Positive Quiddity: Superb Animation

Running Man
Zach Hugh (Banjo Ginga) is the titular "Running Man," the undefeated champion of the "Death Circus" racing circuit and has raced for 10 years. Competitors race in high-speed Formula One-like craft, and spectators bet on the lives of these people for huge winnings. A Marlowe-esque reporter (Masane Ksukayama/Michael McConnohie) is sent to interview the mysterious Zach outside of the track and watches one of his races. He soon discovers Hugh has telekinetic abilities which he uses to destroy the other racers, after quietly observing him in the dark chronically over-using an interface console inside Hugh's penthouse.

As the race ends in his favor, Hugh begins to see the spirits of racers who perished on the track and he continues the race until his vehicle goes up in flames. The Death Circus ends shortly afterwards, the reporter believes it was because spectators wanted to see how long Hugh could outlast death.

[This is one of the three segments of the film Neo Tokyo, released in 1987]

The film premièred on September 25, 1987, at that year's Tōkyō International Fantastic Film Festival. Other than festival screenings, distributor the Toho Company originally relegated the film direct-to-video, releasing a VHS on October 10, 1987, but did eventually give it a general cinema release in Japan, on April 15, 1989. In English, the film was licensed, dubbed and released theatrically (as a double feature with the first Silent Mobius film) and to VHS in North America by Streamline Pictures, the license later being taken up by the now also out of business ADV Films.

Running Man
"Running Man" is adapted and directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri, with character design and animation direction by Kawajiri, mechanical design by Takashi Watabe and Satoshi Kumagai, key animation by Shinji Otsuka, Nobumasa Shinkawa, Toshio Kawaguchi and Kengo Inagaki and art direction by Katsushi Aoki. The segment also appeared on Episode 205 of Liquid Television [aired October 20, 1992, the fifth episode of season 2 of Liquid Television] with a different voice actor, Rafael Ferrer, than Michael McConnohie’s Streamline dub.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_Tokyo_(film)

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Note by the Blog Author
The blog author considers the Liquid Television presentation of Running Man as narrated superbly by Rafael Ferrer to be the finest animated cartoon ever produced, anywhere, by anyone.It appears that the Liquid Television version has never been available or released at any time. It was not part of the Liquid Television consumer released compiled summaries from MTV.

The blog author considers The Sinking of the Lusitania, a silent cartoon released in 1918, as the next-best animated cartoon ever produced. It is available from YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYKdXABWaFg . The history of this animated film is described in detail at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sinking_of_the_Lusitania .
The blog author considers the greatest opus of animation to be the Warner Brothers "Merrie Melodies" and "Looney Tunes" cartoons from the 1930s until the cartoon shop closed in 1962. Nearly all voices were performed by Mel Blanc, allowing the viewer to understand, pre-conciously, that the story involved universal truths about human nature, since all voices were ultimately, factually, one. These cartoons form the definitive art presented anywhere, at any time, involving the humor that can be evoked by the omnipresence of human cruelty. As such, they were never properly short features for the amusement of children.

See also: the earlier Daily Quiddity blog entry for Mel Blanc. See also: the Daily Quiddity blog entry for Jack Benny, with whom Mel Blanc worked regularly.

Poison Foods

We human beings continue to eat poison things, even though they can be profoundly dangerous, as Melissa Breyer of Mother Nature Network notes in an article online. Here are eight things that it is unwise to injest.
1. Lima beans when eaten raw (they contain cyanide)

2.  Pufferfish

3.  Castor beans

4.  Almonds

5.  Casava

6.  Rhubarb leaves

7.  Potato and tomato leaves and stems

8.  Mushrooms, especially the death cap (Amanita phalloides) and
the destroying angel (Amanita ocreata) varieties
 

http://shine.yahoo.com/photos/8-surprisingly-poisonous-foods-eat-slideshow/-photo-2644938-192600237.html

Heavy Bias Is Built Into Search Engines

By the Blog Author

There’s an alarming tendency by search engines such as Google to take you on a train ride to hell (formally, philosophically, through the fallacious philosophical preferences of deconstructionism.)

What Google, for example, does is guess your preferences and attitudes, then filters your search to suck up to you and give you back clickable selections that you will find to be groovy and which appeal to your mindset.

That’s cheating. That’s irrational. It’s also a lousy way to do research. What you want, instead, in accordance with good debating technique, good argumentation and good science, is an authoritative, unbiased, disinterested search engine that gives you the best matching and most relevant responses.

Google flunks these criteria of fair-mindedness. So do most other search engines.  And they are not telling you that they are filtering their findings to flatter you.

Odd things fall out of this. You might get a "C" instead of an "A" on your next research paper, because you were directed to a goofball cult instead of a scientific laboratory. You might think you don’t have to bother to save an article or website, because you can always search for it later and find it. But over a year, your searches skew differently, such that when you finally go back to find that website, you’re identical search doesn’t work! You have to flail around trying to remember snappy key words that will somehow bring it back up (this has happened to me fairly often).

