Tag: architecture

Pyramids built with concrete blocks

This makes me wonder if the whole pyramids business was really a japanese-style ploy to bolster the economy 🙂
2022-07-04: Evidence of highly skilled workers

On a summer afternoon 4600 years ago, near the end of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu, a boat crewed by some 40 workers headed downstream on the Nile toward the Giza Plateau. The vessel, whose prow was emblazoned with a uraeus, the stylized image of an upright cobra worn by pharaohs as a head ornament, was laden with large limestone blocks being transported from the Tura quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. Under the direction of their overseer, known as Inspector Merer, the team steered the boat west toward the plateau, passing through a gateway between a pair of raised mounds called the Ro-She Khufu, the Entrance to the Lake of Khufu. This lake was part of a network of artificial waterways and canals that had been dredged to allow boats to bring supplies right up to the plateau’s edge.

Based on the contents of the papyri, at least some workers in the time of Khufu were highly skilled and well rewarded for their labor, contradicting the popular notion that the Great Pyramid was built by masses of oppressed slaves. In several instances, Merer and his team were awarded gifts of textiles. In addition to a diet including poultry, fish, fruit, and a variety of breads, cakes, and beers, the men were also provided with dates and honey, delicacies that were extremely scarce and generally reserved for those within the royal entourage. In fact, the laborers may have been quite close to the royal family. During their several months working at the Giza Plateau, Inspector Merer’s phyle—and possibly other phyles that were part of the same group—appears to have taken turns guarding and helping to provision a royal institution called Ankhu Khufu, which likely referred to Khufu’s valley temple. In the papyri, Merer’s men are called the setep za, “the chosen phyle” or “the elite,” a phrase that can denote a royal guard force. “I think these boatmen were a very special category of workers because their activities were really vital for the royal project. I think the monarchy had an interest in being fair to them because it was essential to have them working well.”

Intelligence means Prediction

The cortex appears wired at its foundation to run Bayesian computations as efficiently as can be possible.

now i REALLY have to cram bayesian math.
2008-09-27:
s/Intelligence is defined by behavior/Intelligence is defined by prediction/

2017-09-06:

Surfing Uncertainty isn’t pop science and isn’t easy reading. Sometimes it’s on the border of possible-at-all reading. Author Andy Clark (a professor of logic and metaphysics, of all things!) is clearly brilliant, but prone to going on long digressions about various boring scholarly debates. In particular, he’s obsessed with showing how “embodied” everything is all the time. This gets kind of awkward, since the predictive processing model isn’t really a natural match for embodiment theory, and describes a brain which is pretty embodied in some ways but not-so-embodied in others. If you want 100 pages of apologia along the lines of “this may not look embodied, but if you squint you’ll see how super-duper embodied it really is!”, this is your book.

2018-11-30: Free energy principle

Friston’s work has 2 primary motivations. Sure, it would be nice to see the free energy principle lead to true artificial consciousness someday, but that’s not one of his top priorities. Rather, his first big desire is to advance schizophrenia research, to help repair the brains of patients like the ones he knew at the old asylum. And his second main motivation is “much more selfish.” It goes back to that evening in his bedroom, as a teenager, looking at the cherry blossoms, wondering, “Can I sort it all out in the simplest way possible?”

and a piece on Friston:

Karl Friston’s free energy principle might be the most all-encompassing idea since Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. But to understand it, you need to peer inside the mind of Friston himself.

2019-07-18:

We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities

2022-04-10:

If that is not mind-bending enough, in his new book, Jeff Hawkins extends the memory framework to the construct of “reference frames”. Everything we perceive is a constructed reality, a cortical consensus from competing internal models resident in many cortical columns, the amalgam of 1000 brains. Those models are updated by data streaming from the senses. But our reality resides in the models. “The brain learns its model of the world by observing how its inputs change over time. There isn’t another way to learn. Every time we take a step, move a limb, move our eyes, tilt our head, or utter a sound, the input from our sensors change. For example, our eyes make rapid movements, called saccades, about three times a second. With each saccade, our eyes fixate on a new point in the world and the information from the eyes to the brain changes completely.” We don’t perceive any of this because we are living in the model, which is predicting the next input to come, across all the senses. “Vision is an interactive process, dependent on movement. Only by moving can we learn a model of the object.”

“To avoid hallucinating, the brain needs to keep its predictions separate from reality. We are not aware of most of the predictions made by the brain unless an error occurs.”

“Thoughts and experiences are always the result of a set of neurons that are active at the same time (about 2% of the total). Individual neurons can participate in many different thoughts or experiences. Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons. Every day, many of the synapses on an individual neuron will disappear and new ones will replace them. Thus, much of learning occurs by forming new connections between neurons that were not previously connected.”

Sequence memory (like predicting the next note in a melody or a common sequence of behaviors): “Sequence memory is also used for language. Recognizing a spoken work is like recognizing a short melody.”

London Wreck-diving

talk about ‘long now’: london is sinking into the soft clay as a result of the disappearance of the ice age glaciers on england.

Short of capping the Highlands in new glaciers of lead, however, or attaching gigantic hot air balloons to the spires of churches to pull the city skyward, London will eventually flood: its undersea fate is geologically inevitable. Whether this occurs in a 100 years or a 100 centuries, London will become a city of canals – before it is lost to the sea entirely. It is a new Atlantis, sinking deeper each day into the oceanic embrace of hydrology.

Walking in the City

London is one of the most beautiful walking cities in the world, but it’s often hard to navigate above ground. Many people use the tube map to find their way walking the streets, even though it distorts our perception of distance and direction. As a result, people often use other transport modes even for short distances, when walking would be quicker and more pleasant: 1 in 20 people exiting Leicester Square tube station were found to have travelled a distance of less than 800m.To combat this over-use of motorized transport, and to get people out there using their feet, the exhibition proposes that London unite its myriad of bewildering street signs both typographically and formally: the same height, dimensions, fonts, terminology, etc. This will make it harder to lose oneself – and, in theory, it will also encourage people to go for a stroll around “one of the most beautiful walking cities in the world,” without relying on mechanized transport.

london’s inscrutable street signs are both a menace and a joy for losing yourself exploring. i’m sure analogies to info architecture could be found 🙂

The use of Metadata in URIs

This finding addresses several questions regarding Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). Specifically, what information about a resource can or should be embedded in its URI? What metadata can be reliably determined from a URI, and in what circumstances is it appropriate to rely on the correctness of such information? In what circumstances is it appropriate to use information from a URI as a hint as to the nature of a resource or its representations? Simple examples are used to explain the tradeoffs involved in employing such metadata in URIs.

a TAG finding on good URI design