Usefull and Useless Things handpicked by Gary “Li’l Bruno” Schmid

This page is a kind of a blog that I will probably only get around to updating every few months or so. It is planned to contain things like my comments on what I regard to be inspiring books or films etc.

Some very interesting books

  • I strongly recommend the following book on Information & Network Science

Arbesman S (2012) The Half-Life of Facts: Why everything we know has an expiration date. Current / Penguin Books, London

This book discusses how things we feel absolutely certain about - facts - actually change all the time. Knowledge is not unlike a substance which can be created, spread out across the globe, and even decay with a half-life like a radioactive element until finally becoming obsolete. Here we also find out about a lot of other interesting things like:

- Stanley Milgram's idea of how everyone on Earth is linked to everyone else by about six degrees of separation

- John Ioannidis's argument that most published research findings are false (Ioannidis JP (2005) Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Med 2(8):e124)

- the ways that DNA and hand-written manuscripts are copied incorrectly are often quite "similar, despite the large differences between how scribes and enzymes work." Systematic errors in copying texts and mutating DNA can be grouped into the same categories in both cases: homeoteleutons (slipped-strand mispairing mutations), dittographies (insertions), metatheses (chromosomal transpositions) and point errors (point mutations). And "each type of error occurs with different yet predictable frequencies" which can be used to judge the ages of documents and DNA sequences.

- the tendency to ignore information simply because it doesn't fit within one's own worldview. This is known as the Semmelweis Reflex, Confirmation Bias, Change Blindness and Dianiel Kahneman's idea of Theory Induced Blindness which, by the way, are all akin to Eugen Bleuler's (the father of the diagnosis Schizophrenia) ideas about Autistic, Undisciplined Thinking (Bleuler E (1912) Das autistische Denken (Vol. 4). Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen, Leipzig & Wien; Bleuler E (1919) Das autistisch-undisziplinierte Denken in der Medizin und seine Überwindung. Berlin)

and much, much more! For example, Samuel Arbesman discusses certain computer programs like the Automated Mathematician created by Doug Lenat in the 1970s and which "provided a foundation for other automated proof systems, such as TheoryMine - see link below - which names a novel, computationally created and proved theorem after oneself or a friend, for a small price."

Here is a list of fascinating, useful websites for your reading pleasure:

www.aitriz.org

www.ambientdevices.com

www.copub.org

www.devontechnologies.com

www.eureqa.com

www.graphpad.com

www.innocentive.com

www.mendeley.com

www.mturk.com/mturk/

www.uptodate.com/home

www.webmd.com

www.worldometers.info

www.wolframalpha.com

http://legatum.mit.edu

http://longnow.org

http://measuringworth.com

http://theorymine.co.uk

all of which are worth looking at.

  • For an extremely important reference to magical thinking I recommend:

Frazer JG (1928) The Golden Bough. Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London

Frazer JG (1928) Der Goldene Zweig:  Das Geheimnis von Glauben und Sitten der Völker (Berlin DpHvB, Trans.). C.L. Hirschfeld-Verlag, Leipzig

  • And now, back to magical thinking again, football and voodoo

I imagine that few people realize that magic still plays a major role in the lives of millions of people in the world today as evidenced by the following book about football and voodoo:

Becker OG (2010) Voodoo im Strafraum: Fussball und Magie in Afrika. Verlag C.H. Beck, München

In addition to the question of which team will prove to be the better sportsmen and the success and prestige which winning brings, there is belief in a parallel competition of magical forces going on during an African football match, namely, which team will prove to be in possession of the more powerful "medicine" by having the more powerful witchdoctor on their side. And this kind of thinking is just as present in modern sports outside Africa when we realize how many sportsmen in both agrarian and nonagrarian societies are superstitious. In fact, I believe that the widespread use of all kinds of crazy doping methods is simply the way sportsmen in the industrial world resort to magical thinking for help.

  • Did you know that the history of mankind is actually a history of slavery?

Indeed, we can all be extremely happy that we are living (for how long yet?) for the very first time in recorded history at a time when slavery is no longer an accepted political form of state? For more information I recommend:

Flaig E (2009) Weltgeschichte der Sklaverei. Verlag C.H. Beck, München

  • That the human animal loves violence should come as no surprise and is well documented in the following work:

Sorg E (2011) Die Lust am Bösen: Warum Gewalt nicht heilbar ist. Carl Hanser Verlag / Nagel & Kimche, München

  • Did you know that since the beginning of recorded history, we have been treating our children ever better?

In spite of our history of slavery and our enjoyment of violence, there's still hope for us in view of the fact that, as far as we know since the beginning of recorded history, we have been treating our children ever better: the ones we used to kill like too many dogs or cats on a farm many thousands of years ago, we slowly decided to just abandon in the woods (Moses, Romulus and Remus ...) and, over time, the ones we used to abandon in the woods, we gradually decided to just let fight it out with the dogs and cats for scraps of food in the court yard (Johannes Kepler and colleagues ...) until, as a result of the industrial revolution, we eventually realized that we can use the little buggers to work for us if we go ahead and feed them and teach them how to use machines. Indeed, it's only been since about the Second World War that human consciousness and empathy have evolved to the point where parents care for and raise their children for the pure sake of having it better than they themselves have had it in life. For evidence as to this trend, I suggest reading:

deMause L (Ed.) (1980) Hört ihr die Kinder weinen: Eine psychogenetische Geschichte der Kindheit (suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 339 ed.). Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

  • Imagine you and I and everyone else were living in a two-dimensional world as flat geometrical beings

in the shape of lines, circles, triangles, squares, rectangles and so on. In this world, our individual personalities - the ways we each behave - would depend upon our shape and size and rate of rotation in the plane, but all we would be able to see of each other would be nothing more than a line in the plane of our flat land. However, voluminous beings from a three-dimensional world would be able to hover above Flatland and observe and understand everything from the (transcendental) perspective of their third dimension. A wonderful mythopoetical "mathephilosophical" way to understand that there may be more to our own world than meets the eye...

