Track of The Day

♫ Mathemagics - "Breaststroke" [MP3]

Stuff I like

Espo is in Philadelphia, along with Swoon and others for Philagrafika.

For New Yorkers, street art is everywhere (and online now for those who don't look up when walking) so I normally just skip gallery events like these... but, Espo hooked up with N. Liberties Tattoo and they'll be doing his flash. (Google that shit.)

Totally a day trip for you New Yorkers. (jealous)

Stuff I like

Via Noise for Airports:

A site that converts html to music, Codeorgan, using a few heuristics and some compelling visuals. Pretty good. My site? Sounds awful. What does yours sound like?

Track of The Day

♫ J-Stalin - "Stop My Shine" [MP3]

From J-Stalin, Prenuptial Agreement, this album makes me wish I had a car (the kind with subwoofers in the trunk)

Stuff I like

Via New Scientist:

An article in the department of Reverse Engineering (bka Neurobiology), suggests that a protein called Rac, is partially responsible for "forgetting." Specifically, flies with Rac production suppressed appeared to forget a negative stimulus response more quickly, and vice versa.

Maybe Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind isn't so far off?

It's the versa that's more interesting. Imagine a world where everyone has eidetic memories?

One thing that's relevant to my research is the benefit of forgetting. In ML, there's a pretty consistent theme that we always want more data. This is because ML is a descendant of stats, which is obsessed with asymptotic convergence to the truth. A common problem in stats/ML is "how many samples do I need to be confident with my conclusions?" (usually alot). But ML, as an engineering discipline, is really concerned about the limits of what we can do right now, with finite samples and with finite resources. So forgetting, in a sense, may be optimal with respect to the limits of computation.

I am pretty convinced that nonparametric approaches (Bayesian or otherwise) are the best way in which to get the most accurate models, but in lieu of infinite resources, I am usually faced with the problem of deciding which examples to learn from. Clustering or sampling approaches are usually used (with the attendant icky feeling), or some semi-parametric approaches commonly posed as prior probability distributions (little less icky).

In an online model, deciding which examples to forget is the other side of the coin, and I've seen a few papers on it, but I haven't read any. I'll read some today, I'm really glad I came across the New Scientist. It's my new favorite site.

Track of The Day

♫ The Middle East - "Blood" [MP3]

This EP (The Recordings of the Middle East) is so so good. Love this song.

Stuff I like

Via Marginal Revolution:

From the department of Pet Monkeys (bka Psychology). An interesting paper on Brown overachieving psych students. They walk slower when you tell them that smarter people walk slower. Eh, safety school.

Stuff I like

Via threeframes:

Track of The Day

♫ Foreign Born, "Early Warnings (Rostam Batmanglij’s Boys Like Us Remix)" [MP3]

Track of The Day

♫ Local Natives - "Who Knows Who Cares" [MP3]

Ok, so this isn't really representative of the album, and there are three songs I think are actually better songs (Airplanes, Camera Talk and Wide Eyes), but this song has such a sweet vintage innocent sound. It's lovely. It really is.

Stuff I like

Back in college, I found myself really depressed over a girl my senior year. Most of my friends decided to completely ignore what was, in hindsight, a completely embarrassing situation. My friend, Jeff (being Jeff), refused to accept my utter debasement and commanded me to go to a bar with him. At 2:00pm on a weekday afternoon.

Whereupon, Jeff proceeded to order me drink and shot after drink and shot, and in roughly an hour I was messed up beyond all belief. I puked my guts out on Columbia's lawn, several times, in the light of day, with stiff-necked Ivy leaguers pretending to ignore me.

As we were heading back, we ran into the cause of my troubles, who proceeded to berate Jeff for poisoning me, while I stretched out on the lawn and turned on my side to puke.

But you know what? It worked.

I felt great, (nauseous, yes), but also great. Since then, I never get into too bad a funk, because I always just go out, get really hammered, and everything always feels better (although I puke less). A regular diet of heavy drinking once or twice a month feels great. I've never recommended this to anyone before, because I've always felt it's just me (and also socially irresponsible). But.

I just came across this paper linked to by the one and only Marginal Revolution blog, which actually builds a pretty strong case for what I've always self-medicated myself with (binge-drinking.)

This is actually one of the tightest pyschology papers I've come across, and can't see any flaws in the methodology. It's nice that they address many of the issues (drinking habits, task difficulty, instrumentation) in the paper.

But more importantly, I already sort of agreed with the hypothesis. In either case, feeling down? Reduce your cognitive dissonance by drinking.

Interestingly enough, the amount of cognitive dissonance had no effect on the rate of drinking for the participants in the experiment. That is, given a rough measure of attitudinal adjust, the amount the participants drank wasn't affected significantly.

So there's evidence that being anxious is not just coincident with drinking, it's that drinking actually relieves anxiety (a causal effect). Which seems to indicate that although anxiety is reduced by drinking, we never really make that connection, even on a subconscious level. That is to say, if Jeff hadn't happened to have shown up that day, and I wasn't the sort of person to analyse everything, I might never have associated my feeling better with the alcohol. That is, we don't associate alcohol with a reduction in cognitive dissonance, even though that's what it does.

Moral: If you have a friend that's really down, go out and get him/her plastered. I mean, totally plastered. Force those drinks down if you have to, until they're vomiting and can't stand. It's science!