We're all aware of cute optical illusions. Some play tricks with our perception of color, size, or motion ... This particularly beautiful example plays with our perception of brightness - both turn out to be equally bright inside and out.

Optical illusions are an interesting tool to study how our brain puts together sensory input sent by the eye and there have been some major surprises and there have been revelations that address the question of how much of reality do we sample through our senses as we observe the world. To what degree are we sampling reality?
I stumbled across this example in a PNAS paper by Bruno Laeng and Tor Endestad of the University of Norway in Oslo. The illusion is well known, but they looked at something else - how the pupil responded.
If you look at something bright your pupils constrict to adjust to the new brightness level. This takes place in about a tenth of a second - reasonably fast on our level of perception - and it was thought to be a pure reflex that helps protect the retina from damage. Reflex mechanisms should be fast to prevent as much damage as possible and this one was thought to occur in in a few dedicated cells in lower brain structures.1 What is curious with this illusion is our pupils contract even though there is no real brightness - the reflex is in response to what we think we see rather than what really exists!
This is fantastic. Perceptual errors behave more liked learned phenomena and may be adaptations. Perhaps evolution has made us more adroit at encountering our environment.
A lot of visual information is ambivalent and noisy. Perhaps there is some contextual processing going on to construct a "reality" that is more useful. Maybe the reality our mind assembles is a bit better for our functioning that what really exists in nature.
The same goes for other senses - particularly hearing, but taste also comes to mind.2
As I am writing this it occurs to me that there are many other evolutionary tricks that help us to deal with how we relate to the environment. We read stories of animal athletes - cheetahs that can sprint to 70 mph, our cats and dogs that can make jumps that appear amazing - and sometimes think humans must be unathletic in the scheme of things. But we are amazingly good at endurance running. We probably evolved to this as our ancestors may have had to run down prey in order to get close enough to dispatch it, but whatever the reason we are wonderful aerobic machines.3
Many people report a "runner's high" after exertion. I find it around the sixty minute mark with my rowing and, if I make it that far the resulting rush is enough to encourage me to continue for as long as an extra half hour. It is a feeling of real euphoria.
It turns out the body under heavy aerobic load produces endocannabinoids which are substances that act as neurotransmitters. The name probably rings a bell - endocannabinoids are chemically very similar to the active ingredient in cannabis.
The runner's high is the real thing and the euphoria can be an excellent reward.
Recently it has been learned that a few mammals that are good aerobic athletes(humans and dogs) produce serious amounts of endocannabinoids during aerobic exercise while other mammals that aren't aerobic athletes (ferrets) don't. It may be we have evolved a reward system to encourage this type of activity - I know it is one of the few things that keeps me on the rowing machine for lengthy periods. Colleen is more geared towards bursts of power, but she notes that she loved the feeling of euphoria that came over her after an hour or so of intense training and the reward was enough to encourage her to go on for several hours more.
My niece Magi is a runner. A remarkable runner. She is a single mom with two very little kids and is struggling with raising them, working a couple of jobs and going to nursing school. A few years ago she took up running and found it came naturally. She's done several marathons and does respectable three hour times - not bad for someone who can't run every day and rarely more than an hour at a time and also lacks the money to get coaching - shoes are a major expense for her.
She lives in the Phoenix area and has always been comfortable in the mountains. A few races were in the back country and she found she really liked them. Also she learned that she's good with distance. Her quarter times on the Boston Marathon were all within a minute with the last quarter being the fastest. About a year ago she started trying the longer distances and did very well in several fifty mile runs.
With those under her belt it was time to get serious. Last Saturday she ran the Zane Grey - not a race for the faint of heart. Rather than writing about it, I'll print the email she sent and add a few images. Do read the links from the race director and another runner for more color... like
...
