Author: James Vornov

Snow Melt, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

This is some of the last snow. Today it looks like a Dr Suess book out there with droopy trees everywhere

There’s a difference between predicting and knowing the future.

Predicting decreases uncertainty but does not eliminate it. We’ll call that level of certainty “knowing the future”. Predicting involves beliefs about the future state of the world and should be probabilistic, dealing in likelihoods of events, often describing a range of possible outomes.

I can make an excellent, accurate prediction about the card that will drawn from a deck. It will be one of the 52 cards in the deck.

Trivial? Not really. I’ve used my knowledge of the nature of card decks to constrain the possible range of outcomes to only those that are possible outcomes.

With more information about the particular deck I’d might be able to narrow the odds of various cards being drawn. For example armed with the exact order of cards in the deck and a historical dataset describing how often each card in each deck position is chosen, I could actually know which card is the single most likely to be drawn. Perhaps if we studied how people tend to draw cards we’d find that the center 25% got 60% of the draws, increasing the probability of those cards being selected over the top and bottom of the deck. Probably I’d be able to provide a list of the cards from most likely to be chosen through least likely.

Just because I know which card is most likely, it doesn’t mean that if the mostly likely card is not drawn in any particular trial that my prediction is wrong or inaccurate. The prediction only allowed me to strengthen my belief in some cards being drawn over other cards.

In selling any prediction service, If I only get one chance to test my ability to predict there’s no way to prove why I happened to be right or wrong. If my knowledge of the order of the deck and human behavior in selecting cards improved my ability to predict the card selected from 1 in 52 to 1 in 20, I’d be more than twice as good at picking the card to be drawn in advance, butits still overwhelming probable that my guess on any particular trial will be wrong.

It makes for a lousy magic trick but a very good way to make better decisions.

The Glamour Tile, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’ve probably photographed my front walk more than any other subject in the last few years. There’s a nice combination of textures in the brick and garden elements particularly when there’s been rain or snow.

Today the world here is buried under a few inches of snow with more on the way tonight. If I want to do some more practice with coach Vince (Versace), I’ll need to use some archive images.

In this deterministic world, one of the most important sources of uncertainty is ignorance. In the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, we don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead. The source of that uncertainty at the macroscopic level is ignorance. The chamber is sealed and we can’t look inside of it.

From a macroscopic perspective, it’s no different from guessing what’s inside a sealed envelope or any other situation where some state of affairs exists but lack certain knowledge.

From a probability perspective, since we understand the physics of the cat in chamber system well enough, the probability of the cat being alive or dead is known. One could put that probability into a decision tree with a high level of confidence. If the probability of a decay event is 0.5, then the cat is not half dead and half alive, it has a 50 −50 chance of being alive. The event is determined, we just don’t know the answer until we open the box.

I want to completely blur past, present and future when it comes to ignorance since for decision making becaus it makes no difference. If the cat was unlucky enough to die in the first 5 minutes of being in the chamber, then the event occurred in the past we remain uncertain in the present. If we’re making a decision at the 30 minute mark the cat has a higher probability of being alive at present than if we make it at an hour just before opening the chamber, but since we won’t open the chamber until later, it doesn’t matter to us making the decision at 30 minutes. The event may or may not have occurred; ignorance obscures equally from the start to the finish. This is true of the future as well. If we substitute a coin flip to occur in an hour with the same 0.5 probability of success, the fact that the event occurs in the future makes no difference.

Let me also point out that knowledge without communication doesn’t dispel ignorance and thus has no influence on decision making. If we assume that the cat knows that it’s still alive inside the chamber, it makes no difference to us outside of the chamber. The outcome when the box is opened remains uncertain to us. Similarly, if I have a tape or transcript of an event in the past as long as I can’t time travel to influence those events my knowledge has no effect on decisions in the past. I know the text of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address but that doesn’t affect the choices he had in writing it in 1863.

In the same context, consider the effect of an omniscient God who controls events in the world. Whether its a God that created a clockwork universe that plays out over time or a God that intervenes in events in the time stream, it makes no difference. Whether its a God who knows the full history of creation from the inception of the world to its end or a God that steers events with some ongoing intent also makes no difference. The knowledge and power of this God has no influence on our decisions unless knowledge is granted us about the world in the past present or future. Without knowledge, the veil of ignorance is itself enough to create conditions of uncertainty. As the world is presented to us, our ignorance requires us to make probabilistic decisions based on belief.

