Tag: brain

Metacognition

has been on my mind this week. fortunately, it is one of these weeks where my productivity is near its maximum. productivity is a binary thing for me. either i have it in spades, or not at all. when i do, it is because of metacognition, or stated differently, a knowledge about how to approach tasks. most of my tasks are highly interrelated, and often deadlock. only in a state of unusual clarity of thought i’m i able to solve these gordian knots, but when i do i usually get more done in a day than in a normal week.

“Metacognition” is often simply defined as “thinking about thinking.” In actuality, defining metacognition is not that simple. Although the term has been part of the vocabulary of educational psychologists for the last couple of decades, and the concept for as long as humans have been able to reflect on their cognitive experiences, there is much debate over exactly what metacognition is.

where are the tool vendors to help me think? Screw “productivity applications”. they are nothing more than fancy funnels anyway. The fountains is where it’s at.

Personal CMS

Mitch Kapor (ex Lotus) is building a personal CMS with Andy Hertzfeld (ex Apple). Very interesting architecture, and with these people behind it has a high chance of seeing the light of day.
2004-10-15: Google Desktop Search brings my vision of a personal cms (for lack of a better term at the time) a step closer. As I am writing this, outlook express is synchronizing my 2 IMAP stores to the local disk so that the indexer may pick them up. this gives me at least access to my existing emails while the wait for thunderbird support continues. I’ll start using slogger to save all my Firefox sessions permanently to disk and see how it goes. (Don’t forget to filter out 127.0.0.1 or you’ll have a nice little feedback loop with slogger picking up your desktop search pages, storing them, desktop search indexing them, etc)
Using adblock aggressively should help to keep the signal to noise ratio of those saved pages as high as possible.
I wonder where SharpReader keeps it’s local copy (currently 23841 posts) and if this facility gives me a way to search through posts that have expired.
I will try to get a good-sized gmane nntp feed in through outlook express to see if it gets picked up as well.
I also noticed that my Trillian chat logs are not being picked up even though they are text files. maybe it is just a file locking issue, but it still makes me wonder why AOL chat logs are singled out in the preferences.
Of course, once you have full-text search over most of your digital footprints (which now seems within reach), you begin to wonder what else you could do. correlating information (what sites was i visiting while I had that IRC conversation?), visualizing connections (show me other mentions of the term “projectx” over time), bayesian techniques (show me sites I might find interesting based on my accumulated data). Eventually we will all be using MyLifeBits.
2005-05-17: For those who already freaked out over the minor changes the google toolbar makes on their site (only if you specifically trigger it, a fact that was conveniently swept under the rug), what will they make of this? personal content management? the writable web? another step towards Xanadu?

Platypus is a tool for modifying web pages and then saving those changes so that they’ll be repeated the next time you visit the page. Changes are made by selecting an element on the page and then hitting a key to use one of the commands below. To save your changes so that they’ll be applied the next time you visit the same web page, hit Save (Ctl-S). This will bring up a window containing a GreaseMonkey script. Install this script and you’re done!

2018-08-12: Memory is central to problem solving and creativity.

In this essay we investigate personal memory systems, that is, systems designed to improve the long-term memory of a single person. In the first part of the essay I describe my personal experience using such a system, named Anki … The second part of the essay discusses personal memory systems in general. Many people treat memory ambivalently or even disparagingly as a cognitive skill: for instance, people often talk of “rote memory” as though it’s inferior to more advanced kinds of understanding. I’ll argue against this point of view, and make a case that memory is central to problem solving and creativity.

Trusted brains

Another problem for the entertainment companies is what they’re calling the “analog hole.” This recognizes the fact that human beings are not digital, so digital programming has to be converted to a format, known as analog, that we can see and hear.

computers will have the capacity of the human brain by 2020.

The memory capacity of the human brain is ~100T synapse strengths (neurotransmitter concentrations at interneural connections), which we can estimate at ~100TB. In 1998, 128 MB of RAM cost ~$200. The capacity of memory circuits has been doubling every 18 months. Thus by the year 2023, 100TB will cost ~$1000. However, this silicon equivalent will run more than 1b times faster than the human brain. There are techniques for trading off memory for speed, so we can effectively match human memory for $1000 sooner than 2023.

if the MPAA and friends have their way it will have to run on trusted hardware. mind control?