the grey cannon team

Brains, Behavior, and Fixing Broken Things

A pretty exciting article about the meeting point between our neurological wiring, behavior, and punishment for doing bad things:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/07/the-brain-on-trial/8520/?single_page=true

1) I totally fell for the “violent gene” thing, stopping midway and looking up info (found something about MAOA genes?). I won’t spoil the fun, but turns out I didn’t need to search that far.
2) I liked the way the argument against free will is laid out.
3) Alien hand syndrome sounds crazy, and like a good ‘grandpa joke’
4) Had another tangent during the part about homicidal somnambulism (yeah, it took me 2 hours to get through this article). But I never put it together that the band Son Ambulance probably took its name from the scientific word for sleep-walking. http://www.saddle-creek.com/bands/reviews.php?id_number=234, Fascinating, I know.

The end of the article was what got me so pumped up. Short of actual ‘brain programming’, the stuff that those LaConte and Chiu fellows sound like they’redoing with prefrontal workouts sounds like exactly what I’ve always wanted to do! Last month, I almost ordered this: http://www.amazon.com/Mindplace-Thoughtstream-USB-Personal-Biofeedback/dp/B004LU7QBQ/ref=sr_1_4?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1312257545&sr=1-4 but they wouldn’t ship it to Australia. No wonder, after reading this article, every device looks like it was made in the 70s. 

Brains and exercise. Where do I sign up?

Don’t Call It A Comeback

I’m doing my once-a-year “I’m going to really start blogging” thing now, so get ready for about a month of regular posting, followed by another 11 months of silence.

The two biggest hindrances that I encounter when thinking about getting into blogging are (1) time and (2) self-consciousness. But I just got all fired up by Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing”, in which he says

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

So at the risk of sounding even more pretentious by calling what may spill forth on this blog “art”, at a certain point you just have to throw up your hands and say ‘fuck it’. I’m not forcing anybody to read this. And if nothing else, one of my primary motivators is to work out my writing muscles, which have atrophied badly in recent years. As such, I’m going to attempt to take another piece of Bradbury’s advice and write one short story per week, hoping for slightly less than a 100% suck rate. Those will be kept elsewhere, of course.

Anyway, the topic of today’s post is another product that I want.

I want a daily or weekly podcast of all the articles I’m interested in. I want somebody to read the articles that I’ve chosen, record them, and send me (or stream to me - with all the goddamn advertisements you want) the mp3. I’d imagine it working with some kind of API for submitting stories I want read to me. Perhaps I could just use a bookmarklet to queue a story up for reading, and in a few seconds/hours/a day? I would be able to tune into my channel and have the story read back to me.

I love getting news during the workday, but sometimes it consumes damn near half my day. And the thing is, most of the news I read isn’t something I need to pay super close attention to. It would be fine to be on in the background with whatever work I’m doing, and I think I would automatically tune into the interesting parts, and tune out of the uninteresting ones, but not having to stop what I’m doing to read the article is the differentiator.

So there’s my free idea of the day. If you build it, I will come. No robot voices though - I don’t want my news articles read by Johnny 5.

How Do I Know You(r Online Persona)?

This just has to exist, but writing it here in case it doesn’t.

Use case: I just got a linked in invite from Allison X. I don’t remember meeting this person, but some details indicate I might (Washington native, roughly my age range, lives in Tacoma, etc.)

Her linked in profile lists her twitter account, and she’d be easy enough to find on facebook I’m sure. 

What I want is a site that lets me type a name, and it returns the branches of my social graph that link us together. For instance, maybe I follow somebody on Twitter that she’s friends with (and that’s how we met a few years ago or something), or maybe she’s a friend of one of my cousins on Facebook. Facebook does a decent job of this for the friends it knows about, but now that we’re collecting followers on Twitter/Quora/LinkedIn, etc, I want a way to search over that entire graph.

An objective fact-based reputation system

I don’t really have time to do this idea justice right now, but its a concept that I used to obsess over as a child, and think the pieces might now exist to make something that could be really useful to people.

The basic idea: create an datastore of people’s predictions about the future, and surface those people’s track-records as they’re proven correct/incorrect over time.

My sister’s and I used to get into some weird fights. She’d say things like “you’re not going to get into college” and I’d tell her “you’re not going to graduate high school.” Thats a bad example, but there were times (100% of them, actually. She graduated high school, but this is just a contrived example) when I was SO SURE I was going to be right, and SO SURE that she was going to be wrong, that I wanted her punished in some way for believing something so stupid.

I thought about this again today after reading this article. http://www.businessinsider.com/jan-hatzius-very-bad-scenario-2010-10

I saw this and thought “shit”. I bet a lot of other people saw this and actually did something. Maybe they bought bonds, or gold, and in doing so pulled money out of Cameron Tangney Corporation. After all, he’s the head of Goldman Sach’s, he must know. But what if he’s wrong? What if his past predictions, like this one or this one were way off? Wouldn’t that be useful context? (NOTE: He’s pretty good, but I doubt that many others share his record of success)

One of the many things that keeps me far away from politics (not even getting involved, just even paying close attention) is the lack of accountability by the players involved. In fact, it seems to me that some of the most successful in Washington are the ones that can get the most crazy, say the most outlandish things, and drum up the most fear/fervor/pride/excitement - regardless of the claim’s factual basis.

I could be wrong, but I’d like a way to hold people’s feet to the fire by creating a system that makes it easy to record concrete predictions, check those predictions in due time, and come up with a composite score for how closely we should listen to the shepherd next time he says that wolves are circling.

It could work similar to the way hunch does. You’d put “facts” into the system, and a date at which that fact should be checked. It should be as objective as possible (so, politicians claiming that “the world will be a better place if I’m elected” probably wouldn’t be possible to use, but “I will increase employment by 2% in my first term” would). Then either we could put up for vote the conclusion at the future date (of course, some liars will claim they were misinterpreted and have the ‘facts’ to back it up) by the community at large, or the person who entered it and/or moderators could give a “yes”/”no” to that claim. 

Over time a person would establish a reputation as either a dead ringer, or a fanciful blowhard, or (I predict for most) a talking coin flip.

The media doesn’t do this well enough for me. And every organization that does seems to be politically biased. FactCheck.org is a start, but its scope is too narrow. I’m interested in ranking CEOs and Professional Coaches, Friends, and just about everybody else.

Something to think about!