17 April 2011: PM Posts

Philosophical Question: can someone who used to be blind who suddenly got sight recognize shapes by sight? Well, no, not exactly, not right away. But…:

[...]Held, Sinha, and colleagues recruited five children, ages 8 to 17, from Project Prakash to tackle Molyneux’s question. The researchers built 20 pairs of simple shapes from toy blocks and tested the children within 48 hours of the surgery to restore their sight. The children had not encountered these unusual shapes before. In one experiment, the researchers gave the children a shape to feel (without looking), then asked them to feel two more shapes and indicate which was the same as the first one they’d felt. All five children chose the right shape more than 90% of the time. In a second experiment, the children could look but not touch. Again they nailed it. But on the third and most crucial experiment, their performance plummeted. After feeling a shape, the children did only slightly better than chance at identifying it by sight alone, the team reports online today in Nature Neuroscience.

That result suggests a negative answer to Molyneux’s question. Because many children travel long distances for the operations, most go home with their families before the researchers can do follow-up experiments, Sinha says. However, when the researchers retested two of the boys with a new set of shapes a few days later, their accuracy on the touch-to-vision experiment jumped to above 80%. That suggests a more nuanced answer of “initially no but subsequently yes,” Sinha says.

“It’s a great story,” says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. The change in the children’s ability to integrate touch and vision happens too fast to be explained by major rewiring in the brain, Pascual-Leone says. Even though they grew up recognizing objects by touch, they needed only a little bit of visual experience to learn to translate between the two senses. “They’re not starting from zero,” he says.[...]

Paul Dirac: here is a nice BBC video about him and his equation:

And here is something that he discovered that we often teach to our differential equations class:

17 April 2011: Long Walk

This post will be about training; my next one will discuss issues.
Short version: my loop took 4:12 to do (16.9 miles) and I did one short neighborhood loop to get to 17.3 miles (28 km); pace was about 14:53. Weather: sunny, windy, cool at the start (36 F). This course featured 805 feet of climbing, 1610 feet of elevation change.
I saw a few runners out there.

The course is basically this: I walk from my house (Cooper Street, just south of Laura near Bradley University), up to Columbia Terrace, to Broadway, up to McClure where I pick up the IVS “Boredom” course (near Sheridan). I work my way to Bigelow, then turn on Forrest Hill and take that to Central (crossing Knoxville). Then I stay on Central (hill here) to Marietta to Prospect in Peoria Heights and take that to Grandview. I stay on Grandview to Grandview Terrace, turn on Harmon then take Bishop past the golf course and then to Harvard.

Here (just past 8 miles into the course) I turned left on Harvard and followed it to just where it meets 150; there I turn right (near the Affina building) and then go into Springdale Cemetery; I go through this and take a large uphill to the the Prospect exit. I turned left, then turned left into Glen Oak park, when around the ball field and then down to where Woodruff high school used to be. I follow that road to the riverfront and get on the trail (going around the goose loop) and stay on the trail until it ends near Hooters. Then I cross Washington street and pick up Kumpf; I follow Kumpf to MLK to Union street and turn onto Moss…and stay on Moss to Cooper.
I follow Cooper home (16.9 miles) and did an extra “lap around the block” to get to 17+ miles (17.3).

The walk took 4:18 or about a 14:50 pace. Slow, but the best long walk I’ve had in a couple of years; the cool but sunny (and yes, windy) weather helped. More importantly, nothing hurt. I did have to stop a couple of times due to very active kidneys (they do that when it is cool).

I don’t want to do the work…

There is an event that I am interested in it. I won’t be fully ready, but I can be minimally ready for it by doing one 20 mile workout (walking) every week for the next 4 weeks. That is nothing compared to what I’ve done in the past.

But I am balking at the thought of doing those workouts.

I have a math idea that I think is fun and neat; even better this is the type of idea that I can readily test (numerical integration idea).
But I don’t want to do the hard thinking that is required to see it through. The same can be said with two papers I have ready for revisions.

MOTIVATION….where are you? I think that I’ve developed an allergy to hard work.

Instead I want to just surf the internet for blog posts like this one.