mattbell

Enthiran is an Indian film that mashes up the major tropes of Indian cinema (weddings, elaborate song and dance numbers etc) with a completely over-the-top James-Cameron-lite action film, heavy science fiction themes of robotics and artificial intelligence, and some completely ridiculous surrealistic non-sequitors worthy of David Lynch.  There's a love triangle between a scientist, his fiancee, and the scientist's robot creation.  It's the sort of thing Neal Stephenson would put into one of his novels to show just how much cultures will mix in the future.  This cut of brain-melting action sequences has been going viral on the internet, but I looked at other parts of the movie, and there's a *lot* going on.

Here are some quick screenshots:





OK, so why would I think this might be one of the most influential movies of 2011? 

I will say, the special effects are ambitious but poorly executed by Western standards, there are plenty of predictable plot elements and piles of trite dialogue, and the very limited number of female characters are mainly there to look pretty. 

The film is obviously geek-bait (scientist-hero with sexy girlfriend, heavy technology focus, quirky enough origin and delivery that it's seen as "alt-y" and therefore embraceable by the subculture), and I'm sure it will take its place in the geek canon with The Matrix, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and whatnot. 

So why is this movie important?  I think it signals a lot of interesting developments:
- Increased acceptance of many new technologies into popular culture, including very traditional non-Western cultures.  (They're *singing* about *Google*!)
- Reorganization of social networks around the world along lines of shared interests as opposed to shared location.  We may get to a point where IT professionals in the US may have more connections with IT professionals in India than with people in a different cultural cluster in the US.   (I just about flipped my lid when I saw Freakonomics show up)
- Less American cultural dominance in media production.  This film cost $40 million to make, and there are only 70 million Tamil* speakers in the world, so this was definitely intended to be a global film.  Over time this will probably help more Americans realize that there's no one way to be a first-world country.  (There's a common misconception among Americans who haven't traveled much that all the gleaming cities in all the first world countries are similar, culturally speaking.  This is so far from the case that it's kind of laughable.)


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The movie is headed for a US release soon, but if you're so inclined, you can watch the whole movie on youtube here, at least until the copyright cops take it down.  I'm also thinking of getting some people together to watch it at my house.  Let me know if you're interested.

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*The film is not in Hindi but in Tamil, a language spoken primarily in the southern tip of India.  (Although only ~7% of India is Tamil, that's still ~70 million people). 

I've been working on other things with the Kinect, but I do want to keep making multiple reality videos.

I got a couple of friends who do acroyoga to come over.  Here's what we made:


In case you haven't been following along:

I wrote some software to merge multiple 3D video streams captured by the Kinect into a single 3D space. Objects from each video stream are superimposed as if they occupy the same physical space, with nearby objects from one video occluding more distant ones from another. Sometimes objects overlap, creating interesting mutant forms.

Google released a 500-billion word corpus of phrase appearances in English and other languages for research.  It's a fantastic tool for tracking word and phrase frequencies over time.  

For example, here are some things I found

- The resurgence of fundamentalist religion starting around 2000 is real.  See God.  Want a broader data set of religious words?  Here you go.

- I've been somewhat skeptical of books like the Fourth Turning and generational theory, but "rebellious" shows peaks every 40 years or so.  I had a conversation with some friends a while back about how the Fourth Turning people could take advantage of quantitative analysis.  I admit it's hard to pick a good word to track, as many have other uses that obscure the data we care about, or go in and out of fashion in a way that dwarfs generational effects.  

- We were bringing sexy back (or bringing it in for the first time)... until someone wrote a song about it.   Yes you, Justin Timberlake, have ruined sexy.   No... THIS is how to bring a word back.  I'm actually impressed that Myst is mentioned more now than it was in the late 1990s... perhaps once it enters the cultural consciousness it becomes more widely referenced as it is incorporated into our collective knowledge.  Or perhaps this corpus is mostly books, and Myst was mainly talked about in magazines at first.  

- America's ascendance of the publishing industry and the English language, as told by colour vs color.  

- How hipsters preceded hippies but were soon dwarfed by them

- "Cool" words like groovy have an initial peak and then sometimes rebound later.  (It's hard to find cool words that don't have other meanings... like, well, "cool".)