Knowledge has positive value in decision making. The more we approach the god-like state of knowing past, present and future, the better we can make decisions. Either probabilistic states can be made to collapse into certainty, like opening up the chamber and determining the state of the cat, or probability estimates can be refined, like checking on the cat halfway through its time in the chamber. Information that is irrelevant to the decision doesn’t help refine the probability estimate. Telling me its snowing outside can’t help refine the probability of whether the cat’s alive when the chamber is opened.

Making decisions under conditions of uncertainty is no different from making decisions under conditions of ignorance. Choosing ignorance over available knowledge is a completely different case

Winter Grass, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I’ve been writing more than photographing in the last few months. I’ve set up the MacBook Air as a fast and light photo processing station.

I’ve moved Aperture and Photoshop CS3 over to the new machine. Nikon Capture NX2 didn’t make it because of serial number issues, but I’m fine with that for now. Based on Thom Hogan’s recent recommendations I feel pretty comforatable with RAW conversion in Aperture with a Vincent Versace influenced OZ 2.0 post processing in Photoshop.

The speed of the workflow is perfectly fine as Derrick Story described soon after the release of the new Airs. I was a bit hesitant about ordering this base 2GB model, but would have had to pay too much of a premium for the 4 GB. And it was suggested to me that with the SSD serving as scratch disk and memory paging there wasn’t going to be a huge hit compared to a conventional HD system.

I like the Tamron zoom with Nikon D7000 combination for image capture and I’d prefer to practice with my favored tools- a DSLR and fast lens, rather than try to get by with a compact. Switching to the Sigma DP1 hasn’t worked because of the fixed wide lens. Its a great travel camera, but not flexible enough to grab a shot like this one from a car window in very dead overcast light.

There’s really nothing very mysterious about uncertainty. We’re soaking in it every moment of our lives. We generally don’t know what’s happened in the past, we don’t fully know the current state of affairs in the world and we have even less of an idea of how events will unfold. While some have looked to the uncertainty that’s part of the current quantum physical models of the universe, there’s really no need to invoke such esoteric mechanisms. Its part of the nature of being human that we experience the world as uncertain. Yet it appears that in a material world working according to Newtonian physics, there is no real uncertainty. The current state of the universe determines the next state of the universe.

The prospect of a “clockwork universe” is frightening. In the most extreme conception, we live in a universe which began its existence with a set of initial conditions that then is playing out the predetermined events implied in those initial conditions. Whether those initial conditions were intelligently set by a creator or “just happened” doesn’t matter for us,we are each actors playing out our parts in a predetermined script. Theoretically, a sufficiently powerful being could have access to all of the initial conditions and the ability to calculate all of the interactions. Prediction would be easy enough by simply running the calculations needed to predict any future event.

I’m going to unilaterally cut off debate on this interesting topic (author’s privilege!) by assuming that this is exactly the kind of world we live in. I’ll ignore quantum effects because at physical level the world appears to be mostly deterministic. Actually, I believe that the uncertainty at the atomic level makes the clockwork universe conception untenable. It appears that events at some physical level like radioactive decay are truly probabilistic. As long as these random events have effects at a macroscopic level (producing a click in a geiger counter for example) then if the world were started over again with exactly the same initial conditions, it would turn out differently because these random events would be different the second time around.
We can use the famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat to illustrate this.

Schrödinger wrote:

One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a “blurred model” for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.

Schrödinger has successfully introduced the odd mathematics of quantum uncertainty into the realm of our experience. There are interesting questions about whether the cat is conscious and thus an observer of its own state and whether there is a difference between the unknown and indeterminacy that are beyond the scope of the current discussion. We want to focus on the fact that the quantum event of decay, an event that can’t be predicted only observed to have occurred, can dictate the fate of the cat.

If there was no random decay, the cat walks out of the chamber and continues to influence the world, shedding fur and ending the lives of mice and birds. If the cat is dead when the chamber is opened, there is a different set of events because of the random quantum event of radioactive decay.

But as I think Schrödinger is arguing, to say that reality itself is blurred seems ridiculous. The macroscopic world operates under deterministic Newtonian physics where theoretically every event is mechanistically caused by the immediately preceding state of the system. My next thought is determined by the current state of my brain, not some mystical non-physical spirit that is free of the physics of our deterministic world. There is no quantum level entanglement like our blurred cat where the next thought both exists and does not exist.

