stimulant

During an open house at the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, I listened to one of the school’s founders speak extensively about how quickly technology changes, pointing out — with a mixture of nostalgia and amazement — the rapid cycles of technological obsolescence in the past three decades. Just as I thought he was getting ready to talk about the self-governance and free model that gave the school its reputation, he ended the talk. Needless to say, I was disappointed. The friend of mine who had brought me to the open house commented that it seemed as though the founder had intended to build up to the point that our current, instruction-heavy curricular model is broken. Given how quickly our world is changing and how rapidly it is expanding, the idea of “preparing” a high school student with the “right knowledge” for the world is increasingly irrelevant. Despite this, many see credentials as more important than ever. But, [the founder] never made it that far.

I’ve complained before about the senseless spiral of credentialism. As the high school diploma lost its scarcity, the college diploma supplanted it, and now, educational inflation has led people to see graduate degrees as increasingly desirable. The politics of manufactured scarcity mean that the same ubiquity of access we seek on people’s behalves creates an economic pressure to keep up the distribution of haves and have-nots, leading to an ever-lengthening list of “necessary” credentials. Simply put: making schooling more accessible is not enough to flatten the distribution of those correlates we associate with education (namely, economic security).

On one hand, there is a conservative push toward increasing specialization qua credentials, characterized by the group who were termed “millennials” several years ago. The other shift¹ , there is a movement toward the disestablishment of credentialism as people find broader and broader contexts in which to monetize their creativity. People like Paul Graham have pointed out that the ease with which startups can now be founded seems to mean that an increasing number of alternatives will be provided outside the successes within the traditional infrastructure of the academic and corporate world. Non-traditional programs and curricula in vaguely defined fields like “design” and “innovation” are cropping up in the face of intense demand. Websites like Etsy are giving individuals’ creations direct exposure to consumers. Despite this broadening of our vocational imaginations, it has favored decidedly “cognitive” or “academic” aspects of work.

Crawford notes that,

Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement.

Ironically, this “egalitarian worry” is paralleled at college as post-secondary education’s openness, in concert with atrophied intellectual autonomies, force students into what feels like a painfully underdetermined system. High-achieving students anxiety balloons to fill this void, hyperfocusing on their choice of a major, often to the exclusion of their genuine interests or even an awareness of what interests them. At finer scales, students obsess over the long term prudence of class choices, planning out courseloads years in advance. Even in relatively portable² fields like math and physics, students operate with the implicit assumption that their life (academic, intellectual, economic) is extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Not only does this create bad habits (like taking at face value the alleged inviolability of prerequisites), but in trying to engineer this, students create absurdities not unlike those of hyperprudent parents who select kindergartens by the schools’ long-term college admissions track record.

But, things are changing. Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class documents the trend among creative professionals to prefer a “horizontal job market.” By this, Florida means that creative professionals anticipate holding many, different jobs, as opposed to many, increasingly senior positions within one company:

When asked about the importance of employment, the people in my interviews and focus groups repeatedly say they are not looking just for a single job but for many employment opportunities. The reason, they tell me, is simple. They do not expect to stay with the same company for very long. Companies are disloyal and careers are increasingly horizontal.³ To be attractive, places need to offer a job market that is conducive to a horizontal career path. In other words, places have to offer a thick labor market.⁴

For most, this type of comfort with mobility and turnover is only possible given assurances of economic security. As the job landscape flattens and widens, it becomes easier to ignore the credentials that guaranteed you admission to what used to be the only games in town. By far, one of the most exciting threads tying themes like personal fabrication, “Web 2.0”, revised visions of intellectual property, and my own plans for changing education is that of economic empowerment through personal creativity. Instead of living on someone else’s terms, people are making the tools and communities that will one day naturally support living on your own.

1. and to me, the inevitably dominant trend [↩]
2. In the context of the job market, that is [↩]
3. From The Next American City:

   Because the Creative Class career trajectory tends to be horizontal (movement from job to job within an industry) rather than vertical (movement up within one company), creative workers look for places with a thick job market. They may not move to follow one particular company, but they will choose places that offer many possible job choices.