The course runs along the base of the Mogollon Rim, constantly dropping in and out of the little canyons and crossing multiple creeks and streams. The route is entirely single track trail and is extremely rugged. Despite a ton of work our volunteers have done on the course, entrants will have to navigate over or under fallen trees, through thick wickets of Manzanita bushes, and over very rocky terrain. There are also sections where the trail just disappears and route finding can be challenging. The middle section of the course, known as the “burn area” had the trees burned down from the Dude Fire in the early 90’s. Runners are exposed to the heat of the Arizona sun and have to travel as far as 11 miles between some aid stations. An unprepared runner can sometimes run out of fluids in these long hot stretches.
Not easy terrain down there. The Mogollon Rim is rough, tough and relentlessly difficult
...
with that, Magi's email:
Here is my first race report. I apologize in advance if you do not want to read this much about me, nevertheless this was an incredible experience and I am really excited to share it!
The Zane Grey 50 has earned a reputation for being one of the most grueling ultras out there. I had spoken with friends who had completed the race and the consensus was I could expect to add about 2 hours onto my avg 50M time (if there is such an avg) prepare to trip, get scratched, sprained, dislocated, lost, broken, etc.,, this all sounds like adventure right?! The race was a bit of a blur so I am sorry for the lack of detailed trail accounts.
April 21st 2012 was the big day of the notorious race, in anticipation of this I had prepared with all sorts of hot, hilly, long, and really fun desert mountain runs. Emmet was prepared to crew for me race day, this made a huge difference. Knowing that someone 100% reliable is waiting for you at designated aid stations on the course with water and nutrition refills, sunblock, an icy towel to wipe down with, words of encouragement, and anything else you may possibly need is beyond words. I say this because when you are running 50 miles through some of the most unpredictable Arizona terrain, your entire life is narrowed down to the steps it takes to get your butt from aid station to aid station. Emmet has accompanied me on many training runs so he knows my pace, my weaknesses, my strengths, and he also knows how to tell me what I need when I may not realize it, this is important. The weather was predicted to be 90 degrees, I wasn't to concerned about this, by default I have to train in the heat and have learned to be very smart about hydration and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately the heat was by far the biggest hazard on the course that day for many of the runners, out of 126 starters only 84 finished.

this
link is an interview with the race director
this link is by a runner, he has great pics of the course in
his blog
In the two days prior to the race I have a total of 5 hours sleep, this was the only stimulus for self-doubt weighing in my head. The night of the race I was lying in bed with the "I want to cry but I'm so mad I can't" feeling. The alarm clock went off at 3:15 am and all that nonsense turned into baloney, it was race day, wheee! We arrived at the start 4:30am, just enough time to hit the bathroom, check in with race officials, and stay warm in the car until just before the 5:00am race start. And just like that the race started, off we went into the woods, all 126 of us with our headlamps beaming in the dark. Actually mine was lightly beaming, I think the batteries died just as the sun rose enough to see without it, lucky me! It was 8 miles to the first aid station, I was equipped with all the nutrition and water I would need to get me to the second aid station (mile 17) where Emmet was planned to meet me, the first 8 miles flew by, it took about 3 miles for the runners to spread out and about 40 minutes for the sun to rise. Running with a headlamp is really fun, the small illumination for your footfalls on new terrain makes me feel like a little kid exploring with a flashlight. Admittedly it really slows me down as the few falls I have had in the past all occurred while running in the dark, thus I now go a little slower. The logic is I'd rather be 5 minutes slower than broken. As we came into the 8 mile aid station we were greeted with cheers, and even better Emmet was there to make sure I was doing OK, (I had started the race with a new hydration pack and he wanted to make sure that it wasn't leaking) I ran through the station on my way to mile 17.

Miles 8-17 were beautiful, the morning was cool and this portion of the trail was through pine forest ascending to views of the Mogollon rim, I was on fresh legs and trying my best to hold back for the many many hills and miles to come. There were numerous river crossings over precarious rocks that really added to the adventure feeling, the course at this point was on an easy to follow single-track trail, well marked with yellow tape and glow sticks. Coming up on mile 17 I could hear the cheers as runners came into the aid station, this was so encouraging I cried a little! Emmet had prepared an area with everything I could possibly need, I quickly toweled off the crusty salt-sweat, exchanged my hydration pack for a freshly packed one, took 2 ibuprofen to help ward off inflammation and set off again----DANG IT! I didn't take my sunglasses, I was running without a visor on purpose as I didn't want to risk missing any trail markers in my periphery, the trail was now becoming more treacherous and it is very easy to get lost. Many experienced ZG runners have lost hours going in the wrong direction.
