[Oh so very true. -egg]

Wondermark » Archive » #934; Change Team, Activate!.

Packaged adventure tours can be fun and useful. A guided hut-to-hut walk in the Italian Alps, or a bicycle tour around the villages of Rajasthan, or a kayaking cruise between Caribbean islands are fantastic journeys that can be hard to program yourself. A good adventure tour agency knows how to smoothly sequence events like this, and on higher-price tours you may get a guide as well.

But I prefer to create my own adventure tours, because I can save many thousands of dollars that way. I use the commercial adventure tour itineraries as a basis for my own travels, and then modify them as needed. The way I figure it, if they can move a dozen people along the route, I should be able to do it with one or two. The most reputable agencies publish their itineraries online in great detail as a sales incentive. But to complete many of the routes they are selling requires private transportation or special accommodations. You might need a pick-up or delivery at a trail-head, or a jeep to reach a village, or even a plane flight, etc. This is where many budget travelers stop. It took me many years to realize that in most places in the world today — even developing nations — it is not hard, or very expensive, to arrange private transportation or expert help. And with the internet, these arrangements can be made beforehand. I’ve pre-arranged jeeps, vans, buses, and boats. The simple rule of thumb is: if a US-based tour agency can pre-arrange it, you can too, and at a great savings…

via Cool Tools – Hack Your Own Adventure Tours.

08. Katie Dear – YouTube.

But simple, beautiful mathematical explanations can make us greedy. While we wish for all explanations of the world around us to be elegant, science often involves “the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact,” in the words of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. Before positing elliptical orbits, Kepler himself succumbed to the desire for beauty when he suggested that the planets’ orbits could be modeled as the Platonic solids nested inside each other. His theory was beautiful, but it was soundly disproved by later observations of the outer planets. In a way, it was almost too beautiful to be right. But beauty cannot be our only metric; beauty must be hampered by reality, if it is to have anything to say about the world around us. Gustav Fechner, a 19th-century psychologist, tried to experimentally prove that people naturally preferred golden rectangles in all kinds of settings, an effort that has not been borne out by subsequent research. It seems he was misled by his “vision of a unified world of thought, spirit and matter, linked together by the mystery of numbers.” This tendency can lead us astray. We see the golden ratio where it doesn’t really exist, and concoct beautiful theories that don’t describe reality.

via Math as Myth – Preview Issue: The Story of Nautilus – Nautilus.

[Interesting video for a great song. -egg]

Darkside – A1 on Vimeo.

[Whoa. -Egg]

In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity and that “patients with mental disorders deserve better”.

As a result the NIMH will now be preferentially funding research that does not stick to DSM categories:

Going forward, we will be supporting research projects that look across current categories – or sub-divide current categories – to begin to develop a better system. What does this mean for applicants? Clinical trials might study all patients in a mood clinic rather than those meeting strict major depressive disorder criteria. Studies of biomarkers for “depression” might begin by looking across many disorders with anhedonia or emotional appraisal bias or psychomotor retardation to understand the circuitry underlying these symptoms. What does this mean for patients? We are committed to new and better treatments, but we feel this will only happen by developing a more precise diagnostic system.

via National Institute of Mental Health abandoning the DSM « Mind Hacks.

BLDGBLOG: Forest Tone
http://bldgblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/forest-tone.html?m=1

But surely this also sets the stage for the design of some incredible future greenhouse somewhere, chilled from within and spanning whole hills, streams, and meadows at a time, where perfectly refrigerated forests grow slowly under controlled conditions to form violins in three centuries: lined with weights and counter-weights, they are pruned, cut, sliced, and pulleyed to stretch the grain toward specific densities, to hit frequencies hundreds of years from now in an echoing concert hall built for music from modified trees.

Families tend the chambered forest, introducing a new carbon dioxide mix every third Sunday of the month according to some arcane unwritten formula, and these perfectly strange trees, ideally shaped for music, roll deliriously inside with their own tuned tides of sap and water. Instrument makers step gingerly over the roots and soils of the controlled forest floor where, barely whispering out of respect for their surroundings, they remove calipers from leather bags, they prism their laser-levelers through passing banks of mist, and they pay on credit three hundred years in advance to reserve well-measured sections of trees for future violins and cellos, imagining whole new forms of music that might emerge someday, given the right, surgically placed sequences of cuts, as if all trees are secretly hiding musical instruments and only the smallest percentage of them have so far been revealed.

(via Instapaper)

Emiliana Torrini – Fisherman’s Woman – YouTube.

OpenWorm is a very cool project that also scares me a little bit: a collaborative, open source attempt to construct an artificial life form — a simple worm, computationally created from the cellular level to a point where it’s sophisticated enough to solve, as the site explains, “basic problems such as feeding, mate-finding and predator avoidance”. This would be the first digital life form of its kind, but if the project is successful, more sophisticated species are sure to follow.

I first heard about this open source project because OpenSim pioneer John Hurliman recently joined OpenWorm’s development team, helping with improving the code’s deployment processes. “In the future I’d like to help with the physical and neural simulation aspects,” he tells me. “It strongly overlaps with the simulation research I did at Intel, even though we were virtual world/avatar focused, for the implementation the theory is equally applicable to a project like this.”

How’s progress on the worm itself going?

“Not a lot from the ‘download and run it’ perspective, it’s a pretty massive undertaking,” John tells me. “I was just in a Google Hangout meeting with the team this morning showing the latest demo, which showed a particle simulation of five connected muscle segments moving together through a body of water. The neuron simulation is also working and there have been some early tests of sending the outputs of that simulation (signals to the muscles to contract or relax) to the physics simulation. It will probably be 3-5 months before both simulations have been debugged and integrated to the point where the average curious developer could build and run the project and see the muscular shell of a worm swimming around.”

via New World Notes: An Open Source Artificial Life Project Called OpenWorm.