   [↩]
4. Emphasis Florida’s. [↩]

Colleen Kaman was kind enough to send me an awfully good essay from The New Atlantis, called “Shop Class as Soulcraft”.¹

Reading through the article, I ran across a contradiction in my thinking about hands-on work. Typically, consumerism is associated with materialism, which I had previously articulated, ad hoc, as the predication of happiness upon acquiring and possessing material goods beyond one’s needs. But I realize that unless I’m prepared to strip materialism of its negative aspects, I need to provide a more nuanced definition. Consider what Crawford says about the psychic appeal of manual work:

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world. But craftsmanship must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. Hobbyists will tell you that making one’s own furniture is hard to justify economically. And yet they persist. Shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives, and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future. Finding myself at loose ends one summer in Berkeley, I built a mahogany coffee table on which I spared no expense of effort. At that time I had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet I imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s work. I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life, the defects in its execution as well as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface textured enough that memory and sentiment might cling to it, in unnoticed accretions. More fundamentally, the durable objects of use produced by men “give rise to the familiarity of the world, its customs and habits of intercourse between men and things as well as between men and men,” as Hannah Arendt says. “The reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced, and potentially even more permanent than the lives of their authors.”

And it’s true: the empowerment associated with building, making, and hacking — even the emotional premise of hands-on learning — is founded upon the assumption that people need real-world involvement and creativity. And of course, we don’t want to put this assumption under the umbrella of materialism.

This is a pretty insignificant realization: obviously, materialism does not deprive material things from their capacity to contain and transmit meaning. But, this minor semantic conflict prompted me to realize that I’ve been undervaluing the role of the material thing itself, thinking that it was the process that was the most important. This cannot be reconciled with my belief that there are two paths to doing engaging work: pursuits that intrinsically appeals to and interests you, or pursuits that are important to someone else, that will affect the real world.

1. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about it, but here’s something to start it off. [↩]

Frustrated with the fact that MIT’s people search does not allow for first name searching (arbitrarily, I might add — it seems to just search MIT’s LDAP directory) — I wrote this little Perl script (change the extension to .pl to run) using Net::LDAP to search the directory and hooked it up to an online form. Currently, it handles wildcard searching of people’s names, which is all I needed it for.

If someone cares enough to ask, I’ll add regex support and display the results a little more coherently.

Feel free to download the script and play with it yourself. I’ll gladly post any revisions here and there.

firstnamebasis is also the first installment of the nascent “beautiliful” page, which will house various miscellany I’ve made that I’ve found useful. It’s still in it’s probationary period, meaning I’ll be slow to add the things I’ve made already.

There is a misperception of science/math as “the way” to teach rational, critical thinking. Unfortunately, that puts the cart before the horse: math and science can provide fantastic contexts for rigorous, critical thinking. There’s no doubt that a strong education in the hard sciences can be a straightforward contribution to a student’s ability to think rationally. However, it is a mistake to think that this benefit is intrinsic to the content. If anything, the elegance and structure you see in science and math makes these subjects more prone to subversion by broken learning strategies like pattern matching, wherein students learn to recognize and exploit patterns in problems presented to them without understanding the basic ideas involved. An aptitude for symbolic manipulation can very easily be mistaken for skilled, critical thinking. Indeed, many people’s academic successes are founded upon their ability to manipulate symbols. We should not assume that to ensure that people can think critically, we need to make sure that they understand the quadratic equation.

[Tragi]comically, the humanities and “soft sciences” in fact need more careful critical thinking, lacking the painstakingly constructed scaffolding of mathematics and scientific methodology. Without it, academia’s attempt at self-justification alienates far more than it educates. Consider the public’s reaction to deconstructionist and post-modern thought. The misappropriation by academics of these ideas has led them to become diluted and meaningless. Worse, they’ve made tremendous room for simply bad thinking.

Conversely, the hard sciences have a much narrower domain: for centuries, people have very carefully built up a reliable foundation. Self-consistency, applied over hundreds of years, has created a modular, conceptually clean set of tools upon which to rely. The humanities do not have a fundamental structure built in by anything analogous to physical principles like conservation of energy or mathematical formalisms like index notation.

Maybe in the past, the social sciences had to accept a certain degree of disengagement from hard data, but technology obviates this claim. To see this, let’s step back and think more carefully about what advantages the hard sciences have when it comes to critical thinking and rigor.

