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John Manley, chair of the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan: If Canadians really don't want to do this, well then that is something that has to be respected. But in the past, Canadians have shown a willingness to do things that were difficult and required sacrifice and were challenging. But you can't feed them news about young men and women dying without putting it in a context in which they can say this is why and this is meaningful and this is tragic but it's worth it. Presumably Manley was referring to the young Canadian men and women dying in Afghanistan. The Afghan victims (young or old) are rarely mentioned. I was reminded of Madeleine Albright's infamous remark regarding the deaths of many thousands of Iraqi children due to the sanctions, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it." I'm not trying to equate these situations, but note that while Manley and Albright both conclude tha...

Last week the Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan released its report . The full report is available here . The basic message? Stay the course: Canadian soldiers should stay in Afghanistan well into the future. The argument is propped up by the usual noble words—and a few ignoble graphs, two of which I've shown here. The graph below shows Afghan's opinions about the direction in which their country is moving: Comments both graphical and political would be most welcome!

My 12 year-old son has been learning Flash and ActionScript , and he has been designing a groovy animation for my blog. Here's version 1.0 (to replay the animation, reload this page): I'm looking forward to new versions ... Comments very welcome!

In my continuing effort to eff the ineffable (consciousness), I today stumbled on an article by Jaron Lanier with the intriguing title " Death: The skeleton key of consciousness studies? " It's written in an entertaining manner with little in the way of technical jargon. Lanier makes some interesting points, but what struck me was the following piece near the beginning: There is a popular story about a princess who complains that she cannot sleep comfortably because of a single pea buried under layers of mattresses. That pea is consciousness in the sciences. To consider consciousness by itself is entirely undemanding. It is a pea. There is nothing to describe. An attempt to account for it in context, however, forces the construction of ever shifting, elaborate adventures of thought. What a temptation it is to dispose of this erratic data point. That is what any first year student of statistics would be taught to do. Excuse me? I was enjoying the metaphor until that last b...

... plus c'est la même chose. The more things change the more they stay the same. Take for instance the fascinating phenomenon of change blindness . Check out this demonstration by Ronald Rensink, a professor of psychology and computer science. The program flashes back and forth between two versions of a picture. Can you see what's changing? It's not as easy as it sounds! Rensink explains : ... we developed a flicker paradigm in which an original and a modified image continually alternate, one after the other, with a brief blank field between the two ... The onset of each blank field swamps the local motion signals caused by a change, short-circuiting the automatic system that normally draws attention to its location. Without automatic control, attention is controlled entirely by slower, higher-level mechanisms which search the scene, object by object, until attention lands upon the object that is changing. The change blindness induced under these conditions is a form of i...

Two years ago I started thinking about consciousness (my earlier posts are here and here ), and ever since, what's in my mind has been on my mind. First, some of what I've been reading lately. About a year ago, Time magazine published an article by cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker titled " The mystery of consciousness ". Pinker refers to a distinction made by philosopher David Chalmers , between the Easy Problem of consciousness (what are the neural correlates of consciousness?) and the Hard Problem (why do is there such a thing as subjective conscious experience?). Chalmers' ideas are intriguing; see for example his Scientific American piece, " The puzzle of conscious experience ". There's also a fascinating video interview with Chalmers. Now, on to some of my thoughts ... First person very singular I know that I'm conscious (in fact for René Descartes , this was the one thing that could be known with certainty). But there's no way...