Europe According to the United States of America

Before anyone complains that the following picture is a huge misrepresentation of our levels of education in America, just remember what we really do say when asked to locate various countries on a map.


And if you need a geography refresher, check out the Animaniacs geography song.
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Chocolate Cake 2

I'm improving!





This cake ROSE in the oven,
which is quite difficult for a vegan cake.
I made a few adjustments to the recipe,
and it's a better cake!
I'm so proud of myself, it's silly!

The frosting came out like frosting this time,
instead of having the previous glaze-consistency,
but it's got grains of sugar in it.?
Which isn't to big of a deal, but...
Hm... I'll have to tinker around with the instructions...
I've got a few ideas I'm excited to try.

I Am a Moderate!

As you may already be aware, Jon Stewart is combating Glenn Beck's recent sensationalist, hate-inducing, fear-mongering rally with a Rally to Restore Sanity to the political discourse in our country. It's about time!

Funny man Roy Zimmerman has composed a little anthem to mark the occasion.

Of course, if you really want moderate, you could not do better than the fundamentalists of the Church of the Holy Undecided :)
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Better Surgery With New Surgical Robot With Force Feedback

Surgical robot Sofie. (Credit: Bart van Overbeeke)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2010) — Robotic surgery makes it possible to perform highly complicated and precise operations. Surgical robots have limitations, too. For one, the surgeon does not 'feel' the force of his incision or of his pull on the suture, and robots are also big and clumsy to use. Therefore TU/e researcher Linda van den Bedem developed a much more compact surgical robot, which uses 'force feedback' to allow the surgeon to feel what he or she is doing.

Read more ....

Julia Child

(Child's kitchen... my current desktop)


After having viewed the movie half a dozen times,
I'm now reading the book Julie and Julia by Julie Powell.
which is better than the film (as per usual),
because the directing/editing is pretty cheesy,
but, mostly, because Julie is portrayed by Amy Adams,
who is incapable of NOT being bubblely and adorable,
even when she's being sad.
That doesn't give much complexity for the role of Julie,
which is a shame, because Julie's writing deserves a deeper performance.
Reading the book, her disgruntled wit is making me laugh out loud in unexpected bursts
which is a tad awkward while on the bus or sitting at a bar...
Anyway, it's inspiring me to cook more, write more,
and to be more constructive in general (more so than I already am!).

I got a bunch of Child documentaries, biographies, and cook books from the Seattle Public Library.
Pretty interesting stuff.
She's a fanscinating person.
A tall glass of water overfloweth with life.





“Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.”


“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.”


“Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment;
but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.”





"You must have discipline to have fun."


"Everything in moderation, including moderation."


"It took architects years to get established,
to show that they weren't just artisans,
and that's what I hope will happen with gastronomy.
For some reason people don't consider cooking a serious business,
but it's like any discipline,
and it's a passionate and fascinating one."





"Some people like to paint pictures, or do gardening,
or build a boat in the basement.
Other people get a tremendous pleasure out of the kitchen,
because cooking is just as creative and imaginative an activity
as drawing, or wood carving, or music."


"You don't have to cook fancy or complicated masterpieces -
just good food from fresh ingredients."


"This is my invariable advice to people:
Learn how to cook -- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless,
and above all have fun!"


"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure.
In cooking you've got to have a 'What the hell?' attitude."


"The best way to execute French cooking
is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken."





"I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do,
such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold,
the potatoes sticking to the skillet,
the apple charlotte slowly collapsing.
One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can,
and bear with it if you cannot."


"I enjoy cooking with wine,
sometimes I even put it in the food I'm cooking."


"The measure of achievement is not winning awards.
It's doing something that you appreciate,
something you believe is worthwhile.
I think of my strawberry souffle.
I did that at least twenty-eight times before I finally conquered it."


"Moderation. Small helpings.
Sample a little bit of everything.
These are the secrets of happiness and good health."


"In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns,
we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal."


"You can have some butter, you can have some olive oil.
It all comes down to moderation, variety, exercise and use your head."





I LOVE these two photos especially, which her husband, Paul, took of her;




What a great example of a good relationship.
I'll bet they laughed all the time.





"The secret of a happy marriage is finding the right person.
You know they're right if you love to be with them all of the time."


"Cooking is like love;
it should be entered into with abandon or not at all."