An oft-cited aim of the hard sciences is to create models of the way our world works that is as true and self-consistent as possible. For the more fundamental sciences like physics and chemistry, their object has been historically predictive. That is, given a situation, predict what will happen in the system. As the systems considered increase in complexity, science shifts its goal to description, with the implicit acknowledgment that characterization must come before understanding.

So even within science, we see that as the systems considered become increasingly complicated, there is a commensurate shift from understanding principles to characterizing behavior. This is a misleading spectrum: in both physics and chemistry, characterizing the system is an essential step. It is just that it is rarely a problem. Measuring quantities like mass or velocity or electric fields is far simpler than trying to get a handle on the microscale structure of the brain.

It is a mistake to suggest that all systems’ behavior can be predicted given the right theory or enough information. I think that this realization is one of the fundamental shifts that will need to happen before we can start making more progress in the study of complex systems. Our old ideas of what comprises an experiment encourage thinking that predictive principles are the only ones with value. Our study of complex systems is slowly changing that idea, and one domain in which we can see this is the study of complex social and economic systems.

The field of data visualization is exploding. Tools like ManyEyes and GapMinder have not only made strong visualization tools available, but provided access to high-fidelity data sets so that it is possible to turn to them to explore complex socioeconomic questions with a data-driven approach.

We are constantly asked — whether as citizens, parents, consumers, or simply people — to make sense of many, low-credibility sources of information. People frequently note that, “we are drowning in information and starved for knowledge.” The distinction is one between data and conclusions or interpretations. The strength of data visualization is it can make easy visual reasoning about complicated elements of a system, revealing trends or interpretations that would typically be obscured. Visualization tools have gotten to the point that we should integrate their use into our conversation. In the class, the teacher dispenses some information in the article. Then, the class discusses this, essentially brainstorming for the entire class. The internet has made the availability of data and visualizations a non-issue. Questions should be answered with research, rather than exploration.

There is this idea of “literacy:” technical literacy, media literacy, math literacy (or numeracy). Literacy does entail shallow information that can be memorized; literacy requires comfort with processing information. Data are building blocks; by and large, we are terrible at using them to build any substantial ideas. For most, these buildings — conclusions and interpretations — are provided, predigested, by the media or parents or friends or teachers.

Instead, imagine a curriculum built around the tool of data visualization. Learning how to massage data, assess its credibility, and transform it to allow for interpretation. Instead of speculating, what if we were to focus on encouraging data-driven discussion? Most people have a pernicious aversion to saying “I don’t know” (or maybe, “It is not possible to know, with the data we have”) when it comes to “everyday” questions like health care, education, racism, economics, etc. Unfortunately, familiarity with a domain often translates into confidence when reasoning about it, despite the fact that these, familiar domains are the most nuanced.

I have to confess, it’s a pretty depressing montage, in some ways. “Collaboration” turned into “instructions” turned into a “show-and-tell”? It feels like a progressive admission that instructables’s users are more like spectators. Don’t get me wrong: that feels accurate. I just wish it weren’t.

Nonetheless, I’m awfully glad instructables is around.

I heard the phrase “future-proof” for the first time¹ . A friend of mine made the comment that (p)

self-documenting tools are inherently future-proof

Their growth and use is never obsoleted by the actions of the surrounding infrastructure: its persistence is built into its genes. That’s pretty significant.

On a sidenote, I was surprised to find out that the idea of something being “future-proof” has been around since the ‘80’s.

1. I know, I know — apparently this is strange. [↩]

This is what I was talking about when I said we needed more collaboration among companies. The municipal government informs the mapping service which informs the municipal government.

ZENRIN maps are widely used by local governments and public utility companies. We provide these bodies with diverse maps from fire department maps to electricity, gas, sewage and telecommunications maps that specify pertinent information. For example, the fire department maps clearly indicate the location of fire hydrants and storage facilities for dangerous materials.

Now, consider extending this to the private sector. As long as companies remain convinced that the data they’ve collected is a significant part of what makes their service valuable, the data landscape will be fractured, and we’ll continue to see the proliferation of kinda neat but underwhelming services.

