One oarstroke from Ram Island back to the yacht club

I was rowing with Tyler, out to Devil's Foot and Ram Island and we stopped at Ram Island to check for clams. There seem to be fewer than when we went last year. The current was setting into the harbor and the wind was from the southwest. Anyway, from behind Ram, I took one strong stroke of the oars out into the current and we quickly drifted out from behind Ram and into the harbor. The wind was blowing us back towards home.

I thought it would be fun to see how far we could drift back towards Dory Beach where I keep my boat, so I rested on my oars. Aside from fending off one mooring, we drifted all the way back to the beach and only missed it by 20 yards. Amazing! One oar stroke from Ram back to home. The entire way, the boat stayed pointed in the same direction, except it started to turn broadside to the wind one time. So I moved towards the back of the boat - leaving more freeboard in the bow for the wind to blow on and this straightened her out. We missed the beach by a couple of yards and got in behind the last Penzance dock next to Dory Beach, rowed underneath it and over the last few yards to where I store my boat.

Went for a row around Penzance

Launched at A and rowed counter clockwise around Penzance. I got to B about an hour before low tide, with the current flowing out, south, and against me. The wind too. But at B, I rounded the corner without difficulty and followed the eddies and occasional counter currents through the gut and into the harbor side. "Easy peasy". Got my boat Rosie in at C, left her on the beach and went back to A to retrieve the boat dolly. Etc. Saw fish splash near the southern red nun in the hole; and again in the harbor on the final leg. It was a bit scary and a bit awesome to be in more open water. Waves and current were not a problem but one submerged rock that suddenly made an unexpected splash off my bow, took me by surprise.

An autobiographical note

Leaving work and moving to Woods Hole at 65, a year later I have run out of motivation and seem to drift from moment to moment. Why even write music? First time since I was 12 that I am not engaged in a creative project. I will try to get more engaged, at least with music, this winter. And I promise to at least do some carving in the future.

An embarrasing possibility

In reviewing how the cuttlefish might create a camouflage skin pattern to match a give environmental background, one possibility is that it is simply a display system that uses the intermediate neurons between the eyes and the skin to transfer input to output in the most direct way possible [whatever that is] or else to transfer the statistical properties of the input to the output.

Either way, the consciousness of the cuttlefish is not in question. I suppose it knows perfectly well what it is displaying on its skin. So its consciousness might be a sort of "occasionalism" that derives from it performing such a duplication process. Or perhaps it's display is more like a reflex that is not willful and has no auxiliary meaning.

All of which gives rise to the question of how my consciousness is different from a display system, as per a squid? Can I legitimately claim to be doing more? Well yes there is certainly a delay between input and output.

While I am moving anyway

I am motivated to do X but not enough to move and do it. But then I am also motivated to do Y and do begin to move. But, where efficient, I do X first.
Probably related to this.

To Giles Laurent, re cuttlefish camouflage algorithms

We went to a great lecture in Woods Hole this summer by Giles Laurent about how cuttlefish can match a background texture with the colored dots (chromataphores) of their skin. It was particularly fascinating in its discussion of image texture statistics being matched rather than image shape statistics.

The speaker distinguished between statistics of "things" (shape) and of "stuff" (texture) and this got me thinking about how the Blaschke problem of reconstructing shape from statistics was never evaluated for reconstructing texture from statistics. After all, the cuttlefish seems to be performing such an inversion in displaying an image on its skin that has similar texture statistics to its background. But look at the previous post about arrays of colored dots being building blocks of a form of texture recognition. There is an algorithm there, which is:

• find an array scaled correctly to best match the background - for each of several color channels.
• localize a piece of that array and display it with a matching color channel chromatophore
• do this for all color channels.

So Giles, here is an algorithm: match the scale of different colors, locally. And synchronize the displayed colors with the perceived ones - either one channel at a time or with a mixing matrix that varies locally.

Trimming the hedge and visual cognition

The hedge has little green tips of growth. I think of it, late at night on a day when I was hedge trimming, and it devolves into an array of light green dots - as though the 'thought' or 'image' of those green growing tips is composed - in part - by detecting such an array. A small field of view pattern is recognized as a sample from a full field array. It does not matter which part of the full array is sampled for the array to be a recognition factor.

Also briefly in this fleeting thought, different arrays at different scales appeared to my mind's eye. With all those constant full field options, as a basis, in various colors, you would be able to recognize quite a bit.
Update: what this suggests is that texture recognition can be done using linear regression, not with the parameters of a straight line, but with the parameters of the grid of colored dots.