Notes from a bubble on Great Barrier Island A month of building – photos tell the story Scotty on the rafters Wrapping The first joinery Bedroom and bathroom windows And words help too! We expected the 25,000 L rainwater tank to be big, but when it arrived – OMG, it’s a monster! It’s gonna look awful, it’s gonna dwarf the house, we better keep it out of sight in front of the house! But placing it “down below” would be more difficult, and a 3 m high monolith would be forever in our faces. With ambivalence we decided to keep its original spot on the plan, where it’s straightforward to install and mostly out of our sight though visible to passersby. Roger and his son Rory place the tank. Roger’s words about the world: “I listen to the news only once a week, in case there’s a tsunami”! Our plumber, Nick, and his apprentice, Harley, connect the tank. These guys are great fun and always up for a joke and a laugh. Though Harley’s from a line of seafarers – his grandfather sailed alone around the world and his father sailed for years in the Pacific Islands and across to LA, he prefers land travel – much prefers it, it seems! Not long ago he drove with his girlfriend from the southern tip of Africa to her family home in Sweden! In the end, we thought the tank didn’t look as bad as anticipated, kind of a round companion to the rectangular house, and Mary just might grace it with an impressionist mural of native trees and birds when she and Paul visit in February. We won't have to water the trees or wait for them to grow! Shaun begins wiring the house. He and his partner, Kat, a renowned GBI cook and caterer (with the unfortunate surname Belcher, though his is the more suitable Currie), grew up here – they were schoolmates at Mulberry Grove, and now their two daughters are too. Like many others here, they “wouldn’t want to live anywhere else”. Shaun will return this week to install the solar power system. For those with an interest in these things, it’s 8 x 260W panels (at about $1.35 per watt), 4 x 6V Synergy gel batteries and a 3kW Outback inverter with Mate and charge controller. We monitored our daily usage for three winter months. It’s low, between 1 and 2 kWh, so this 2kWh system should cover our fridge, water pump, computers and monitors, modem, lights and daily Nutribullet green smoothie! When Wendell was on a week-long school trip, skiing and snowboarding near Mt Ruapehu, Scotty enlisted Brownie to help gib the ceiling. It was great to meet Brownie, whose Monday morning show, Kick Start, we listen to on Aotea FM. Scotty madly insulates. He’s still on his own, and you can tell he can’t wait to get the job over with. It may be called “green stuff” but it’s certainly not quick-and-easy stuff to cut. In addition to the praises I’ve already sung about Scotty, I love how he’s always listening quietly in the background when we’re on site talking to another tradie, ready to make a helpful suggestion or point out a consideration, and how he surprises us by doing helpful extras, like firmly securing the tank after it was delivered so it didn’t end up rolling down Oceanview Road to the beach on a windy day – like one we saw on YouTube traveling at speed down a South Island highway! He knows how to go with the building flow, to knock down potential obstacles and keep progress going – most of the time! Sometimes our angelic builders get tired of being angels and decide to taking the afternoon off to go surfing! Ro’s standing by the califont. The outside is nearly finished, and that’s where the house will sit for a while, oblivious to our need to move into it before our lease ends on 30 November. The framing failed its moisture test on Friday, and no telling how long it will take to fall from 18 percent to the required 16. Meanwhile Wendell’s doing another job for two weeks, though he’ll gib for us on rainy days once the framing gets its stamp of approval from Lance, the building inspector. Scotty has a month off surfing in Sumatra. We don’t know whether to hope for rain to fill the tank (1 L per mm of rain per sq m of roof = 50 L per mm of rain!) or for sun to dry out the timber, and then for rain to keep Wendell gibbing! As wiser ones say, it is what it is! A woman wild about weeds! We were lucky to enjoy two afternoons and a morning workshop with herbalist Julia Sich of Tauranga, back on the island to help people learn to identify edible weeds and get their benefits. The three of us are now fast friends and we even share some friendships with people dear to all of us in Golden Bay. Julia loves the Barrier – maybe we’ll get really lucky and she’ll decide to move here! I’m editing the next edition of her book, Julia’s Guide to Edible Weeds and Wild Green Smoothies. After 15 years of continuous editing, I’ll soon be in need of a project, so please comment if you know of someone who could use help with a book, a website or words of any sort. Julia boards the three-seater back to Tauranga, with a detour to Whangarei to pick up another passenger. In a few seconds they're nearly as high as Hirakimata. Julia says she feels like a bird in that tiny plane. Intelligence: Man or Machine The third