There are plenty of questions when it comes to considering an open database of user and resource data, but beyond calls for Facebook to open up, I’ve heard little in this direction. Imagine if there were an open database of (optionally anonymized or otherwise secured) user information that web applications not only drew from, but added to as a byproduct of their use. Or just read about a couple possibilities and keep in mind that there are myriad more.

So, most people agree that music recommendation engines aren’t so great (or at least, not consistently). That’s fine by me: I don’t really expect them to be. I’m looking to find music I haven’t heard before so that I can deliberately explore specific artists.

But, I was listening to the “Regina Spektor” station on Pandora, and realized something interesting (and obvious, in hindsight), as the station transitioned between Regina Spektor’s Samson and Vanessa Carlton’s Half a Week before the Winter: Pandora groups songs that are similar that sound similar. ¹ But, I enjoy music because of a nontrivial interplay between how spngs sound and what they say. Rage Against the Machine, Sage Francis, Phil Ochs, and Pete Seeger are all pretty close, semantically. But, I’d never hear them on the same station on Pandora because of how the Music Genome Project works:

A given song is represented by a vector containing approximately 150 genes. Each gene corresponds to a characteristic of the music, for example, gender of lead vocalist, level of distortion on the electric guitar, type of background vocals, etc. Rock and pop songs have 150 genes, rap songs have 350, and jazz songs have approximately 400. Other genres of music, such as world and classical, have 300-500 genes. The system depends on a sufficient number of genes to render useful results. Each gene is a number between 1 and 5. Fractional values are allowed but are limited to half integers.

I remember I used to ask people whether they thought that the content or the presentation of a song was more central to their listening pleasure. As with most hard questions, I think the real answer is somewhere in between. I didn’t realize how significant an assumption Pandora et al were making in classifying like this.

1. If you haven’t heard them, the songs are extremely similar, musically [↩]

Why are my friends and acquaintances significant to me? Largely (and couched with deliberate callousness), I care about them because of what they do for me. They provide value. Whether this is because I inevitably have fun around them; because they know how to do the things I want to; or because they have access to ideas or people or equipment that I need; the underlying theme is the same: my friendships are determined by my interests (in the game theoretic sense) and how my friends (and those resources to which they have access) help me pursue my goals.

Despite the inflammatory wording, this is true of everyone. Maybe some people would suggest that friendship is unconditional, but nobody would recommend staying in a net negative relationship.¹ Everyone uses their friends for something:² sex, fun, emotional support, money, homework help, etc.

My social network is just the collection of people I have found useful enough to connect to.

social networking still hasn’t left the gate

So, this is what my real social network does for me. What about my online social network? Well, it can tell me who I know in the real world, where they live, what movies they like, what they’re interested in, whether they’re up for casual sex, … in short, it doesn’t tell me much. Sites like facebook provide for pretty terrible network searching and browsing if you don’t know who you’re looking for, and if you’re not searching within a small, particular, explicitly defined³ group. Honestly, I don’t care that much about what movies my friends watch. It’s good to have access to this information, and it’s certainly valuable. But, there could be much more potential.

People commonly cite the idea that “social networking is a feature, not a product” as one of the hallmarks of “Web 2.0.” But in this regard, social networking hasn’t even left the gate, having failed to realize that there are real, significant reasons we want to connect to other people that can and will exist outside of social network software. Furthermore, contexts exist other than those manufactured by sites like twitter or iLike or Last.fm; in fact, those are the least important reasons I care about knowing somebody. Right now, social network software focuses on who your friends are, rather than why you’re friends with them, despite the fact that it is the latter information that will allow social networks to enable really significant collaboration. This is why calls for portability, openness, and interoperability make so much sense. Despite these possibilities, we’re still connecting people together for, in many cases, no particularly good reason. The social networking “workflow” ends with your connecting to or finding the other person (or maybe peters off with your ability to message them or poke them or dedicate a song to them). But, it can and should begin when you “friend” a person: finding someone is only the seed, the first step of community building. Once we acknowledge this, we can envision some pretty neat possibilities.

identity

Consider the thorny problem of identity and anonymity online: right now, we manage our identities — that is, we disambiguate and distinguish ourselves — by creating and maintaining the privacy of secret information (most frequently, usernames and passwords). But, in the real world, this is not at all how we operate. More fundamentally, secretive, unique data are not what actually define our identity: they’re artifacts of our interactions with massive, top-down organizations like schools and government. Our real world identity is defined by whom we know, what we do, what we read, what we like, what we dislike, etc. Our identities arise from how we apportion our attention and to what resources — people, things, knowledge — we have (and conversely, want) access.