- Racial slur for a black person.  One peak around the Civil War, another one during 1930-1950 (why??), and another one during the Civil Rights era.  

- Google crushes googol (though google was oddly popular around 1900 for some reason)

- Hope and fear are shockingly correlated.  I supposed they must be used together a lot.  Also in the antagonism wars, love crushes hate but lose beats win.  

- Wars make people think about the future.  


Yup, large datasets are my porn.  

I've given my friend plenty of advice about the specifics of how to get around, what to bring etc, but for her going-away ceremony I wanted to give her the gift of high level experiential and spiritual advice.  Here's what I said:

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1. Be a scientist investigating your soul. Peel off your exoself -- all that stuff that's wrapped around you.   Possessions, routines, people etc. Then drop your core into lots of radically different environments and see what happens.  Mix with different cultures. Mix with different paces of life and structures for each day.  Mix with different outlooks.  Mix with different companions.   Sit back.  Observe the results.  Share with your fellow scientists. (that's a fancy metaphor for blogging).   Experiment anew.  The word "experiment" is actually just a fancy word for playing so that scientists can feel like adults.  But playing is how we learn.   Be a kid again and play.

2. Feed your creative brain.  Some random ancient monument will not necessarily be directly relevant to your life goals, but it will lay down a web of neural pathways linked to art, beauty, design, inspiration, experience, and psychology, among other things.  As these pathways become denser, you'll be creating a new mind for yourself, a new way of seeing the world, that will emerge in totally unexpected ways when you come back and face the familiar.

3. Get yourself some transport.  Take a long walk or get your hands on a bike, scooter, ATV, or car.   Get outside of the self-reinforcing ego-serving tourist bubble from time to time and find some strangers.

4. Play sociocultural bingo.   You have to cover all the combinations of rich, middle class, poor, ancient, traditional, modern, urban, rural, serious, and playful, to win.

5. Inspire other women in areas where women fill culturally restricted roles.  If this is done carefully and respectfully, your independence and adventurous spirit will open their minds to a new way of living.

6. Don't log onto Facebook.  Share your experiences in longer posts.  Your experiences deserve it.

7. Keep your pack light. It's no fun to be a pack animal.  Aside from weird esoteric things, they do sell stuff just about everywhere else in the world.  You can live off the local supply chain, and then you'll weigh less.

8. Don't buy souvenirs unless they are incredibly special... otherwise you're just weighing yourself down.  (Well... unless you have a friend visiting for a week, in which case you should do things like give them a chunk of the Dead Sea to take home for you.)

9. Take photos.   Photos are little hooks that will, years later, let you pull out piles of associated memories you thought you'd lost.  Don't get obsessed with taking the perfect photo of some person or event; chances are there's something even better you'll see in half an hour.   Also, if there's a "no photography" sign, bribe the guards to take a photo of you next to it.

10. Watch your stuff and back up your data.   Given all that time you spent assembling your travel kit, it wouldn't be fair for some thief to have it instead of you.

11. Eat weird food.   Look for the place that's popular with the locals, and try it.

12. Be a sponge and soak in the adventures.   This time of your life will always be special, and its memories will always be with you.

 

I made some improvements to my program from yesterday.  Now I can control how multiple RGB/Depth images are merged together to create a virtual 3D sculpture I can walk through.  This stuff is seriously fun.

After hearing about blue-blocking glasses at the Life Extension Conference, I decided to give them a try.  The basic principle behind them is that your body keys its circadian rhythm off of the presence of sunlight, specifically light in the blue wavelengths.  A lot of insomnia (the hypothesis goes) is caused by exposure to blue light well after sunset via our artificial lights and computer screens.  This light apparently confuses our circadian rhythms and causes a suppression of melatonin production, which can lead to insomnia.  There have been some studies (both in mice and in human shift-workers) coming out linking a lack of melatonin to a variety of cancers. 

I've found melatonin to be useful as a sleep aid, but the idea of using blue-blocking glasses to naturally increase melatonin production earlier in the night seems even more appealing as it's less of a brute force method. 

Here's my experience after trying it for a few nights:

First, the world is ugly while wearing the glasses.  Each type of light is a different sickly shade of orange or yellow, and when they're both lighting an object, the combination of colors in the light and shadow areas is unpleasant and irritable.  It's like some bad '70s nightmare.