We’ve come to the first philosophical barrier in Deciding Better, the nature of free will in a deterministic universe.

This evening I put a copy of Photoshop on the new MacBook Air. I then downloaded the plug-ins that Vincent Versace includes with Welcome to Oz 2.0.

OK, this isn’t much of an image, but it was a jpeg captured with a compact camera that I had at hand. I can confirm that my typical workflow is fine on the Air. Never more than 10 layers or so. Some NIK filters. Not significantly different in feel from the MacBook Pro. I’ll need to work on a workflow, but I’m encouraged that I’ll be able to do my usual post-processing activities without much trouble on the machine.

With a few days of use in general, I can make some comments. Of course, look elsewhere for the specs. Lets skip what everyone knows: It’s fast, it’s small, it’s light, it’s supercool.

I bought it as my Mac content creation device. As I wrote about in my discussion of the decision to buy it, the iPad just doesn’t work for me as for writing because of a combination of lack of keyboard and tools (Tinderbox, Scrivener, MarsEdit).

1. Get the 13″ screen. Its got the resolution of a 15″ MacBook Pro, so it’s not at all cramped.

2. Compared the old MBP, what have I gained? Portability. Battery life. Cooler running temp. The current glass trackpad with multitouch gestures and inertial scrolling.

3. WIth the small screen and high resolution, the pinch to zoom function on the trackpad becomes important. I’ve become used to it on the iPhone and iPad. The old MBP didn’t support it, but I never really needed it. But with my 53 year old eyes, the ability to zoom and pan a web page or pdf is great if some print or illustration is too small. You also tend to want to keep this very small device closer to you than a bigger laptop. More like an iPad than a conventional laptop. It would be nice if it was universally supported in programs. I can’t zoom in on a Tinderbox map with it for example.

4.A media management strategy is needed because of the small hard drive. 128 is enough for my purposes outside of media storage. The combination of Home Sharing and Airplay makes this pretty easy now. At home, you need a mac with the full media library always on and running iTunes. You can then stream music though an Airport Express (I have 2) or AppleTV (none yet). That’s now the older MBP. I find this conducive to writing because I can put on music through the stereo using the tool I’m writing with. Its less context switching for me. I may end up with no music on the MacBook Air itself since out of the house, I generally have the iPhone for headphone listening.

5. The lack of a fast external port is an inconvenience. No FW800, no Gigabit ethernet. Just USB2. But the drive is small and I don’t expect to be moving large files around.

My homunculus is tired of being dismissed so casually. In neurology, we’re introduced to the Homunculus in reference to body maps in neuroanatomy. For example, there’s a map of the body superimposed on the motor cortex, the part of the cerebral cortex that initiates the final common pathway for volitional movements from the cortex to the muscles, The maps a funny one, being upside down and distorted so that the regions with the greatest control (face and hands) take up largest area:

There’s a neat 3D model of what this distorted little man would look like:

There’s a similar somatosensory map for touch sensation from the skin. These funny looking little men are the internal representations of our body in the brain.

I’m reading Alison Gopnik’s excellent book The Philosophical Baby. She does a great job of tackling some real philosophy in the context of developmental neuroscience and psychology. But like lots of scientists, when up against that very difficult barrier of materialism and functionalism, she bails.

I’ve pointed out before that materialists, faced with a complete inability to explain the subjective feeling of consciousness turn into dualists, asserting that only the brain can exist. Yet they can’t help speaking of mind as something that exists even while implying it can’t exist as it is not material and can’t be pointed at; only the brain can is.

We know that there are models of the body in the brain. The motor homunculus is a well established example. It is the motor map in the cortex. It seems clear to me that I experience voluntary movement through that map. It is the homunculus and I don’t need another map to control that map. There are also maps of the world in the brain. Maps of concepts like the analogous ideas of distance and addition of numbers

The existence of the motor homunculus doesn’t mean there’s a little man sitting on the motor cortex controlling movement. Its the cortex that’s doing the work. It is organized as a map of the body.

When she dismisses out of hand the concept of the homunculus, Gopnik makes the mistake of confusing the general concept of a homunculus with an infinite regress. That’s the fallacy of the little man controlling movement. If I have a little man in my head, then that little man needs a little man to control him and on into an infinite regress.

