Reading Links

Couple of highlights from my online readings this week:

1. I see the Henry Adams curve mentioned a lot; I think one of those posts led me to search a bit more and I read this post by J Storrs Hall where he dissects Henry Adams’ quote:

The coal-output of the world, speaking roughly, doubled every ten years between 1840 and 1900, in the form of utilized power, for the ton of coal yielded three or four times as much power in 1900 as in 1840. Rapid as this rate of acceleration in volume seems, it may be tested in a thousand ways without greatly reducing it. Perhaps the ocean steamer is nearest unity and easiest to measure, for any one might hire, in 1905, for a small sum of money, the use of 30,000 steam-horse-power to cross the ocean, and by halving this figure every ten years, he got back to 234 horse-power for 1835, which was accuracy enough for his purposes

In the blogpost, Hall argues we could be using using 5 times as much energy (I presume by 2020 based on the date of the blogpost- I haven’t looked deeply at the plot, just the trend). His book shows this would have been quite technologically feasible (a future read, perhaps).

1. Read this great obituarial post on Eleanor Maguire, who was Demis Hassabis’s academic mother, and her work on spatial memory. Some highlights from the article (which I recommend reading in full).

taxi drivers have larger posterior hippocampi than do controls who do not drive taxis.

London bus drivers, who drive just as much but only along established routes, have a smaller posterior hippocampus than taxi drivers do, she found, and the size does not correlate with the amount of experience.

Maguire and her team reported in 2007 that people with damaged hippocampi cannot imagine new experiences. The participants struggled to build a spatial scene of something that hadn’t happened yet, in the same way that they cannot construct scenes of their past experiences. This discovery led her to develop the scene construction theory, which asserts that the different functions of the hippocampus are all oriented around space.

Maguire and her team reported in 2007 that people with damaged hippocampi cannot imagine new experiences. The participants struggled to build a spatial scene of something that hadn’t happened yet, in the same way that they cannot construct scenes of their past experiences. This discovery led her to develop the scene construction theory, which asserts that the different functions of the hippocampus are all oriented around space.