The color gamuts of the camera and computer monitor are insufficient to capture the rancid sickliness of these colors, no matter how much I try to manipulate the white balance or use Lightroom's advanced color management. 

 
 

Especially on the first day, this miscolored world made me irritable.  It's become less annoying with further uses though.  One frustration that doesn't go away is that the glasses make you blind to a lot of information on the computer.  Graphs will have lines missing, blue buttons will be invisible, unvisited and visited web links will be the same color.  It gives me more appreciation for what red-green colorblind people have to deal with. 

However, on the plus side, they do appear to work.  While I haven't noticed much decrease in the time it takes me to get to bed, I have noticed that it makes me get up earlier and with less grogginess.  That alone makes them worth using on certain days.  Scientifically this makes sense, as suppressing blue light in the evening causes the brain circuits responsible for controlling circadian rhythms to start (and thus end) the night phase earlier. 

While wearing the glasses can be a pain, there are some easier things that you can do to help your body have a more natural rhythm:
- Buy red LED night lights.  Turning on bright bathroom lights in the middle of the night totally messes up your melatonin production.
- Get red compact fluorescent lamps for your bathroom, bedroom, and living room, and use them exclusively during the last hour or two that you're awake. 
- Turn your monitors' brightness as far down as possible during the last couple of hours of the day.

I'll be doing more quantitative research on the glasses over the next month or two.

If you want to buy the glasses, you can buy them from lowbluelights.com for $70 or from Amazon for $10.  your choice.  :-) 

For $10, they're worth a try. 

I'd like to talk about a serious shortcoming of the medical system in treating a category of illnesses, and a simple, self-experimental approach that allows you to potentially treat these illnesses cheaply and easily.

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Introduction:

"Diffuse Conditions" is a term I made up to describe health conditions that have numerous potential causes and numerous potential treatments.  These conditions include insomnia, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, and anxiety. 

Diffuse conditions are hard to treat via the medical system.  Due to the economic, research, and procedural constraints of the medical system, patients are often steered toward a narrow set of potential treatments.  Moreover, these treatments are generally expensive drugs or procedures rather than simple practical advice.  In addition, because of the prescription system, patients are only able to try one potential treatment per doctor visit, and since diffuse conditions have many potential cures, that potentially means a lot of doctor visits to find one that works.  In addition, the diffuse conditions are sometimes bad enough to affect a patient's quality of life, but not bad enough to merit "medical attention".  Doctors are generally focused on fixing people when they are broken as opposed to tuning them for optimal function.  Basically, all this means that someone with a diffuse condition is likely to have a lot of difficulty finding a solution, and will end up spending a lot of money (either directly or via the tragedy of the commons system known as health insurance) trying to find a solution.  At this point, healthcare is already up to 17% of our GDP in America, so we need to figure out a cheaper approach.  I believe medical experts can be useful in treating diffuse conditions, but they need to empower patients to engage in a highly iterative cure discovery process. 

The solution, I believe, is to data-mine your own life.  This is a five-step process.
1. Get quantitative tools for measuring your performance.
2. Try various interventions. 
3. Track performance and interventions over time
4. Look for correlations to suggest ways you can improve your condition
5. Share your findings online so that others can see if your successful interventions work for them. 

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I'm going to provide a personal example of this to show how it can be done: 

Sleep videos:

I've always had trouble with insomnia.  For a long time, I just ignored it as a fact of life.  In my early twenties, I decided to finally do something about it and get a sleep study.  I went to one of the best sleep clinics in the country (Stanford).  They found some minor issues (sleep apnea so mild that it could not be designated "mild sleep apnea") but nothing medically actionable.  Unfortunately, that gave me little to act on.  A sleep study requires you to sleep in a hospital with an unbelievably large amount of equipment attached to your head.  Sleep studies are so expensive that any given person is only likely to do one or two of them.  So unfortunately a sleep study is not a good way of determining anything useful.

I got the idea to use a cheap near-infrared video camera (Sony sells analog "nightshot" video cameras that can see in the dark) to do my own sleep study at home by doing time-lapse recordings of myself sleeping.  I ended up with fascinating videos like these, which show the range of strange things that happen during the third of our lives when we aren't conscious.