Mile 17-33 was brutal, I was told to expect the worst during this part, the majority of the trail is an old exposed burn area. Tons of direct sunlight (grrr no sunglasses) lots of elevation to climb, and lucky you if you don't get lost as you have to be super aware of trail markers. This part of the trail has to recover from a harsh winter so the area has a ton of dead tree fall, new dry grass/shrubby growth, and lots of crumbly unsteady soft red rock. At mile 23 there is an aid station only assessed by the official race crew, this aid station is an oasis---it's called Hell's Gate from mile 23-33-- as I ascended into the station the volunteer shouted out "Welcome to Hell, how you doin'? I was doing pretty good considering all the runners were in the same hot boat, I was conditioned for the heat so I knew as long as I kept hydrated I would have no problems. I filled up my pack with water, chugged another few cups of water, and threw a handful of ice down the back of my shirt, off I went into Hell. At this point in the race runners were beginning to drop, many people started out to fast, spent their energy, and were not prepared for the heat. I was not really going to fast but I managed to pass many people during this stretch. The race is organized so that there are rescue workers stationed on the course about every 7 miles with radios, their job is to account for each runner as they pass and make sure nobody goes missing. About mile 25 I came up on a man who had passed me around mile 20, he was hunched over on the side of the trail, he was obviously unprepared with not enough water or calories, as I was offering him some of my water he vomited, nothing I could do for this guy except for run on ahead to tell the next rescue crew they had a runner in trouble. There were some pats of trail during this leg where I would think to myself "seriously?? I am supposed to run this?" and other parts where I had to remind myself that I had trained to go faster and harder, hiking was the only option for many parts of the trail, however dragging my feet was not. My head needed to be reminded to move my feet!
Whoo-hoo I made it to mile 33 aid station! The delirium sets in completely about this point, as I came into the station Emmet was yelling "go this way, now go this way, now this way" leading me from the check in to the car where all my gear was. This is where it makes a difference for someone who knows your habits to intervene, I was spot-on for nutrition and hydration but with the heat every ones sweat factor was major--Emmet made sure to impose upon me the importance of taking saltstick caps--these are electrolyte tabs to swallow--if you had seen all the salt crusted on my face/shirt/body it's pretty obvious I was depleted, I now swear by these caps! Seriously, all I could tell you at this point was which way is up or down. My brain was only focused on watching my footfall to not trip and keeping a keen eye on trail markers. A funny note here, about a week prior Max had told me in his cutie voice "Good job Mommy" when I pointed out a local peak I ran to during a training run. During the race I had his cute little voice in my head rewarding me with a "Good Job Mommy!" every time I came upon a trail marker!

So onto miles 33-44, Emmet loaded me up with 2L of water on my back, 32oz in my hands, about 800 calories in my pack (all of which I would use) and I was on my way! This was serious fun, the trail was about 60% run-able so now I know I need to improve my hiking skillz, other than this I was focused on the next 11 miles of adventure. I think my most proud accomplishment for this race was not falling once, I don't fall often but still this terrain is really 'trippy' (funny right?) so now blur blur blur, hill, hill, up , up , up , and I arrive at mile 44!
The crowd is cheering all the runners as we descend into the station, Emmet leads me to the car and preps me for the last 6 miles. Hmmm 6 miles, how long might this take...try 1 hour and 40 minutes...uuuuuffffff. This last 6 miles was long and exhilarating, and hard. The terrain was pretty pine forest but my legs were shot, there was spot about mile 42 where some thin ice patches were still frozen on the ground, it just made sense to me to come to a stand still stop to look at them and contemplate lying down on one--I chose to keep on trucking but now I was day dreaming of cold pools to dip in and icy drinks. After what seemed like an endless stretch of trail I rounded a corner and was in earshot of the finish, what a rush! I picked up the pace as best I could and finished strong, the 35th finisher and 8th female to be exact. The whole race took me 12:40 minutes and every second was great!

