Lone Gunman

On a large num­ber of ‘best of’ or ‘books that changed my life’ lists I always spot Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB), the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Dou­glas Hofstadter.

When my copy arrived at my door recently I was taken aback by this tome and realised that it was going to be a dense read that will need—and hope­fully reward—all of my atten­tion. As with sim­i­lar books, I will under­take back­ground research and read­ing first so that I can fully appre­ci­ate all the con­cepts con­tained within.

This is when I found MIT’s ‘spe­cial pro­gramme’ specif­i­cally based on the book. While it doesn’t pro­vide a wealth of use­ful, sup­ple­men­tary mate­r­ial (much like the Wikipedia entry), it does men­tion some good Bach pieces to accom­pany your reading.

Need help in visu­al­is­ing four dimen­sions? Étienne Ghys has now cre­ated a series of videos for ‘teach­ing’ oth­ers how to visu­alise objects in the fourth dimen­sion (the spa­tial, not tem­po­ral, fourth dimension).

How on earth can we visu­al­ize such a thing? [The] chal­lenge in visu­al­iz­ing four dimen­sions is very sim­i­lar to the one that would be faced by a per­fectly flat crea­ture who lived in two dimen­sions and tried to visu­al­ize three, like the inhab­i­tants of Edwin Abbott’s Flat­land or the lizards in the page in Escher’s Rep­tiles. A cube or a sphere would be nearly unimag­in­able for the two-dimensional lizards, since they are unable to rise out of the plane.

At 24 I firmly believe that I’m still young enough to com­pletely change my pro­fes­sional ‘direc­tion’ and for it to have no dis­cernible effect on my future earn­ing power. As such I always have these fan­tas­tic ideas that one day soon I will go back to uni­ver­sity and com­ple­ment my CS degree with another degree in a field that has fas­ci­nated me for years: cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science.

Here are some links I’ve been click­ing on a lot recently:

• MIT Open­Course­Ware
  • Cog­ni­tive Neuroscience
  • Lab­o­ra­tory in Cog­ni­tive Science
  • Com­pu­ta­tional Cog­ni­tive Science
• Major Branches in Neuroscience
• Neu­ro­science + Com­puter Sci­ence = ? (Ask MetaFilter)

Brows­ing the MIT OpenCourseWare’s Lab­o­ra­tory in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence entry, I came across a paper on giv­ing effec­tive sci­en­tific talks.

1. Pre­pare your mate­r­ial care­fully and logically
2. Prac­tice your talk
3. Don’t put in too much material
4. Avoid equa­tions
5. Have only a few con­clu­sion points
6. Talk to the audi­ence not to the screen
7. Avoid mak­ing dis­tract­ing sounds
8. Pol­ish your graph­ics
   1. Use large let­ters (no fonts smaller than 16 pts)
   2. Keep the graphic simple
   3. Use color
   4. Use car­toons
9. Use humor if possible
10. Be per­son­able in tak­ing ques­tions
    1. First, repeat the question
    2. If you don’t know the answer then say “I don’t know, I will have to look into that”
    3. If the ques­tioner dis­agrees with you and it looks like there will be an argu­ment then defuse the situation
    4. Never insult the questioner

The DFL blog rounds up the Bei­jing Olympics with some great data visu­al­i­sa­tions on last place fin­ishes and some wise words on how the Olympic spirit has changed.

It’s part of a larger prob­lem: media cov­er­age can be so over­whelm­ingly focused on the home team that the big pic­ture is missed. Events in which your coun­try has no chance are ignored. Gold medal­lists from other coun­tries are only shown to explain why your country’s com­peti­tor came in 12th. And you’ll almost never hear some­one else’s anthem played at the podium.

I was sur­prised to spend so much time blog­ging about the ugly nation­al­is­tic side of the Olympics in this round of DFL. The 2008 ver­sion of this blog has been the angry DFL, wherein I ful­mi­nate against the media, national Olympic com­mit­tees, the IOC, and the gen­eral pub­lic for their obses­sion with medals and their ten­dency to blame ath­letes for fail­ing to bring back the shiny knick-knacks and mak­ing their whole coun­try look bad.