Here's what I learned and did about it:

- I move around a lot while I sleep.  Limb movements were documented on the sleep study.  They appeared to correlate either with my posture (specifically, lying on my back) or with dreaming.  The limb movements appeared to be impacting my quality of sleep as they appeared to often line up with or precede awakenings as seen on the sleep study.  By looking at several night, I was able to see that the limb movements most often appeared when I was dreaming, regardless of posture.  Also, as any good scientist knows, it's good to have a control group for comparison.  As a result, I taped myself sleeping next to three different people, and found that I moved around substantially more than any of them did.
- If I'm sharing a bed, it needs to be king-sized if I am to sleep well.  The video shows many instances of sleep-disturbance ping-pong, in which one person shifting causes the other person to shift, and that's in a king bed.  In a smaller bed, it's even worse. 
- If I'm sharing a bed, everyone needs their own quilt.  Quilt-sharing dramatically worsens sleep disturbance ping-pong. 
- Morning light dramatically lowers sleep quality.  The morning light stimulates production of hormones to help me wake up, but this is not useful if I'm going to bed many hours after sunset.  As a result, I started using heavy curtains to help myself get a full night's sleep. 
- I don't have Restless Leg Syndrome.  Based on the movements, I thought I might have it, so I got a doctor to prescribe the two most commonly used RLS medications.  Both of them made my sleep worse. 
- Posture interventions didn't change my quality of sleep.  It appears that I need to spend some time sleeping on my left side, my right side, and my back.  If I choose one particular posture to fall asleep in, I will spend most of the tail end of that night in the other two postures.  If I force myself into a particular posture (eg by wearing a shirt and stuffing a pillow into the back), I fight it intensely.  I think this may have to do with circulation; no part of my body likes to be compressed for long periods of time.  I dislike extended sitting when I'm awake.
- Anti-apnea technologies don't help reduce the movements.  CPAP is loud, messy, and obnoxious, and actually made the movements worse.

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Sleeping pills:

I also did an evaluation of just about every type of sleeping pill I could get my hands on, and rated how effective they were at getting me to sleep and how much of a "hangover" effect they have the next day.  I evaluated them via self reports, and sometimes with the videos, for how much they affected my sleep quality.  Your results may vary.  Here's what I found:

- Most over-the-counter sleeping pills (Tylenol PM, Nytol, Sominex, Benadryl) are bad.  They tend to be based on the antihistamine Diphenhydramine HCl.  While they are great at getting me to sleep, they worsen apnea (probably by relaxing the throat muscles too much) and they seem to make me stupider the next day.  I was excited when earlier this year, a study came out showing that my "it makes you stupider" observation isn't just anecdotal. 
- Alcohol (even a single drink) is a bad sleeping pill. 
- Valerian was okay (decent effectiveness but some hangover), as was Lunesta. 
- Melatonin was best for everyday use, and it's available over the counter.  Your body produces it naturally, and you're probably already deficient in it if you are around bright lights before you go to sleep.  I found 1mg was sufficient to do the trick.  At >= 3 mg, I started to have some hangover effect the next day and some habituation issues (making it harder to go to bed the next night without it).  However, at 1mg, I had very little hangover.  I now tend to take it if I haven't been able to fall asleep after 45min.
- Ambien is useful as a "nuclear option" when I'm taking a transatlantic flight or on a packed overnight bus.  It has some hangover, but it's shockingly effective.  It has the bonus effect of helping reset your circadian rhythm to a new time zone if you take it at the bedtime you desire for the new time zone.  Ambien has been known to have some substantial side effects, like sleepwalking, in certain people.   In addition, before putting you to sleep it provides you with a feeling not unlike drinking an entire six-pack of beer in one sitting.  I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually ended up as an illegal drug. 

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Quantitative interventions

While the above research yielded a lot of gains, I was able to learn even more when I started using automatic sleep-tracking technologies like the Zeo.  Zeo uses an EEG headband to monitor your brainwaves.  It can determine if you're awake, dreaming, in light sleep, or in deep sleep, by looking at them.  From there, it comes up with derivative measures like sleep latency (how long it takes to fall asleep) and sleep efficiency.  It also has an adaptive alarm so that you can be woken up at the end of a sleep cycle instead of mid-dream.  It's accuracy isn't perfect, but it's fairly good.  (When I'm awake, it registers me as awake at least 90% of the time).  Because Zeo only takes data in 2-minute increments, it cannot notice short awakenings.  Hopefully, the next version will have an accelerometer or a bone conduction microphone to detect apnea, limb movements, and snoring.