I will definitely do this race again, it was a total adventure! Thank you so much for all the encouragement
For many reasons I'm very proud of Magi:-) Today - a week later - she's running a regular marathon "for fun"
She obviously is mostly slow twitch or red muscle. This comes from both sides of her family, who tend to be gracile and endurance/non-sprinter types. I'm really slow and a terrible jumper, but I can go for a long time. In college I would regularly ride "centuries" (100 mile bike rides) on most weekends and never had any exhaustion problems. Even now when rowing I specialize on going for an hour to an hour and a half rather than intense five minute intervals of burst effort.
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1 This is similar to what happens when you burn your finger. Your finger touches a red hot burner and a signal races towards the closest area that can make a decision - the spinal cord in the case of the finger. A response is quickly generated and sent back causing the muscles to jerk your finger out of the way. This happens "reflexively" - long before signal can be processed by the brain and long before pain is even felt.
2 By taste I am referring to flavor which really isn't the conventional five tastes on the tongue, but the mixture of taste, touch and smell that generates "flavor" in our mind.
Also color is generated in the mind as is music.
3 This is one of the reasons why our bodies respond so well to aerobic exercise and why we tend to fall apart when we become sedentary. At risk of sounding preachy, your body and brain with greatly benefit from regular aerobic exercise so find an excuse to just do it.
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A Very Simple Simple Pea Soup
Ingredients
° 2 tbl unsalted butter
° 1 diced medium sweet onion
° 1 clove garlic, sliced
° Kosher salt to taste
° 2 c thawed frozen sweet peas (fresh only if picked on the same day!!)
° 1/2 c lightly packed fresh tarragon leaves
Technique
° Melt butter over medium low heat. When it foams add onion, garlic and salt. Cover and cook until the onions are soft, but don't brown! Stir frequently - not a walk away and forget it stage
° Add a quart of water and bring to a boil. Add peas and tarragon and cook 'til tender - a few minutes
° take off heat, purée and strain.
° Reheat if necessary and serve. I like to garnish with a few whole raw peas and a bit of plain greek yogurt
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bonus non-recipe
After 80 or 90 minutes of hard rowing I'm soaking with perspiration and am in need of something cold with a lot of protein. Here is my current favorite - not vegan friendly though. "Shake" is tongue in cheek - I can make a quality milkshakes. Ask if you visit and we'll do one.
Berry Yogurt "Thickshake" with Nuts and Chocolate
Ingredients
° A good handful (about 100g) of slightly thawed frozen blueberrys or raspberries
° About 200g plain greek yogurt - I like to use 2%
° a half frozen banana - I remove the skins on very ripe bananas and tightly wrap them in plastic wrap and freeze. A great way to deal with ripe bananas
° 2% or whole milk. Start with 100g and adjust
° something sweet - maple syrup, honey, sugar
° 15 to 30g of dark chocolate broken into small bits
° 15 g broken pecans
Technique
° Blend banana, fruit, and about 50g of milk.
° Add the yogurt and milk as necessary to get a good enough consistency. Add sweetner if necessary
° Pour into a serving glass or bowl depending on thickness. Stir in pecans and chocolate
leading horses as well as choosing them
So three cheers for Jheri! I am toasting her with some proper homemade ice cream tonight.
Jheri is now in her mid 20s and was a poor student in high school. There were some reasons for this, but the bottom line is that she wasn't ready to learn. We have an education system that assumes a readiness on the part of the student across many subjects that is probably optimal for a small minority. But now she wants it and is focused on learning biology and has been finding math and science come easil to her. I'm not surprised - she has a sparkling curious mind and has discovered the wonderful ignorance that science provides.. She has a career, but is getting a bit of schooling in her spare time and will soon quit and go full time. I wouldn't be surprised to see her go on for an advanced degree.