annual “No Barriers: Small Island, Big Ideas”, organised by the Awana Rural Women, explored human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Who (or which) will win out in the battle of the brains? You can imagine that Ro, having recently read James Barrat’s 2016 book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, as well as numerous articles on AI, good and bad, in the science magazines Cosmos and Focus, had a good idea of the answer to that question! This mind-bending event was of high interest to me and Ro, and I’ve written a lot about it. I hope you find the information and ideas as fascinating as I did! It’s been a treat to review my notes and revisit a day of learning and enrichment. Three brains: rat, baboon, human Saturday morning’s presenters were Sir Richard Faull, Michael Corballis and Albert Yeap. Sir Richard, a neuroscientist and founder of the Brain Bank, has amassed a vast amount of knowledge about the human brain and a vast amount of good will among enough people – the patients and families who are direct beneficiaries of his good work and others who appreciate it – to have been knighted for services to brain research. He interwove an overview of the structure and workings of the brain with a brief autobiography, beginning with his community-focused, hard-working country upbringing in Taranaki, through his nascent fascination with the brain, his research team's landmark finding that a diseased human brain can repair itself by creating new brain cells, his drive to uncover the causes of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s motor neurone disease, epilepsy and other degenerative brain diseases and how they can be prevented and treated, to his development of the Centre for Brain Research and its brain bank – a lab for study of the tissue of donated brains of people who died of these diseases. Though his findings on neurogeneisis – the ongoing birth of brain cells in adult brains – were at first considered revolutionary and refuted, but they’re now embraced by mainstream science, which recognises the implications for brain function and treatment of neurological disease. Sir Richard believes we will never fully understand the human brain! He’s well past retirement age but his quest for understanding carries on. The Centre for Brain Research is the culmination of his life’s work. It’s a collaboration among doctors, patients and families, and scientists, including 70 research groups totalling 450 researchers in a range of related fields. He LOVES his work and can’t believe he gets paid to do it. We didn’t expect to be holding a preserved human brain. Tidbits from his talk: * The brain is a flat sheet of cells folded into a small space, with a “geography” or pattern to the folds. As in reflexology, each fold relates to a specific function, such as personality, speech, movement, memory, colours, vision, muscle movement, sensation etc. * Therefore damage from hemorrage, stroke, tumour or other disaease will affect the function related to the area where it occurs. * We can identify the types of cells in each area but we don’t really know how they work and communicate. * The forebrain is the seat of thinking, computing, appreciating and other advanced knowledge that other animals lack the capacity for. * Second by second, a “lifeline” of blood flows from the heart to parts of the brain being used. * The human brain contains more than 100 billion brain cells, more than all the stars in the Milky Way. * It weighs 1.5 kg on average, 20 g per kg of body weight. * It develops continuously throughout life. * One in five Kiwis will suffer from brain disease. * Though the brain can repair itself, it’s often too little too late. * Creative people have more mental health problems and challenges of the mind because they see in complicated ways. * We can influence the development, health and repair of our brains by exercise, stimulating environments and creative thinking. If we don’t use it, we’ll lose it! Michael Corballis, a psychologist and author, presented a history of the definition of intelligence. To this day, no one knows exactly what it is! The best we can do is to say that it’s what’s measured by intelligence tests, or possibly that it’s your brain’s ability to take you away from the present in time and place, unconstrained by the immediate environment. This “mental time travel” may be unique to humans. It’s believed that intelligence has adapted through the aeons, enabling us to adjust and survive. A complex world has resulted in complex us. What constitutes intelligence and what’s measured by intelligence tests has been fraught with controversy, including famous cases of fraud and racial and cultural bias. The tests have changed radically since Alfred Binet made a start in the early 1900s. Perhaps you’ve been saddled all your life with a number resulting from a mid- to late-20th century Simon-Binet IQ test. Thankfully the concept of IQ (“mental age” divided by chronological age) is becoming obsolete, and tests that focused on a narrow range of verbal, numerical, spatial and memory functioning have now been phased out and replaced by broader