In addition to the Zeo's data, I manually wrote down how happy, focused, and stressed I was each day, as well as a detailed 2-sentence description of what I did.  From there, I derived several more quantitative measurements, like whether I exercised, if I slept alone, if I had sex etc.  Then I dumped it all in a big spreadsheet and looked for correlations between measures of sleep quality and my activities.  Several useful correlations popped out.

Here's a subset of what I found after gathering four months of data:

One issue that has always bugged me is sleep latency -- the amount of time it takes me to get to sleep.  Here's what was correlated with lower sleep latency:

- Get exercise (though don't do it too late in the day).  I had heavy exercise on 66% of the low latency nights vs 42% of the high latency nights.
- Going to bed earlier.  This is counterintuitive, as I'd expect myself to be more tired later in the night.   (Average 1:16am bedtime for low latency nights vs, 2:04am for high latency)  From personal experience, I know sleep latency gets much longer again if I go to bed before midnight.  There's basically an ideal window.
- Don’t have intense new social connections in the evening   I'm not about to make my life more boring to sleep better, but I can be more proactive about exercising or taking melatonin to help myself sleep.   (10% of low latency nights had intense new social connections, whereas 38% of high latency nights did.  The same applies to arguing at night.
- Don’t sleep alone  Having someone sleep next to me helped me get to sleep faster.  (52% of low latency nights were with a partner, while 28% of high latency nights with partner)  Just make sure the bed is big enough!
- Have evening sex  The effect was astonishing.  (22% of low latency nights had evening sex, vs 0% of high latency nights)  Even morning/afternoon sex has an impact (31% of low latency nights had morning/afternoon sex vs 22% of high latency nights)


Exercise:

Digging through the data more, I discovered other interesting things. 
Exercise turns out to be good for a lot of things:

- Earlier to sleep (1:37 vs 1:52)
- Increased total sleep (436 vs 400 min  (+36min))
- Reduced sleep latency (22 min vs 25 min (-3min))
- Increased REM sleep (153 vs 137 min (+16min))
- Happier, more engaged, less stress that day (6.9 vs 6.1, 6.5 vs 5.9, 3.3 vs 4.0 on 1-10 scale)
- Happiness/engagement/stress benefits even carry over to next day (6.6 vs 6.3, 6.4 vs 6.1, 3.5 vs 3.8)

This is one of the things that encouraged me to start getting daily exercise.

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Correlation vs causation:

As any good scientist knows, correlation does not imply causation.  In regular terms, if two things tend to happen together, it doesn't mean one directly causes the other.  There could be a third thing that causes both of them.  Thus, doing one may not cause the other.

For example, the correlation between having a sleeping partner and shorter sleep latency could be explained for many reasons.  When I have a sleeping partner, I'm more likely to have sex before bed, spend evenings out, cuddle before bed, and not work or browse the internet late at night.  Any of those could be the actual cause.  However, doing that kind of multivariate analysis requires a lot more data, as, for example, there are only a handful of nights where I had sex before bed but no sleeping partner.  I could run a controlled experiment, but at some point I have to stop being a scientist and live my life.  "No sex tonight honey, I need more data for the control group" is a great way to ruin a relationship. :-)  In the end it's good enough to know that being in a healthy relationship helps me sleep better, regardless of the mechanism.

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Application to other areas:

As I mentioned in the beginning. this technique of personal data mining does not just apply to sleep; it can be used against things like irritable bowel syndrome.  I tracked what I ate every day for a month, and noted if I had gas or diarrhea.  From there I could correlate the consumption of various foods with digestive issues.  By avoiding those foods, I've substantially reduced instances of IBS. 

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Conclusions

Overall, by paying personal attention to numerous factors and making use of some self-tracking technologies, I was able to make lots of improvement to my quality of sleep.  While medical advice and technology was useful, the ultimate evaluation of the effectiveness of everything was up to me.  I had to be willing to self-track a variety of things, including things that had no known connection to sleep, and vary my life to include different behaviors.  Most of the interventions I tried didn't work, and what worked for me may not work for you.  

