Category: Sense Perception

Freakonomics Podcast: “It’s Fun to Smoke Marijuana”

February 11, 2015

“A psychology professor argues that the brain’s greatest attribute is knowing what other people are thinking. And that a Queen song, played backwards, can improve your mind-reading skills.”

“‘Another One Bites the Dust‘ — when played backward — contains a secret message that, in the end, may help people communicate better.”

http://freakonomics.com/2014/03/13/its-fun-to-smoke-marijuana-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/

On the same topic, here’s a compilation of songs along with lyrics played forward and then backwards with the alleged secret messages.

If you watch the video, try not to watch the words on the video when listening backwards and decide what you think the “secret” message is. It seems only to be “clear” when you see the words on the screen and are otherwise unintelligible.

The Intelligent Plant: Scientists debate a new way of understanding flora

January 29, 2015

“Somehow, a plant gathers and integrates all this information about its environment, and then “decides”—some scientists deploy the quotation marks, indicating metaphor at work; others drop them—in precisely what direction to deploy its roots or its leaves. Once the definition of “behavior” expands to include such things as a shift in the trajectory of a root, a reallocation of resources, or the emission of a powerful chemical, plants begin to look like much more active agents, responding to environmental cues in ways more subtle or adaptive than the word “instinct” would suggest. “Plants perceive competitors and grow away from them,” Rick Karban, a plant ecologist at U.C. Davis, explained, when I asked him for an example of plant decision-making. “They are more leery of actual vegetation than they are of inanimate objects, and they respond to potential competitors before actually being shaded by them.” These are sophisticated behaviors, but, like most plant behaviors, to an animal they’re either invisible or really, really slow.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant?currentPage=all

Using Math to analyze baseball. Sabermetrics

January 28, 2015

Popularized in the book and later on the movie, Moneyball, Sabermetrics is “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.’ Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as ‘which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team’s offense?’ or ‘How many home runs will Ken Griffey hit next year?’ It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as ‘Who is your favorite player?’ or ‘That was a great game.'” -Bill James.

Sabermetrics has caused tremendous controversy among sports analysts and enthusiasts because of the positions they take on questions such as: How do we reconcile mathematical knowledge that contradicts our intuition? What if our eyes tell us one truth and our numbers tell us a different one?

Some people complain that the reliance on numbers takes away from the “magic and mystery of the game.”

The baseball organizations themselves have adopted the data driven approach to analyzing players. With the success of the Oakland Athletics (a team that was an early adopter of the mathematical methods known as Sabermetrics) and later on the Boston Red Sox, most if not all teams use these analytical methods.

The first link below is an introduction to the basics of sabermetrics and below that are two disagreeing with its use.

http://sabr.org/sabermetrics

http://www.hardballtimes.com/death-to-sabermetrics/

http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/story/sabermetrics-moneyball-stat-geeks-are-ruining-sports-092211

Synesthesia: Rare but Real: People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color

January 28, 2015

“When Ingrid Carey says she feels colors, she does not mean she sees red, or feels blue, or is green with envy. She really does feel them.”

http://www.livescience.com/169-rare-real-people-feel-taste-hear-color.html

http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/05/6-intriguing-types-of-synesthesia-tasting-words-seeing-sounds-hearing-colours-and-more.php

Radiolab Podcast: Reasonable Doubt

January 28, 2015

“On July 29th, 1985, a 36-year-old woman named Penny Beerntsen went for a jog on the beach near her home. About a mile into her run, she passed a man in a leather jacket, said hello and kept running. On her way back, he re-appeared. What happened next would cause Penny to question everything she thought she knew about judging people — and, in the end, her ability to be certain of anything.”

http://www.radiolab.org/story/278180-reasonable-doubt/