Jaguar XKE notes

Have you seen this?

http://jaguar-xke.blogspot.com/2009/01/jaguar-xke-sports-car-have-you-ever.html

"You will pay less amount of money for second hand cars than for new cars. The difference in cost or price can going up to over ten thousand dollars. If you are thinking about buying a second hand car make sure to check the cost of a new car of the same type and see how much you can save."

(looks like ESL)

While that first sentence is generally true, it really isn't for an XKE. Not that you can buy a new XKE. You could certainly buy a different used Jaguar model, for a lot less. But a used XKE is *not* cheaper than a new car...cheaper than *some* new cars, but not many. OK, a cheap XKE might be more cheaper, but then it may well not be one worth getting, because you're going to have to do a chunk of work on it.

The rest of the blog entry is comparably off-target.

On Dying

Turned 50 last year. The end of my life is closer than the beginning. I have two grandparents who lived to be 90+, but I am certainly past the halfway point.

Feels like my health started downhill 5 years ago, beginning with the kidney stone. Actually maybe it began a couple years earlier with some kind of bronchitis attack. Throat hasn't been the same since. May be having the occasional heart murmur trouble the past few years.

Leads you to wonder...but that's not what this blog post is about.

I'd prefer to die pretty quick, rather than gradually deteriorate. My mother-in-law has Parkinson's, that's a slow degeneration. Alzheimer's is too; dementia, etc...and you're not allowed to decide to just die, and by the time you really need to be able to, you don't even have the ability to make the decision.

My dad died of pancreatic cancer. Gradual deterioration for six+ months, and then fairly quick the last 30 days. (I have the feeling he had some Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam.)

Is this life all there is? Is there an after? What happens after? Should I want whatever it is? What would we be "reborn" as? Am I reborn as a human-shaped being? At what age? (i.e., am I reborn at age 25, or the same age as when I died?) Am I a more/less-likable person? Better looking? Am I still "me" physically and mentally? What about everyone else? Will I have to worry about job/income/housing/food etc? Just like now? Will I have to deal with the same amount of obnoxious other people? The same ones?

Read the comics enough, and the impression you get (at least from Family Circus) is that once dead and living in heaven, that is all about standing around on the clouds, talking. OK, that's not the daily struggle for food and shelter. But what happens when the obnoxious person decides he wants the cloud you're on?

If the afterlife is just like this one, I'm not too interested. I'm not going to be interested in fighting the same kinds of battles for all eternity. But I don't want to just stand around and talk. Reading on some religious-based websites you can readily find that heaven is not going to be much like this, but in ways that we cannot imagine, and that we shall all be made perfect. Which really means that a lot of us are not going to be the same person. Wants won't be the same, either, so one expects less inter-personal conflicts. Or maybe they are just different ones?

All unknowable. But you gotta wonder...

Artificial Stupidity

I started through Spellforce 1 again, as mentioned last month. Played as a fighter, did maximum FPS before doing any RTS on any level--it's like a different game. Started on the first expansion. It does look good on a 24" monitor.

And then I got hammered by the NPC's Artificial Stupidity again.

I started this expansion as a wizard this time. Never played as that char before, because it seems too hard--primarily because you run out of mana, whereas a fighter never runs out of sword. Useful to have such in the group, but not to BE such. I don't remember how I played this one level before; it has some scripted behaviors I can't control properly.

I'm at this point where I have to escort a group of refugees. They don't move very fast, but they will fight; and they're weak. So they are probably going to get killed. A couple of levels back I had a team of Dark Elves, one class of which can summon things, and another can revive dead as skeletons. So you really have a lot of extra fighters.

It should always be the case that when you have an escort mission, you should be able to tell the escortee(s) "Wait here!" because you are going to go clear a path. And then you should be able to go back and say "Follow me!" and have that happen.

I start a new map with these refugees, it's an ice/snow location. As soon as I move, they start heading towards this locked gate. The key to the gate is on some giant wolves nearby. So I have to kill the wolves. I have some ice elf archers, but the group of us is not strong enough to swarm the wolves. I have to do the whole rope-a-dope routine in order to stay alive. This means that the wolves will get close enough to get the refugees to attack, meaning I lose half the refugees.