Here’s a website that explains this manipulation, with examples, and then offers a link to its own favoritism-free search engine:
 

http://dontbubble.us/

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There is a current events topic that is tangential to this. Out there in Intellectual Village, there is a legally fallacious argument behind the fog machine that says that the NSC hasn’t broken any constitutional requirements, because it is obtaining telephone numbers and visited websites rather than listening to telephone calls or reading your entire emails (scanning them for key concepts and words used by terrorists is supposedly not the same as a search or seizure.)

But the power of modern computing and the mathematical power of association elevate data minting to a search and a seizure. So NSC is, with certainty, conducting a searches without warrant and lacking probable cause. Be careful.

How and Why Social Critters Swarm

By the Blog Author

Ants swarm to gather food. Bees swarm when creating a new hive. Fish swarm to confuse predators and minimize mortality. Caribou swarm to avoid wolves.

These critters have small brains – too small to organize a swarming strategy. If they aren’t smart – and they aren’t – what are they doing to come up with such a brilliant strategy? None of them grasp the big picture, yet all can act simultaneously for their survival.

Let’s take bees swarming and moving to build a new hive. Scouts go out looking for a new location. Eventually, FIFTEEN scouts will find a particular location. They know each other are present. At the magic number, they all leave together to return to the swarm and tell it where to relocate. The first location to attract fifteen scouts is the "winner" of the new location.

The bee’s rules for decision making:

Seek a diversity of opinions
Encourage a free competition among ideas
Use an effective mechanism to narrow choices (the swarm moves with the first group of 15 scouts to return unanimously approving a particular location)

Another example – pigeons in Washington DC. The birds rest on ledges. Something disrupts them, and suddenly they are all off together in synchronized flight. These pigeons

Avoid crowding nearby birds
Fly in the average direction of nearby birds
Stay close to nearby birds

The bees and birds are using simple, universally-followed, hard-wired survival techniques that don’t require a large brain.

How did I find out about the bird, bee, ant and fish synchronous rules? I was bored! In a waiting room at a medical facility this morning. I picked up a five year old National Geographic and started reading. And I couldn’t put it down.

It’s still on the net – here is the link:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/07/swarms/miller-text

These are generally superior, follower-based, ego-free wilderness survival techniques.

Ten Great Ideas of Science

Science advances through new ideas and concepts which provide a more accurate method of looking at the world, making things work and furthering knowledge as well as the scientific method itself. But there are some ideas that are so profound and stunning that they may last as particularly sturdy advances in knowledge. A book published in 2003, Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, by Peter Atkins, lists ten lasting ideas – though a disproportionate number of these ten ideas are from the 19^th and 20^th centuries:

Evolution Occurs by Natural Selection

DNA Encodes Heritable Information

Energy is Conserved

Entropy: The Universe Tends Toward Disorder

Matter Is Made of Atoms

Symmetry Quantifies Beauty

Classical Mechanics Fails to Describe Small Particles

The Universe Is Expanding

Spacetime Is Curved by Matter

Mathematics Is the Limit of Reason 

http://www.realclearscience.com/lists/10_greatest_ideas_in_the_history_of_science/

Normal Gamers Can Detect Mentally Ill Players Over the Internet

The subtle hallmarks of psychiatric illness
can reveal themselves even remotely
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Roanoke, Virginia – April 9, 2013

Healthy study subjects playing an anonymous online game with people with borderline personality disorder were able to detect the erratic behavior that characterizes the disorder.

Most people are so attuned to the nuances of social interaction that they can detect clues to mental illness while playing a strategy game with someone they have never met.

That was the finding of a team of scientists led by Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. The researchers discovered that healthy people and those with borderline personality disorder displayed different patterns of behavior while playing an online strategy game, so much so that when healthy players played people with borderline personality disorder, they gave up on trying to predict what their partners would do next.

For their large neuroimaging study, the scientists used a multiround social interaction game, the investor-trustee game, to study the level of strategic thinking in 195 pairs of subjects. In each pair, one player played the investor and the other the trustee. The investor chose how much money to send the trustee, and the trustee in turn decided how much to return to the investor. Profit required the cooperation of both players.

"This classic tit-for-tat game allows us to probe people’s responses to the social gestures of others," said Montague, who also directs the Computational Psychiatry Unit, an academic center that uses computational models to understand mental disease. "It further allows us to see how people form models of one another.
These insights are important for understanding a range of mental illnesses, as the ability to infer other people’s intentions is an essential component of healthy cognition."

The scientists classified the investors according to varying levels of strategic depth of thought. The healthy subjects fell into three categories: about half simply responded to the amount the other player sent; about one-quarter built a model of their partner’s behavior; and the remaining quarter considered not just their model of their partner, but also their partner’s models of them. Not surprisingly, the depth-of-thought style of play correlated with success, with the players who looked deeper into interactions making considerably more money than those who played at a shallow level.

When healthy subjects played people with borderline personality disorder, though, they were far less likely to exhibit depth of thought.

"People with borderline personality disorder are characterized by their unstable relationships, and when they play this game, they tend to break cooperation," said Montague. "The healthy subjects picked up on the erratic behavior, likely without even realizing it, and far fewer played strategically."

