In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear [...]
I’m still loving almost every one of the TED Talks, but every now and then one pops up and really grabs me by the collar.
Here’s the one that really hit me this week.
This is a presentation by photographer Chris Jordan, where he presents some of the images from his exhibition, Running The Numbers. (At the [...]
I often use the same example Cory uses here in discussing security issues at work: 99% effective means 10,000 failures over a million instances. Which in turn means that if you’re trying to detect a 1-in-a-million event, then you will get it 9999 false positives for every real event you detect–and at that rate, you [...]
I have been insanely busy and travelling all week. This will continue tomorrow, hopefully reaching a peak so that things will mellow out a bit into the weekend.
The remainder of this post is for the gentleman who, when challenged by me today asked me with a straight face “You don’t need proof that 1+1=2, do [...]
From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about [...]
“The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great — a little understood thing.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith
I read a lot of magazines–oddly more offline than on. I think this is because my online reading tends to be wide-ranging, shallow, and driven by references from other sources–there are few “online magazines” that I find myself reading “cover to cover”, as it were. Interesting magazines tend to be composed of pieces that are [...]
“People who have to apply rules like them because they eliminate the need to exercise judgment.”
-Ernie The Attorney
He goes on to suggest that some people don’t want to have to defend a judgment, but I suspect there are a really large number of people who are too lazy to get that far: they just don’t [...]
Most people acquire their beliefs through osmosis and observation, not investigation. We’d rather observe than derive. Raised in a society awash in certain ubiquitous beliefs, you tend to accept those beliefs without thinking. I think most people come to their faith in the same way they come to believe that not wearing a tie is [...]
Kit OConnell
Mr. McLaren
KiraMr. McLaren
GwendaMr. McLaren
b3n
James DavidMr. McLaren
Sharon