If I could have told the refugees to stay put a ways back, wolf problem can be solved. (ok , alternative: only send my archers forward, me and the refugees stay behind until wolves are dead.)

So on we go through the gate. The refugees slog onward, we encounter additional opposition, but I can deal with that, until we pass the ice-elemental-spawner. They start to attack, and while they are up ahead, the refugees halt and wait for me to kill the elemental spawner. Well, I'm too weak for that, and the refugees will NOT follow me to the next gate. Which is going to mean we are all going to die.

This is because of unrealistic behavior. Artificial Stupidity. "Let's attack the giant wolves with our bare hands! They're only five levels stronger than we are!"

Is our President read?

Just a week ago, Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, reacts to an op-ed piece by Karl Rove some days earlier that I didn't see, asserting that apparently George W Bush reads A LOT. Apparently something like 100 books per year.

That's two per week. Really? Shouldn't take an Advanced Degree to figure this out...

For comparison:

I have been a heavy reader since about 1972 or so. Prior to that I just didn't have enough access. About 1970 or so I began to have enough of my own books that I was re-reading them a lot, in addition to new ones. Mom took us to the library fairly often, as she was a heavy reader too (from having been stuck in bed for a year as a child, apparently with TB, although apparently decades later that was debunked).

Since 1972 I've read about 3000 books. I still have most of them. That's almost two per week. The shortest ones are probably 125 pages. The longest, over a thousand pages.

I read fast. Damn fast.

In 5th grade I had a nearly unique experience in school--all the 5th-graders took speed-reading. This was in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1968/69, not a location you connect with advanced thinking like this...I'm not aware of this happening anywhere else, really. i was only there for a year, but this was almost unimaginably valuable. (I was back there in 10th grade, and took typing, comparably valuable.)

The scoop: we learn to read by reading aloud. (Think back on your earliest years in school, and before.) So we read at the same speed we talk. On average, this is about 150 words per minute. Everyone in my class started speed-reading training at 150 words a minute. The trick to going faster, in your brain, is that you have to decouple reading and speaking. This is doable by most folks, and pretty much everyone can progress to about 300 words a minute. This is roughly one page in a novel every minute (a page in a printed book usually has about 300 words, I've counted this a number of times in the past; it varies with font-size, but 300 is a good approx). I think I remember everyone in my class being at least at 300 by the end of the school year.

(Lacking speed-reading training, you don't read faster than you talk, and I don't mean the "Evelyn Wood" noise, that isn't really speed reading, but it too requires you to decouple from your speech.)

How was this done? They had a film-strip-like machine that would move a sliding box across a line of text, L to R, then repeat with a new line of text. (There's a computer program that more or less duplicates this, called "Ace Reader"; the sliding box motion is jerky rather than smooth, I found it jarring to try to read that way.) You have to move your eyes to follow the box, so you begin to separate eye movement and subconscious vocalizing. The complete text was a story. You'd take a quiz at the end. High enough score on the quiz, and you moved ahead 25 words/min the next week. The machine's speed incremented in 25 words/minute quanta. So we only did the jumps once a week. At the beginning of the training everyone is at 150. Next week, some still are, some have moved on. By the end of the school year, the spread has increased, and there are kids at most speeds. Nearly everyone has moved beyond 150. I am in the fastest group, at 625, along with 2 or 3 others. Yes--I read 4X faster than I did before.

Damn fast. I still read pretty fast now, but it's variable, depending on the content. A technical manual is a slow read; Janet Evanovich is fast, maybe even faster than 600...

Which means that most novels unfold for me at the pace of a theatrical movie. AND, it means that reading 100 in a year isn't that hard or unlikely. Altho these days I'm busy enough with other things that I don't read that many. Suppose you read one page/min. Suppose the average book is 300 pages, so Bush reads 600 pp/week. Roughly 100 per day, or 100 minutes per day. Does he actually have that kind of time?

But apparently in this Karl Rove article they've been keeping a list of them (which sounds a bit artificial to being with). I haven't seen the list, apparently Cohen has. Apparently the list content has its own interesting features, but that's his discussion. My blog entry argues against his even having done the reading, regardless of what it was.

I don't even have a list of what books I've *bought* in the last year, much less read.