Notably, the functional magnetic resonance imaging of the subjects’ brains revealed that each category of player showed distinct neural correlates of learning signals associated with differing depths of thought. The scientists used hyperscanning, a technique Montague invented that enables subjects in different brain scanners to interact in real time, regardless of geography. Hyperscanning allows scientists to eavesdrop on brain activity during social exchanges in scanners, whether across the hallway or across the world.

"We’re always modeling other people, and our brains have a substantial amount of neural tissue devoted to pondering our interactions with other people," Montague said. "This study is a start to turning neural signals into numbers – not just theory-of-mind arguments, but actual numbers. And when we can do that across thousands of people, we should start to gain insights into psychopathologies – what circuits are involved, what brain regions are engaged, and how injuries, congenital disorders, and genetic defects might play into psychiatric illness."

Montague believes the study represents a significant contribution to the field of computational psychiatry, which seeks to bring computational clout to efforts to understand mental dysfunction. "Traditional psychiatric categories are useful yet incomplete," said Montague, who delivered a TED Global talk on the growing field of computational psychiatry last year. "Computational psychiatry enables us to redefine with a new lexicon – a mathematical one – the standard ways we think about mental illness."

Computationally based insights may one day help psychiatry achieve better precision in diagnosis and treatment, Montague said. But until scientists have the right instruments, they cannot even begin to make those connections.

"The exquisite sensitivity that most people have to social gestures gives us a valuable opening," Montague said. "We’re hoping to invent a tool – almost a human inkblot test – for identifying and characterizing mental disorders in which social interactions go awry."

The study appeared in PLoS Computational Biology in the article "Computational Phenotyping of Two-Person Interactions Reveals Differential Neural Response to Depth-of-Thought," by Ting Xiang, a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas; Debajyoti Ray, a doctoral candidate in computation and neural systems at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; Terry Lohrenz, a research assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute; Peter Dayan, director of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London; and Montague, the corresponding author, who is a professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, a professor of physics in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, and a professor at the Wellcome Trust Centre for
Neuroimaging at University College London.

The research was supported by grants to Montague from the Wellcome Trust, the Kane Family Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute on Aging, as well as funding to Ray and Dayan from The Gatsby Charitable Foundation.

http://research.vtc.vt.edu/news/2013/apr/09/subtle-hallmarks-psychiatric-illness/

Brain Protein Tied to Psychiatric Disorders

Psychiatric disorders linked to a protein involved in the formation of long-term memories
Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists discover a protein that regulates synaptic ion channels that have been tied to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
By Ken Kingery, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Roanoke, VA – May 20, 2013 -- Researchers have discovered a pathway by which the brain controls a molecule critical to forming long-term memories and connected with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The discovery was made by a team of scientists led by Alexei Morozov, an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.

The mechanism – a protein called Rap1 – controls L-type calcium channels, which participate in the
formation of long-term memories. Previous studies have also linked alterations in these ion channels to certain psychiatric disorders. The discovery of the channels’ regulation by Rap1 could help scientists understand the physiological genesis of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

"People with genetic mutations affecting L-type calcium channels have higher rates of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia," said Morozov. "This suggests that there might be a relationship between the activation of L-type calcium channels and these psychiatric disorders. Understanding how these ion channels are controlled is the first step to determining how their functioning or malfunctioning affects mental health."

A single neuron in the brain can have thousands of synapses, each of which can grow, strengthen, weaken, and change structurally in response to learning new information. Electric signals traveling from neuron to neuron jump across these synapses through chemical neurotransmitters. The release of these chemicals is caused by the flow of electrically charged atoms through a particular subset of ion channels known as voltage-gated calcium channels.

Previous studies have shown that blocking these ion channels inhibits the formation of long-term memories. Although it was known that L-type calcium channels are activated in response to learning, how they are controlled was a mystery.

In the experiment, Morozov and colleagues knocked out the gene responsible for coding the enzyme Rap1, which he suspected played a role in activating L-type calcium channels. The researchers then used live imaging techniques to monitor the release of neurotransmitters and electron microscopy to visualize L-type channels at synapses. They discovered that, without Rap1, the L-type calcium channels were more active and more abundant at synapses all the time, increasing the release of neurotransmitters. The results showed that Rap1 is responsible for suppressing L-type calcium channels, allowing them to activate only at the proper moments, possibly during long-term memory formation.

"Our next step is to determine whether this new signaling pathway is altered in cases of mental disease," said Morozov. "If so, it could help us gain a better understanding of the molecular underpinnings of channel-related psychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Such knowledge would go a long way toward developing new therapeutic methods."

The study appeared in The Journal of Neuroscience in the article "Rap1 Signaling Prevents L-Type Calcium Channel-Dependent Neurotransmitter Release," by Jaichandar Subramanian, now a research
fellow at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Louis Dye, a staff scientist at the Microscopy and Imaging Core of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; and Morozov, who is also an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences.

http://research.vtc.vt.edu/news/2013/may/20/psychiatric-disorders-linked-bad-rap1/