I'm finding something similar about myself. I was extremely interested in math and science as a kid and far to focused. (another Jeri knew me a bit then and will probably vouch for that) Then I found myself as an undergrad in a school that was really a glorified trade school. I tested out of many of the "non important" subjects and continued my singular focus. Grad school was a mentor relation that focused almost entirely on physics. As a result I'm extremely narrow - something that has been bothering me a lot. I have been developing interests in history, art and music playing with these a bit as a curious amateur. Perhaps one day I'll go to a real university and learn how to ask a few questions in these areas in much greater detail. At least I am identifying my ignorance and am curious enough to learn. It doesn't matter that I don't know much - at least not to me.
Being ready to learn happens in areas you may not immediately suspect. The men's volleyball team at UC Irvine took the NCAA Division 1 championship this past weekend. Except for volleyball they have an unremarkable athletic department, but head coach John Speraw is one of those remarkable characters who is both cerebral and humble. He knows that he doesn't know and seems to delight in learning.
Speraw hasn't been with Irvine that long, but has managed to put together three national championships. During the last season he raised eyebrows when he hired a female psychologist with no volleyball experience as one of his assistant coaches - even though the program is too small to support full time assistant coaches. This weekend he praised her noting she gave him and the team the right tools to do the remarkable. Of course they, as an organization, had to be radically different from the standard men's volleyball team in order to understand, modify and implement what she was telling them. Speraw observes, experiments and learns from his successes and failures. He has turned his staff onto his techniques and the players are doing the same. UC Irvine now has a learning organization that is crushing organizations with rich histories and much larger financial resources. My guess is more than a few men's programs will hire psychologists and most (all?) of them will be too inflexible to learn and adapt. In the meantime John will find other tools.
One wonders about the parallels with other organizations - corporations for example.
When are companies ready to learn and can you identify them by the questions they are asking? Does their thinking become calcified over time and do they see a need to learn and adapt? Where do they find the questions to learn from and what are their mechanisms for dealing with the questions? Do they have an institutional learning process and an institutional memory to take advantage of their learnings? Do they recognize the value of failure? Do they recognize the value of play? Are those charged with running the company curious enough to ask questions or have they followed a path that has given them success to date giving them an artificial sense of confidence? How do they select and promote employees at all levels and is the ability and readiness to learn part of the process?
My guess is learning organizations are probably rare. I'm reasonably familiar with Apple and Pixar and both are great examples where learning is central. I'm also familiar with many others that are mostly unable - or at least unready - to learn.
Is your organization curious enough? Does it actively identify, cultivate and celebrate its ignorance? Is it diverse enough to connect dots and identify potentially new areas of ignorance - areas that, when explored by the right people will illuminate opportunity that others hadn't considered.
Think about the last paragraph and imagine Apple and Pixar. Try it again with average organizations you know.
It makes me think of how new ideas and techniques are identified and, if useful, implemented. Many companies follow bandwagons - some companies sort out the world by asking the right questions and blaze their own paths, but many become little more than buzzword compliant with a considerable amount of time, talent and money in the process.
I think data mining and "big data" (I dislike both terms for a variety of reasons - sit me down with some cold milk and fresh cookies and I'll go into detail) are a great example of the potential success and failure of institutional learning. A few organizations will understand what they are doing deeply enough to be able to play in this area effectively, but many are probably going to fail as has been true with many "next big things" over time.
You really need to understand something deeply enough to know if there is a there there. I was drawn to physics as, in principal, it is so simple. Simple enough that you have some hope of asking fundamental questions in a productive fashion. But add a bit of complexity and the world rapidly becomes far too complex to understand at a fundamental level. There may be levels of possible understanding that describe it that, if you are sufficiently clever, allow you identify those techniques that will work for your organization.
The term "data" is highly contextual - so much that I try not to use it. It isn't a fundamental piece of information, but rather is a cloud of information surrounding the core of what you think it is. Some of this cloud may be obvious and some may be hidden. As an example consider this well-known description of an email problem. The system is relatively simple (I've written successful email gateways so they must be simple), but the description assumes you have a bit of familiarity with the subject. Feel free to skip over it if your eyes glaze over - the point is there was an obscure condition that eluded detection resulting in some puzzling behavior.