Many also confuse the concept of a homunculus with dualism. Certainly a theory that requires a separate homunculus, a little man that controls movement or who sees what is projected into the brain isn’t useful.. This kind of dualism accounts for consciousness but is unacceptable because it has no explanatory power.

The tough question is how does mind, consciousness, arise from its substrate, brain.

There’s a common misunderstanding of John Searle’s Chinese Room argument mostly made by materialists. Searles argues strongly and directly against materialism, believing as I do that mind exists and must itself be explained. It is a different level of analysis of the material world, the way hardness or smoothness of rocks can’t be explained solely with reference to reductionist information from inorganic chemistry. Hardness and smoothness are systems level qualities that are dependent on the chemistry, not explained by it. Similarly mind is dependent on brain, not explained by it.

In the Chinese Room argument, a translator appears the same to an outside observer whether or not he understands the language or is just looking up phrases in a big book. This demonstrates that information about function can’t distinguish between the conscious and the mechanical. Materialist explanations, without reference to a larger systems level examination are missing something. Mind is something different from the functional activity, here for example translation. It can be done with understanding or without understanding The brain need not itself be conscious to generate the events. The substrate can be aware or not aware in the black box.

The difference between the translator that knows chinese and the one who is translating mechanically without awareness is understanding.

So I’ll point to my motor homunculus as one part of the brain that I know my mind is dependent on for fine voluntary movement. I can’t yet point to where Searle’s Chinese Room argument is modeled in my brain. Sorry.

I’ve got a 13″ MacBook Air on the way. It was an interesting decision, long in development. It was worth considering formally because a Mac purchase is a 3 year technology commitment. And I think worth considering in detail here to illustrate a decision process.

iPhones are a one year commitment. At this point we all believe that the new version is going to be coming around each summer. AT&T has always given me the upgrade choice. I bought the original, had to upgrade to the 3G, skipped 3GS since I saw little reason to spend any money on it, then grabbed the iPhone4 which was a major advance. I await iPhone 5.

My iPad Experience: The Good

I’m glad I grabbed a WiFi+3G iPad on release. Its been a useful device, worth the money for the family just as an attractive media and browsing package. As a personal device, Useful, but not my companion. I never bonded with the iPad the way I have with my iPhone.

The iPad is great at a few things. Netflix streaming video, reading mainstream news sites (New York Times, Washington Post, etc), and Flickr. I think that iPad directed media will be an area for development and as a musical instrument, its got quite a nice start with synthesizer and drum machine apps. I’ve got a small collection. The twitter app is great.

Twitter is an interesting case because the experience is driven by the integration of the app with iOS. For interesting reasons, I had little interest in Twitter until just a few months ago. But the Twitter App on the iPad is one of my favorites. Its best feature is the integrated web browser. Click on a tweet with a link in it and a browser window slides in with the web page displayed. The iPhone app does the same. How oddly painful to have the Twitter app spawning web page after web page since there’s no similar integration.

My iPad Experience: The Indifferent

In the end, for me the iPad is a limited use satellite device. There are things I’d rather do on the iPhone or Mac. RSS feed reading has been a big problem for me on the iPad. I’m a longtime user of Google Reader, but I hated the need to do a two finger flick to scroll. It was something I constantly fought against but never found a better interface in any of the RSS reader apps that I tried. It odd that the Google interfaces on the browser or the iPhone but the iPad interface just didn’t work well. Reeder gets me part of the way there, but not enough that I don’t wait till I’m sitting with the laptop to look at feeds.

I was also disappointed with the iPad as an eReader. Its legible and fast, but its just too heavy for reading. Actually, my guess on the ergonomics is that its too dense. Its a bit heavier than a 500 page hardcover as judged by just picking them up. But the thinness and weight distribution of the iPad tires my fingers and wrists if I fail to support it. Web surfing sessions last minutes, but reading a book is a less dynamic activity and can stretch much longer.

A few months ago, when the latest Kindle was released, I bought one for reading. Its light, fast enough and the controls easy to use after a short period of gaining the right habits. At this point, there are no books on the iPad. I travel with a laptop and kindle, generally leaving the iPad

The lack of multiuser capabilities is another nagging problem with the iPad. While the iPad is a great cheap extra screen for watching movies or surfing the web, there’s no way to prevent other users from having access to the main user’s email and personal accounts like Twitter. Since its family using the device, I worry more about accidental deletions than malicious use, but it remains a situation in which a personal device is used by a group without a way to hide sensitive or important information.