As more and more of our life goes online, we are looking for increasingly dynamic online environments and platforms that are responsive not only to our needs and our explicit requests, but our identity. Historically, browsing the internet has been a passive process wherein the user is a spectator moving among static pages. We’re moving toward a participatory society⁴ where our interactions are increasingly active: they no longer comprise simply receiving information. This active component of our online experience goes beyond content creation and extends to a fuller recognition of our identity. Commensurately, we’ve been giving up more and more of our anonymity. This is a natural consequence of moving from consumers of online information to producers of online content and actors in the online community. What does this mean for the management of our identity online?

Currently, identity is managed pretty shallowly. For most rich internet applications (RIAs) and communities, identity is managed with a user account. Depending on the information you give the application and the preferences you set, your user experience changes. Unfortunately, the process of giving applications information is still relatively labor-intensive. Although people have recognized⁵ that if you can convince users to give you loads of ostensibly useless, raw data (e.g. browsing history or bookmarked sites or book preferences) about their lives, you can almost always extract and monetize a useful application from it, we still conflate the application and the collection of raw data. This practice naturally fractures users’ online experiences, requiring them to set up redundant user profiles, and in turn handicaps developers who always want more data.

We are still stuck on the idea that we need a unique identity in all places. For example, when you log into Amazon, you need to see your recommendations. What if your results overlap 99% with twenty or thirty other people? You could gain increased privacy without trading functionality if you realize that your identity is not an all-or-nothing piece of information: you can reveal your book preferences without revealing your name and credit card number. In the real world, there are a variety of ways to control how much of your identity you reveal. Social networking could provide a robust sense of identity if we expand our sense of what a node can be on a social network.

What if it could be a movie, a place, a body of knowledge, or a person? Then, the information in your social network would become a deep but very flexible representation of the what that you find pertinent about yourself. Precisely the facets of your identity you’re interested in sharing with developers would be made available, and their availability would itself be flexible. Essentially, by allowing for the addition of markup or meta-information to the edges on your social network (i.e. your connections to other people), one could provide for levels of privacy, or for easy access to subsets of anonymous but useful information (e.g. what restaurants you like) which could then be made available without revealing the other elements of your identity that uniquely define you. Rather than solving the privacy problem with more security, we could make an end-run around it by more finely controlling what information we reveal. Note that this is a fundamentally flexible and dynamic decision: rather than a static user profile requiring updating, a user can simply choose to reveal more information. No one need engage in the painfully redundant process of writing up user profiles and accounts.

For this dream to come true, companies and services (both online and offline) need to collaborate to create an open, independent network. Frankly, I don’t know if facebook is up for it. I’m a little flabbergasted by the dearth of collaboration between companies, particularly online! Given how much of a service’s ability to provide deep user experiences depends on the information available about its users, openness is clearly in everyone’s best interest. The fact that an API and a set of closed data is the best we can do is concerning. Luckily, people are asking for more.

network of trust

Calling for such openness naturally raises questions of security. If we broaden how we think of a social network just a little bit, we can take care of that, too.

In May of 2007, Linus Torvalds gave a Google Tech Talk about source control management (SCM) and in particular, his SCM solution, git. Version control is a really, really powerful idea that confronts a lot of the problems central to collaboration. Those problems remain, for the most part, unsolved; despite the fact that there are many domains this solution could revolutionize — like Congress — it’s not quite what I want to focus on, today. I do want to take a look at an excerpt from Linus’s talk (emphasis mine):