But wait...what did Rove mean by "read"? Did Bush read every word? Or just the first paragraph in the chapters? Skim the chapters? If we assume he reads at 150, then he didn't read 600 pp/week. The President just would not have that kind of time, that's about 3 hours per day. Any more, *I* don't manage to have 3 hours/day for it (although 100 pp takes me < 1 hour).

Cohen's article is about the books themselves. Apparently they are biographies, and their thematic content is such that they would be reinforcing Bush's self-image, and offering some personal vindication for his actions as President. Are there in fact 500+ books like that so that one *could* read that many? That too strikes me as unlikely--but I can imagine it, and if there's really a list...

My conclusion: the mechanics of it indicate that Bush does not, and has not, read 100 books per year. (Of course, if he's had that same speed-reading training I have, well, maybe he did.)


(Aside: why I think this reading machine does this well: our eyes/brains are attracted to motion. Why? I think it's probably ancient racial memory--things that are moving could be predators, so we need to focus on them. There's an interesting bit of imagery/video I'm thinking of here; it begins with a still photo, mostly of non-uniform vertical lines, but when you see part of it move you are able to resolve that it is a tiger (vertical stripes) obscured by nearly-vertical vegetation leaves; no motion = no danger, motion means the tiger (danger) needs to be watched.)

How we learn

A theory. Which I have, and that is mine. A-hem.

Yesterday I happened upon another paper about how infant learning takes place...it has long seemed to me that those who write about this didn't have kids. So they're inventing some kind of explanation. This particular paper was about learning language. Are we born with the ability to process or language, or is that a learned thing? (i.e., the classic "nature vs nurture" argument).

What I think we are born with is a pattern-matching feedback system. That's all.

In fact, I think that's all you need. Well, plus some chemical enjoyment feedback when patterns are matched and repeated, for positive reinforcement.

Think of it this way: what do babies do? They watch things. They wave their arms and feet a lot. They put things in the mouth (because the first thing that goes in their mouth makes them happy--getting fed). Imagine an audio and video pattern matcher, completely untrained, just receiving a huge amount of input all the time. Mostly it's junk, but it's not random junk--it's the parents, and the rooms in the house. Not much changes there, so there's lots of time for reinforcing imagery and sound.

Imagine that the waving of arms and feet is all essentially random motion--random neural firings (what else can it be, really?). But the mid-brain is aware of the nerve-firings that cause the arms to move, and the eyes will eventually see the motion, and the feedback connection will be made that leads to awareness of causality: "these nerves and thoughts lead to this visible motion". Patterns will match, reinforcement occurs, and thus memory.

Recall why it is that a deaf person doesn't learn to speak: the feedback loop for the pattern-matching is broken. No feedback, no learning, because the muscular control can't be tested.

Learning is all about pattern-matching. Learning something new is usually based on matching an existing pattern. Otherwise it takes a lot longer, because you have to generate new base patterns. Thus we always start with simple things.

Analogical reasoning is all about matching a pattern, and extending it.

So why haven't we used this approach to teach a computer to speak like we do? Beats me. Probably because it would take just as long as teaching a baby--years. So we have tended to take different approaches that go from zero to sixty in one leap, rather than zero to one to two to three...

We learn things when we are ready to learn them. Which means that we have to have enough base patterns to correlate against.

Some people are better about doing this pattern-match than others. They learn faster and earlier. We learn most things by watching others. I have personally observed this in action a couple of places: #1 being the DC Metro subway system. Watch someone who wasn't born here and doesn't read/speak english try to figure out how to use a farecard machine. Can only be done by watching what others do to get one--because you can't get through the turnstile without it. You observe what someone else does, then you try to do it too. Receiving a farecard = success, you are happy because you have the card, so there is positive reinforcement. Next time, you might have to watch again, but that is reinforcing a pattern, not creating one, so it goes faster.

When you hear someone speak and you don't understand them, you want them to go slower, or talk louder, because your learned patterns aren't being matched. If that person has an accent, you might have to hear unusual words (or words that match the sound but not the context) more than once in order to match the sound AND the context.

You'd think that this is an experimentally verifiable behavior. No one seems to have done (far as I've read, which hasn't covered this topic for a while).

How hard could it be to do it?