I think if these approaches are going to be adopted broadly, a few things need to happen:

- Patients' relationships with medical professionals need to change.  Patients need to become active partners in solving health conditions.  This means that interactions with medical professionals need to be longer and more frequent, perhaps with automatic sharing of health data between visits.  Given the cost of medical degrees and the way doctor visits are billed, it likely won't be doctors that would be doing this.  Insurance probably won't pay for it anyway. 
- Data collection needs to be super easy.  Techniques for automating data collection are great, and any manual data collection should be available via a wide variety of methods so that everyone has a method they find easy -- eg a phone app, text messaging, paper forms that can be scanned or photographed to extract the data, websites etc. 
- Wikis and social networks need to make the sharing of potential remedies easy.  Sites like CureTogether do a good job of giving people a space to share potential remedies.  Voting systems help ensure that suggested remedies aren't totally off base, and these potential remedies are really just meant as raw material for experimentation so it doesn't matter if many of them don't work.  With experimentation, you'll find the ones that work for you. 

I already self-track numerous metrics, such as weight, body fat %, cholesterol, sleep, stress, and happiness.  However, the Life Extension Conference helped me realize that there are far more things that I should track.  Here's why:

- You might discover that you are abnormally low or high in a particular metric, and this knowledge will allow you to quickly and cheaply take corrective action that will improve your quality of life or prevent you from developing a disease.
- Although it is useful to know how well you stand relative to the rest of the people your age and gender, knowing how you are doing relative to a past version of yourself is also very helpful as it can indicate some physiological change that has taken place.  For example, the PSA test, which tests for evidence of prostate cancer, is notoriously inaccurate, but it has been found that a significant increase in PSA over time is much more predictive.
- Frequently collecting data on a particular metric allows you to do self-experimentation to see what affects that particular metric.  The more frequent the testing, the more we are able to learn about ourselves.  The self-experimentation approach is especially good when trying to deal with diffuse conditions that have a range of possible causes, such as insomnia, allergies, anxiety, and depression.

So what is worth tracking?   Here's my first cut at things I might want to check periodically:

Physical performance:

Cardiovascular fitness:

- One of the biggest indicators of cardiovascular health is something called VO2Max, which is the maximum rate of uptake of oxygen by your lungs.  Actual VO2Max testing requires a doctor and lots of specialized equipment.  However, there is a way of indirectly testing VO2Max that's very simple, very accurate, and just about free.  It's called a beep test or shuttle run, depending on which side of the Atlantic you grew up on.  You basically run between two cones 20m apart at a particular rate, and the rate gradually increases until you can't make it in time.  

Agility/speed:

- I'm tempted to measure my performance on a particularly hard song on Dance Dance Revolution, but perhaps something simple, boring, and technology-free like the Hexagon Drill would be better, especially if I want to be able to do the same test in 20 years.

Strength & Power:

- Max # of pull ups.   (In high school I could do 1-3, now I can do 12-14. :-) )
- Max bench press for some # of repetitions.  
- Standing long jump
- Standing vertical jump

Flexibility:

- I could do the sit & reach...  (ah, memories of high school)
- This site also recommends a trunk rotation test and groin flexibility test

Physical health:

- Body composition (body fat %, water %, total weight).  My current scale has decent but probably somewhat inaccurate measurement of this.  
- Glucose levels fasting and after eating a high-carb meal.  This is easy to measure.
- Sleep quality (sleep latency, time in each sleep stage etc.  Technologies like Zeo and FitBit allow for some measure of this.  

I can also order specific tests for levels of various minerals, fats, and other components.  While these tests are somewhat expensive, I really can get by doing them every 1-5 years, with possibly more frequent tests around things I'm trying to change.  The way my health insurance works (high deductible, low monthly premiums) I would order these tests myself from sites like directlabs.com and lef.org (their testing and supplements business is way more respected than their monthly magazine).  

[LOTS OF RESEARCH CONDENSED INTO A GOOGLE DOC]

The above table, and the decisions of what to take, took a couple of hours of research.  Doing all the tests I want to do will take about $500, and I estimate that I'll spend a fraction of that each subsequent year.  I'm still not sure about the food antibody IgG vs IgE tests -- I have heard that some of them are highly inaccurate.  