In practice you will never see, oh, there will be a thousand or maybe twenty thousand different branches, but in practice you won’t ever see them because you won’t care. You will see like a few main branches, maybe you’ll see only one. in the case of the kernel, a lot of people, they only ever look at my branch. so even though there are lot of branches you can ignore them. What happens is that the way merging is done is the way real security is done. By a network of trust. If you have ever done any security work, and it did not involve the concept of network of trust, then it wasn’t a security work. I don’t know what you were doing but trust me, it’s the only way you can do security, and it’s the only way you can do development. The way I work, I don’t trust everybody. in fact I am a very cynical and untrusting person. I think most of you are completely incompetent. The whole point of being distributed is I do not have to trust you, I do not have to give you commit access. But I know that among the multitude of average people, there are some people that just stand out and I trust, because I’ve been working with them. I only need to trust 5, 10, 15 people, if I have a network of trust that covers those 5, 10, 15 people that are outstanding, and I know they are outstanding, I can pull from them. I do not have to spend a lot of brainpower on the question. […] And the nice thing about trust is that it does network. That’s where the network of trust comes in. I only need to trust a few people that much. They have other people, they have determined, hey, that guy is actually smarter than I am, that’s actually a really good measure of who you should pull from. If you have determined that somebody else is smarter than you, go for it. You can’t lose. Even if it turns out that you pulled crap and somebody else starts complaining, you know who you pulled from and you can just point to that other person and say “hey, I just pulled, go to him, he knows what he is doing”.

Linus is only talking about development, here. But, SCM is a powerful idea⁶ , and in particular, the idea of a “network of trust” seems underimplemented. Social networks provide an extremely natural way to generalize the idea of a network of trust and make the feature modular and portable.

Currently, social networks are very simple graphs whose nodes are people and whose edges represent acquaintance of some sort. Our real world connections between people are much subtler and much more multi-faceted than “acquaintance of some sort.” Unwittingly, as far as I can tell, people have been slowly straining to add more information to these edges: e.g. facebook allows you to note how you met someone, while the Top Friends and Enemybook/Snubster applications clumsily let you note what kind of relationship you have to a person. But this is really a joke compared to what we should be expecting of social network software. What if we could define attributes by which we classify our connections to people, defining subgraphs of our social network to which we can attribute privacy settings, levels of trust, etc. What if rather than being added to the developers’ permissions list for a version control application, you simply joined a developer’s group online? Rather than leaving the definition of groups up to the service, what if you could decide what groupings were important, and make these distinctions available on-the-fly to other applications and services? Again, the idea is that identity exists t many more scales than we acknowledge currently, and we not only need to recognize those scales, but give users finer control over what scales — i.e. what facets of their identity — they reveal.

needs

• We need to get over the newness of the idea of an online social network and reappropriate the knowledge and intuition we’ve already created for designing and capitalizing upon social networks.
• We need to broaden our definition of what constitutes a node on a social network so that we can start adding extrapersonal significance to the documentation of our relationships.
• We need to understand the long term benefits of openness: rather than trying to capitalize on incremental innovations in the short term, we need to work together to assemble a flexible infrastructure for the long term.
• We need to start identifying the themes behind people’s problems and desires (e.g. resource matching!) and make tools to address these; domain specific problem solving can lead to an unjustified lack of interoperability.

I’m excited!

1. In fact, it’s hard for me to reconcile the existence of an affective metric with the idea of unconditional emotions: the metric needs to be fully irrelevant! [↩]
2. I understand that I’m bastardizing the meaning of “exploit” and the connotation of “use,” but please bear with me. [↩]
3. By which I mean that users have set out an explicit group (e.g. a class) as opposed to an implicit group formed by facebook on the fly, given desired parameters [↩]
4. Some would say that we’ve arrived; however, I think we’ve a long way to go [↩]
5. I know I’m paraphrasing from a source elsewhere, but I can’t seem to find it again: any hints would be appreciated [↩]
6. If you skipped the link the first time, go now and read about Congress’ need for version control. [↩]

Apparently, some Japanese scientists have found that installing a heat sink in an epileptic’s brain can reduce the intensity and frequency of seizures. The idea is that abnormal activity brings more bloodflow to the area, overheating the brain and making it prone to more abnormal activity.

Is the assumption that the higher the temperature of the brain, the more [chemically] reactive everything is? Does this actually mean that neuron firings are more frequent? I’m a bit confused about this, because while I know that there are temperature sensitive neurons (particularly in the hypothalamus), it’s unclear to me whether or not most epileptic seizures originate in these areas and cascade.

I guess there is an established tradition of using heat transfer to treat brain disorders¹

But man. Heat sinks for our brains.

1. That’s right, someone patented a medical method! [↩]