Writing on the iPad

Extended writing on the iPad also has never really worked for me. The onscreen keyboard has works well enough, but has shortcomings for anything but casual text entry. There’s no apostrophe on the QWERTY keyboard. I think I’m not alone in thinking that the apostrophe is a pretty important part of english, what with its use in both possessives and contractions. Autocorrect is nice for simple writing, but get technical or expand the vocabulary and it increasing makes its own odd substitutions. Placement of the insertion point with the touch screen is really a pretty big step backward from the earliest onscreen editors like vi and emacs with their keyboard control.

I like the either/or world of mouse, cursor keys and keyboard shortcuts. The iPad enforces its tyranny of touch interface that’s slow. For a while I hoped that using a bluetooth keyboard would help with extended writing, freeing up screen space and giving me a full key set, but it doesn’t remove the conflict between keyboard and touch interface. I’d like to see how a bluetooth trackpad would do as a substitute for the touchscreen.

The bluetooth keyboard also locks out the onscreen keyboard, so that if you pick up the iPad from its stand and move to the sofa to read and edit, there’s no keyboard available until bluetooth is disabled. This is unexpected to me, since with my MacBook Pro, the bluetooth keyboard and trackpad don’t affect the function of the laptop’s own input devices.

Apps that keep their data in the cloud make notetaking on the iPad possible though. I mostly live in Evernote for note taking. It syncs perfectly across all of my devices- iPhone, iPad, MacBook Pro and Windows XP laptop supplied by my employer.

Reaching a decision

Over the last month, I performed a face-off between three options- iPad, MacBook Pro and a theoretical MacBook Air. The first two started with the huge advantage that I already own them. If I could come to a workable solution without the Air, I could postpone purchase until the next round of Apple product announcements, postponing the next hardware commitment.

I optimized both as well as I could adding apps and honing workflow to optimize each. I found in the end that the MacBook Pro was my solution of choice except for work email and document generation or editing. My inability to get writing working well enough on the iPad meant that I needed more.

I decided that a little more formal exploration would be useful. My usual approach would be to build a Tinderbox map, but since I had been working on systematically exploring the tools I had at hand, I decided to create a mind map on the iPad using iThoughtsHD. Here’s the result of an hour’s work:

If you’ve never used mind maps at all, I’d recommend giving it a try. Once you get the right motor movements for iThoughts, it becomes a powerful idea sketcher. In fact, I’d hold it up as a great example of a perfect use of the iPad. Its graphical and perfectly suited for a touch interface, needing small amounts of text input.

A mind map is a hierarchical structured document, always a tree structure. It resolves into a standard outline with the central node representing the outline itself and the first set of branches the highest level of the outline. Child nodes are children in an outline. The advantages to mind mapping are due to the graphic nature of the technique. In the map here, I started considering contexts for device use, but realized that I’d need to represent devices within the map. So the pink nodes are devices or storage spots.

iThoughtsHD is nice because it has some nice nontraditional mind map elements. There are callouts, links (the read lines with arrowheads at each end). I didn’t use any here, but it also allows floating nodes so one could create the kind of flat map that’s so natural in Tinderbox. Adornments, background map zones in Tinderbox, would be a great addition to a mind mapping app like iThoughts. Mind mapping would be an interesting addition to tinderbox since it too is outline based.

What I learned from the mind mapping was that I have a huge number of tools, represented both by devices (iPhone, iPad, kindle, MacBook Pro, Windows XP, notebook) and places (Evernote, the weblog, Twitter, etc). Location and connectivity matter, but influence choice between tools more than the nature of the tools themselves.

But I actually have fewer tasks. There’s work email and documents. There’s reading, photographing and writing for this weblog and related projects. Then there’s note taking which is information harvesting from the environment both real and virtual.

For me, there ends up being no way around the conclusion that I end up needing a corporate laptop for work and a creative laptop for content generation. So the best solution for writing in the smallest Mac that will run Scrivener, Tinderbox, Evernote and MarsEdit well. So the MacBook Air 13″ is on its way.