Mental performance:

This is a tricky one.  There are so many possible things to measure, some of which are extremely difficult to quantify repeatably.  In addition, while I like the automatic data gathering of computer software, anything I use has to still be available in 20 years so that I have consistent methods of measurement.

I could use a brain training suite not to train my brain (only a subset of the tests appear to generalize to other situations) but to periodically test it.  The best brain software appears to be the web-hosted lumosity.com, but I'm worried that the tests may change over time (the site brags that they're making changes and improvements *all the time*).  In addition, the service costs around $80 a year, which is a lot if I only use it a couple of times a year to assess mental performance.  I started looking for desktop software and quickly realized that the low/mid end desktop software market died several years ago.  There's very little, and most of it is crap.  One alternative would be to get iphone/ipad software.  (I'm imagining myself 20 years from now, turning on some ancient hardware to run some games.)  However, getting access to the performance data will be an issue.  


In terms of specific things to test, it would be interesting to cover:
- Working memory
- VIsual attention and tracking
- Ability to focus with distractions
- Multitasking
- Visual/Spatial processing
- Audio processing
- Logic
- Mental flexibility (Boggle?)
- Face recognition (lots of these exist)
* Idea generation / creativity (Ability to plan and prioritize short and long term goals simultaneously)
* Organization
* Self-awareness of emotional states
* Emotional processing
* Recognition of social cues
* Reading comprehension
* Performance under stress
* Willpower 

The eight starred items do not appear to be easily testable in an automated way with the software I've found.  There are a couple of ways of measuring willpower, such as resisting a particular temptation or enduring a painful but harmless sensation.  

Any suggestions on brain testing technique (or any of the things I'm considering, for that matter) are highly appreciated.

Also, if you're interested in doing a testing/discussion group with me (these things are more fun with friends anyway), let me know.

In case you were wondering, this is what Yosemite valley looks like in near-infrared.  Near-infrared is different from thermal infrared, which shows temperature.  In near-infrared, which is commonly used in see-in-the-dark security cameras, foliage is very light, while water is very dark and murky.  I brought a near-infrared camera along on my trip to Yosemite yesterday. 



 
 
 
   

Full set on flickr.

If you like these, I also have some near-infrared pictures of the japanese gardens in San Francisco.

This is fascinating:


As a child I very much shied away from and often ridiculed the "jock" approach to things.  "Jock" was often synonymous with "dumb".  This probably was aided by the fact that the cool kids in my school were not the jocks but the academic overachievers.  (I went to a well-funded public school that was full of Stanford professors' kids).  However, it's interesting to come around and realize that the jock approach can often have a lot of value.  It should be seen not as an antithesis to the "nerd" approach, but as a separate skill that's worth using when appropriate.

Back to the video...  The weightlifter, Kirk Karwoski, has spent years building up his strength via a variety of exercises and fine-tuning his proprioception so that he knows exactly how far he can push himself.  It's not the most intellectually demanding work, but it involves an incredible amount of willpower, perseverance, and an ability to be extremely in tune with his body.  When it comes time to do the record-setting lift, the movement sequences and possible contingencies are all completely mapped out into muscle memory and learned procedures, requiring little to no deliberative conscious input.  When there's 1000 pounds of weight on his back, he has to know exactly what he's doing.  He also has to set aside any doubt, minor pains, or other mental obstacles in his way.  All the animal grunting serves a purpose -- it gets him purely focused on the task and ready to push his abilities to the limit.  Nike understood this when their marketing department, after I'm sure was a long and extensive deliberation, chose the slogan of "just do it".

What can "nerds" learn from the jock approach?  When is it applicable outside scenarios where large amounts of mass must be moved using human muscle power alone?  I've noticed a lot of objectively highly intelligent people suffer from indecisiveness, hyper-rationality, procrastination, getting lost in details, timidity, lack of focus, poor body awareness, and poor body care (lack of exercise, poor diet).  Often these issues are over-expressions of a trait that is good in moderation; indecisiveness is overactive comparative analytical skill, procrastination is overactive perfectionism, etc,  However, these issues prevent their intelligence from translating into making a significant impact in the real world.  I believe that having some fluency in the "jock" approach, and knowing when to apply it, can go a long way toward correcting hyperactive "nerd" abilities.