"Dining with one's friends and beloved family
is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights,
one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal."


"It's fun to get together and have something good to eat at least once a day.
That's what human life is all about -- enjoying things."


"You find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful people.
Why not make an honest effort to confer that pleasure on others?
Half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy."

Quantum Leap Towards Computer Of The Future

An artist's impression of a phosphorus atom (a red sphere surrounded by a blue electron cloud) coupled to a silicon single-electron transistor (College of Fine Arts, The University of New South Wales: William Algar-Chuklin)

From ABC News (Australia):

An Australian-led team of scientists have taken a big step forward in the race to develop a quantum computer.

Quantum computing relies on harnessing the laws of quantum physics - laws that apply to particles smaller than an atom - to get a computer to carry out many calculations at the same time.

Read more ....

Deceptive Robots Hint At Machine Self-Awareness

From New Scientist:

A robot that tricks its opponent in a game of hide and seek is a step towards machines that can intuit our thoughts, intentions and feelings

ROVIO the robotic car is creating a decoy. It trundles forward and knocks over a marker pen stood on its end. The pen is positioned along the path to a hiding place - but Rovio doesn't hide there. It sneaks away and conceals itself elsewhere.

When a second Rovio arrives, it sees the felled pen and assumes that its prey must have passed this way. It rolls onwards, but is soon disappointed.

Read more ....

bad idea cakes

Penn Jillette - This I Believe: There Is No God

When it comes to the intellectual battle between atheism and religion, the group with the imaginary friends ain't gonna win. But what about the intellectual tension between atheism and agnosticism? One could argue that atheism is an arrogant position, since it claims the non-existence of God, but one could also argue agnosticism is a bleeding-heart fence-sitting position held by people afraid to have some conviction.

It may seem reasonable to be an agnostic, since one can't prove that God doesn't exist. But it's also impossible to prove that unicorns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster don't exist. Should we really be agnostic toward their existence? Is that really a sensible position? Or would it make more sense to believe they don't exist (since there is no evidence that they do), and then change our minds should evidence of their existence ever make itself available?

In the following short clip from NPR's series 'This I Believe,' Penn Jilette shares some of his thoughts on the issue, as well as why being an atheist is bound to make one a more compassionate and loving human being.

And don't forget to check out some awesome Penn & Teller magic.
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Robot Teaches Itself To Fire A Bow And Arrow

From Gadget Lab:

In the latest episode of “stop teaching them so much,” scientists have created a humanoid robot that teaches itself how to accurately hit a target with a bow and arrow.

The cute, childlike robot, named iCub, was designed by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology. Armed with a bow, an arrow, a cute (if politically incorrect) Native American headdress and a complicated computer algorithm, the robot learns from his missed shots iteratively, until he makes the bull’s-eye.

Read more ....

HashMash

I know it looks a little weird,
but it was TASTY!!!

I sliced a potato and boiled it.
Heated up canola oil and olive oil
to sauté' onion, red pepper,
and a dime-sized bit of green jalapeno.
Turned up the heat,
strained the potatoes, and threw em on top,
salt/peppered it,
broke the potatoes apart in the pan with the spatula,
a splash of soy milk,
added cilantro,
tossed in some spinach,
squeezed lemon(!) on it
sprinkled on cheddar and mozzarella (vegan, of course),
and lobbed it onto a plate.

IT WAS SO GOOD!
And filling.
Thick like meatloaf or something...
Next time i make it,
I'm going to prepare it the same way,
but add some crumpled soft tofu,
throw everything into a pie tin,
and then I'll have Breakfast Pie!

Carl Sagan - Consider Again that Pale Blue Dot

You've seen Carl Sagan meditate on the significance of looking at Earth, our pale blue dot, from the distance of outer space and in the context of the rest of the universe.

Continuing with that meditation on the follies of our anthropocentrism, he describes in the following video the history of this all-too-human psychological imperative, explaining in the process that our ancestors, given their knowledge at the time, were justified in feeling themselves the center of the universe: from their perspective, that's what it looked like. But just as children must learn when they grow up that the universe doesn't revolve around them, it is time for us to do the same. Much depends on it.

Of course it looked like the sun revolves around us, but just ask yourself, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once did, what would it look like if it looked like we revolved around the sun? Just some food for thought :)
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Heartlands Hospital

Here are a few pics of the enhancements we've just done for Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham, you can see the rest of the photos here...