measures of aptitudes and creativity. The tests are still evolving in light of a changing society, a greater understanding of intelligence, a gradual increase in human intelligence overall and a distaste for the practice of comparing people. Now the focus is more on human abilities compared to those of other animals and increasingly to machines! In some respects machines are more intelligent than humans. In chess, for example, they can see many moves head. Their memory, computing power and accuracy far surpass ours, and they’re catching up in more subtle areas where we previously surpassed them, such as voice and face recognition and navigation. It’s been 3.9 billion years of slow, gradual, random, diverse, naturally selected human evolution vs the rapid, sudden, purposeful manufacture of “intelligent design” beyond biological constraints such as our brains being limited by our senses. The gaps between humans and AI are closing, but humans are still ahead in social intelligence, scene analysis, emotions, theorising, free will and creativity, which arises from randomness and a wandering mind. Albert Yeap is a professor of Artificial Intelligence who shares Ro’s and my alarm at the accelerating, no-holds-barred pace of the development of artificial minds. He believes that in due course they will control us. AI has been underway since 1966. It’s an attempt to reproduce how the mind works for use in specific applications. Since no one understands how the mind words, AI developers are trying to replicate something they don’t understand. At present AI is a black box with an outcome. It’s dumb but powerful and therefore dangerous. While each human is unique and unpredictable, AI is meant to be predictable, but is it? We can program AI to achieve an objective but we can’t control what it does to achieve it. A robot programmed to use certain resources to manufacture paper clips just might destroy the earth and everything on and under it in its single-purpose quest to fulfil what it was programmed to do! The pace and scale of technological unemployment are ramping up and encroaching on new areas. With AI’s massive data sets and increasing human abilities such as extrapolation, AI lawyers, chat bots and teaching assistants are already replacing humans. Another danger zone is the brain-computer interface known as augmented intelligence – AI embedded into the mind. “Wetware” uses human DNA for storage and computation. Increasingly fewer areas are uniquely human, such as art, music and poetry. For better or worse, AI and humans drive innovation and creativity in each other. The morning was a time to be fascinated and learn, learn, learn as each of the presenters shared his expertise. The afternoon was a less satisfying panel discussion moderated by broadcaster and journalist Damian Christie. The fourth afternon guest was Kaila Colbin, an inspiring young woman who describes herself as a “serial entrepreneur”. Amongst more worthy roles and projects than it seems possible for one person to be involved in, she’s a founder the Ministry of Awesome in Christchurch, the New Zealand ambassador for Singularity University, and the curator and licensee for TEDx Christchurch and TEDx Scott Base. She has also cultivated a broad and deep understanding of the whole AI (dare I say?) mess. The murky minefield of AI could blow humanity to bits. It's no place for a she’ll-be-right optimist like Sir Richard. Despite Kaila and Albert’s warnings, the audience at the event seemed comfortable following his lead in predicting that humans would win out in the battle of the brains. To me, considering the folly of much of human history and what’s at stake in an AI future – the likes of robotic law enforcement and weapons, super AI machines that are smarter than us and come to control us, the very real possibility of terminator technology literally ending the human era – complacency based on faith in humans making the right choices doesn’t seem very intelligent! Black Ferns crowned champions We watched a rugby match. Not a remarkable statement in New Zealand, but it was my first rugby watching ever! More accurately, we watched the highlights of the last game of the Women’s Rugby World Cup, all the while looking out for #7, the jersey belonging to Eloise Blackwell, granddaughter of Winnie and Charlie! Eloise has been a first choice selection for the Black Ferns since 2013. She's played every game since the first match against England that year. Her move from the Barrier to the Ponsonby Club – which I now know is the rugby starting point for many great New Zealand players – was a catalyst for her success. When she’s not playing rugby, she’s helping and inspiring young people as a phys ed teacher at Epson Girls Grammar School. Eloise is to the right in the haka, her name across her jersey. View from a friend’s place above Claris. Despite a nice cup of tea, we’re still warming up from a winter afternoon’s river swim. Our Barrier wave – International Sign Language for I love you! South end of Medlands, our favourite swim spot. We call these rocks Slipper and Tack. :-)
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