer goggles! Seriously, take off your glasses, or back away from the screen, and the image will change.

What’s happening here is that we do not see through our eyes, we see through our brains, which process the information from our eyes. We’re starting to understand the processing well enough that we can create illusions that take advantage of the way our brains work. More examples here. Thanks to jde for the link.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Consequently, we use magical thinking to deal with advanced technology.

This is very evident to me when I watch other people use computers, which I understand better than they do. Sometimes I catch myself doing the same thing, for example when I have to do something with Vista and Microsoft has changed the terminology or behavior to make it more confusing (to me).

As technology advances, any one person will understand less and less of it. We will have to use more magical thinking, not less.

Or maybe there is a synthesis, a scientifically informed magical thinking. With branded chemicals, such as Benadryl, I understand that diphenhydramine hydrochloride has a predictable effect on my body. I believe that I am capable of understanding the chemical reactions involved if I put in some effort, although I do not presently understand them.

There is also a false magical thinking, as when people pay as much extra for the Benadryl brand as they did for the diphenhydramine hydrochloride. The false magical thinking is encouraged by the advertisers, who aren’t thinking magically at all.