The Streets Of Philadelphia - 1844, 2010

If any teacher in America can be said to have been overburdened with responsibility and vastly underpaid, it was Louisa Bedford. As an elementary school teacher in an area north of Philadelphia in 1844, she faced quite a dilemma. As is the case today for many educators from primary school to the university level, her crisis (and the crisis of the entire city) was brought on by calcified, self-important bureaucrats 'above her'. When the Philadelphia County School Board Controllers mandated that the Protestant King James Bible be the standard reading book in the classrooms in 1842, their decision was applauded by white, Anglos-Saxon nativists - many of whom possessed an inordinate and irrational fear of Catholics and Catholic doctrines. Long before and after 1844, Catholics were held under suspicion for having more allegiance to the Pope than to the American constitution. As for the large group of Irish Catholics in the city, they were appalled at the decision. Why should Protestants be able to dictate their views in public classrooms? As a result of the school board's policy, Philadelphia was divided more than ever, and Louisa Bedford was at wits end trying to allay the concerns of the Irish-Catholic parents of her students.
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The Catholic Bishop, Francis Kenrick, relayed two ideas to end the pedagogical impasse. His first solution was quite logical. While Protestant students read out of good ol' King James, Catholic students could simultaneously read from the Catholic book of scripture known as the Douay. This noble ecumenical proposal, however, was shot down immediately by the preponderant Protestants. If Protestants objected to that idea, he suggested that the Catholic schoolchildren be allowed to leave the class during the readings from the King James Bible for Protestant students. Perhaps the Catholic children could be given an educational activity or task to complete until the King James readings finished. This idea was also rejected. What to do?
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As the days and weeks progressed, the nativists turned into spin-doctors and accused Bishop Kenrick and the Catholics of trying to have the King James Bible taken out of the classroom altogether by having the Douay added to the curriculum. While no Catholic had actually proposed substituting the Douay for the King James, some nativist propagandists were well on the way to successfully instilling a perilous amount of distrust between the two main religious groups.
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Enter Hugh Clark - an Irish-Catholic member of the education bureaucracy and politician. He thought he had the most perfectly logical solution to diffuse the simmering crisis. As introducing the Douay out of fairness was ruled out for Catholic students, why not simply conduct class without any religious readings? His secular idea, presented to Ms. Bedford, made sense, and she began focusing her classes strictly upon non-religious subjects. Problem solved, right?
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Wrong. Angry nativists now accused Ms. Bedford, Hugh Clark and Bishop Kenrick of having conspired to remove the King James Bible from the classroom from the beginning, and they treated the decision to suspend readings from the King James Bible as an act against the Protestant faith and as an attempt by Catholics to impose their 'absolutist church doctrines' upon a free society.
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Of course, these sensationalist charges against the Irish-Catholic population had no basis in reality. Catholics simply wanted to have a balanced curriculum for their children. The hard-line nativists, however, would not listen to reason. Protestants and Catholics had co-existed uneasily for years in the city and had critical differences on religion and social customs (i.e. drinking alcohol). Moreover, Protestants always resented competing for scarce jobs with the influx of Irish-Catholic immigrants - of which large numbers arrived during this period to escape the potato famine in Ireland.
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What happened next could be compared to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany in November 1938. Bands of rampaging Protestant men set fire to a Catholic church (St. Augustine), invaded the Catholic section of town (the Nanny Goat Market) with the intent to destroy their shops and residences and threatened additional violence in the future. When the Catholics defended themselves and killed a member of the Protestant gang, enraged Protestants swore revenge and continued their attacks. Only martial law, which was imposed after the rioting, restored a semblance of order to a city that had been at peace until Louisa Bedford was asked to grapple with - what turned to be - a deadly curriculum.
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In 2010, religious tensions in Philadelphia are almost non-existent. People from all faiths (and no faith) can be seen walking side by side down Market Street, shopping on Chestnut Street or enjoying a break in beautiful Rittenhouse Square - which was once a refuse dump.
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Rather than religious conflict, Philadelphia is today faced with a functional illiteracy rate between 13-20% and a poverty rate hovering around 25% - a conservative estimate.
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The oppression of poverty is as pernicious as religious oppression. How much longer will the American people tolerate squalor and ignorance in the richest nation in the world? President Obama just put in $50 billion into the economy to spur growth. It won't even make a dent. To fight World War II, the US government spent the equivalent of $30 trillion dollars in today's money. The result of that investment? Thirty years of overall prosperity.
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If America fails to invest in its own future, the future of America and its people will be very dim indeed.
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(Picture: Rendering of the Nativist Riots in Philadelphia, 1844 - click to enlarge)
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To watch the video Streets of Philadelphia (1993) by Bruce Springsteen, you may click onto the following link: http: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z2DtNW79sQ&ob=av2e
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J Roquen