Abbott EA (1952) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (6 ed.). Dover Publications, Inc., New York

See also the "Dr Quantum - Flatland" cartoon on my website via the link: Links & Flicks under the heading SCIENCE.

Some very interesting pictures

  • On this col­or com­pos­ite of the Ul­tra­V­ISTA im­age (click for full-screen view), the large white ob­jects with haloes are fore­ground stars in our own Milky Way Gal­axy. A host of oth­er ga­lax­ies can be seen, from rel­a­tively near­by ga­lax­ies which ap­pear large enough to dis­cern their struc­tures, to the most dis­tant ga­lax­ies which ap­pear as red dots in this im­age. (Cred­it: Ul­tra­V­ISTA/Terapix/CNRS/CASU / See also: http://www.world-science.net/othernews/120322_vista.htm)

Mind-Body Updates

One! Two! Three! Some "Rules of Thumb" to help you along the way!

Dream Enhancement

To possibly enhance the intensity and quality of the sound and color impressions of your dreams and to be better able to remember your dreams in the morning, try taking a 100 mg tablet of pure Vitamine B6 just before going to bed. (Vitamine B6 may also be helpful to some people suffering from sleep disturbances.)

Botox & Depression

A recent study supports the concept, that the facial musculature not only expresses, but also regulates mood states (Wollmer MA, de Boer C, Kalak N, Beck J, Gotz T, Schmidt T, Hodzic M, Bayer U, Kollmann T, Kollewe K, Sonmez D, Duntsch K, Haug MD, Schedlowski M, Hatzinger M, Dressler D, Brand S, Holsboer-Trachsler E Kruger TH (2012) Facing depression with botulinum toxin: A randomized controlled trial. J Psychiatr Res). Botox injections can iron out depressive symptoms within your brain along with the wrinkles on your forehead. Worry and fear often express an underlying depressive disorder and the nerve poison botulinum toxin paralyses muscle movements expressing worry and fear. Positive results were shown already after only six weeks of botox treatment in the cited (double-blind placebo-controlled) pilot study. 

Any two persons are separated by at most 5 friendship links

Here is an article about the famous claim that any two people on Earth are just six introductions apart. In other words, in his famous experiment of over 40 years ago (Milgram S (1967) The small world problem. Psychology Today 2(1):60-67), Stanley Milgram challenged people to route postcards to a fixed recipient by passing them only through direct acquaintances. The average number of intermediaries on the path of the postcards lay between 4.4 and 5.7, depending on the sample of people chosen. The following modern paper using data from Face Book puts the figure at four to five.

Backstrom L, Boldi P, Rosa M, Ugander J Vigna S (2011) Four Degress of Separation.arXiv:11114570v3 [csSI]

See also the "Science of Six Degrees of Separation" film by Veritasium on my website via the link: Links & Flicks under the heading SCIENCE.

Mathematics

Do you know Yutaka Nishiyama's essay "The mysterious number 6174" about a process called Kaprekar's operation?

Named after the Indian mathematician D R Kaprekar, the operation begins by taking a four-digit number in which the digits are not identical (say, 1946, my birth year) and rearranging them to make the largest and smallest numbers possible (9641 and 1469 in this case). If you subtract the smaller number from the larger one, and repeat the same rearranging-and-subtraction operation for the result, you will eventually arrive at the number 6174.

At this point the process reaches a dead end because 7641–1467 = 6174; hence, 6174 is the "kernel" of Kaprekar's operation for four-digit numbers.

It makes a nice party trick, but Nishiyama argues that it could be more: "maybe, just maybe, an important theorem in number theory is hiding in Kaprekar's numbers".

Ref.:

Parc S (Ed.) (2014) 50 Visions of Mathematics. Oxford University Press, Oxford

Games invented by Gary Bruno Schmid

Blindman’s Golf

Team: The game involves two teams, each with one to several players each. Any number of players can comprise a team but the teams must be of the same size.

Game Field: A game field about as big as for Boccia with two circles of roughly one meter diameter on the ground at each end of the field is required.

Setup: The opposing teams gather at opposite ends of the well-defined playing field.

Rules: The game starts as a player from the one side – flip a coin to see which team goes first – closes their eyes (or is blindfolded) and tries to blindly make their way into their own team’s circle at the other end of the field. When a player thinks they are in the circle, they open their eyes (or take off the blindfold) and stay put where ever they are.

Then a player from the other team tries to do the same. If a blind player bumps into a player from the other team, this blind player must return to their starting field and the next team is on. (The player from the other team remains in place until their next turn comes up.) If a blind player bumps into a player from his own team, both players must return to the starting field and the next team is on.

Once all players of a given team are out on the field, they each continue to play when their respective turn comes up by closing their eyes (or putting on a blindfold) again and attempting to finally get into their own team’s circle.

Goal: Only after all players from a given team have entered their own team’s circle is the game over and this team has won!

Enjoy!

- gbs Zürich 21. April 2017

Variations

Countless other variations of this game are possible. For just one example:

  • On a real putting green there is only one and same hole for both teams. Each player has a marked ball which takes their place in the game with the same rules as above: Eyes closed while putting; If my golfball bumps into a golfball from the other team, I have to start over again at the beginning; If my golfball bumps into a golfball of someone from my own team, both of us have to go back to the beginning.