The following is the 500-mile email story in the form it originally appeared, in a post to sage-members on Sun, 24 Nov 2002.:
From trey@sage.org Fri Nov 29 18:00:49 2002 Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 21:03:02 -0500 (EST) From: Trey Harris <trey@sage.org> To: sage-members@sage.org Subject: The case of the 500-mile email (was RE: [SAGE] Favorite impossible task?) Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the whole thing more entertaining. I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department. "We're having a problem sending email out of the department." "What's the problem?" I asked. "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained. I choked on my latte. "Come again?" "We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther." "Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500 miles?" "It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily. "You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--" "You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And you couldn't send email this whole time?" "We could send email. Just not more than--" "--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't you call earlier?" "Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now." Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--" "Geostatisticians..." "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius." "I see," I said, and put my head in my hands. "When did this start? A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at that time?" "Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it. But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system." "Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely believing that I was playing along. It wasn't April Fool's Day. I tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke. I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails. This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles) worked. But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed. Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence (580 miles) failed. I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle. Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have broken down in tears. Having established that--unbelievably--the problem as reported was true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar. I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn't been altered--it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain I hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option. At a loss, I telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS sendmail banner. Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark codes that had been used in Sendmail 5. The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had "patched the server," he had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing *downgraded* Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf alone, even though it was now the wrong version. It so happens that Sendmail 5--at least, the version that Sun shipped, which had some tweaks--could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new long configuration options--those it saw as junk, and skipped. And the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so, finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to zero. One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds. An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100% switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by incidental router delays. Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell: $ units 1311 units, 63 prefixes You have: 3 millilightseconds You want: miles * 558.84719 / 0.0017893979 "500 miles, or a little bit more."This example is really easy - it involved a well-defined system built around logical constructs.1 Understanding humans and human behavior is much more difficult and anyone who says they can is naïve and/or lying. Data mining may give candidate shards of information, but they are highly contextual and you must know the steps used to gather, filter and process the information and how reliable they are. You had damn well know the errors and error propagation. And even then the resulting information may not be terribly useful as human behavior isn't exactly an axiomatic system.
It is more important to develop a deep understanding of what you need to know. You must learn what it is you need to know and how to get a "good enough" approximation. For companies like Apple, Pixar, Trader Joe's, and Lululemon success doesn't rest on data mining, but on other techniques. It is likely data mining techniques wouldn't be terrible useful to these companies for their current products. It may be that Apple finds some great uses as Siri builds out, but for now great design doesn't rest on it.
I suspect the companies successful with data mining will be vendors who sell to the masses and don't really care about the results as long as the money keeps coming in along with a few companies who have learned there is a solid niche for them and can ask the right questions to know the information produced is robust enough to make a material difference in their bottom line. I suspect the later group will be made up with companies who are indeed ready to learn.
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I'm very proud of Jheri! Here is the ice cream I'll make in her honor defrosting some wild blueberries that were picked last Summer at peak season. I'll follow it with a quick recipe for something really simple.
There are many ways to make ice cream - I use a simple refrigerated freezer that gets reasonably cold. Liquid nitrogren techniques are even better if you have access. Drop me a note if you are interested. Also I have more than a few great ice cream recipes from years of experimentation starting with Steve in the dorm basement at Stony Brook. We literally wore out three freezers during our experiments.
Blueberry Ice Cream
Ingredients
OK now the simple recipe.
The Un-Egg Cream
Too simple to talk about ingredients or technique. I like the idea of an egg cream and this is a simple variation. Get some seltzer or, better yet, Cherry 7-Up chilled to near freezing. Pour some milk based drink, properly chilled into the glass - perhaps 50 grams or so (about two ounces). Pour about five or six times as much of the bubbly fluid on top and rapidly stir with a long thin spoon.
Very refreshing. My favorite combination is Sunkist Naturals Pina Colada Protein Smoothie and Cherry 7-Up (diet or regular ... diet is probably somewhat healthier)
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1 There is a class of computer "failures" that are, at their hearts, insufficiently understood systems. Often "data" is the issue
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