Home Sweet Home

"It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home"
-Edgar Guest

Jenna and I have different experiences of home. My family moved fairly often, so I can quickly adapt and feel comfortable in a new place. Where I lay my head is home. On the other hand, my wife grew up in the same house her entire life, and the transition is more difficult for her.

I think she was just starting to feel comfortable at our house in St. Paul when we uprooted and moved to the country. Personally I was getting sick of it and restless for a change!

mad men yourself

heh, that was fun!




...and yesm, I'm in my nightie at work...
...I had a long night......
...what?

Steven Johnson - Where Good Ideas Come From

If you're familiar with Steven Johnson's books, you've probably noticed his view that place and social networks have historically played an important role in our understanding of social and intellectual innovation. In his latest book (to be released soon), he finally tackles the question of the origin of good ideas head on, trying to understand the sorts of conditions that are common to periods of disproportionate innovation.

Despite our romantic view of the quirky mathematician who has a spontaneous eureka moment while taking a bath, or the apocryphal story of the lonely genius who figures out the law of gravity after being hit on the head by a falling apple, good ideas are seldom the result of solitary genius let loose. Instead of Archimedes or Newton, Johnson uses Darwin's "slow hunch" as a more realistic model of the emergence of great ideas.

But having a long hunch isn't always enough. It also helps if curious and thoughtful people get to meet and share their ideas with other curious and thoughtful minds, and then let those ideas have sex with each other. It's those intellectual orgies that, Johnson argues, have given rise to truly revolutionary ideas which are more powerful than the sum of their parts. Here is an animated trailer of the upcoming book:

And here is a slightly more detailed explanation of Johnson's main thesis:

Don't forget to check out other fascinating TEDTalks.
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Robots On TV: Rescue Bot Knows, Um, What You Mean

From New Scientist:

A robot that can understand plain English and manage a complicated to-do list could soon be the hero of search and rescue missions.

Most robots that can recognise speech only respond to pre-determined instructions. For example, some powered wheelchairs respond to spoken directions, but only when certain words are spoken clearly. In the real world, that's not how humans communicate. Our speech is peppered with "disfluencies" – the "umms", "ahs" and stutters of everyday language. If we want to successfully speak to robots in real-life situations – such as search and rescue missions, where noise and stress might get in the way of clarity – robots need to understand these complications.

Read more ....

Coop

Here's the story of how I built my little backyard chicken coop. I decided to use found materials as much as possible, which was probably a mistake in hindsight, as it ended up taking more time and not saving me all that much money. The frame was built with pallets salvaged from my office alleyway.

I sort of got the walls squared up and put some supports underneath. Just getting to this stage took much longer than it should have. I was figuring out a lot of things about the design as I went along and kept revising my plans. My inspiration came from online photos and the basic guidelines in my chicken book.

There was a bunch of lumber in our barn and I found these cool old tongue-and-groove floorboards for the coop floor. They fit together pretty nicely. Too bad you'll never see them because the floor is always covered in several inches of wood shavings and chicken droppings!

When I had the coop finished to this point, Jenna helped me carry it out of our garage and up the hill to its final resting place, beside the ramshackle deck. It was unbelievably heavy. The tiny legs I had used snapped right off so I put on more substantial treated 4x4s.

And here's the finished product, covered with the cheapest siding I could buy at Home Depot. I've been doing some tweaks ever since the hens moved in, but the basic shape is as complete as it ever will be. We cleared out most of the rotted wood planks and turned the old deck area into our new enclosed chicken run. It's not perfect but it was a fun project, and it works!

Do children with autism understand the link between seeing and knowing?

Autism researchers are control freaks. A large part of what we do is concerned with ruling out alternative explanations for our results, which involves designing carefully controlled experiments. Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder, meaning that it affects just about every aspect of cognition (and apparently most parts of the brain). So there are always plenty of alternative explanations to worry about. And attempting to publish your research involves running the gauntlet of reviewers, each primed with their own alternative explanations, which you hadn’t even considered let alone controlled for. Some of these may even be plausible.

In a new paper in Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Sophie Lind and Dermot Bowler report a study looking at autistic children’s understanding of the concept that seeing something leads to knowing about it. This is an interesting topic because understanding the link between a person’s perception of the world and their consequent mental states is an important milestone in the development of theory of mind. And, of course, impaired theory of mind is widely argued to be the root cause of the social difficulties in autism. However, the study also highlights some important methodological issues relating to experimental control in autism research.
As Lind and Bowler point out, previous studies looking at the performance of autistic kids on "see-know" tests have had one major methodological problem or another. Either there have been floor effects (even the control group struggled on the task), or group differences have been confounded with differences in language ability. In one case, the statistical analyses and conclusions didn’t actually match up with the data reported. On top of this, it isn't really clear that failure on "see-know" tests is indicative of specific problems with comprehension of seeing and knowing. It could just be that kids with autism find these kinds of questions difficult in general.
To address these issues, the authors took a number of steps. They ensured that the tasks were age-appropriate to avoid floor effects and they compared the performance of children with autism to a control group matched on age and verbal ability, allowing them to rule out language difficulties as a potential explanation. Most importantly, they added control questions to ensure that the kids could actually do the task. These questions were similar in structure and format to the "see-know" questions. The idea being that, if kids with autism can pass the control questions but still fail the "see-know" questions, then we can rule out any alternative explanation that predicts that they should also fail the control questions.

Lind and Bowler’s "see-know" test was similar to those used in previous autism studies. It involved two Playmobil characters, John and Fiona, and a load of boxes. On each trial, one of the characters opened a box, the other looked inside, and the child was asked “Who knows what is in the box?” The control task involved scenarios that didn’t involve seeing and knowing but were similar in their structure and memory demands. For example, the child was told that Fiona cut her knee while John got muddy knees; they were then asked who had sore knees.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

90% of the control children passed the see-know test, getting it right on at least 4 of the 5 trials. In comparison, only 60% of autistic children passed. However, children with autism were also much more likely to fail the control task.

The authors therefore excluded all the children who failed the control task, reasoning that their problems on the see-know task could be explained away in terms of “extraneous” task demands such as recalling the action sequences or making inferences in general. They then reanalysed the data, looking only at the children who passed the control task. There was still a statistically significant difference between the pass rates of the two groups, and so Lind and Bowler concluded that “children with ASD have a specific deficit in understanding that seeing leads to knowing”.

In many ways, this is a really neat study. Methodologically, it is certainly a cut above previous work in this area, for all the reasons mentioned earlier. The results seem pretty compelling - even controlling for all the extraneous task demands, there are still significant group differences in the pass rates. Case closed one might think. But, there is just one more thing…

Typically, researchers just exclude the participants who fail the control task and we hear no more about them. We’re left to assume that they would have failed the theory of mind task too. Helpfully, Lind and Bowler include the full cross-tabulated data showing the number of children in each group who passed and failed each task.

Table 2 from Lind & Bowler (2010)

The kids who either pass both questions or fail both questions don't really tell us much. What we’re really interested in is the performance of kids in the off-diagonal cells of the tables – the ones who pass one task but fail the other. If autism is associated with specific difficulties understanding seeing and knowing, then we would expect to see lots of kids failing the see-know task despite passing the control task. In fact, only 8 out of the 40 kids with autism show this pattern (highlighted in the table). Three kids with autism actually show the opposite pattern. However, these kids were excluded in the final analysis. In the control group, the numbers are smaller but the ratio (2:1) is similar.

So, at the risk of sounding like one of those annoying reviewers I'm not entirely convinced that children with autism really do have a specific deficit in understanding that seeing leads to knowing. If anything, this reaffirms the importance of Lind and Bowler's novel control tasks. Further proof that, in autism research, control is everything.

Reference:

Lind, S., & Bowler, D. (2010). Impaired Performance on See-Know Tasks Amongst Children with Autism: Evidence of Specific Difficulties with Theory of Mind or Domain-General Task Factors? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40 (4), 479-484 DOI: 10.1007/s10803-009-0889-y